Last Wednesday, we learned that the Pentagon has spied on law-abiding, anti-war protestors. On Friday, we learned about Bush’s program of warrantless searches through the NSA. Today, it’s the FBI and controversial activist groups.
Counterterrorism agents at the Federal Bureau of Investigation have conducted numerous surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations that involved, at least indirectly, groups active in causes as diverse as the environment, animal cruelty and poverty relief, newly disclosed agency records show.
In response, FBI officials told the New York Times that the operations were driven solely by evidence of criminal or violent activity, and that the Justice Department has no interest in the groups’ political activities. But the documents obtained by the NYT don’t appear to point to activist-driven organized crime.
One F.B.I. document indicates that agents in Indianapolis planned to conduct surveillance as part of a “Vegan Community Project.” Another document talks of the Catholic Workers group’s “semi-communistic ideology.” A third indicates the bureau’s interest in determining the location of a protest over llama fur planned by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
The documents, provided to The New York Times over the past week, came as part of a series of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. For more than a year, the A.C.L.U. has been seeking access to information in F.B.I. files on about 150 protest and social groups that it says may have been improperly monitored.
I haven’t seen the FBI reports, so I have no idea whether the agency had cause for concern about criminal activities or not. For that matter, the documents the ACLU shared with the New York Times have been “heavily edited, making it difficult or impossible to determine the full context of the references and why the F.B.I. may have been discussing events like a PETA protest.”
Maybe there were legitimate concerns, and maybe the scrutiny of these activist groups is more benign than it appears. There just isn’t enough public information to say for sure. But given what we’ve learned of late, it’s awfully difficult to give the Bush administration the benefit of the doubt when it comes to surveillance of Americans on American soil.