RSS 2.0 FeedPolitical Beliefs = Probable Cause For Arrest
by Doug MataconisAnthony Gregory at LewRockwell.com writes about a report in today’s Washington Post which seems to indicate that FBI agents were targetting people for arrest based on their political beliefs during a 2002 anti-war protest:
A secret FBI intelligence unit helped detain a group of war protesters in a downtown Washington parking garage in April 2002 and interrogated some of them on videotape about their political and religious beliefs, newly uncovered documents and interviews show.
For years, law enforcement authorities suggested it never happened. The FBI and D.C. police said they had no records of such an incident. And police told a federal court that no FBI agents were present when officers arrested more than 20 protesters that afternoon for trespassing; police viewed them as suspicious for milling around the parking garage entrance.
But a civil lawsuit, filed by the protesters, recently unearthed D.C. police logs that confirm the FBI’s role in the incident. Lawyers for the demonstrators said the logs, which police say they just found, bolster their allegations of civil rights violations.
(…)
FBI agents dressed in street clothes separated members to question them one by one about protests they attended, whom they had spent time with recently, what political views they espoused and the significance of their tattoos and slogans, according to interviews and court records.
As Gregory notes in his post, this is both sickening and disturbing. The idea that the police are starting to target people based not on their actions but on their political views is antithetical to everything that the First Amendment is supposed to stand for. Unfortunately, living as we do in post-9/11 America, inconvenient things like individual rights are often pushed to the side.
I’d be a little learty about taking the Partnership for Civil Justice word for it. They are part of International ANSWER, aka Stalinsit Thugs for Peace.
This is not to say that what the government allegedly did was okay. ANSWER can spew its bile to its hearts content and should not have to fear the government while doing it. Still, they are not a peaceful group and some members of their ‘coalition’ are violently criminal (remember the Seattle WTO riots). I wouldn’t trust them farther than I could throw them and it may very well turn out that they were up to no good.
So I would suggest keeping one’s powder dry here. This is like the KKK claiming to be oppressed.
Comment by tkc — April 4, 2007 @ 2:45 pm