FBI Continues Attack on Civil Rights, Demands Increased Powers
Monday 02 August 2010
by: Shahid Buttar, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis

(Photo: blimpa / flickr)
The week before last, The Washington Post concluded a two-year investigation of our government's domestic spying activities, revealing a lack of accountability pervading its far-flung and vast operations. Last week, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, confirming that the FBI is violating the constitutional rights of Americans en masse - as it has done before.
Adding insult to injury, the bureau now preposterously demands even further powers beyond those dramatically extended by the Patriot Act. At a minimum, Congress should emphatically reject demands for FBI access to "electronic communication transactional records," such as email meta-data and browsing history. However, Congress must also go further, by - as a coalition of nearly 50 peace, environmental, civil rights and civil liberties groups requested last week - shining light on the bureau's violations of constitutional rights and considering long overdue legislative limits to constrain the FBI.
President Eisenhower warned 50 years ago that national security could undermine democracy by subverting popular policy preferences. His warning was prescient. In the 1960s, the FBI pursued a concerted campaign to undermine the civil rights movement by criminalizing groups, like the NAACP, pursuing peaceful political activities protected by the First Amendment.
This is no conspiracy theory: Congress documented wanton FBI abuses in over 14,000 pages of testimony. According to the Church committee, the FBI's activities then would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but Cointelpro (counterintelligence program) went far beyond that ... the bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights....
Revelations of the FBI's Cointelpro prompted a national outrage that forced the Department of Justice to enact limits in 1976 curtailing the bureau's various abuses. Today, these problems are back.
The attorney general's guidelines that once constrained the FBI have faced repeated erosion, culminating in revisions in 2008 - adopted over Congressional objections in the last full month of the Bush administration - that essentially invite racial and political profiling.
The 2008 Mukasey guidelines hold that race may serve as a factor justifying suspicion, and even grants individual agents discretion to use intrusive investigatory methods without any evidence suggesting that a crime has been committed. Last week, Mueller mistakenly claimed before the Senate that FBI agents must at least have a suspicion of wrongdoing before beginning surveillance - but later conceded that, in fact, FBI surveillance is not limited by even suspicion.
This bears repetition: the FBI currently conducts monitoring and surveillance operations based on neither evidence nor suspicion. Think about that for a moment.

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Comments
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Terrorism and acts of terror
Mon, 08/02/2010 - 17:06 — Anonymous (not verified)Terrorism and acts of terror are effective when they cause the oppositions government to react disproportionally to the threat. We are wasting a trillion dollars and inconveniencing the American people while simultaneously bankrupting the Nation. As the threat is mostly imaginary there is no real way to fight "it". There is no way to win. Those in power in America today, engrossed in an imaginary WAR ON TERROR, are unable and unwilling to stop their assault on its citizens rights in a totally ineffective illegal and anti-American frenzy of "anti-terror acts" . It will only get worse.
Under the Freedom of
Mon, 08/02/2010 - 19:03 — Anonymous (not verified)Under the Freedom of Information Act, I was told, you could request finding out if the FBI had a file on you and what was inside it. But the catch was, just in the act of asking, the FBI would make a file on you.
This has gone on for a long time in this country. I hope we don't have another El Salvador here. In the McCarthy era, they went in and fingerprinted kids if their parents stepped out. Had to make sure they could follow them through their lives, I guess.
And we listen to these right-wingers talking about fat government.
To some extent, we must learn to regard this somewhat like freedom of speech. "Let them talk all they want" -- let them take notes all they like.
Try calling your local FBI
Mon, 08/02/2010 - 19:47 — Anonymous (not verified)Try calling your local FBI office in your home state to inquire about mortgage fraud, or something most rational people would assume would fall under the FBI's jurisdiction, you know, stuff like organized crime.
Instead, this too gets their attention. Any one making noises about power could fall under their umbrella of agitation. This is always the most terrifying aspect of any policeman. The possibility of outrageous abuse, of thoughtless drone like duty that destroys human rights, of political repression and state sanctioned violence that the status quo and the 4th estate hide from the public's view. These are terrible times, every one knew what the bastards would do after the planes hit the buildings.
Instead, this too gets their attention. Any one making noises about power could fall under their umbrella of agitation. This is always the most terrifying aspect of any policeman. The possibility of outrageous abuse, of thoughtless drone like duty that destroys human rights, of political repression and state sanctioned violence that the status quo and the 4th estate hide from the public's view. These are terrible times, every one knew what the bastards would do after the planes hit the buildings. The Washingon Post, almost 10 years later finally publishes a taste of the massive secret Gov'mint.
Read Hedges brilliant contribution on this very topic: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/08/02-0
Unfortunately, the U.S.
Mon, 08/02/2010 - 23:44 — S. Wolf Britain (not verified)Unfortunately, the U.S. government is not very American anymore; or, so-called "Americanism" has been radically changed by the U.S. government, and is getting worse and worse every day; thus making it embarrassing to be American anymore. No wonder more and more people around the world hate us. I absolutely love this country; but, for very good reason(s), as millions of Americans do, I absolutely abhor what the U.S. government has become, and is becoming more and more; an authoritarian, very soon to be totalitarian, police state.
Our liberties and freedoms, and the U.S. Constitution itself, are being abrogated and eradicated, and American citizens can be and are falsely, fraudulently and unconstitutionally accused of "perceived threatening conduct" under the so-called "USA PATRIOT Act", simply for getting angry at a federal employee, looking cross-eyed at them, or for doing nothing at all but being falsely accused of having done so. Thus, more and more innocent Americans are being wrongfully criminalized in order to falsely discredit them and make them law enforcement targets.
This criminalization of law-abiding citizens is also so the government has something to use against them and imprison them with in the future if those citizens have any further run-ins with the government, to make them falsely look like "habitual criminals", and demonize them to the public. In addition, the fraudulent criminalization of greater and greater numbers of innocent Americans that the government is perpetrating on an escalating basis, is in order to scare such falsely accused people into not exercising, or not continuing to exercise, their Constitutional right(s) and DUTY(IES) to dissent and/or stand up against this destruction of liberty and freedom, the destruction of the Constitution, and this criminalization of innocent people, as well as against other unconstitutional government infringements; thus stifling, discouraging and eradicating the duty(ies) of dissent.
So much for a free country. So much for the U.S. being a bastion of liberty and freedom. So much for a government "of the People, by the People, for the People". So much for a truly "representative government". So much for the freedoms embodied in the Constitution. Now the U.S government is almost nothing but a government of the corporate-fascists, lobbyists and lawyers, by the corporate-fascists, lobbyists and lawyers, and for the corporate-fascists, lobbyists and lawyers. And, as far as they are concerned, "the People be damned!" They will not be satisfied until all of us are criminalized and presumed guilty of being "potential terrorists", and all suspected of being guilty of something; as almost everything, especially the God-given and Constitution-given human rights and civil liberties we are supposed to hold dear above all else, is being made "unlawful" and "criminal".
Once more, may God and the People save the United States of America!
Efforts to control the FBI
Tue, 08/03/2010 - 05:23 — morgan 1 (not verified)Efforts to control the FBI (And the CIA) have always failed. They use the playbook of the old USSR which was one step back, two steps forward so they are always gaining and expanding.
The FBI created the rule book under the cross dresser and paranoid freak Hoover--It is still in use and never went away. The FBI has kept a low profile for years but with 9/11, the gloves came off and they made a major push to get everything they wanted to spy, arrest, harass and intimidate all dissent without justification. This is nothing new. It is sad and tragic but welcome to the world of super networks of intelligence gathering on all of us--Real terrorists excluded.
Obama reenacted the Patriot
Tue, 08/03/2010 - 08:58 — ProfessorEmeritusPB (not verified)Obama reenacted the Patriot Act. I have written extensively about the dangers of The Patriot Act and The Military Commissions Act of 2006 for four years and this president has shown himself to be, except for a name difference, GW Bush from head to toe. He is no Progressive and I knew that going in when his Medical adviser rudely rejected my plan to cover 300 million people under medicare by taxing Outsourcers, Nationalizing Pharma's, hospitals and physicians and turning all over to the Major Universities for management.
Obama will never again get my vote even if he runs for dogcatcher. He has betrayed his voter base. Aside from JFK, and briefly when Jimmy Carter capped oil at $8-$10 a barrel and hit big Oil with a Windfall Profits tax, Progressive Movement began dying, withering, when FDR Died. China, in God's odd ironic way, now seems. despite its past a more humane nation striving to make jobs for its entire citizen base, which is 3+ times the size of ours, while American corporations embrace treason, by seeking to weaken us by throwing it's labor base into the gutter and stripping citizens of retirement.
The national security state
Tue, 08/03/2010 - 09:58 — Vic Anderson (not verified)The national security state exists to Defend ITSELF from US citizens.
We Are All Yossarian Now.
Tue, 08/10/2010 - 13:35 — Frances in California (not verified)We Are All Yossarian Now.