It was right out of the J. Edgar Hoover Playbook: In times of national crisis, round up the usual suspects. Thus, in the wake of the attacks of 9/11, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft gave the FBI its head to pursue America's enemies, foreign and domestic. And just as in Hoover's days, the agency spent a fair amount of time and effort going after . . . environmentalists, peaceniks, war protesters and the rest of the usual suspects.
It wasn't activists for Greenpeace who flew hijacked jets into the Twin Towers. But the FBI opened a file on that suspect environmental group anyway. Neither did the Catholic Workers group hit the Pentagon. But it attracted the FBI's attention, post-9/11. Nor did the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals conspire with alQaida, but that didn't stop the bureau either.
What we are learning in the wake of a Freedom of Information lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union seeking public records of FBI surveillance files is that the "new" FBI used its postcrisis license to spy on Americans pretty much the same way as the "old" FBI.
In his day, Director Hoover confronted what was known as the "communist menace" by, among other things, investigating threatening characters such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Elvis Presley. Now we learn that, after 9/11, the bureau took an unusual interest in something called the "Vegan Community Project" -- a most unlikely name for a terrorist cell. Meanwhile, The Palm Beach Post and others have reported that a program under the Defense Department has included scrutiny of a group meeting in a Quaker meeting house in Lake Worth, in Palm Beach County. <snip>
http://www.theledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060103/NEWS/601030301/1036
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