Defining "Terrorism"

Years ago, I remember a "clean up" effort in Baton Rouge where local police ran around an area near campus rounding up as many "undesirables" as they could grab on a given night, using excuses like violation of open container laws (conveniently not enforced on football Saturdays, by the way) or even littering (a friend of mine was so charged when police pulled a piece of paper out of his back pocket. They were looking for an ID, and said friend was handcuffed).

Meanwhile, real, serious crime continued apace, particularly just down the road--for those who don't know Baton Rouge, the area just north of LSU's campus is a massive slum, reaching essentially to downdown.

It seems like that sort of mentality is active on a national level:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has collected at least 3,500 pages of internal documents in the last several years on a handful of civil rights and antiwar protest groups in what the groups charge is an attempt to stifle political opposition to the Bush administration.

The F.B.I. has in its files 1,173 pages of internal documents on the American Civil Liberties Union, the leading critic of the Bush administration's antiterrorism policies, and 2,383 pages on Greenpeace, an environmental group that has led acts of civil disobedience in protest over the administration's policies, the Justice Department disclosed in a court filing this month in a federal court in Washington.

The filing came as part of a lawsuit under the Freedom of Information Act brought by the A.C.L.U. and other groups that maintain that the F.B.I. has engaged in a pattern of political surveillance against critics of the Bush administration. A smaller batch of documents already turned over by the government sheds light on the interest of F.B.I. counterterrorism officials in protests surrounding the Iraq war and last year's Republican National Convention.

If you prefer the Post's version:

FBI agents monitored Web sites calling for protests against the 2004 political conventions in New York and Boston on behalf of the bureau's counterterrorism unit, according to FBI documents released under the Freedom of Information Act.

The American Civil Liberties Union pointed to the documents as evidence that the Bush administration has reacted to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States by blurring the distinction between terrorism and political protest. FBI officials defended the involvement of counterterrorism agents in providing security for the Republican and Democratic conventions as an administrative convenience.

I suppose you could say that at least it keeps the FBI busy; however while they're dilligently keeping tabs on obvious bomb throwers like the ACLU, United for Peace and Justice, etc. etc., and doing their best to ensure that, in the words of one statement, "the diversity of New York, and the multiplicity of this nation - community organizers, black radicals, unions, anarchists, church groups, queers, grandmas for peace, AIDS activists, youth organizers, environmentalists, people of color contingents, global justice organizers, those united for peace and justice, veterans, and everyone who is maligned by Bush's malicious agenda" would be thoroughly monitored, some real, genuine, horrific acts of terrorism continue to occur.

Over the weekend, Frank Rich, writing about the Rove scandal, used the Alfred Hitchcock term "MacGuffin" to describe the latest attempts from Team Bush to heap slime on Joe Wilson and/or Valerie Plame. Rich cites the O.E.D.:"[a MacGuffin is] a particular event, object, factor, etc., initially presented as being of great significance to the story, but often having little actual importance for the plot as it develops." That's dead on accurate in regards to Rovegate, and not all that off the mark when it comes to G-Men ignoring genuine terrorists and, instead, targeting people who exercise their First Amendment rights. Which, by the way, is precisely the fear many of these same folks had when the Patriot Act was rammed through--that such provisions would be used against activists, as opposed to terrorists.

Which, um, isn't exactly all that new for the FBI...although, to come full circle in this post, an older friend told me about a COINTELPRO operative here in Baton Rouge in the late 60's/early 70's who helped CREATE a surprisingly active (for a southern campus) student body (which he then informed on, at least until the student newspaper discovered his day job). So, while the actual fact that activist groups are being monitored is certainly troubling, one can always hope that the people in charge are sufficiently incompentent stumblebums...

Being an official "enemy" isn't always such a bad thing, particularly when the one's doing the fingering are such idiots. Unfortunately, they happen to be heavily armed, and today's political climate is about one spark away from generating support for "shoot first, then ask questions," if it's not there already.

Which is why people are protesting in the first place.

And, one thing that ISN'T is terrorism. But try to tell that to the clown posse running the show in DC.