Another Strong Editorial from Star Tribune on The Abuses of the Bushies

You have to read this in total; just a snippet is here. More and more, newspapers are finally standing up, with Editor and Publisher often in the lead. I applaud those that do. While at one time, this was what should be expected from the news media, the Bush years have changed that all, hasn't it?

From yesterday's Star Tribune:

Disclosures that the FBI has been building files on Greenpeace, the American Civil Liberties Union and other law-abiding critics of administration policy are a shameful affront to American notions of political freedom.

So where is the outrage?

Thus far, the FBI has declined to state its reasons for gathering some 3,500 pages of documents on Greenpeace and the ACLU, or to describe the contents of the files -- although some bureau officials used the cover of anonymity to float the idea that they might consist largely of routine correspondence. As if this should somehow make their collection less offensive.

And the bureau's overseers in the Justice Department are resisting legal moves to force a speedy turnover of the files, saying it will take up to 11 months to gather and copy so many pages. The process could be expedited if the Justice Department considered the matter urgent, which it does not.

For a long time, a wide range of groups at odds with Bush administration policies have believed they were subject to special attention from the FBI and other police agencies, especially after the post-9/11 Patriot Act loosened restraints on investigations. Greenpeace, the ACLU and several other organizations filed a lawsuit to find out if that was so.

This forced the FBI to acknowledge its files on these two groups, as well as the considerable attention its counterterrorism specialists paid to a coalition of small and seemingly innocuous antiwar outfits that planned to protest at the Republican and Democratic national conventions last summer. Parallels to the bad old days of the Nixon administration are plain, if inexact.