The Beauty of Investigating Yourself: You Can Always Decide You're Not Guilty

That is exactly what the Justice Department ruled for itself this week when it investigated itself over whether it was hurting government protesters. This technique has worked well for Rumsfeld's Department of Defense and Arnold Schwarzenegger on groping charges toward women as well!

From Saturday's WaPo:

FBI interviews of protesters before and during the 2004 political conventions were carried out for "legitimate law enforcement purposes" and not to prevent people from demonstrating, the Justice Department's inspector general said yesterday.

In a 37-page report, Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said the FBI was checking out 17 protester-related threats of disruption at the Democratic and Republican conventions when it conducted interviews, carried out physical surveillance and searched for protesters' names in FBI databases. The FBI tracked down 60 people in nine states, and 41 consented to interviews, the report said.

"Our review did not substantiate the allegations that the FBI improperly targeted protesters for interviews in an effort to chill the exercise of their First Amendment rights," Fine wrote. "We concluded that the FBI's interviews of potential convention protesters and others that we reviewed were conducted for legitimate law enforcement purposes."

FBI spokesman John Miller said the agency knew its dealings with protesters would be a sensitive subject, and provided training and guidance to agents well in advance.

"The OIG report shows the FBI conducted its investigations properly," Miller said. "They went into this with their eyes open, saying this can be brittle territory and it's important to be mindful of the regulations and do it carefully."

The American Civil Liberties Union has accused the agency of using the threat of terrorism as a pretext to intimidate protesters and dissuade them from gathering at the national party conventions. The group, which has sued the FBI for records, says that through extensive Freedom of Information Act requests, it has turned up evidence of political intimidation on other occasions not related to the party gatherings.

"We think that the facts discussed in the report confirm what we've been saying all along, which is that one of the reasons that the FBI was interviewing protesters around the country was to discourage them -- inappropriately -- from attending the political conventions," said Ann Beeson, associate legal director of the ACLU. "We are still quite concerned with an overall pattern, with the targeting of peaceful groups, based primarily on their rights of association and free speech."

Beeson pointed to a section of Fine's report that examined the FBI's practice of conducting "pretext interviews" with potential protesters before the conventions in an effort to dig up threat information. The report quotes a memo from the FBI's St. Louis field office as saying, in part: "The purpose of the interviews will be to increase intelligence in this area and discourage the interviewees from traveling to any of the above [events] to criminally disrupt the event."