The Raging Grannies

[Nbadan]

Scary? Only if they're your blind-date

The ACLU wants to know why the FBI is monitoring non-violent antiwar groups
By ELI SANDERS/SEATTLE
Posted Tuesday, Mar. 21, 2006

The Raging Grannies, an organization of aging activists whose chapters across the U.S. and Canada used sit-ins, songs and satire to protest the war, might not seem like the most obvious target for government surveillance. But the ACLU of Washington State filed a series of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests early Tuesday that demanded more information from the FBI and Department of Defense about what the ACLU claims is overreaching government surveillance of this group and 10 other non-violent political organizations in Washington State.

Concerns about the group are connected to an annual maritime festival called Seafair, which draws a flotilla of Navy ships — and, increasingly, antiwar protesters — to this port city each year. Do ents released through an earlier, more narrow Freedom of Information Act request by the local ACLU chapter and first reported on in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer showed that the Raging Grannies had been monitored by the FBI in 2003 out of concern that the Grannies, usually passive protesters, might be connected to a more aggressive group suspected of planning to chain themselves to navy ships as an act of civil disobedience.

In filing a battery of FOIA requests on behalf of the political groups, the ACLU is opening another front in its nationwide fight to discover the extent of government spying on domestic activists under the Bush administration. The ACLU of Pittsburgh announced last week that it had obtained do ents showing that the FBI there had monitored the Thomas Merton Center, a religious group devoted to peace. Members of the group engaged in some antiwar leafleting in 2002, and the Pittsburgh do ents reportedly show that FBI agents took photos of the leafleters and conducted other surveillance.

Time

Now we know why they search old ladies at airports!

[boutons_]

Rove and RNC no doubt have long enemies/Dems list they will be submitting to CIA/NSA/FBI for warrantless surveillance.

[Hook Dem]