Justice Dept. Hand-Slaps FBI for Spying on Greenpeace and Friends

Posted on Sep 20, 2010

Flickr / GuenterHH (CC-BY-ND)

The supervising bureaucrats at the Justice Department acknowledged that the FBI should not have been spying on activists, although they decided that the bureau was not targeting anti-war and environmental groups for political reasons.

Washington Post via @ggreenwald:

A report by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine absolved the FBI of the most serious allegation against it: that agents targeted domestic groups based on their exercise of First Amendment rights. Civil liberties groups and congressional Democrats had suggested that the FBI employed such tactics during the George W. Bush administration, which triggered Fine’s review.

But the report cited what it called other “troubling” FBI practices in its monitoring of domestic groups in the years between the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and 2006. In some cases, Fine said, agents began investigations of people affiliated with activist groups for “factually weak” reasons.

In others, the report said, the FBI extended probes “without adequate basis” and improperly kept information about activist groups in its files. Among the groups monitored were the Thomas Merton Center, a Pittsburgh peace group; People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals; and Greenpeace USA. Activists affiliated with Greenpeace were improperly put on a terrorist watch list, the report said.

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