ACLU Files Lawsuit Against FBI Over Interviews (from CNN)

The ACLU Really Is In Solidarity With Terrorists

Published on October 24, 2004 By Eastern Diamondback In Politics

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SAN FRANCISCO, California (AP) -- The American Civil Liberties Union has sued the FBI, trying to get more information about the agency's questioning of Muslims and Arabs as it investigates the possibility of pre-election terror attacks.

The ACLU suit, filed Thursday, is seeking internal documents under the Freedom of Information Act to find out whether the government is protecting the constitutional rights of the subjects of its unannounced interviews at homes, workplaces and mosques.

"We are trying to get much greater sunshine over these activities," said ACLU attorney John Crew.

The FBI has conducted more than 13,000 interviews this year as part of an effort to detect and disrupt a potential election-year terror attack.

The interviews are voluntary and are not meant to indicate that the person is a suspected terrorist. Still, Muslim groups have expressed concern that they are being singled out for unfair scrutiny.

The ACLU wants to know, among other things, how the agency chooses whom it will interview.

"These random interviews or interrogations raise the concern that the FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Forces operating in Northern California are infringing upon the civil rights and civil liberties of immigrants, U.S. citizens and organizations by interrogating them without any valid basis, rationale, or individualized suspicion for doing so," the ACLU's FOIA request says.

Joe Parris, an FBI spokesman in Washington, D.C., said the agency had no comment because of "pending litigation."

LaRae Quy, an FBI spokeswoman in San Francisco, told the San Francisco Chronicle on October 6 that agents were going to mosques as part of their pre-election terror investigation.

"We're trying to learn about the Muslim community and understand how a terrorist could move or hide in that community, or find out who in that community might be funding terrorists," she told the paper. "If this were a Catholic jihad, we'd be going into Catholic churches."

No court date has been set for the ACLU's suit, which comes a month after the FBI refused the group's request to immediately respond to its Freedom of Information Act claim.

In a letter to the ACLU, the FBI said it would process the request in a "first-in-first-out" basis, a process that would take more than a year.

Wow! The ACLU is really full of shit here. Now it's a civil matter simply to make Moslems feel uncomfortable?

CAUTION AMERICANS: If you so much as look at a Moslem funny, the ACLU, CAIR, NLG, and every other activist group says you're next.

Comments

drmiler

on Oct 24, 2004

No matter *what* these clowns say, those interviews were *not* random!

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