Someone has already reported this but I'm going to do it again in the hope that it gets some serious attention. Apparently the Ramsey County Police in Minnesota with the assistance of the FBI, conducted "preemptive raids" on the homes of left wing dissidents and protestors for the sake of intimidation.
Part of the "reason" given for the raids was that the group was in posession of incendiary devices (i.e.fireworks). What worse is that these groups had been infiltrated by local moles to see if they were doing anything wrong.
Back in May, Marcy Wheeler presciently noted that the Minneapolis Joint Terrorist Task Force -- an inter-agency group of federal, state and local law enforcement led by the FBI -- was actively recruiting Minneapolis residents to serve as plants, to infiltrate "vegan groups" and other left-wing activist groups and report back to the Task Force about what they were doing. There seems to be little doubt that it was this domestic spying by the Federal Government that led to the excessive and truly despicable home assaults by the police yesterday.
Apparenty the GOP is so terrified that protestors are going to show up at their convention that they've decided to try to terrorize them into silence.
So
here we have a massive assault led by Federal Government law enforcement agencies on left-wing dissidents and protesters who have committed no acts of violence or illegality whatsoever, preceded by months-long espionage efforts to track what they do. And as extraordinary as that conduct is, more extraordinary is the fact that they have received virtually no attention from the national media and little outcry from anyone.(my emphasis) And it's not difficult to see why. As the recent "overhaul" of the 30-year-old FISA law illustrated -- preceded by the endless expansion of surveillance state powers, justified first by the War on Drugs and then the War on Terror -- we've essentially decided that we want our Government to spy on us without limits. There is literally no police power that the state can exercise that will cause much protest from the political and media class and, therefore, from the citizenry.
http://current.com/...
http://www.salon.com/...
If the national media won't raise the alarm on this, we must. This is not Nazi Germany, yet. This is not the Soviet Union nor Communist China,yet. What we have here is the Bush/Cheney twisted vision freedom in the United States of America and attempts by those in power to intimidate a free people into silence. If these assaults on peaceful citizens of the United States go unanswered, then by default, we've acknowledged that we agree with them.
The only way to fight them is to do whatever we can to shine a light on their actions. Call, or write your congressperson, write to your local paper, forward the links I've included to your friends but DO NOT LET THIS STORY DIE!!