FBI Monitoring

March 20th. 2006
Sent to but not published in the Boston Globe

I agree with almost everything that James Carroll says in his column, The Politics of Pacifism meets FBI Monitoring (Globe, Monday, March 20th, 2006: page A11).
However I disagree when he says that "the FBI ... sees enemies everywhere..." It did not see enemies in the time leading up to 9/11. The FBI is like the drunkard who seeks his lost car keys under a lampost rather than in the penumbra where he dropped them. The FBI looks in the easy places like the peace movement and eschews the hard task of connecting the dots that might have prevented 9/11.
As someone who was young in the 1960's, I am saddened to see the FBI repeating the mistakes that it made during the Vietnam war. Like the country it serves, the FBI has not learned from history