[lentulusgracchus]

“Under Bush, the attorney general’s guidelines governing FBI operations were overhauled, allowing investigative tactics from the infamous COINTELPRO era, such as infiltrating constitutionally protected ideological groups — on the basis of a secret legal standard that has never been disclosed. And even though the CIA is prohibited from operating within the United States, it has smeared critics and trained local law enforcement in counterproductive profiling techniques.”

Your source sounds awfully Lefty .... knocking COINTELPRO ... "constitutionally protected ideological groups" = ones being run by KGB Active Measures .... "on the basis of a secret legal standard that has never been disclosed": How about NSA decrypts of KGB intercepts, naming names and groups and outlining plans to grow an Obama in the ranks of the New Mobe and the SDS?

And profiling sounds pretty damned good to me, when applied to fanatical-to-the-death raggies bent on mass murder. How about you? In the Philippines in 1903, we shot people like that out of hand. It worked. You want to get all mooshy on them, and link up with Kunstler's crowd to strap on Shrub and Big Dick?

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

That was then, but how about those techniques applied to conservatives? Remember that after Timothy McVeigh in ‘95, the feds openly classified lots of conservative movements right alongside terrorist groups, and 9-11 did not change that one bit.

At no point did W. Bush tell them that conservatives were no threat to the US. So much of the Patriot Act is used today to spy on conservatives.