NEW BEDFORD — A senior at UMass Dartmouth was visited by federal agents two months ago, after he requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung’s tome on Communism called “The Little Red Book.”

Two history professors at UMass Dartmouth, Brian Glyn Williams and Robert Pontbriand, said the student told them he requested the book through the UMass Dartmouth library’s interlibrary loan program.

The student, who was completing a research paper on Communism for Professor Pontbriand’s class on fascism and totalitarianism, filled out a form for the request, leaving his name, address, phone number and Social Security number. He was later visited at his parents’ home in New Bedford by two agents of the Department of Homeland Security, the professors said.

The professors said the student was told by the agents that the book is on a “watch list,” and that his background, which included significant time abroad, triggered them to investigate the student further.

“I tell my students to go to the direct source, and so he asked for the official Peking version of the book,” Professor Pontbriand said. “Apparently, the Department of Homeland Security is monitoring inter-library loans, because that’s what triggered the visit, as I understand it.”

Story.

Apparently some people don’t understand the difference between a leak that is solely intended to hurt someone as an act of political retribution — i.e., Valerie Plame — and a leak that is intended to blow the whistle on a violation of the law. Let me try to put this simply: the first is a dangerous abuse of power. The second is an attempt to prevent a dangerous abuse of power.

There. Wasn’t that easy?

I’m glad we had this little talk.

Sorting through this one could take all day, and I’ve got deadlines. But I’ll be interested to see the fact checking on this:

We were listening to (Osama bin Laden). He was using a type of cell phone, a type of phone, and somebody put it in the newspaper, that this was the type of device he was using to communicate with his team, and he changed … and this is before they attacked us by the way.

Somebody with Lexis/Nexis needs to do some digging and see if there was actually a newspaper article sometime before 9/11 about the type of phone Osama bin Laden was using, or if Bush just pulled that one entirely out of his ass.

…Update via an alert reader below. The punchline: the paper was the Washington Times.

The Commission footnote (chapter 4, no. 105) refers to a front page
story in the Washington Times on August 21, 1998 entitled “Terrorist
is Driven by Hatred for U.S., Israel,” by Martin Sieff, and to
interviews with several intelligence community officials.

That Washington Times story stated in passing that “He [bin Ladin]
keeps in touch with the world via computers and satellite phones and
has given occasional interviews to international news organizations,
including Time magazine and CNN News.”

“There was no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the attack of 9/11,” Bush said. “I’ve never said that and never made that case prior to going into Iraq.”

Yes, he really said it.

Tangentially related cartoon here.

Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible “dirty numbers” linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.

The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval represents a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.

“This is really a sea change,” said a former senior official who specializes in national security law. “It’s almost a mainstay of this country that the N.S.A. only does foreign searches.”

Story here.

Remember right after 9/11, when the Bushies went on a massive power grab and the right wingers assured us it was all good, nothing to worry about? The government may have abused its authority, spied on its own citizens, in some distant, half-forgotten era, but rest assured, it would never ever do so now, and anyone who suggests otherwise is a crazy tinfoil-hat-wearing conspiracy nut. It’s the “things are different now” syndrome, also known as the “refusing to learn from the mistakes of history” syndrome, wherein any such abuse is safely relegated to a less enlightened time, and therefore cannot possibly be repeated.

Until it is.

WASHINGTON - A year ago, at a Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Fla., a small group of activists met to plan a protest of military recruiting at local high schools. What they didn’t know was that their meeting had come to the attention of the U.S. military.

A secret 400-page Defense Department document obtained by NBC News lists the Lake Worth meeting as a “threat” and one of more than 1,500 “suspicious incidents” across the country over a recent 10-month period.

“This peaceful, educationally oriented group being a threat is incredible,” says Evy Grachow, a member of the Florida group called The Truth Project.

“This is incredible,” adds group member Rich Hersh. “It’s an example of paranoia by our government,” he says. “We’re not doing anything illegal.”

The Defense Department document is the first inside look at how the U.S. military has stepped up intelligence collection inside this country since 9/11, which now includes the monitoring of peaceful anti-war and counter-military recruitment groups.

* * *

Still, the DOD database includes at least 20 references to U.S. citizens or U.S. persons. Other documents obtained by NBC News show that the Defense Department is clearly increasing its domestic monitoring activities. One DOD briefing document stamped “secret” concludes: “[W]e have noted increased communication and encouragement between protest groups using the [I]nternet,” but no “significant connection” between incidents, such as “reoccurring instigators at protests” or “vehicle descriptions.”

The increased monitoring disturbs some military observers.

“It means that they’re actually collecting information about who’s at those protests, the descriptions of vehicles at those protests,” says Arkin. “On the domestic level, this is unprecedented,” he says. “I think it’s the beginning of enormous problems and enormous mischief for the military.”

* * *

“Some people never learn,” he says. During the Vietnam War, Pyle blew the whistle on the Defense Department for monitoring and infiltrating anti-war and civil rights protests when he published an article in the Washington Monthly in January 1970.

The public was outraged and a lengthy congressional investigation followed that revealed that the military had conducted investigations on at least 100,000 American citizens. Pyle got more than 100 military agents to testify that they had been ordered to spy on U.S. citizens — many of them anti-war protestors and civil rights advocates. In the wake of the investigations, Pyle helped Congress write a law placing new limits on military spying inside the U.S.

But Pyle, now a professor at Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts, says some of the information in the database suggests the military may be dangerously close to repeating its past mistakes.

“The documents tell me that military intelligence is back conducting investigations and maintaining records on civilian political activity. The military made promises that it would not do this again,” he says.

August has a few select quotes from the deathless prose of renowned champion of morality and virtue, Tommy O’Malley Bill O’Reilly.

Had a little downtime due to a server hiccup. Things should be back to normal now.

It’s getting to the point that I probably won’t be able to get signed prints out in time for the holidays, so I’m going to stop taking orders after tonight. If you’ve been planning to order one as a gift, you need to get that done today — they won’t be available again until January.

Okay, let me get this straight — Fox News held a Titanic-themed “holiday” party?

Is this somebody’s way of admitting that they’re stuck on board an ideological sinking ship?