Told You So

Talk about surprises! It turns out the FBI took the extraordinary powers granted them under that hysterical screed, THE PATRIOT ACT, and made its provisions even less ordinary by “improperly, and, in some cases, illegally” using it to push for personal information about American citizens.

At least according to this Associated Press account slapped into the online issue of the “Los Angeles Times.”

the highway scribe would like to launch into long tirade of bloggarrhea, go on about how our Founding Fathers built in civil protections against the police and government because of a long and abusive history wrought by both across time and throughout the world. He might spit words to the affect that civil rights is about protection from those who protect us. the scribe might point out that throughout the cold war the FBI made the personal details of Americans’ lives their special and privileged provenance. He could add that the pariah used to be a “communist” and that now it’s a “terrorist.”

But instead he just wants to say... “Told you so.”

As is the Bush administration’s wont, the Justice Department audited itself, so just choose a multiplier of your choice in order to determine how bad things have really been.

Here’s an interesting quote from the dispatch, hardly a developed look into the 126-page audit itself, which “blames agent error and shoddy record-keeping for the bulk of the problems and did not find any indication of criminal misconduct.”

Now the scribe is no lawyer, but was pretty sure “criminal misconduct” and “illegal” pointed in the same direction... prison.

Unless of course your friends in the media want to get you a presidential pardon.