FBI memo: agents can “bend or suspend the law and impinge upon the freedoms of others”
It has now emerged that the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) formally taught their agents that they were able to “bend or suspend the law and impinge upon the freedoms of others” in their quest to find alleged terrorists and criminals.
It gets even worse when we read that they claim they have “the ability to gather information on individuals which would normally be protected under the US Constitution through the use of FISA, Title 3 monitoring, NSL reports, etc.”
While the FBI’s extrajudicial assaults on the freedoms of Americans is nothing new, along with the federal government’s insane expansion of authority into unthinkable realms including the power to assassinate Americans at will, these discoveries are especially troubling.
According to Wired’s Danger Room, the FBI claims they simply didn’t mean it and since have removed the offending document from their counterterrorism training curriculum, characterizing it as an “imprecise” instruction.
This explanation is hardly surprising given that the Department of Defense made similar claims after it emerged that their training materials explicitly classified protesting as an act of “low-level terrorism.”
Harold
ACGR's "News with Attitude" 