So while it’s not a surprise, there is a certain satisfaction in the latest media rumor that “Law & Order” is planning one of their classic “ripped from the headlines” dramatization of the scandal:

Raffaello’s arrest was and still is the buzz in New York City’s social circles.…He was the ultimate con man; handsome, rich, smooth and with a celebrity girlfriend to make him seem legit. I’m sure this will be the highest-rated Law & Order episode next season.

There’s enough angles to this story to fill an entire season of television so we don’t know how prominent the Bishop’s part will be. But L&O creator Dick Wolf grew up an altar boy at St. Patrick’s cathedral in New York and the L&O costume department has more clerical outfits that Raffaello Follieri’s closet. Wolf rarely misses the chance to throw a priest into the script. Whole seasons of the show were devoted to ripped-from-the-headlines pieces on the priest/bishop sex abuse scandal in the early 2000s and I’m sure a follow-up look at the web of financial fraud fueled (or at least justified) by the settlement payouts would be a big ratings hit.

I just wish Lennie Briscoe was still around to make the collar. BOMP BOMP.

But yet again her publicity machine rolls on. Most news outlets are calling the papers her “diaries” in oblique reference to her appearance in the 2001’s “Princess Diaries” movie. One tongue-in-cheek headline read “The FBI knows whether Anne Hathaway dots her ‘I’s with hearts.” Financial papers, photos, documents, etc., are reduced to “diaries”. Boy oh boy. I wonder if the celebrity blogs will start describing the D.A. as a “fire breathing dragon.” Poor little Anne bilking millions of dollars from investors, how was she to know?

The NY Daily News article says the papers included photos of Follieri with the Clintons, Pope John Paul II and John and Cindy McCain. Down here in South Jersey we can’t help but wonder whether a few chummy shots of the Italian con man with pal Bishop Joseph Galante. Such pictures certainly exist somewhere, whether in Anne’s collection or in the photo shoebox of some South Jersey priest. I would love to see them.

Hello? She was on the board of directors of the Follieri Group’s charities. The New York penthouse they shared was paid for by conned money as were their lavish trips and high flying lifestyle. Boyfriend drama is the last thing she needs to be worried about right now. I sure hope the FBI is carefully going through her checkbook and date book right now. She both solicited and received stolen money. No wonder she’s lost a lot of weight.

And what’s up with her getting off the plane from London and driving a couple of hours to the southern tip of the New Jersey? The Cape May County house Follieri bought from the bishop was reportedly just sold again. Could Anne Hathaway be on the deed or authorized to sign for  Follieri? Idle speculation of course but I do wish her publicists weren’t making fools of the popular press like this.

MS-NBC started the ball rolling on the 14th when they informed us that the Pentagon had a database of “protesters including the Raging Grannies and a dozen or so Quakers in Florida”:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10454316. This must have prompted the New York Times to publish a story they had been sitting on for a year: the scoop that Bush had ordered the super-secret “National Security Agency to start evesdropping on Americans”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/15/politics/15cnd-program.html following the 9/11 terror attacks. It’s revelation was an FBI agent’s email complaining about “radical militant librarians [who] kick us around”:http://www.ala.org/al_onlineTemplate.cfm?Section=alonline&template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=111469. Two days later we received the almost-humorous news that the Department of Homeland Security was hard at work monitoring the “Massachusett’s inter-library loan system “:http://www.southcoasttoday.com/daily/12 [UPDATE: this has been “revealed to be a hoax”:http://www.southcoasttoday.com/daily/12–05/12–24-05/a01lo719.htm by the student]. Trying to outdo the DHS in ridiculous, we learned on the 20th that “the FBI has been infiltrating vegan potlucks”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/20/politics/20fbi.html. Today it turns out the “New York City Police Department”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/22/nyregion/22police.html has been doing its own extensive investigations into protesters. They even apparently staged mock arrests in an attempt to incite violence (their contribution to the self-parody has been to send officers undercover on bicycle protests).

Are we surprised by all this? Well, not really. The fears unleashed after 9/11 ignited a firestorm of paranoia in the ranks of spydom. Nonviolence.org got a call from the U.S. Secret Service when Osama bin Laden posted to the board that he wanted to kill President Bush (well, actually we’re pretty certain it was a acne-faced fourteen year old procrastinating on his geometry homework). When I shot “shot photos of a scuffle at a Biodemocracy protest a few months ago”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/2005/06/biodemocracy_pr.php a Philadelphia police detective was in my office an hour later wanting to see it (the “melee” was harmless except for a policeman with heart conditions who took that moment to have a heart attack).

While some monitoring and prudence is indeed necessary, what ties together the string of stories this week is the randomness of the targets. It’s as if the agencies had lost all sense of judgement. Anyone critical of the war (or even mainstream culture: witness the vegans) was considered a threat. All leads were investigated, no matter how silly.

While invading American’s privacy is upsetting and unwarranted, the greatest danger is the sheer mass of irrelevant information that’s been collected. What’s an agency to do with reams of data on bicycle riders and Quakers? Who’s watching the flight schools and fertilizer depots while Agent Nincompoop is trading hummus recipes with the cute vegan with the nosering?

One of the greatest political mysteries of the Twentieth Century was revealed this week as “Vanity Fair revealed the identity of Deep Throat”:http://www.vanityfair.com/commentary/content/articles/050530roco02, the government informer who led Washington Post reporters onto the full scope of the Watergate Scandal. Here’s the “Post’s own article on the revealing”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/31/AR2005053100655.html.
Although I was far too young to follow the events at the time, the _Washington Post_ stories combined with the followup book and movie to create a popular images of the fearless investigative reporter, the showdowy government insider with unclear motives and the newspaper publishers taking a risk for the big story.
So it seems ironic that Deep Throat–no excuse me, W. Mark Felt, the number two man at the FBI in the early 1970s–was a close assistant of the notorious FBI head J. Edgar Hoover and was himself convicted in 1980 for authorizing government agents to break into homes of suspected anti-Vietnam war protesters (looking for suspects from the radical Weather Underground bombings).

President George W. Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft are just such opportunistic leaders. Under the cloak of fear and the blind of terrorism, they are trying to strip away civil liberties in this country.

It is true that we must review our privacy laws and security policies following the horrors of the airplane hijackings. We must see if some judicious re-balancing might create more security while keeping true to the spirit and traditions of American liberty.

But George W. Bush and John Ashcroft are not the men for careful, judicious review. With every day that goes by, with every press conference or speech, it is becoming clearer that they are using the times to grab power. The Attorney General in particular is sullying the heroism of those who died on September 11th trying to rescue their fellow Americans. He is a coward in the unfolding national drama.

MASS ARRESTS

Over 1,200 people have been arrested and detained since September 11th. Hundreds of them remain in jail. There is no evidence that any of them aided the September 11th hijackers. Only a handful of the detainees are suspected of having any connection with any terrorists. Attorney General Ashcroft has refused to give basic details about these people–including their names!. He has defended the secrecy by implying that jailing such large numbers of foreigners might maybe have prevented other terror plots, though he’s never provided any evidence or given us any details.

His is a legal standard based on the fear and paranoia level of he and his President are feeling. But we here in America do not lock up anyone based on our paranoia. We need evidence and the evidence of someone’s skin color or national origin is not enough.

The evidence of skin color and national origin was enough in one other time in American history: the shameful rounding up of Japanese-Americans in World War 2. Political opportunities saw the possibilities in American’s fear following the bombing of Pearl Harbor and we constructed concentration camps. Many of those sent there were full American citizens but they had no choice. There weren’t enough clear-headed, decent Americans then to say “enough,” to demand that the U.S. live by it’s birthright mandate to ensure freedom. The property of Japanese Americans was also taken and given to politically-connected landowners who had long coveted it. It was a dark moment in American history. Now, in 2001, we are once again locking up people based only on the country of their origin.

KANGAROO COURTS

President Bush has by sleight of hand declared that suspected terrorists can be tried by United States military tribunals. This is an extreme step. We have judicial processes that can try criminals and the United Nations does as well. The only reason to use the military tribunals is out of fear that other courts might be more fair and more just. They might be more deliberate and take longer to weigh and consider the evidence. They will surely be seen as less credible in the eyes of the world, however. We will have lost any moral leadership. But more importantly, we will have lost the true meaning of American liberty and justice.

DOMESTIC SPYING

Yesterday, November 30th, John Ashcroft announced a further grab of political power, another attempt to erode civil liberties. He is considering allowing the Federal Bureau of Investigation to begin spying on religious and political groups in the U.S.

The New York Times says: “The proposal would loosen one of the most fundamental restrictions on the conduct of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and would be another step by the Bush Administration to modify civil-liberties protections as a means of defending the country against terrorists.”

For those of you who don’t know the history. These restrictions against open spying were put into place in the 1970s when the extent and abuse of former spying became known. The F.B.I. had a widespread network that actively tried to suppress political groups.

Figures such as Martin Luther King, Jr., were not only under constant surveillance by the F.B.I. They were harassed, they were blackmailed. Often incriminating evidence would be placed on them and rumors spread to discredit them in their organization.

The federal government actively suppressed political dissent, free speech, and organizing. The regulations Ashcroft wants to overturn were put into place when the extent of this old spying and dirty-tricks campaigning was exposed.

President Bush and Attorney General Ashcroft are using the fear of terror to return us to an era when domestic spying and abrogation of liberties was the norm. When fear of foreigners and political dissent gave U.S. officials powers far beyond those that democracy and security require.

The words you read right now are a gift from the U.S. founding fathers and from generations of good Americas who have stood up boldly to demand continued liberty. Like the fire-fighters of September 11th, dissenters and free speech advocates are normal people who were called by the times to be heroes. Our country and are world needs mores heroes now. Speak out. Demand that our freedom not be another victim of September 11th.