PETA, Saddam's paperwork, and more.

'DOMESTIC SPYING' for $500, Alex

As The Scrapbook enjoyed an afternoon walk down Washington's M Street last week, it passed an array of newspaper vending machines, for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and USA Today, among others. A scan of the headlines found the words "Domestic Spying" on all the front--page headlines. This was the artful shorthand America's top editors came up with to describe the president's decision, after 9/11, to intercept calls "from outside the country to in the country, or vice versa," when one of the parties to a call was someone with known ties to al Qaeda or its affiliates-without the benefit of a court warrant.

Intriguingly, when a similar controversy arose in 1994, with the Clinton administration claiming a similar duty to engage in warrantless surveillance for national security purposes, the headline writers, at least at the Washington Post, found a different way to describe what was going on. "Administration Backing No--Warrant Spy Searches," was how the Post put it then. Arguably, it would have better served public understanding of Bush's policy had the headlines last week said that the administration is "Backing No--Warrant Al Qaeda Searches." But you can see how describing it that way might damp down enthusiasm for impeaching Bush. So "domestic spying" it was.

Equally intriguing is the fact that the papers couldn't turn up any innocent victims of this "domestic spying" program. One of the Americans whose privacy was invaded by the Bush dragnet was described. He's an Ohio truck driver named Iyman Faris, now serving 20 years in federal prison for "supporting Al Qaeda by planning to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge with blowtorches," as the New York Times described this particular activist's agenda.

But give credit to the Washington Post. They found the next best thing to some innocent victims-an utterly unrelated bunch of ACLU clients who are being "monitored" (no mention of wiretaps) by the FBI in utterly unrelated investigations. The investigations of these groups-most prominently PETA, the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals-came to light thanks to an ACLU lawsuit against the FBI, news of which, the Post helpfully reported, came "amid recent revelations about the extent of domestic spying." Indeed.

As is usually the case, the FBI had nothing to say about why it might or might not be monitoring PETA and the other aggrieved groups. The Post couldn't come up with any clues, either, but gave the ACLU and PETA lots of room to speculate that this might be part of the well--known Bush administration plan to violate the First Amendment rights of its opponents and crush dissent in America.

We have a different idea. The animal rights movement is a large and diverse one, and includes some violent groups and some apologists for terror. Consider Jerry Vlasak, a California physician and spokesman for the Animal Liberation Front-a group funded by PETA in the past-who testified before a Senate committee last October 26. This page quoted his testimony at the time, but here's a bit more, in which he defends the assassination of medical researchers who experiment on animals:

Sen. Inhofe: So you call for the murder of researchers and human lives?

Vlasak: I said in that statement and I meant in that statement that people who are hurting animals and who will not stop when told to stop, one option would be to stop them using any means necessary and that was the context in which that statement was made.

Sen. Inhofe: Including murder, is that correct?

Vlasak: I said that would be a morally justifiable solution to the problem. . . .

Sen. Lautenberg: Dr. Vlasak, you approve of these dastardly acts in the name of liberation, of a liberation movement?

Vlasak: Yes. . . .

Sen. Lautenberg: [You practice at several hospitals] but you are willing to take lives. That is the anomaly here. You are willing to say that somebody you don't know, somebody's kid, somebody's parent, somebody's brother, somebody's sister-take that life, that's okay.

Vlasak: These are not innocent lives.

Hmmm. On second thought, maybe the Post was more right than it knew to link these two stories.

Full disclosure: We should note that The Scrapbook's Christmas shopping also came "amid recent revelations about the extent of domestic spying." Make of this what you will. ?

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