aka A Man, a aplan, a dam and a Damn Fool.
Who says words are not important?
A (Terror) Fish Story - New York Times
We’ve been fascinated by the story of how Jim Bensman of Alton, Ill., went to a hearing about fish and wound up as a potential terrorism suspect....the Army Corps of Engineers held a meeting in Mr. Bensman’s neighborhood to talk about helping those fish swim around the locks and dams it has constructed on the Mississippi River over the years. There was a PowerPoint presentation on various options. One — clearly not the Corps’s favorite — was to eliminate a dam in East Alton. To illustrate that idea, the presentation included a picture of a dam being dynamited.
Mr. Bensman rose later to support removing the dam. Big mistake.
A local paper reported that Mr. Bensman told the Corps he “would like to see the dam blown up.”
A Corps security officer read the report. He decided that Mr. Bensman was threatening a public facility. He notified the G-men.
An F.B.I. agent then contacted Mr. Bensman, who was surprised to learn that federal investigators believed a terrorist might announce his plans at a public hearing of the Army Corps of Engineers.
When the agent said he wanted to visit his home, it occurred to Mr. Bensman that he needed a lawyer. At that point, Mr. Bensman said, the agent threatened to “put you down as not cooperating.”
Talk about over reaction. The Corps security officer who misread the newspaper article ought to be demoted, and sent back to remedial reading classes.
More here including:
...That was when Mr. Bensman got angry. “I know what Bush is doing with all these secret programs spying on the so-called terrorists, all these provisions in the Patriot Act that I think crosses the line, being able to spy on a suspected terrorist without the check and balance of a court or a judge,” he said. “That’s just something that really worries you.”He said he also remembered that the F.B.I. had a history of spying on civil rights, antiwar and environmental activists. He said one reason he knew his caller was a genuine agent was that he could cite items in Mr. Bensman’s own F.B.I. file.
Mr. Bensman said the agent had told him that someone from the corps had asked the F.B.I. to investigate him. “I was saying, ‘What in the world?’ There is no way anyone in the corps could reasonably think I was a terrorist threat. They know me.”
Tags: FBI, /incompetence
