Many Groups Spied Upon in MD Were Nonviolent

[MountainLaurel]

Actually, it looks like almost all of them were. Damn, peaceniks.

Maryland State Police labeled members of a Montgomery County environmental group as terrorists and extremists days after they held a nonviolent protest at an appearance by then-Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. at a Bethesda high school.

Police files released to the activists reveal that the governor's security detail alerted the state police's Homeland Security and Intelligence Division to what troopers guarding Ehrlich described as "aggressive protesting" by the Chesapeake Climate Action Network in 2005.

A review by The Washington Post of those and other files given in recent days to many of the 53 Maryland activists who were wrongly labeled as terrorists in state and federal databases shows an intelligence operation eager to collect information on the protest plans of a broad swath of nonviolent groups from 2005 to at least early 2007.

Those groups included not only death penalty and Iraq war protesters who were spied on by undercover troopers in a 2005-06 surveillance operation exposed in July, but also those who opposed abortion, the manufacture of cluster munitions, globalization and the government's expansion of biodefense research at Fort Detrick.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/18/AR2008111803487.html

[Fumesucker]

1. I'm too lazy to look it up..

But I thought MD was a "blue" state?

[MountainLaurel]

2. Sort of

But "Bobby Haircut" Ehrlich was a Repuke, and a politically vindictive one at that, known for firing Dems without cause.

The only reason that MD is a blue state is that the heaviest population areas, the DC and Baltimore 'burbs, are Dem. In terms of geography, most of the state is firmly in the Repuke camp. (Remember Obama's comment about "bitter" folks clinging to guns and religion? -- This is who we was talking about.)

[Fumesucker]

3. Thanks.. n/t