Any self-respecting child of the 60s will greet the news that the FBI is shadowing anti-Iraq war demonstrations to investigate the ... the what?-demonstrators, leaders, tactics? with a shudder. Now we find the the NSA has been doing illegal phone surveillance of American citizens within the boundaries of our country.

I am proudly liberal, Anti-WTO, Pro-choice, Anti-war; you name it. That's just a sampling of the issues for which I have demonstrated, petitioned and written forceful letters to the editor. Anyone who values her skin wants the punks, anarchists and vandals that are eager to attach their caboose to her train when a demonstration is under way, out. If not, your principled protest and damned hard work gets labled "radicalism" and you're lucky if you don't get maced. Immedialte crowd control, applied with proper restraint, is the province of the local constabulary, not the Federal Bureau of Investigation and certainly not the National Security Administration.

Police are who one usually wants to take on the immediate and forceful dampening of illegal acitivity at your average rally. Surveilance can contribute nothing to the forces of order because the guys are undercover. Being undercover and accountable to no one but John Ashcroft and George Bush, I have little confidence that I will ever know how the information gained by this surveilence is used. The FBI has, in past decades, been used to illegally spy on civil rights organizers and supress completely legal protest activity.

Tell you what Mr Rumsfield, since you're so interested in the anti-war Americans, save yourself the trouble of creating one of those damnable files that keep getting revealed in the bowels of our federal law enforcement agencies. The ones enumerateing participants in completely legal protest activities who are assumed to be: secretly breaking laws and plotting in conspiracies to break laws and advocating the breaking thereof, on the sole authority of the list compiler, by virtue of the fact that whomever is compiling the list disapproves of the views of the compilees. To save you the trouble I'm creating the ultimate and all-inclusive registry of anti-Iraq war protesters. I hope to publish the list and let you get back to the task of hunting real terrorists. Perhaps each registrant would contribute a small amount of money to help the anti-war effort as the cost of being included on that list of those who oppose the war in Iraq.