The First Amendment gives Americans the right to protest their government. If you study history, you quickly learn this has never really been popular with the federal government since John Adams, and even Abraham Lincoln had serious issues with those who spoke out and printed stuff not favorable to Lincoln's tyranny. So we have another example in Portland, Oregon, where the feds raided a house and seized literature no friendly to the federal government.
The National Lawyers Guild in Seattle issued a statement Thursday condemning the raids, calling them “a pretext for harassing political activists. FBI agents served these subpoenas at the same time that heavily armed FBI agents raided homes in the Portland area, reportedly seizing anarchist literature, black clothing, and computers.”
These sound like scary people--anti-government propaganda, black clothes, and computers. How could this be happening in Janet Napolitano's police state. People aren't supposed to act this way? It's supposed to be white clothing with words like Hope and Change with words that encourage the statists in Washington.
Left behind at one of the homes was a search warrant affidavit that said agents were looking for anti-government or anarchist literature or material; black clothing, backpacks, face coverings and shoes; green, red, black, grey or blue/purple paint; sticks and flags carried during the commission of the offenses and material for making flags; computers, cell phones and electronic storage media, and flares or similar incendiaries, the Oregonian reported.
Is this stuff illegal? Backpacks? These guys are even more scary that I first considered.
Seriously, what crime did these people commit? Apparently, there may have been some vandalism, but even that doesn't seem to be certain according to the article from KGW:
An anarchist group at the May Day rally targeted the federal courthouse in Seattle for vandalism. The group wore the same black outfits and carried distinct flags, with poles that had nails or screws attached, the paper said.
The Lawyer's Guild continued in its statement by saying "while grand juries are part of our federal criminal justice system, the grand jury was intended to serve as a protector of people’s rights and should not be used as a mechanism for intimidating those who speak out against social and economic injustice in our society."
They targeted, but did they carry out and actually commit a crime? While these guys may be morons the question should be did they commit any crimes to justify the fed's raid. Simply producing anti-government rhetoric isn't justification nor is having black suits with face masks for an FBI raid.
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