FBI Acknowledges Spying on Journalists

by Mary

The NY Times and Washington Post both report that some of their reporters had been illegally spied on by the FBI. As Raw Story writes:

We're sorry.

That's the message from FBI Director Robert Mueller to the executive editors of the New York Times and the Washington Post, after an inspector general discovered that the agency had seized telephone records from four US reporters without a grand jury.

Mueller called Times' editor Bill Keller and Post chief Len Downie Friday, "expressing regret" that agents had not followed "proper procedures. The "lapse" occurred nearly four years ago and involved four staff members of the papers.

One point not made in any of the pieces I've seen on this is why Ray Bonner might have been targeted by the FBI in this manner. Back in the Reagan days of lawlessness when the administration was supporting the right wing strongmen in El Salvador, Raymond Bonner was one of two reporters that reported on the El Mozote massacre where the Reagan backed right-wing death squad murdered an entire village of innocent people. The warmongers in Reagan's administration tried to destroy Bonner's career for his reporting on this story and they accused him of distributing propaganda. It took years before the El Mozote massacre was acknowledged as true within this country when the village was exhumed and the bodies that documented the massacre were unearthed.

I was not surprised to see that Bonner was one of the reporters who was targeted by the FBI.