{"id":33532,"date":"2013-05-14T21:08:13","date_gmt":"2013-05-14T20:08:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/bush-used-the-irs-fbi-cia-and-secret-service-to-go-after-opponents-where-was-the-fox-and-gop-outrage\/33532\/"},"modified":"2013-05-14T21:08:13","modified_gmt":"2013-05-14T20:08:13","slug":"bush-used-the-irs-fbi-cia-and-secret-service-to-go-after-opponents-where-was-the-fox-and-gop-outrage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/bush-used-the-irs-fbi-cia-and-secret-service-to-go-after-opponents-where-was-the-fox-and-gop-outrage\/","title":{"rendered":"Bush Used the IRS, FBI, CIA and Secret Service to Go After Opponents — Where Was the Fox and GOP Outrage?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Former US President George W. Bush thanks US President Barack Obama during a dedication ceremony at the George W. Bush Library and Museum on the grounds of Southern Methodist University on April 25, 2013 in Dallas, Texas.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

May 14, 2013<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/span>
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As your kindergarten teacher probably told you, two wrongs do not make a right. But the discrepancy in reactions to wrongs does, indeed, show how Washington so often serves the interests of the political right. <\/p>\n

That\u2019s one of the big \u2014 if deliberately ignored \u2014 takeaways from the reaction to news that the Internal Revenue Service allegedly targeting conservative organizations for extra scrutiny in their larger review of political groups\u2019 tax exempt status. In the last few days, the allegations have generated a wave of national headlines, a congressional investigation<\/a>,federal legislation<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0ever-louder<\/a>\u00a0calls for impeachment<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Considering the gravity of the allegations against the Obama IRS from the Treasury Department\u2019s inspector general, congressional scrutiny is certainly warranted. However, there\u2019s just one problem: most of the lawmakers and pundits today decrying the use of public resources against a White House\u2019s political opponents had little \u2014 if anything \u2014 to say about equally troubling revelations about the Bush administration\u2019s deployment of public resources against its opponents. In fact, conservatives said so little back then that Fox News apparently doesn\u2019t even know<\/a>\u00a0(or is pretending not to know) the Bush administration used the IRS in the same way the Obama adminstration allegedly did. <\/p>\n

And here\u2019s the even more incredible thing: the Bush cabal didn\u2019t just use the IRS for its political hackery \u2014 it mounted a full-scale government-wide assault on its enemies, marshaling disparate agencies in its smear efforts. <\/p>\n

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Bush\u2019s use of the IRS was but one part of that larger assault. As my Salon colleague Alex Seitz-Wald notes today in greater detail<\/a>, in 2005, Bush\u2019s IRS began what became an extensive two-year investigation<\/a>\u00a0into a Pasadena church after an orator dared to speak out against President Bush\u2019s Iraq War. Not coincidentally, the Los Angeles Times<\/a>\u00a0reports that the church targeted just so happened to be \u201cone of Southern California\u2019s largest and most liberal congregations.\u201d That IRS church audit came a year after it launched a near-identical attack on the NAACP<\/a>\u00a0after the civil rights organization criticized various Bush administration policies. <\/p>\n

That is not where the story ends, however. The Bush administration\u2019s crusade against its enemies moved from the IRS into the Secret Service. <\/p>\n

Under the Republican president, that law enforcement agency was repeatedly<\/a>\u00a0deployed<\/a>\u00a0to physically block suspected antiwar activists from attending public presidential events. As the San Francisco Chronicle<\/a>\u00a0reported, the scheme eventually targeted some peaceful antiwar activists for arrest for the alleged crime of \u201cholding up small handwritten protest signs outside the designated zone\u201d of free speech (yes, the Bush White House cemented the precedent that the right to dissent is no longer a fundamental right, but is instead only allowed in certain \u201cfree speech zones\u201d<\/a>). Ultimately, in a case dealing with a man who was arrested for simply telling Vice President Dick Cheney that his \u201cpolicies on Iraq are disgusting,\u201d the Republican-dominated Supreme Court upheld the Bush administration\u2019s use of \u201cretaliatory arrests\u201d<\/a>\u00a0against the administration\u2019s ideological critics. <\/p>\n

Then, in 2010, we learned that Bush\u2019s targeting operation was also operating inside the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Recounting findings from the Justice Department\u2019s Inspector General, the Washington Post<\/a>\u00a0reported that \u201cthe FBI improperly investigated some left-leaning U.S. advocacy groups after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks\u2026citing cases in which agents put activists on terrorist watch lists even though they were planning nonviolent civil disobedience.\u201d <\/p>\n

A year later, we learned that along with the IRS, Secret Service and FBI, the Bush administration may have also been using the Central Intelligence Agency against its political enemies. As the New York Times<\/a>\u00a0reported, \u201cA former Central Intelligence Agency officer who was a top counterterrorism official during the administration of President George W. Bush, said the White House at least twice asked intelligence officials to gather sensitive information\u201d on prominent Iraq War critic Juan Cole. That story had an eerie similarity to the Bush administration\u2019s effort to out CIA operative Valerie Plame as retribution for her husband\u2019s criticism of that same war. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

This article originally appeared on : AlterNet<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Former US President George W. Bush thanks US President Barack Obama during a dedication ceremony at the George W. Bush Library and Museum on the grounds of Southern Methodist University on April 25, 2013 in Dallas, Texas. May 14, 2013 \u00a0| Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-33532","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33532","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33532"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33532\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}