Elsewhere in Minnesota news this morning …

STATEWIDE: Gov. Pawlenty’s 2004 pledge to end homelessness by 2010 hasn’t happened yet. Maybe he should have promised a moon shot. [Associated Press]

ST. CLOUD: Collegians study Berlin Wall. You know you’ve been put out to pasture as a historical event when you’re the subject of a two-credit class that attracts seven students. [St. Cloud Times]

SEVENTH CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT: U.S. Rep. Collin Peterson voted to add an abortion ban to the health bill. The amendment passed, but he voted against the bill anyway. [Smart Politics]

ST. PAUL: Easy come, easy not go. Pawlenty’s quick trade trip to Mexico planned for today got put off when President Felipe Calderon had more pressing obligations than meeting with the next president of the United States. [Star Tribune]

ALBERT LEA: Legionnaires want a digital sign. It would change every nine seconds, in a historic district. [Albert Lea Tribune]

ST. PAUL: You say your job is killing you? For Minnesotans who really did die on the job, a new memorial on the State Capitol grounds opens next year. [Associated Press]

Elsewhere in Minnesota headlines this morning …

ST. CLOUD: Michele Bachmann bans press, makes quick cameo at own public forum. People who can’t take her for more than 10 minutes didn’t have to. [St. Cloud Times]

MINNEAPOLIS: Memo to self: Try that chokehold again. Coleen Rowley revisits a local angle on the U.S. government torture program, in light of the latest revelations. [MN Progressive Project]

ST. PAUL: Tony Sutton’s long ascent to become MNGOP chair. His cure for the “Obama hiccup”? Slam another Diet Coke. [City Pages]

MINNEAPOLIS: City council could go to court to block referendum from ballot. The park board’s bid for independent taxing authority might burn out like a 2004 medical-marijuana reeferendum. [Star Tribune]

UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA: Budweiser can’t do the can, says “U.” The King of Beers’ gold-and-maroon cans go the way of Victoria’s Secret U of M–themed togs. [Star Tribune]

AVON: Bones of prehistoric woman dug up at construction site. Since it’s going to be a credit union, she’ll be reburied with no added fees. [St. Cloud Times]

The murders have come on the heels of a widely criticized report by the Department of Homeland Security, which described potential violence from people with extreme anti-abortion, anti-immigrant and white supremacist ideologies. Was the report accurate? And is the labeling of entire political groups and ideologies — such as the DHS report and the profiling of RNC protesters — an effective counterterrorism activity?

“There have been a lot of mistakes and problems with the way the so-called war on terror has been run domestically since 911,” former FBI agent Coleen Rowley said in an interview with the Minnesota Independent.

Rowley said the DHS report on right-wing extremism was wrong, but not for the objections that Republicans have raised.

“The reports contain almost no specificity but instead, make generalizations and stereotyped comments about large political or interest groups,” she said. “It’s true that individual loners or duos may be inspired by the extremist ideology stemming from any group, to include the ‘pro-life’ groups, but you need specific facts identifying the individual instead of stereotyped characterizations about the group.”

In a press briefing Thursday, Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano said the recent murders didn’t vindicate the report and said it was problematic.

“I don’t look at those murders as anything other than terrible crimes and tragedies,” Napolitano said, according to Washington Independent’s Spencer Ackerman. “I do think, as I’ve said before, that the so-called right-wing extremist report was not a well-produced product,” she said. “It could and should have been done better. We’ve already taken steps within the department to improve that situation.”

Rowley said the overly broad efforts such as the extremist report exacerbate the difficulties in identifying those loners or small cells of extremists.

“When looking for a needle in the haystack, massive ‘intelligence’ collection about the members of the groups only adds hay to the haystack and also chills exercise of First Amendment rights,” she said. “Members of the larger, mainstream group, if not alienated by being smeared, will be in the best position to identify the ‘true terrorist.’”

Indeed that was the case with the recent shootings In Arizona committed by members of an off-shoot of the anti-illegal immigration movement, the Minutemen. Shawna Fordes has been arrested in the murders and anti-illegal immigration groups say that they had forwarded information about Fordes to law enforcement after kicking her out of the Minuteman organization.

Rowley said that alienating these groups could prevent them from going to law enforcement when a troublemaker is identified.

Minnesota saw its share of generalized profiling at the Republican National Convention in September 2008.

“The worst recent example of this overbroad targeting, as well as surveillance and infiltration, would be that directed against the RNC Welcoming Committee and other peace/social justice protesters,” she said.

Eight members of the Welcoming Committee were charged with “furtherance of terrorism” under the Minnesota Patriot Act because of damage to property of over $1,000. Rowley said that this new definition of terrorism is wrong.

“‘Acts dangerous to human life’ is supposed to be the definition of domestic terrorism not just ‘property damage,’” she said. “The use of the looser definition in the ‘Minnesota Patriot Act’ which includes mere ‘property damage’ of $1,000 or more contributed to the misdirection of resources by law enforcement and intelligence agencies in the lead-up to the RNC.”

Attorney Jordan Kushner, who represented members of the RNC8, said charges were politically motivated. The terrorism charges were dropped, but not before having a chilling effect at the RNC protests.

“The fact that they were filed in the first place and pursued for a period of about eight months does show how much ‘terrorism’ is a political label,” he said.

As details emerge, authorities say Roeder, who was convicted in a bombing plot in 1997, was seen attempting to vandalize Tiller’s clinic in the days leading up to his murder.

Rowley, an FBI agent in Minneapolis who documented FBI failures leading up to 9/11,  said the Roeder case “should have been jumped on much more aggressively.”

“The bombing in the background, even if it was years before, kind of ratchets it up,” said Rowley. That conviction, she said, “adds quite a bit to probable cause, and adds to the specificity of the threat.”

Photo: Jill Brady/The Vigil

Minnesotan Coleen Rowley has emerged in the last few days as a potential “off-the-grid” nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court. Rowley’s addition to unofficial SCOTUS “long lists” (as opposed to shortlists) comes as U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar downplays chatter that she might be tapped to replace retiring Justice David Souter.  

Interest in Rowley seems to have originated with Nadine Strossen, a professor at New York Law School and former longtime president of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Strossen was among a dozen experts on constitutional law and the Supreme Court consulted by the National Law Journal for an article on possible nominees that appeared online Tuesday.

She’s first quoted as saying that President Obama should not name a white man: “It would create a negative implication — there are no extraordinary, well-qualified women or underrepresented minorities available.”

Two candidates she proposes also teach law: her New York Law School colleague Annette Gordon-Reed and Stephen Carter of Yale Law School.

Then, as paraphrased by reporter Marcia Coyle, Strossen adds:

And, she asked, why not someone whose understanding of and commitment to the law have been tested in the most difficult circumstances, such as FBI whistleblower and lawyer Coleen Rowley and former U.S. Navy Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, who represented Guantánamo detainee Salim Hamdan?

Rowley clearly appeals to Strossen on her merits — but it may not hurt her cause that Strossen hails from Minnesota. (After earning undergraduate and law degrees from Harvard University, Strossen returned to her home state to clerk at the Minnesota Supreme Court in 1975 and 1976 and was in private practice in Minneapolis from 1976 to ’78.)

On Wednesday, the conservative National Journal added Rowley, along with others from Coyle’s article, to its long list, which now numbers 41 names, from the obscure to such agreed-upon frontrunners as Judge Diane Wood, Elana Kagan and Sonya Sotomayor.

Rowley laughed off the SCOTUS speculation in an email to the Minnesota Independent:

A bit of comic relief?  Long shot would be an understatement!

I did consider, for a couple weeks, trying for head of the Office of Special Counsel just because it has an awful history of being totally ineffective and there are a lot of government whistleblowers who were hoping for someone to reform OSC which would require someone with independence from the agencies and therefore from outside the beltway.  But for a lot of reasons, I declined to pursue it. I would have been an extremely long shot for that position too although OSC is apparently the smallest government agency that exists — it’s only like 100 attorneys or something like that.

I don’t know anyone in the Obama Administration except one of his press people, Dan Burton, who is a former DCCC [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] press guy and, interestingly enough, a former congressional staffer for Bill Luther when Luther was [Minnesota] CD 2 Congressman. Burton happened to be in Minnesota for a wedding when I announced my campaign for congress in July 2005 and he came for the event. I’ve only exchanged one short e-mail with him in the last two years. Interestingly enough, a year or so before the election in 2008, Burton saw one of my HuffPosts against torture and said to keep up the good work or something like that.

Photo: Conservapedia

Klobuchar, a former Hennepin County attorney, doesn’t appear on the National Journal list, but she has been received high-profile mentions elsewhere.

Her status as a potential nominee was the first topic of conversation when she appeared for an hour Wednesday on Minnesota Public Radio’s “Midday” program.

Host Gary Eichten asked whether she might soon don judicial robes instead of the two hats she currently wears as Minnesota’s junior and senior U.S. Senator while the Norm Coleman/Al Franken election contest drags on. Klobuchar’s reply:

I would say this: Minnesota has only one senator and it needs at least one senator. So it’s nice to have my name being sort of bantered [sic] about, but I don’t think that that’s in the cards right now. I did talk to the president this week. He called me and talked to me a little bit about, just in general, the Supreme Court nominee and what I think was important in that nominee. We had a very good discussion and I know he’s very interested in getting this through as soon as possible. … Let’s just say we’re focused on moving forward and I’m Minnesota’s Senator. And that’s it.

If there was more to that conversation than Obama is letting on, Klobuchar succeeded at hiding it better than the brazen Christine Arguello, a federal judge in Denver, or the cagey Judge Wood.

Klobuchar went on to say that being a woman shouldn’t be a litmus test for Obama’s choice in a nominee — at least not for this, his first appointment to the Supreme Court.

Here is the audio of Klobuchar on MPR (Supreme Court discussion begins at the 3:08 mark):

Protestors demonstrate the use of water boarding on volunteer/actor Maboud Ebrahim Zadeh in Washington. (WDCpix)

The Minnesota Independent contacted four outspoken critics of America’s torture policies and practices for reaction to revelations about Bush-era treatment of prisoners. None of them said, “I told you so.” But the truth is … they told us so.

Steven Miles

On Monday, just as the nation’s interest in the torture issue was resurging, Miles’ 2006 book “Oath Betrayed: America’s Torture Doctors” came out in paperback. The new, updated edition reworks the original subtitle (“Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror”), delves into whether psychologists used interrogations to perform coercive experiments and provides a handy guide for book groups.

Miles, a physician and University of Minnesota professor of bioethics, lauds the Obama administration for releasing four “torture memos” last week, but says that move alone is far from sufficient:

The decision [to release the memos] is another step to restoring international law and the United States’ role as a leader for civil society. However, the task is not done. We need a Truth Commission and an independent prosecutor.

The American Bar Association and state physician and psychologist licensing boards must investigate and sanction health professionals for misconduct. Such sanctions are necessary for us to criticize the health [professionals] of other nations that cooperate with torture and to resume our role in supporting those groups who dare to challenge torturing regimes.

Miles tells the Independent he’s currently focused on researching all the doctors from around the world who have been punished for assisting torture.

Douglas Johnson

Douglas Johnson, executive director at the Center for Victims of Torture (CVT), issued a statement Thursday (pdf) applauding President Obama’s stated openness to “investigations of those policymakers and lawyers who authorized torture.”

The Center issued an e-mail alert asking members to urge lawmakers to launch investigations, which includes this message:

It is clear to the world that the U.S. committed torture. It is equally clear that authorizing, ordering or perpetrating torture is illegal. At this point, we urgently need an investigation to determine who authorized and ordered torture. We do not need to strengthen our laws. We need to enforce them; in fact, we are required to as a matter of law. … Whether this is a politically convenient time is not part of the equation.

“Prosecutions tend to strengthen democratic regimes,” Johnson told MnIndy  Wednesday. But he said the center’s clients tend to be mixed on the issue, with some strongly in favor of prosecutions and others who say an apology is what’s needed.

Attitudes toward prosecutions can change during treatment, Johnson said, as victims’ sense of safety slowly returns. CVT’s clients, he said, are “filled with fear”:

The predominate purpose of torture is to create a climate of fear and a culture of fear. … It produces a sense of panic, a brittleness, that makes it difficult to accurately judge what political space is available [in which] to work.

The politics of torture in America is based on warped views. “I don’t think either the media or the people have a very good handle on it,” Johnson said.

We’re hearing a lot from Bush’s people’s perspective. … The question is not “Does torture work?” but “Work for what?” … The focus is on the interrogation chamber instead of the costs we’ve paid as a country.

Johnson offers three ways torture costs America, saying it endangers American personnel in the future, it gives enemies incentive to fight to the death, and it contributes to a drop in approval of the United States by our allies.

America’s turn to torture, in Johnson’s estimation, was the work of “amateurs and a lack of respect for the rule of law.” Referencing World War II, he noted that though the post-9/11 world is scary, “We’re not fighting two wars in Europe and Asia. We did that without resorting to torture.”

Kirk Anderson

That’s a point picked up by Kirk Anderson, a St. Paul-based political cartoonist.

“The Nuremburg trials helped to carve in stone some basic premises about the rule of law, like you don’t get to ignore it when things get rilly rilly bad, even in a national emergency, even if there’s a national emergency with NAZIS, fer krine out loud,” he wrote in an e-mail. “We have apparently forgotten those lessons, and even now spout the Germans’ legal and moral rationalizations. They were only following orders! Somebody higher up said it was okay!”

Late last year Anderson published “Banana Republic,” a book compiling the weekly cartoons he drew for the Star Tribune for more than two years from 2005 to 2007. In the strip, Anderson relentlessly excoriated the Bush administration for treating prisoners as poorly as does the stereotypically repressive regime that controls his fictional Latin American country of Amnesia.

Is Obama’s move “courageous,” as some have said? Anderson responded by e-mail:

I suppose it is. Pretty sad that when your country commits war crimes, it’s “courageous” not to sweep it under the rug. … I am a very cynical, pessimistic guy. But the last eight years, I’m repeatedly astounded that my cynicism is no match for the day-to-day morality of Washington movers and shakers. Just when I think all the scales have fallen from my eyes, I read the morning paper, and realize that more scales are falling into my cereal. …

Anderson isn’t shy about wishing for prosecutions up and down the chain of command:

Of course, the higher-ups must be tried, but we need not gloss over lower level torture bureaucrats. This isn’t a difficult case, the former president and vice president admitted they were accomplices to torture on national TV … . We don’t need a “truth commission” or a “fact-finding commission,” many or most of the facts are already known. We need perpetrators rotting in jail, so this doesn’t happen again. At least not for a good ten years or so. …

But also, we should not let ourselves off the hook. We are all complicit, we all had a pretty good idea of what was going on. Congress, the Democrats, the media, us citizens, we let it happen, and often facilitated it. Part of the reason any accountability is unlikely is that Democrats are complicit, so they’re not real anxious for any hearings either. …

Coleen Rowley

Photo: Jill Brady (The Vigil)

That sense of broader national complicity is on Rowley’s mind as well. She told MnIndy: “Torture cannot be ended by being swept under the rug. And we, the American people, have already been seen as complicit.”

The former FBI agent, one-time DFL congressional candidate and now peace and government-openness activist, has been all over the mediascape, from the New York Times to the Huffington Post, since the torture memos’ release.

Torture is wrong, illegal and it doesn’t work. … The FBI agents should be speaking out right now bc the FBI all along was not a part of it. They knew it was wrong from the start. They started a “war crimes” file. … but all that time they were keeping quiet.

So Rowley said she was encouraged to see an op-ed titled “My tortured decision” in Thursday’s New York Times by Ali Soufan — the former FBI agent who Rowley called on more than a year ago to tell the truth about CIA torture.

“That’s a big deal,” Rowley said. “He specifically counters the things Cheney is lying about in terms of [torture's] effectiveness.”

To Rowley’s way of thinking, Obama is confusing the issue by rejecting “retribution.”

“Retribution” is pejorative term for the penalty phase of the criminal justice system. … He’s jumping over the fact finding phase. The little people, some of them didn’t like this. They didn’t want to do it. There’s a mixture of reasons why lower-end people went along with it. Obama should not be skipping over that.

On the other hand, Rowley said, “I don’t think there’s a lot of excuses for Cheney.”

Rowley recommends what she calls a “two-tiered approach” — congressional committee hearings combined with a special prosecutor’s investigation.

She cites the 1970s congressional committee led by the late Sen. Frank Church as the last to effectively investigate the country’s intelligence agencies and recalls that former Vice President Walter Mondale was a member.

“There have been 11 commissions since the Bush Administration started on intelligence failures. No one cares about these stupid commissions,” Rowley said.

Still, she figures it’s worth a try: “It’s such a historical moment. I think you could get the stellar people who are beyond reproach.” Mondale and former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor are two she has in mind.

A Congressional committee should have purview only over non-criminal matters, Rowley said. Leave that to a special prosecutor, who in her view must be named by Attorney General Eric Holder, not Obama.

The president is not supposed to be doing it. Appoint [a special prosecutor] and do not even tell people who it is [for a while]. … If we had a good prosecutor, it couldn’t be reckless. It would take a long, long time.

The video, taken by Twin Cities Indymedia, documents tour stops with cops-on-bikes in tow, a luncheon at a Minneapolis church with a parking lot full of police vehicles, and a musical (but “awkward”) petition-presentation to Ramsey County District Attorney Susan Gaertner with someone the TC Indymedia identifies as a plainclothes officer making his own video recording.

The events were in support of the RNC8, the eight individuals who face felony terrorism conspiracy charges from arrests made at pre-emptive raids before the RNC took place. Friends of the RNC8 are asking Gaertner to drop the charges.

In the video, famed FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley presents Gaertner with an appeal from famed Pentagon whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, among others. Don Olson, a member of the Minnesota 8, a group who vandalized a Vietnam War-era draft office, told Gaertner, “We actually did something, but they didn’t do anything.”

TC Indymedia said 50 riders (not “rioters,” as it sounds like on the video) took part in the Tour de Fletcher, named for Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher, the man behind much of the law enforcement at the RNC.

After estimating the post-luncheon contingent at seven or eight remaining bicycles, a St. Paul police officer is shown issuing a radio message: “They’re not very forthcoming on information so I guess they don’t want to be safe on their bicycle ride.”

Police made one arrest for disorderly conduct, according to the video.

In a letter to Minneapolis Police Chief Tim Dolan, bike-tour participant Nigel Parry wrote:

You are making the Cities a scary place to live. We should be able to go about our Constitutionally-guaranteed business, our political associations, and our vegan potlucks without this kind of—frankly—pervasive and fascist intervention.

The occasion: a bill designed to overhaul policies for handling criminal intelligence information by making it easier for law enforcement agencies to keep and share information about citizens.

Under the proposed legislation, intelligence data collected on individuals by law enforcement officers could be kept secret for a year. The information would then be made available to the target of the probe unless it meets a series of criteria related to the prosecution of potential crimes.

The legislation would also authorize law enforcement agencies to share intelligence data with other government officials — not limited to police officers — when necessary to protect the public.

The bill was drafted by the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and is sponsored by St. Paul DFLer Rep. John Lesch (pictured). (A companion bill has been introduced by Sen. Don Betzold, DFL-Fridley.)

In introducing the measure, Lesch acknowledged concerns about civil liberties but argued that some form of legislation is necessary to regulate the sharing of such data.

“A version of this will happen in future years, if not this year,” he said. “I think it’s important that this discussion be had.”

But the proposed legislation has raised alarm bells among peace activists and civil liberties advocates. They fear that the bill is overly broad and would lead to widespread spying on law-abiding citizens.

Teresa Nelson, an attorney with the Minnesota chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, argued that the legislation would allow law enforcement agencies to keep “political dossiers” on citizens, while only creating an “illusion of security.”

Bernie Hesse, an organizer with United Food and Commercial Workers Local 789, expressed a concern that labor unions would be targeted for engaging in nonviolent acts of civil disobedience, like walking picket lines.

“We’re afraid that we might be labeled as a criminal organization,” he said. “We’re very conscious of and appreciate the work that law enforcement agencies do, but we also don’t want to be restricted in some of the things that we have to do to bring about economic justice for workers.”

Retired FBI agent and veteran peace activist Coleen Rowley said that since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the government has been obsessed with collecting intelligence data.

“One of the false notions since 9/11 that leads to this massive intelligence collection has been the idea that we did not have enough dots,” she said. “The failure to connect the dots was the problem, not that there was not enough dots.”

The concerns are exacerbated because of prosecutions stemming from Republican National Convention, which was held in September. Law enforcement relied extensively on undercover informants to infiltrate activist groups and build criminal cases. The most notorious example is the case of the RNC Eight, who are charged with criminally conspiring to disrupt the four-day gathering.

For now the legislation isn’t going anywhere. Lesch acknowledged the concerns about the bill, and moved that it be laid over for further consideration. That motion was adopted unanimously.

Photo: Jill Brady (via The Vigil)

FBI whistleblower-turned-activist Coleen Rowley is on a roll. She ripped into the City of St. Paul’s report on Republican National Convention law enforcement in a commentary that appeared Friday at MinnPost and today at The Huffington Post. Tomorrow, as court hearings start in the cases of the RNC8 protesters, Rowley and individuals from Women Against Military Madness (WAMM) and other groups will file formal complaints against the city, state and Ramsey County over police tactics. And Rowley’s inquiries into what she suspects was overbroad surveillance during the RNC are starting to bear fruit — or at least what she calls a first “non-responsive” response from Ramsey County Sheriff Bob Fletcher’s office.

In her commentary, Rowley cites President Obama’s inauguration as an example of a National Special Security Event (like the RNC) that police pulled off “somehow, without tear gas, tasers or thousands of people dragged off in handcuffs.” St. Paul’s Heffelfinger-Luger report, Rowley points out, avoids the question of “whether such aggressive ‘police state’ action during the RNC was actually necessary.” She concludes:

Perhaps the worst mistake made in the RNC Commission Report is falling for the notion of trade-offs between security and liberty instead of seeing them as intertwined. President Obama phrased it well in his inaugural speech statement, when he said “we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.”

After a “Mardi Gras-themed procession” at noon on Tuesday on the state Capitol lawn, Rowley and others plan to file ”Notices of Claim” (pdf) that will contain charges like this:

In the year-long investigation and planning that preceded the RNC and the police enforcement during the RNC, Sept 1-4, 2008, the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office, along with other state, local and federal law enforcement agencies and private corporations and associations of private companies, including the “Department of Homeland Security’s (now defunct) Highway Watch” and presumably the FBI’s “InfraGard” corporate partnerships did produce faulty and defamatory “intelligence” assertions that linked the organization WAMM that I am a member of to “terror networks”. Ramsey County opened an investigation approximately one year before the RNC that provided the basis of the false claims used to defame WAMM and to violate the privacy rights of WAMM members by then disseminating this information to private corporations, associations and other law enforcement agencies.

Rowley’s public-data requests to the FBI (her former employer) and Ramsey County have so far elicited only a brush-off response from Fletcher’s office (pdf).

Her draft response:

1) If I understand correctly, any data gathered on the other organizations and groups (besides the RNC Welcoming Committee) that I inquired about—to include that gained by viewing their websites–is not contained in separate files but in the same investigative file as the one that has led to prosecution of some of the “RNC Welcoming Committee”. Is that understanding correct?

2) If you are saying that the information your Department has collected on other groups and members of other groups, is all contained in one big file, there still would be no reason it cannot be segregated out for release, would there? Since there are no ongoing prosecutions related to these other groups and members of these other groups? For example: the “Women Against Military Madness (WAMM)”; “Troops Out Now”; the “Anti-War Committee”; “Protest RNC 2008” and other peace and social justice groups are charted out in a “Social Network Analysis” and “Power Centrality Ranking” that links them to the “RNC Welcoming Committee” in a Homeland Security-Highway Watch document that has recently come to light. It’s not clear whether this “intelligence” product was only produced as a result of “viewing their websites” but even if that’s so, wouldn’t there at least be notes and copies made from that law enforcement effort of analyzing the public websites?

3) I have a hard time believing that Ramsey County Sheriff Department informant(s) reported information only on the “RNC-8”. It is precisely the other individuals who are not being prosecuted and about whom information may be contained in the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office that is of interest for the research that Mr. Cox and I are conducting. Are informant report files maintained separately?

4) Again assuming I’m correct in believing that the Ramsey Sheriff Department’s information is contained in one big file that also involves the information collected on the “RNC Welcoming Committee,” what is the name of that file? How is it indexed for retrieval and further use? Was the file opened to contain all investigative data collected in the lead-up to the RNC or was it focused solely on the RNC Welcoming Committee? If the latter, why would the information on other groups and members of groups not connected to the prosecution of the “RNC Welcoming Committee” not be releasable at this time? Can you give me an idea of the size of the file and how many other individuals and groups (not being prosecuted) are documented or referenced in the file?

5) Why did you ask for a delay when first responding to my request back in December, telling me you expected my request to take a lot of time to gather up responsive materials?

He writes:

Was the act pre-meditated? Yes.
Was it a felony? Yes…if charged with felonious assault.
Was their violence to persons or property? Yes. (property damage)
Was the act intended to “terrorize, intimidate, or coerce a considerable number of members of the public in addition to the direct victims of the act”? Yes. Intended to affect all supporters of Roe v Wade.
or
Did it significantly disrupt or interfere with the lawful exercise….of lawful commerce? Yes.

Here’s the language in state law that Mindeman cites:

“a crime is committed to ‘further terrorism’ if the crime is a felony and is a premeditated act involving violence to persons or property that is intended to: (1) terrorize, intimidate, or coerce a considerable number of members of the public in addition to the direct victims of the act; and (2) significantly disrupt or interfere with the lawful exercise, operation, or conduct of government, lawful commerce, or the right of lawful assembly”.

Gaertner is running for governor in 2010.

One place to compare notes on the line between protest and terrorism is at a 3-6 p.m. town hall meeting on Sunday, Jan. 25 at Walker Church, 3100 16th Ave. S., Minneapolis, to discuss the defense of the eight RNC protesters charged with terrorism. Speakers will include retired FBI agent and TIME Magazine 2002 Person of the Year Coleen Rowley, state Rep. Phyllis Kahn, Macalester College professor Peter Rachleff.