"...the Constitution doesn't allow for arresting people for what they might potentially do."

WorkingForChange-Police state files:

"As the released documents make clear, that, and only that, was why they became targets: because they opposed the war in Iraq. An FBI document from 2002 notes that the center is 'a left-wing organization advocating, among many political causes, pacifism.' Pacifism! Egads! Aside from the fact that pacifism is a set of personal moral beliefs -- not a 'political cause' -- is pacifism, in our militarized 21st Century America, the new Red Scare? Seems so. Just ask the Quakers.

Or maybe, instead, pacifism is simply terrorism. Because the outfit investigating the Thomas Merton Center wasn't the Pentagon TALON program, which was the tool used to go after the Lake Worth (Florida) Quakers and hundreds (at least) of other domestic peace groups. It wasn't even an NSA monitoring program. The Merton Center caught the attention of the Pittsburgh version of a Joint Anti-Terrorism Task Force, a program set up in dozens of cities across the U.S. to combine the efforts of the FBI and other federal, state, county, and local law enforcement agencies to combat the alleged threat of 'domestic terrorism.' With only so many domestic terrorists to go around, there's got to be something handy to keep all those task forces busy and their budget dollars flowing. Now, we have a better idea of what that 'something' might be: investigating ordinary, law-abiding citizens who oppose Bush administration policies. That's now considered terrorism. Of course, it's the far right that has engaged in 'domestic terrorism' in our recent history (remember Oklahoma City), but for some reason that's not who these task forces are concerned about.

Apparently, in nearly three years of probing, the terrorism most frequently engaged in by the Mertonites was the handing out of leaflets. A February 2003 FBI report titled 'International Terrorism Matters' detailed a schedule that the center posted on its web site of anti-war rallies in Pittsburgh, New York, and elsewhere.

...The second set of documents came from yet another source: the court-ordered release, as part of an ongoing lawsuit, of five internal NYPD memos detailing and analyzing -- mostly with gleeful satisfaction -- steps taken to disrupt and minimize New York City demonstrations in 2002, particularly the World Economic Forum protest that was the first, and virtually the last, major anti-summit demonstration after 9-11.

What the memos for the first time detail are police tactics that have been used widely across the U.S. against such demonstrations ever since law enforcement was embarrassed by the 1999 anti-WTO protests in Seattle. Anyone who has been to these demonstrations knows the playbook: massive presence of police in riot gear, heavily armed mostly with chemical weapons and batons; tanks, visible police vans and buses, and a widespread use of undercover cops; corralling protesters into tightly controlled spaces with no access available for the public to enter or leave; a constant shifting of police lines, including provocative forays into the crowd; and the preemptive arrests of any protestors the police don't happen to like or find inconvenient, with the understanding that they'll be held until the summit or convention or whatever leaves town and then released, with charges (if any) later dropped or dismissed. One of the NYPD memos notes, for example, the arrest of about 30 masked demonstrators (doubtless black bloc anarchists) for the "crime" of being "obvious potential rioters."

The last I checked, the Constitution doesn't allow for arresting people for what they might potentially do. But that, along with the rest of these tactics, with minor variations, is pretty much what's happened at every major post-Seattle U.S. protest of the war or the international corporate regime, in New York, Washington, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Miami, and so on."