If you pay your ratcatchers by the number of rats they catch, you shouldn’t be surprised to find them breeding rats in the basement. Breeding terrorists is harder, but on the other hand, since terrorists don’t look that different from normal people . . . Well, have a look at what local law enforcement — not to mention the FBI — are getting up to:

In an interview with the [Oakland] Tribune, Mike Van Winkle, spokesman for the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center, issued a remarkably broad definition of terrorism. “You can make an easy kind of link that, if you have a protest group protesting a war where the cause that’s being fought against is international terrorism, you might have terrorism at that protest,” he said. “You can almost argue that a protest against that is a terrorist act.”

What do you say to something like that? Don’t they teach civics in school any more?

“This is a good way for police officers to get terrorism points,” says Timothy Edgar, legislative counsel for the ACLU. “They have to justify the dollars they’re receiving from the federal government for homeland security. We’ve seen a massive inflation of terrorism statistics on the federal level. Every Arab who has a phony drivers license is now called a terrorist by the Justice Department, so they can say, ‘We've arrested thousands of terrorists.’

And if the fact that all those Arabs and hippy longhairs are getting beat up and arrested doesn’t bother you, this should: while the cops are wasting their time making lists of Democrats, shooting beanbags at kids, and arresting people for talking to National Guardsmen, the real terrorists are laughing their asses off.

“This is the perfect example of not learning the lessons of 9/11,” he continues. “The FBI was not sufficiently focused on the possibility that a group like al-Qaida would commit a serious terrorist attack. One real failure since 9/11 is that, when they call everything a ‘terrorist,’ they're still not sufficiently focused on actual terrorists. There’s an overbroad definition of domestic terrorism in the PATRIOT Act, and it’s had a spillover effect into state and local governments who want to justify their antiterrorism funding and mission.”

Details on Salon.