“Are you telling me tens of millions of Americans are involved with al-Qaeda?” … “These are tens of millions of Americans who are not suspected of anything” — Sen. Patrick Leahy, then-ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, May 2006, on the news that telecom companies had handed domestic phone records over to the government in the wake of 9/11.

In the nearly seven years since 9/11, Americans have said time and again and in varying degrees, that security trumps individual liberties — even taking a crack or two at the Constitution is acceptable if the bad guys are “on the run.” One could argue that this unexamined response to the marching beat set by the Bush Administration and its defenders on the Right has endured in part because of one lyrical, seemingly blast-proof meme: “If I am doing nothing wrong, I have nothing to fear.” It’s applied to everything post-Patriot Act: National Security Letters, black bag searches, racial/ethnic profiling, national ID cards, secret renditions, torture, warrantless wiretapping, etc.

But one doesn’t need a tin-foil hat, carry an ACLU card or be a subscriber to Reason to suggest that events over the last month should be regarded with more than typical passivity. The ultimate test — “could this happen to me?” — is being answered more readily with “maybe so,” as aggressive law enforcement tactics target innocent servants of the state itself.

By now, most government watchdogs have heard and commiserated over the story of Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo, whose two dogs were gunned down inside his home by a SWAT team July 29. The front door had been busted down with no warning in an unauthorized “non-knock” drug raid. Calvo and his mother-in-law were tied up in plastic shackles and forced to lie next to the bloody corpses of their black labs, while police reportedly swaggered around his suburban Washington, DC home.

You see, Prince George’s County police thought the part-time mayor and his wife – a finance officer with the State of Maryland — were the rightful recipients of 30 pounds of dope left on their doorstep. The pot was meant for someone else, part of a scheme the police had been tracking already, but they blasted in with guns blazing anyway. Turns out they didn’t even have the “no knock warrant” they initially claimed they held when the questions started to fly. The Calvo family has since been exonerated. The piddling response from the County Police Chief was that the police “regret” killing the dogs, but there has been no apology to the mayor, his wife or mother-in-law (who was reportedly forced, handcuffed and prone, to face one of the dead dogs “for a considerable amount of time,” while an agent prattled away on her cell phone about how “excited” she was to be on her first raid, and at the mayor’s house no less!)

In Calvo’s words:

More disturbing, we now have received reports of similar misconduct involving other innocent homeowners, including invasion of the homes of other innocent country residents and killing of other innocent family pets. This appears to be a pattern and practice in our law enforcement agencies where a lack of training and supervision is apparent. There are also significant questions as to why our county’s sheriff’s department, whose statutory mission does not involve drug enforcement, should be executing drug raids.

On the same day of the Calvo raid, Bruce Ivins, a government microbiologist, was pronounced dead of an apparent suicide. The FBI says he is likely responsible for the 2001 anthrax attacks. The newspapers proceed to run a series of stories suggesting he was a paranoid, drug-addled homicidal freak. But this was just weeks after another scientist, Steven J. Hatfill, won a $5.8 million suit against the feds for wrongly accusing him of the same crime, destroying his livelihood and reputation in the years they aggressively pursued him as “a person of interest.” Now questions, via watchdogs like Glenn Greenwald, have been raised about the strength of the case against Ivins. Christopher Ketcham’s cover piece for this month’s TAC, pokes even more holes in the Ivins-as-lone-nut theory.

Meanwhile, after the initial rush to frame the FBI operation like the cracked case in a CSI episode, reports have surfaced about the innocent people who happened to stumble into the crosshairs of the investigation along the way: scores of Army scientists, bio-warfare specialists, community leaders and academics — wrongly accused, physically threatened and intimidated, driven to divorce, depression, alcohol and even suicide. Again, no apologies.

According The New York Times, federal agents turned on three Pakistani-born city officials in Chester, PA., with more zeal than solid information after the 2001 anthrax attacks. One, Dr. Irshad Shaikh, was the health commissioner; his brother, Dr. Masood Shaikh, ran the lead-abatement program. The third, Asif Kazi, was then an accountant in the finance department.

Mr. Kazi was sitting in his City Hall office one day in November 2001 when F.B.I. agents burst in and began a barrage of questions.

“It was really scary,” Mr. Kazi recalled in an interview last week. “It was: ‘What do you think of 9/11? What do know about anthrax?’ ”

Across town, an agent pointed a gun through an open window at Mr. Kazi’s home while others knocked down the front door as his wife was cooking in the kitchen. At the Shaikh brothers’ house, agents in bioprotection suits began hunting for germ-making equipment and carted away computers.

None of the three men had ever worked with anthrax. But for days, they were on national television as footage of the searches ran on a video loop and news announcers wondered aloud if they were the killers.

The men were cleared after it turned out that a disgruntled employee had sought revenge by calling in a bogus tip. But for all three, trouble followed. The Shaikhs’ path to citizenship was disrupted, their visas ran out and both had to find work abroad, Mr. Kazi said.

But the Pakistanis were just three in a growing list of FBI “leads” gone cold, according to The Times:

In 2002, [Ohio microbiologist] Mr. [Perry] Mikesell came under F.B.I. scrutiny, officials familiar with the case said. He began drinking heavily — a fifth of hard liquor a day toward the end, a family member said.

“It was a shock that all of a sudden he’s a raging alcoholic,” recalled the relative, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of family sensitivities.

By late October 2002, Mr. Mikesell, 54, was dead, his short obituary in The Columbus Dispatch making no mention of his work with anthrax or the investigation. “He drank himself to death,” the relative said.

The FBI’s response?

“You do the best you can, and it’s not always pretty,” said Robert M. Blitzer, a former director of the F.B.I.’s section on domestic terrorism. “Here you have a bunch of people dead and several diminished, and you’re charged with solving the crime. You try not to step on people’s toes, but sometimes it happens.”

FBI Chief Robert Mueller: “I do not apologize for any aspect of the investigation. It is erroneous, he added, “to say there were mistakes.”

On the same day that NYT story appeared, another was making its way across the wires: “FBI Says Reporters’ Phone Records Improperly Obtained.”

Seems that a countless number of phone records were swiped by the FBI during a “terrorism investigation” in 2004. Affected were Washington Post and New York Times reporters working in Indonesia. The records were captured through the now-aborted use of “exigent letters” which require grand jury subpoenas, though in this case, the FBI admitted the warrants were never issued. Sounding familiar.

When the Patriot Act was first passed in 2002, right wing advocates demanded fealty, while assuring the new police and prosecutorial powers would never be abused — that they were essential in the Global War on Terrorism. Well, beginning with the use of the Patriot Act to investigate a Las Vegas strip club operator who was bribing local officials in 2003, there is now a well-documented trail of abuses.

But despite all the data, the striking-down of Patriot Act provisions as unconstitutional in federal courts across the country, the drip-drip of revelations by the White House and the Justice Department, the establishment organ — cranked by its foot soldiers — maintains the illusion that the abuses are rare, and still, if you are innocent, you have nothing to fear. Liberal paranoia can get so out of hand.

Faced with mounting evidence to the contrary back in 2003, former Justice Department lawyer John Yoo, now known as the author of the “torture memos” and an visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, co-authored a defense of the Patriot Act as a protector of rights. He shared this telling nugget at the end:

What of the charge that the administration is using public fear to consolidate political power? History shows that new security policies usually last only as long as the war or emergency. The president and Congress usually voluntarily give up their emergency powers; when they do not, courts step in. Despite a succession of wars and emergencies since the Civil War, civil liberties in our country have expanded steadily…

It took Pearl Harbor to shatter the complacency of the American public. We can only hope the absence of an al Qaeda attack on American soil during the last two years will not lull us back into our pre-September 11 stupor.

Our post-September 11 stupor has allowed for an arbitrary and high-handed law enforcement approach in which everyone is a criminal until proven otherwise. I’d like to ask Mr. Yoo if he plans on pressing the next president – McCain? – to “voluntary give up their emergency powers,” and if not, whether he will be leading the charge to have “the courts step in.”

But the new, cavalier tone has extended far beyond anti-terrorism efforts and runaway executive power, in fact, the federal model has merely accelerated the paramilitary transformation of local and state police departments seeded in the 1990’s.

Writing about the effect of this growing police aggression in 2006, author Radley Balko pointed out that SWAT team “call outs” increased from 3,000 a year to 40,000 by 2001 alone. Since then “wrong door” or hyper-enacted no-knock raids on individual homes have yielded dozens of deaths – including the now infamous case of 57-year-old Alberta Spruill, a New York City employee who died from a heart attack after NYPD raided her home on a “bad tip” from an informant.

Still, in a society that rewards conformity, that whets with glee the voracious appetite for shows like COPS and Dog The Bounty Hunter, indulging in that righteous snicker at the demise of “the other guy” walking the crooked mile, it is difficult for us tin-foiled heads to get across how alarming these recent developments really are.

Perhaps people will listen if Newsweek starts making the point for us. Patti Davis, daughter of the late President Reagan, has this to say about the Calvo raid in the current edition:

We have all been living in a climate of “shoot (or accuse) first, ask questions later.” And that attitude is contagious….

We want to feel that if the bad guys come, we can call the police and they will be the good guys. We want to believe that if we’re innocent, armed men with government badges won’t handcuff us and shoot our pets and wave their weapons in our faces.

But more and more of us don’t believe that.

How many more it will take is the question.