Who is it that hates us for our freedoms again? The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been questioning political demonstrators across the country, and in rare cases even subpoenaing them, in an aggressive effort to forestall what officials say could be violent and disruptive protests at the Republican National Convention in New York. F.B.I. officials are urging agents to canvass their communities for information about planned disruptions aimed at the convention and other coming political events, and they say they have developed a list of people who they think may have information about possible violence...'The message I took from it,' said Sarah Bardwell, 21, an intern at a Denver antiwar group who was visited by six investigators a few weeks ago, 'was that they were trying to intimidate us into not going to any protests and to let us know that, 'hey, we're watching you.' '' The unusual initiative comes after the Justice Department, in a previously undisclosed legal opinion, gave its blessing to controversial tactics used last year by the F.B.I in urging local police departments to report suspicious activity at political and antiwar demonstrations to counterterrorism squads. The F.B.I. bulletins that relayed the request for help detailed tactics used by demonstrators - everything from violent resistance to Internet fund-raising and recruitment. In an internal complaint, an F.B.I. employee charged that the bulletins improperly blurred the line between lawfully protected speech and illegal activity. But the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, in a five-page internal analysis obtained by The New York Times, disagreed. The office, which also made headlines in June in an opinion - since disavowed - that authorized the use of torture against terrorism suspects in some circumstances, said any First Amendment impact posed by the F.B.I.'s monitoring of the political protests was negligible and constitutional. Errol asks the right questions: Is anyone else appalled at how the Justice Department issues a legal opinion authorizing the harassment of citizens because of what they might do at the Republican Convention. Someone at the FBI feels like this is a little strange, and what is the institution that has the final say? The same Justice Department that came out with the original legal opinion, who, mysteriously decides to uphold it's original reasoning. That doesn't seem like a check on the power of the FBI at all, or the Justice Department. Where are the Federal Courts in the matter? Why does the Justice Department get to write its own legal opinions?