Why a Congressman Paid the Fine for My Arrest in Congress

By Ann Wright – t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor
Monday 26 March 2007
What irony! I was arrested last week in a Capitol Police abuse of power upon leaving a Congressional hearing on FBI abuses of our civil liberties.

I was arrested on March 20, 2007 in a hallway outside the Judiciary Committee hearing of the US House of Representatives. As I stood to walk out of the hearing on the FBI's abuse of National Security letters, I vocally agreed with a committee member that the public does not trust the FBI because of those abuses, and I thanked the committee for holding oversight hearings on them. The Justice Department Inspector General had reported to the Congress that FBI officials have illegally obtained access to bank records, telephone bills and Social Security numbers without tying the need for access to specific investigations.

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Ann Wright is a 29-year US Army veteran who retired as a colonel. She also spent 16 years in the US diplomatic corps in Grenada, Nicaragua, Somalia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Sierra Leone, Micronesia and Mongolia. She was on the first team into Kabul, Afghanistan, to reopen the US Embassy there in December 2001. She was one of three US diplomats who resigned in March 2003 in opposition to the war in Iraq.

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