Citing Facebook Posts, Fox News Turns in Indiana Grandmother for 'Terror Link'

Fox Insists Woman Made 'Anti-American Comments' in Emails
by Jason Ditz, December 28, 2010
Antiwar.com
Dec. 29, 2010

Apparently no longer content to simply shill for a growing police state, Fox News decided to take what passes for the law these days into its own hands today, turning in a 46 year-old grandmother from Indianapolis, Indiana for having a “possible terrorist link.”

The entire case against the woman, one Kathie Smith, appears to have been based around data culled off of her Facebook page and the content of emails they exchanged with her. The Department of Homeland Security in Indiana confirmed that their first information about Mrs. Smith was when Fox News sent them a video in which she allegedly makes “anti-American comments.”

The case against Mrs. Smith is virtually entirely circumstantial, and is available, in all its grim details, on Fox News’ website. The report cites photographs of suspects in a German terror plot appearing in their home. Smith notes that her husband, a German Muslim, grew up with the men in question.

Indeed, Fox expresses outraged that Mrs. Smith flew “as recently as two weeks ago,” to Germany with her husband and demanded to know she was not on the “no-fly list” on the basis of her conversion to Islam and her criticism of US foreign policy.

Despite being an effort to portray Mrs. Smith as a thoroughly unseemly character, the article itself delves into serious kookiness later on, as the author complains that Mrs. Smith refused to “friend” her on Facebook and was discovered to have clicked “Like” on a profile for Anwar al-Awlaki, a US born cleric tapped for assassination by President Obama.

The “case” against Mrs. Smith however is not really the relevant factor here, so much as the fact that Fox News took it upon themselves to build a case against some random convert in Indianapolis and then “turned her in” to the feds.

The indications are that the feds were thoroughly unimpressed with the case against her, adding the video to some state-wide database called the “Indiana Intelligence Fusion Center” but apparently doing little else.

The effort against Smith closes with a chilling comment from the grandmother, who notes “I am exercising my right, as an American citizen to freedom of speech, religion, and the right to bare arms. I have the right in America to say what ever I want. That is what makes America so great, right?” The report then immediately segues into a comment from an unnamed “consultant” claiming that Smith’s comments are “classic signs of extremism.”