In George W. Bush's America, it's hard not to sympathize with the folks at the Thomas Merton Center for Peace and Justice. The Pittsburgh advocacy group, which spends much of its time opposing war and violence, released federal documents this week that it says proves the FBI was spying on peace activists here.

The FBI sees it differently, saying the bureau was monitoring activities and even photographed a November 2002 leafletting by the Merton Center in Market Square because of a person already under FBI investigation. "Once that comparison was made, and determined to be of no value to the ongoing investigation," said an FBI spokesman this week, "the photos taken at the event were destroyed."

The American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the Freedom of Information Act request last year to obtain documents on behalf of more than 150 organizations and people in 20 states, isn't comfortable with that explanation, and it shouldn't be. But it's not suing either.

The FBI's description of the Merton Center is not some crazed and concocted version from the Red Scare days. It called the group a "left-wing organization advocating, among many political causes, pacifism" and said its efforts in 2002 "focused on its opposition to the potential war with Iraq." It's the kind of boilerplate account one could find on a political Web site, so what's the fuss?

The fuss is that any group of political dissenters has a right to wonder what information is being gathered and what assessment is being placed in a federal file when the White House sees itself above the law on how to monitor other Americans. We're referring, of course, to the Bush administration's disregard for the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, under which a special court must approve warrants for the National Security Agency to electronically eavesdrop on international communications by people in the United States with suspected links to terrorists.

Despite the 1978 law's clear stipulations for how the NSA should monitor such contacts, the Bush administration has espoused a cavalier, civil-liberties-be-damned attitude. Shades of J. Edgar Hoover.

Now put yourself in the shoes of a benign protest group like the Thomas Merton Center, which has been opposing American wars and criticizing administrations since the Vietnam era, and it's easy to see how a dissenter can feel uneasy. Dissent, by its nature, is unpopular, but it has come in for special attack by this administration for being anti-American and anti-democratic.

It is just the opposite.

The FBI, which has an important law enforcement role to play, may be right in its description of events. But the Bush administration's callousness toward the law casts a shadow over agencies like the FBI. It also stirs suspicions that are warranted among people who are merely exercising their constitutional right to dissent.

That's life, unfortunately, in George W. Bush's America.