Cindy Sheehan hotel room bugged in Denver

When Cindy Sheehan returned to her Denver hotel room yesterday she may have stumbled upon the invisible man in the flesh: a "maintenance" man with a screwdriver holding her phone apparently caught in the act of bugging her hotel room.

Then she let the guy leave, losing forever a chance to at least try to connect some dots here. Imagine if the security guards at the Watergate hotel had let those Nixon spooks simply go home that night in '72 with a "Scram you burglars and don't come back ya'hear."

Here's her description of what happened:

I was upset at first thinking that housekeeping had made a mistake and left my room open and I was worried that something might be missing. So I walked into my room and bigger than life, there was a man standing by my desk holding the room phone with a screwdriver in his hand!

I immediately said; "What the hell are you doing? Are you putting a bug on my phone?" He looked like he got caught with his hand in the cookie jar and stammered out: "N--no, we are having problems with the phone." I told him to get out of my room because my phone was fine and I called the front desk and the person at the front desk stammered something out about "problems" with some of the phones.

Now, she says, her phone is in the room fridge.

Rob Kall at OpEdNews relates the story with an interview with Cindy. Her original blog post describing the event can be found here. You may notice that Cindy does a tremendous job of "burying the lead," waiting until the fifth paragraph following "something that really bothered" her: activists harassing Fox News reporters.

Cindy, the long-time peace activist who protested for weeks outside Bush's range in Crawford after her son died in Iraq, is running for Congress this year against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

My question is this: Why did she casually let the man leave her room? Why didn't she refuse to let him leave, or follow him down the hall and out the building, in effect trailing him until she could reach security or a police officer or a hotel official to confirm the man's identity? Here she is with the biggest smoking gun perhaps that any peace activist who has ever claimed to be bugged could ever imagine falling into their lap and she just lets the guy go. She could have, perhaps, begun an investigation very similar to the way Watergate unraveled.

I have no doubt that FBI, Homeland Security, even police officers and citizen intelligence gatherers -- which the Denver Post, as a matter of fact, reported in June -- are in fact spying on peace activists and other domestic dissidents. Take the terrorist watch list that recently reached 1 million names. I just wish Cindy had been a little more on the ball when it came to actually confronting first hand the real life evil that more times than not lurks only in the shadows.