At the meeting, Mr. Bensman, a coordinator with Heartwood, an environmental organization, suggested the corps simply destroy the dam. It was an idea the corps itself had considered. In fact, a photograph of an exploding dam was included in the corps’ PowerPoint presentation, explosive demolition being by far the most common method of dam removal.

Mr. Bensman said he had long criticized the system of locks and dams as environmentally damaging and an unfair government subsidy benefiting boat traffic over railroads. “I’ve been fighting these things for decades,” he said.

But news accounts of the hearing did not put it quite like that. One newspaper said simply that he “would like to see the dam blown up.”

On July 31, he said, he got a telephone call from someone who identified himself as Matt Federhofer, an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. There is such a person at the agency’s office in Fairview Heights, Ill., a St. Louis suburb, but he did not respond to a voice mail message yesterday.

So let me see if I have this right. Guy goes to a meeting where they are talking about building a fish channel vs removing the dam, think removing the dam is a better idea than building the channel, and now has the FBI sticking a microscope up his ass. Yep, that's the "War on Terror" at work.