The FBI IS the bad guy!
I suppose it’s old news: FBI spies on American citizens going about their lawful business. but every time it happens, there’s much talk about how the Bureau has “overstepped” bounds and “neglected” to report its “mistakes.” History helps us see that the Bureau constantly does this, and always chafes at the bit of constitutional protection. Here’s the piece I published in Newsday (Long Island) earlier this week.
Never let a civil right get in the way
Under Patriot Act, the FBI continues its deliberate, sordid tradition of snooping on citizens
BY WARREN GOLDSTEIN
March 19, 2007
So the Federal Bureau of Investigation has engaged in “errors,” “mistakes,” “slipshod” record-keeping and “improper” use of the Patriot Act between 2003 and 2005, says the agency’s inspector general.
FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III acknowledges a serious problem, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales says these are serious issues and President George W. Bush says, “Those problems will be addressed as quickly as possible.” All, the inspector general included, close ranks around the idea that these abuses were due to errors, rather than intent.
Nonsense. Only Americans’ profound historical ignorance about the FBI - and willingness to suspend critical faculties - can give this argument a shred of legitimacy.
In the three years covered by the inspector general’s report, the FBI issued 143,000 national security requests, collecting information from banks, credit, telephone and Internet companies, and many others on more than 52,000 people. That’s 130 letters a day, counting Sundays.
The report found consistent underreporting of these numbers, even to the Justice Department’s own database. In the 77 case files the inspector general sampled in just four of the FBI’s 56 field offices, the report found 22 percent more requests than had been reported. At the same time, agents issued some 739 “exigent letters,” demanding information because of urgent investigations. Such letters require subpoenas, and the FBI assured recipients in many cases that they had already sent requests for subpoenas for the information in question. The inspector general selected 88 of these letters at random and asked for information on the first 25. When the FBI could produce only unsigned national security letters for 14 of these, the inspector general concluded that the FBI would be “unable to provide reliable documentation” on the rest.
Are we surprised that this report exists only because Congress ordered it - over the objection of the attorney general? Of course, the FBI underreported these numbers to Congress. Agents and their superiors clearly relished their new powers to scoop up information whenever and wherever they wanted, once they got rid of that pesky thing called judicial review - but even the new broad powers of the Patriot Act weren’t enough for them.
It would be one thing if this pattern of overstepping were a departure for the FBI in the wake of 9/11. But the modern pattern is completely in line with the history of the FBI, which has systematically violated the civil liberties of innumerable Americans for nearly a century.
From 1956 to 1971, under the umbrella of the Counter Intelligence Program, or CoIntelPro, the FBI dramatically broadened its efforts against Communists, the Ku Klux Klan, the Socialist Workers Party and a wide range of antiwar and civil rights groups.
Somehow popular perceptions convey that the FBI served as the good guys during the glory days of the civil rights movement. Nothing could be further from the truth. Beginning in 1963, according to the U.S. Senate Committee that investigated CoIntelPro, the FBI undertook an intensive campaign to neutralize the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. “as an effective civil rights leader.” Agents wiretapped King’s home phone, as well as those of his associates and his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. They bugged King’s hotel and motel rooms, trawling for information to discredit him and the movement. They sent a tape recording of his sexual liaisons to his wife, hoping to precipitate a divorce, and to King himself (anonymously), threatening to release the tape if he didn’t kill himself. This is the organization we’re now being asked to trust.
And we haven’t even touched on the antiwar movement, harassed and infiltrated by the FBI, or Watergate, when the FBI became the personal tool of the Nixon White House. During the Reagan years, the FBI routinely conducted surveillance on organizations supporting nuclear disarmament and opposing U.S. policy in Central America.
Here’s what the congressional committee concluded about the Nixon-era FBI:
Too many people have been spied upon by too many government agencies, and too much information has been collected. The government has often undertaken the secret surveillance of citizens on the basis of their political beliefs.
What’s the lesson of all this sordid history? That only the most rigorous congressional oversight - intense, unflagging, persistent - has a prayer of keeping the FBI from collecting vast quantities of information illegally and using it to damage the legitimate exercise of the First Amendment to the Constitution.
Copyright 2007 Newsday Inc.
August 5th, 2007 at 8:46 am
Dear Warren,
The FBI, like the CIA, like every security agency, will always be tempted to act illegally “for the greater good.” That is why the notion of oversight and accountability is always necessary. And it is also why this administration is so completely scary — because the one thing they really, deeply, hate is oversight. So, whether it is President Bush’s outrageous use of “signing statements,” his administration’s ingnoring the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court, or Dick Cheney’s ominous “black box” decisions, these people both do not understand that their actions are completely un-American and unconstitutional, nor do they understand how inevitable it is that security agencies will do these things.
August 6th, 2007 at 11:17 am
Terry–
I fully agree with your sentiments here. I would only add, from the historian’s perspective, that while you and I think the actions you describe are “un-American,” there is also a deep, powerful, thoroughly American, line of thought and action going back to the 1790s, that trusts state power over people’s civil liberties, and has generally been able to get away with constitutional murder. From John Adams to Woodrow Wilson (I know some would put Lincoln in there too, but he at least had a genuine rebellion on his hands, unlike the others), Harry Truman to Richard Nixon and now Bush the younger, too many Presidents of both parties have loved having the power to turn the state loose on journalists, freethinkers, peace advocates, unionists, and advocates for the poor and disfranchised.
And as of yesterday, the U.S. Congress has again rolled over and given this incompetent, fanatically secretive, Constitution-despising Administration the authority to wiretap conversations by the tens of thousands while bypassing the courts. What will it take for the “liberal” leadership of this Congress to discover its liberal spine?