by
James Bovard
President
Trump’s firing of FBI chief James Comey last May spurred much of
the media to rally around America’s most powerful domestic federal
agency. But the FBI has a long record of both deceit and
incompetence. Five years ago, Americans learned that the FBI was
teaching its agents that “the FBI has the ability to bend or
suspend the law to impinge on the freedom of others.” This has
practically been the Bureau’s motif since its creation in 1908.
The
bureau was small potatoes until Woodrow Wilson dragged the United
States into World War I. In one fell swoop, the number of dangerous
Americans increased by perhaps twentyfold. The Espionage Act of 1917
made it easy to jail anyone who criticized the war or the government.
In September 1918, the bureau, working with local police and private
vigilantes, seized more than 50,000 suspected draft dodgers off the
streets and out of the restaurants of New York, Newark, and Jersey
City. The Justice Department was disgraced when the vast majority of
young men who had been arrested turned out to be innocent.
In
January 1920, J. Edgar Hoover — the 25-year-old chief of the
bureau’s Radical Division — was the point man for the “Palmer
Raids.” Nearly 10,000 suspected Reds and radicals were seized. The
bureau carefully avoided keeping an accurate count of detainees (a
similar pattern of negligence occurred with the roundups after the
9/11 attacks). Attorney General Mitchell Palmer sought to use the
massive roundups to propel his presidential candidacy. The operation
took a drubbing, however, after an insolent judge demanded that the
Justice Department provide evidence for why people had been arrested.
Federal judge George Anderson complained that the government had
created a “spy system” that “destroys trust and confidence and
propagates hate. A mob is a mob whether made up of government
officials acting under instructions from the Department of Justice,
or of criminals, loafers, and the vicious classes.”
After
the debacle of the Palmer raids, the bureau devoted its attention to
the nation’s real enemies: the U.S. Congress. The bureau targeted
“senators whom the Attorney General saw as threats to America. The
Bureau was breaking into their offices and homes, intercepting their
mail, and tapping their telephones,” as Tim Weiner recounted in his
2012 book Enemies: The History of the FBI. The chairman of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee was illegally targeted because the bureau
feared he might support diplomatic recognition of Soviet Russia.
Hoover,
who ran the FBI from 1924 until his death in 1972, built a revered
agency that utterly intimidated official Washington. The FBI tapped
the home telephone of a Supreme Court clerk, and at least one Supreme
Court Justice feared the FBI had bugged the conference room where
justices privately discussed cases. In 1945, President Harry Truman
wrote in his diary, “We want no Gestapo or Secret Police. FBI is
tending in that direction…. This must stop.” But Truman did not
have the gumption to pull in the reins.
The
bureau’s power soared after Congress passed the Internal Security
Act of 1950, authorizing massive crackdowns on suspected subversives.
Hoover compiled a list of more than 20,000 “potentially or actually
dangerous” Americans who could be seized and locked away at the
president’s command. Hoover specified that “the hearing procedure
[for detentions] will not be bound by the rules of evidence.”
“Congress secretly financed the creation of six of these
[detention] camps in the 1950s,” noted Weiner. (When rumors began
circulating in the 1990s that the Federal Emergency Management Agency
was building detention camps, government officials and much of the
media scoffed that such a thing could never occur in this nation.)
From
1956 through 1971, the FBI’s COINTELPRO program conducted thousands
of covert operations to incite street warfare between violent groups,
to get people fired, to portray innocent people as government
informants, and to cripple or destroy left-wing, black, communist,
white racist, and anti-war organizations. FBI agents also busied
themselves forging “poison pen” letters to wreck activists’
marriages. The FBI set up a Ghetto Informant Program that continued
after COINTELPRO and that had 7,402 informants, including proprietors
of candy stores and barbershops, as of September 1972. The informants
served as “listening posts” “to identify extremists passing
through or locating in the ghetto area, to identify purveyors of
extremist literature,” and to keep an eye on “Afro-American type
bookstores” (including obtaining the names of the bookstores’
“clientele”).
The
FBI let no corner of American life escape its vigilance; it even
worked to expose and discredit “communists who are secretly
operating in legitimate organizations and employments, such as the
Young Men’s Christian Association and Boy Scouts,” as a 1976
Senate report noted. The FBI took a shotgun approach to target and
harass protesters partly because of its “belief that dissident
speech and association should be prevented because they were
incipient steps toward the possible ultimate commission of an act
which might be criminal,” the Senate report observed. That report
characterized COINTELPRO as “a secret war against those citizens
[the FBI] considers threats to the established order.” COINTELPRO
was exposed only after a handful of activists burglarized an FBI
office in a Philadelphia suburb, seized FBI files, and leaked the
damning documents to the media. The revelations were briefly shocking
but faded into the Washington Memory Hole.
FBI
haughtiness was showcased on national television on April 19, 1993,
when its agents used 54-ton tanks to smash into the Branch Davidians’
sprawling, ramshackle home near Waco, Texas. The tanks intentionally
collapsed 25 percent of the building on top of the huddled residents.
After the FBI pumped the building full of CS gas (banned for use on
enemy soldiers by a chemical-weapons treaty), a fire ignited that
left 80 children, women, and men dead. The FBI swore it was not to
blame for the conflagration. However, FBI agents had stopped
firetrucks from a local fire department far from the burning
building, claiming it was not safe to allow them any closer because
the Davidians might shoot people dousing a fire that was killing
them. Six years after the assault, news leaked that the FBI had fired
incendiary tear-gas cartridges into the Davidians’ home prior to
the fire’s erupting.
Attorney
General Janet Reno, furious over the FBI’s deceit on this key
issue, sent U.S. marshals to raid FBI headquarters to search for more
Waco evidence. From start to finish, the FBI brazenly lied about what
it did at Waco — with one exception. On the day after the Waco
fire, FBI on-scene commander Larry Potts explained the rationale for
the FBI’s final assault: “These people had thumbed their nose at
law enforcement.”
Terrorism
FBI
counterterrorism spending soared in the mid to late 1990s. But the
FBI dismally failed to connect the dots on suspicious foreigners
engaged in domestic aviation training prior to the 9/11 attacks.
Though Congress had deluged the FBI with almost $2 billion to upgrade
its computers, many FBI agents had ancient machines incapable of
searching the web. One FBI agent observed that the bureau ethos is
that “real men don’t type…. The computer revolution just passed
us by.” The FBI’s pre–9/11 blunders “contributed to the
United States becoming, in effect, a sanctuary for radical
terrorists,” according to a 2002 congressional investigation.
Former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft groused that “the
safest place in the world for a terrorist to be is inside the United
States; as long as they don’t do something that trips them up
against our laws, they can do pretty much all they want.” Sen.
Richard Shelby in 2002 derided “the FBI’s dismal recent history
of disorganization and institutional incompetence in its national
security work.” (The FBI also lost track of a key informant at the
heart of the cabal that detonated a truck bomb beneath the World
Trade Center in 1993.)
The
FBI has long relied on entrapment to boost its arrest statistics and
publicity bombardments. The FBI Academy taught agents that subjects
of FBI investigations “have forfeited their right to the truth.”
After 9/11, this doctrine helped the agency to entrap legions of
patsies who made the FBI appear to be protecting the nation. Trevor
Aaronson, author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s
Manufactured War on Terrorism, estimated that only about 1 percent of
the 500 people charged with international terrorism offenses in the
decade after 9/11 were bona fide threats. Thirty times as many were
induced by the FBI to behave in ways that prompted their arrest.
In
the Liberty City 7 case in Florida, FBI informants planted the notion
of blowing up government buildings. In one case, a federal judge
concluded that the government “came up with the crime, provided the
means, and removed all relevant obstacles” in order to make a
“terrorist” out of a man “whose buffoonery is positively
Shakespearean in scope.”
The
FBI’s informant program extended far beyond Muslims. The FBI
bankrolled a right-wing New Jersey blogger and radio host for five
years prior to his 2009 arrest for threatening federal judges. We
have no idea how many bloggers, talk-show hosts, or activists the FBI
is currently financing.
The
FBI’s power has rarely been effectively curbed by either Congress
or federal courts. In 1971, House Majority Leader Hale Boggs declared
that the FBI’s power terrified Capitol Hill: “Our very fear of
speaking out [against the FBI] … has watered the roots and hastened
the growth of a vine of tyranny…. Our society cannot survive a
planned and programmed fear of its own government bureaus and
agencies.” Boggs vindicated a 1924 American Civil Liberties Union
report warning that the FBI had become “a secret police system of a
political character” — a charge that supporters of both Hillary
Clinton and Donald Trump would have cheered last year.
Is
the FBI’s halo irrevocable? The FBI has always used its “good
guy” image to keep a lid on its crimes. It is long past time for
the American people, media, and Congress to take the FBI off its
pedestal and place it where it belongs — under the law. It is time
to cease venerating a federal agency whose abuses have perennially
menaced Americans’ constitutional rights. Otherwise, the FBI’s
vast power and pervasive secrecy guarantee that more FBI scandals are
just around the bend.
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