IN THESE TIMES
Feature Story
Friday, June 7, 2002
http://www.inthesetimes.com/issue/26/16/feature1.shtml
By Doug Ireland
What do you do with a federal agency of notorious incompetence that is also
famous for regularly trampling on the Constitution?
If you're George W. Bush, you give it more money and power.
That's exactly what happened when the "reorganization" of the FBI was
announced on May 29 by Attorney General John Ashcroft. By giving the FBI
carte blanche to spy on speech and ideas--from libraries to the Internet,
from religious groups to political meetings--and by opening its files and
agents to unprecedented levels of cooperation with the CIA (heretofore
prohibited from domestic spying), the Bush administration has taken another
giant step toward turning this nation into a garrison state.
Legal wiretap spying on Americans had already increased in the first year
of the Bush administration by 25 percent, according to the annual report of
the federal court system. Federal and state police legally intercepted
approximately 2.3 million conversations and pager communications in 2001
(and this number does not include all U.S. Customs surveillance--many of
its records were lost in the destruction of the World Trade Center--or the
secret investigations done under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act).
Now, under the new Ashcroft guidelines, FBI agents will be able to monitor
what you say in Web chatrooms, or in religious and political meetings,
without any court order, without any evidence of a potential crime, even
without approval from FBI headquarters. For the first time, the FBI also
will be able to use commercial databases to monitor the books you buy, the
publications you subscribe to, where you travel, your credit profile, and
a wide swath of other data.
Even medical privacy is no longer sacrosanct--under new regulations to be
promulgated in October by Bush's Department of Health and Human Services,
doctors and hospitals will be required to open medical records to HHS and
other government agencies (including the FBI) any time they ask, without so
much as a court order.
It will also be illegal to enter into a contract with your doctor to
protect your health information from the feds, and HHS will create a
database for every possible ailment, coded down to your individual visits.
This awesome aggregation of new surveillance powers, rivaling those of the
Soviet KGB at its height, is all the more disturbing because the FBI has
long been the federal government's version of the Keystone Kops. Remember
Richard Jewell, the security guard falsely accused by the FBI--in
deliberate press leaks--of the bombing at the Atlanta Summer Olympics? Then
FBI director Louis Freeh, in his grudging public apology to the innocent
Jewell, blamed FBI field agents for "a major error in judgment."
Now field agents will be able to go on fishing expeditions of their own
without seeking approval from the Washington hierarchy. Yet the FBI
recently has given ample proof of its inability to carry out even the
simplest of investigative and analytical tasks, let alone distinguish the
guilty from the innocent. Consider everything from Waco to Wen Ho Lee, from
the "missing" FBI files in the case of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh
to the failure (even after unmasking CIA traitor Aldrich Ames) to
administer regular mandatory polygraph tests that could have discovered the
Russian spy in the bureau's midst, Robert Hanssen.
Yet when these hydra-headed errors have been exposed, the insular,
secretive and self-protective culture that characterizes the FBI has led to
brazen cover-ups. Thus, when FBI scientist Frederic Whitehurst told his
superiors how the bureau's own crime labs had so little quality control
that hundreds of prosecutions were questionable, the denizens of the J.
Edgar Hoover Building suspended and transferred Whitehurst, instead of
adopting his proposed reforms.
The new FBI guidelines take us straight back to the days of domestic spying
under COINTELPRO, the bureau's "counterintelligence" program in the '50s,
'60s and '70s. According to the Senate's Select Committee to Study
Government Operations, COINTELPRO was "a sophisticated vigilante operation
aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of
speech and association."
COINTELPRO infiltrated radical and dissident groups engaged in lawful
dissent; used agents provocateurs to push dissenters into extremist and
unlawful actions; engaged in disinformation campaigns and harassment of
protest organizations, including those of the civil rights movement; and in
the process drove thousands of radical activists toward burnout and
despair, as they blamed themselves for problems and errors that were the
result of the FBI's disruptions. Given this history, the notion that the
bureau will limit itself to passive domestic spying under the new
guidelines stretches credulity to the breaking point.
The previous guidelines, which have now been thrown out the window by
Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller--and which required the bureau to
show evidence of a crime before engaging in domestic spying--were
promulgated by Ford administration Attorney General Edward Levi to prevent
another COINTELPRO and other abuses of civil rights and liberties. But even
the Levi guidelines didn't prevent the FBI from going off on its own. In
1987, a decade after they went into effect, the Center for Constitutional
Rights exposed the CISPES investigation of activists opposed to U.S. policy
in Central America. The FBI had been keeping files on lawful dissenters and
infiltrating peace groups to weaken opposition to U.S. government support
for dictatorships and death squads in El Salvador, Guatemala and Nicaragua.
Nearly as scandalous as the new Ashcroft guidelines has been the failure of
the Democrats' poll-driven congressional leadership to denounce them. (A
Gallup Poll shows two-thirds of Americans view the FBI favorably--and 8 in
10 surveyed continue to approve of Bush.)
The alarm has been sounded, but, as of this writing, only by a few
constitutionally minded Republicans. House Judiciary Committee Chairman
James Sensenbrenner Jr. of Wisconsin told CNN's Novak, Hunt, & Shields
show: "I get very, very queasy when federal law enforcement is effectively
going back to the bad old days when the FBI was spying on Martin Luther
King. ... The Levi guidelines were designed to prevent that from happening
again, and nothing has told me that adherence to the Levi guidelines were
what caused 9/11." (As the widely publicized Phoenix and Rowley memos
revealed, the FBI could not even digest and act on the information it had
accumulated on the terrorists under the Levi guidelines before 9/11.)
By contrast, neither Tom Daschle nor Dick Gephardt (mindful of their
presidential ambitions) has uttered a word of criticism of the Aschcroft
guidelines. (Gephardt's opportunism knows no bounds: In a major foreign
policy address on June 4, he even leaped on the attack-Iraq bandwagon,
giving Bush a green light for this new military adventure at a time when
the military has signaled its opposition.)
The Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Vermont's
Patrick Leahy, has given a blanket endorsement to FBI Director Mueller (who
has been assiduous in courting his "oversight" as chairman); and in TV
appearances after Ashcroft announced the new guidelines, Leahy showed
himself as toothless as he was when he led Senate approval of the civil
liberties-shredding USA Patriot Act.
The polls also have silenced the journalistic eunuchs of the mass media,
who have been remarkably quiescent on the new threat to our civil liberties
(with a few notable exceptions, like conservative New York Times columnist
William Safire). Within 36 hours after Ashcroft unveiled the seismic policy
changes, the story had effectively disappeared from the radar screen.
What all this means is that we are now entering a period that Sam Smith,
editor of The Progressive Review, rightly describes as "Post-Constitutional
America." And in the present jingoistic climate, once our Bill of Rights
protections against government abuse of power are given away, one by one,
we won't get them back. That's arguably the terrorists' greatest victory to
date.
Copyright 2002 In These Times. All rights reserved.
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