BUSH ADMINISTRATION CITES SEPTEMBER 11 'FAILURES' TO ATTACK DEMOCRATIC
RIGHTS
FBI gets blank check for domestic spying
____________________________________________________________________

News & Analysis: North America
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/jun2002/ashc-j07.shtml
By Jerry Isaacs

Last week Attorney General John Ashcroft granted sweeping powers to the
Federal Bureau of Investigation to spy on political organizations,
religious groups and private citizens in the US. When he announced the
measures, Ashcroft declared that previous restrictions on domestic spying
had contributed to the FBI's failure, despite warnings from agents in the
field, to prevent the September 11 terror attacks.

"As we have heard recently, FBI men and women in the field are frustrated
because many of our own internal restrictions have hampered our ability to
fight terrorism," the attorney general told a May 30 press conference in
Washington. Since September 11, the attorney general added, "we in the
leadership of the FBI and the Department of Justice began a concerted
effort to free the field agents--the brave men and women on the front
lines--from the bureaucratic, organizational and operational restrictions
and structures that hindered them from doing their jobs effectively."

What has emerged since September 11 is a large body of evidence that the
FBI had intelligence--ample intelligence--that a plot was under way to
carry out a major terrorist attack in the US, that it involved Islamic
fundamentalists associated with Al Qaeda, and that the modus operandi would
involve the hijacking of US commercial aircraft.

Among other things, field agents in Phoenix alerted FBI headquarters about
Middle Eastern students with Islamic fundamentalist sympathies training to
fly planes and urged a nationwide screening of flight schools for possible
terrorists; Minneapolis FBI agents reported the detention of Zaccarias
Moussaoui--who one agent described as someone who might fly a jumbo jet
into the World Trade Center--and urgently requested authorization to search
his personal computer; the US government received advance warning from
Egypt and other governments about an impending attack. And yet, for still
unexplained reasons, the FBI, the CIA and the White House ignored these and
other warnings.

Nothing that has emerged remotely suggests that the FBI was hindered from
gathering information on potential terrorist attackers by the restrictions
on domestic spying of political and religious organizations and US citizens
that were imposed in the mid-1970s. Ashcroft does not even attempt to make
the case that FBI "lapses" were caused by or even related to such
restrictions. Instead, he makes a sweeping assertion and relies on a
compliant media to grant it legitimacy. What Ashcroft is obliged to explain
to the American people--which he refuses to do--is why the FBI and his own
office ignored the clear implications of the intelligence information they
had gathered.

All the evidence points not to some mysterious failure to "connect the
dots" or an overweening concern for civil liberties on the part of an
organization notorious for its contempt for constitutional safeguards, but
rather a politically motivated decision not to expose suspected terrorists
and to allow them, instead, to proceed with their plans.

There are two possible reasons for this. Either it was decided that a
hijacking would serve the interests of the Bush administration by providing
a casus belli for war in Central Asia and a pretext for sweeping attacks on
democratic rights in the US, or Moussauoi and other alleged Al Qaeda
operatives enjoyed official protection because they were involved in
international covert operations under the direction of US intelligence
agencies. In either case, the deaths of more than 3,000 civilians on
September 11 has its roots in the reactionary and secret operations of the
American intelligence apparatus.

Now the White House is using the revelations about the unexplained failure
of the FBI and CIA to stop the attacks as a pretext to strengthen the
repressive powers of the state and persecute American citizens solely on
the basis of their political beliefs and activity, effectively overriding
the constitutional protections spelled out in the Bill of Rights.

The Justice Department is overturning restrictions that were imposed in
1976 following the Watergate crisis and the exposure of the massive
domestic spying operations conducted by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, the CIA,
army intelligence and other government agencies in the 1960s and 1970s. A
series of "Attorney General Guidelines" was established at that time to
limit the scope of "acceptable" surveillance and infiltration of political
and religious organizations, which stated that the advocacy of unpopular
ideas or political dissent alone could not serve as the basis for an
investigation. FBI agents were obliged to show that their targets were
engaged in or planning criminal activity before an investigation could be
pursued.

Of course, only the most naïve observers would accept the official story
that since these restrictions were announced the FBI has scrupulously
observed them. As clearly emerged in a series of well-publicized cases in
the 1980s involving FBI surveillance and harassment of supporters of the
Palestinian struggle and opponents of US policy in Central America, these
guidelines did not put an end to FBI abuse. Nevertheless, Ashcroft has now
given the FBI a blank check to conduct domestic spying without presenting
the slightest evidence of actual or potential criminal wrongdoing.

The factual record also refutes the pretense that these measures were
necessitated by the discovery of the FBI's so-called failures. The plans to
lift restrictions on domestic spying began well before the latest
revelations. Shortly after September 11 the attorney general authorized the
FBI to waive the guidelines "in extraordinary cases to prevent and
investigate terrorism," and by December 2001 Ashcroft had made it known he
intended to scrap the restrictions entirely. Moreover this measure is
entirely in line with the general thrust of Bush administration and Justice
Department policy since September 11, including the secret detention of
thousands of Middle Eastern immigrants, the sanctioning of military
tribunals, and the vast expansion of government wire-tapping, electronic
eavesdropping, and search-and-seizure powers authorized by the "USA Patriot
Act," the anti-terrorist law passed with bipartisan support last October.

The new guidelines will allow FBI agents to monitor political gatherings,
Internet sites and chat groups, libraries and churches. The FBI will use
commercially available "data mining" technology and other means to monitor
credit card data, book purchases, tax records, academic scores, insurance
records, mortgage payments and other personal information. The government
will be allowed to track every visit an individual makes to a web site,
every comment to a chat room and every book or movie he or she purchases
from Amazon.com and other web sites. Undercover agents will be free to
attend political meetings and take note of who was present and what was
said.

Ashcroft made the ridiculous assertion that these measures were benign
because they only gave FBI agents the rights that the American public
enjoyed: to visit public places, attend events and view web sites freely.
But, of course, FBI agents are not simply members of the public. They are
operatives of a political police force, whose job is to gather information
for use against anyone who is deemed to be "subversive" or an "enemy of the
state."

The framers of the Constitution warned against the unchecked power of the
government and drafted the Bill of Rights to protect citizens from
government efforts to crush political dissent. As late as the 1950s,
Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson warned that without clear limits a
federal investigative agency would "have enough on enough people" so that
"even if it does not elect to prosecute them" the government would still
"find no opposition to its policies."

The rights to free speech and assembly mean nothing if individuals who
exercise them face a knock on the door by the FBI and reprisals, including
prosecution, public scandal and the loss of employment.

Cointelpro

It is important that the American public be reminded of the type and scope
of FBI activities against which the 1976 guidelines were drafted. Just what
was going on in the 1960s and 1970s? What can the American people
anticipate in the coming weeks and months as a result of the lifting of the
guidelines?

As the Watergate revelations made clear, the massive domestic spying by the
FBI and other intelligence agencies were part of a growing resort to
conspiratorial and illegal methods of rule that were directed by the
highest levels of the state, including the Nixon White House. The
guidelines imposed on the FBI were part of an attempt to restore
credibility to the political system in the eyes of the American people in
the wake of a massive political and social crisis that culminated in the
first-ever resignation of a president. The restrictions were imposed in the
aftermath of a period dominated by massive anti-war protests, urban riots
and militant labor struggles. American democracy was badly discredited and
its essential hypocrisy exposed--both by the brutal and repressive measures
employed to put down domestic dissent and the barbaric policies carried out
in its name in Southeast Asia. It had become obvious to all but the most
backward elements in the ruling elite that measures were needed to restore
a measure of public confidence and rein in those state forces whose
police-state methods threatened to provoke even more massive upheavals.

After Nixon's resignation, the Church Committee, named after its chairman,
Senator Frank Church of Idaho, conducted a wide-ranging investigation of US
intelligence agencies. In its final report, issued in April 1976, the
committee concluded: "Domestic intelligence activity has threatened and
undermined the Constitutional rights of Americans to free speech,
association and privacy. It has done so primarily because the
Constitutional system for checking abuse of power has not been applied."

The committee said the abuses by the intelligence apparatus mirrored the
growth of excessive executive power and excessive secrecy, and that in the
name of "national security" intelligence officers and their senior
officials blatantly disregarded the law and the civil liberties of their
targets.

The Church Committee revealed the enormous scope of the operations against
anti-war demonstrators, civil rights activists and left-wing political
parties. This included the FBI's Counterintelligence Program (Cointelpro),
which had the stated goal "to expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or
otherwise neutralize" left-wing opponents of government policy. FBI
headquarters alone developed over 500,000 domestic intelligence files on US
citizens.

In addition the committee found:

* At least 26,000 individuals were at one point catalogued on an FBI list
of persons to be rounded up in the event of a "national emergency."

* Nearly a quarter of a million first class letters were opened and
photographed in the US by the CIA between 1953 and 1973, producing a CIA
computerized index of nearly 1.5 million names. Separate files were created
on approximately 7,200 Americans and over 100 domestic groups in the course
of the CIA's Operation CHAOS (1967-1973), aimed at crushing the student
anti-war movement.

* Millions of private telegrams sent from, to, or through the US were
obtained by the National Security Agency from 1947 to 1975 under a secret
arrangement with three US telegraph companies.

* An estimated 100,000 Americans were the subjects of United States Army
intelligence files created between the mid-1960s and 1971.

* Intelligence files on more than 11,000 individuals and groups were
created by the Internal Revenue Service between 1969 and 1973 and tax
investigations were started on the basis of political rather than tax
criteria.

The Senate committee also found that these agencies sent anonymous letters
attacking the political beliefs of targets in order to induce their
employers to fire them. Similar letters were sent to spouses in an effort
to destroy marriages. The committee also documented criminal break-ins, the
theft of membership lists and misinformation campaigns aimed at provoking
violent attacks against targeted individuals.

One of the most infamous operations uncovered by the Church Committee was
the FBI's campaign to "neutralize" civil rights leader Martin Luther King
Jr. This included an extensive surveillance program to obtain information
about the "private activities of King and his advisers" to use in order to
"completely discredit" them. The FBI mailed King a tape recording made from
microphones hidden in hotel rooms. As one agent testified, this was an
attempt to destroy King's marriage. The tape was accompanied by a note
suggesting that the recording would be released to the public unless King
committed suicide.

The FBI's Cointelpro operations against the Black Panthers involved the
killing of several leaders, including Fred Hampton, by the Chicago police,
as well as the frame-up and imprisonment of scores of others.

Referring to this period, Ashcroft made a passive reference to "abuses"
that have been "alleged about the FBI decades ago." The attorney general
assured one and all that he and the president would never allow the FBI to
use its new powers to crush political dissent or civil liberties. Like his
boss in the White House, Ashcroft's answer to concerns over the gutting of
democratic rights is, "Trust me."

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