{"id":3648,"date":"2012-05-30T07:41:50","date_gmt":"2012-05-30T12:41:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?p=3648"},"modified":"2012-05-30T07:41:50","modified_gmt":"2012-05-30T12:41:50","slug":"fbi-a-stasi-for-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/30\/fbi-a-stasi-for-america\/","title":{"rendered":"FBI: “A Stasi for America”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Following is a review essay I wrote for the American Conservative<\/strong><\/a> – <\/p>\n

A Stasi for America<\/strong><\/p>\n

By James Bovard<\/p>\n

A ripple of protest swept across the Internet in late March after the disclosure that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was teaching its agents that \u201cthe FBI has the ability to bend or suspend the law to impinge on the freedom of others.\u201d This maxim was inculcated as part of FBI counterterrorism training. The exposure of the training material\u2014sparked by a series of articles by Wired.com\u2019s Spencer Ackerman\u2014spurred the ritual declaration by an FBI spokesman that \u201cmistakes were made, and we are correcting those mistakes.\u201d No FBI officials were sanctioned or fired for teaching lawmen that they were above the law.<\/p>\n

At least the FBI has been consistent. Since its founding in 1908, the bureau has rarely let either the statute book or the Constitution impede its public service. Tim Weiner, the author of a superb expos\u00e9 of the CIA (Legacy of Ashes) has delivered a riveting chronology of some of the FBI\u2019s biggest crimes with his new book, Enemies: A History of the FBI. <\/p>\n

The FBI was born in deceit. Congress had prohibited Theodore Roosevelt\u2019s administration from creating a separate agency of federal investigators for fear that the new hirees would trample the Constitution. Rep. George Waldo, a New York Republican, warned that it would be a \u201cgreat blow to freedom if there should arise in this country any such great central secret service bureau as there is in Russia.\u201d But Attorney General Charles Bonaparte\u2014a direct descendent of the French dictator\u2014created the bureau by his own edict, shuffling funds from the Justice Department\u2019s expense account to bankroll the new operation.<\/p>\n

The bureau was small potatoes until Woodrow Wilson dragged the U.S. into World War I. With 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 embarrassed when the vast majority of young men who had been arrested turned out to be innocent.<\/p>\n

In January 1920, J. Edgar Hoover\u2014the 25-year-old chief of the bureau\u2019s Radical Division\u2014was the point man for the \u201cPalmer Raids.\u201d Up to 10,000 suspected Reds and radicals were seized. (The bureau carefully avoided keeping an accurate count of detainees.) Attorney General Palmer used 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 as to why individuals were arrested. Federal judge George Anderson complained that the government had created a \u201cspy system\u201d that \u201cdestroys 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

After the debacle of the Palmer raids, the bureau devoted its attention to the nation\u2019s real enemies: the U.S. Congress. The bureau targeted \u201csenators 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.\u201d The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was illegally targeted because the bureau feared he might support diplomatic recognition of Soviet Russia.<\/p>\n

After President Warren Harding died in August 1923, the bureau\u2019s political espionage was exposed. The chief of the Justice Department\u2019s criminal division urged Congress to \u201cget rid of this Bureau of Investigation as organized.\u201d The new attorney general, Harlan Fiske Stone, warned, \u201cA secret police system may become a menace to free government and free institutions because it carries with it the possibility of abuses of power which are not always quickly comprehended or understood.\u201d Stone fired the bureau\u2019s chief, and Hoover, who was number two in the agency, pledged to cease the abuses. But the FBI soon resumed its machinations.<\/p>\n

Hollywood teamed with the Roosevelt adminsitration to whip up support for a war on crime in the 1930s, and Hoover became the face of federal law enforcement. While Hoover stood as an icon of law and order, his men became experts at installing wiretaps and conducting \u201cblack bag\u201d burglaries, often including the planting of listening devices. By the late 1930s, Weiner notes, \u201cAt the highest levels of power in Washington, an awareness dawned that Hoover might be listening to private conversations. This sense that the FBI was omnipresent was its own kind of power.\u201d After the FBI tapped the home telephone of a Supreme Court clerk, \u201cChief Justice Charles Evans Hughes suspected that Hoover had wired the conference room where the justices met to decide cases.\u201d<\/p>\n

While FDR welcomed the dirt the FBI delivered to him, Attorney General Robert Jackson noted in a secret memo, \u201cThe FBI is the subject of frequent attack as a Gestapo.\u201d Shortly after taking office, President Harry Truman made a similar comment in his diary: \u201cWe want no Gestapo or Secret Police. FBI is tending in that direction. They are dabbling in sex-life scandals and plain blackmail\u2026 . This must stop.\u201d But Hoover outfoxed Truman and continued building his empire. Hoover correctly perceived that the Roosevelt and Truman administrations\u2014especially the State Department\u2014had been heavily infiltrated by Soviet spies. The FBI nailed some of the double-agents who provided Stalin with key information to build atomic weapons.<\/p>\n

In 1950, three months after the start of the Korean War, Congress passed the Internal Security Act, which authorized mass detentions of suspected subversives. Hoover compiled a list of more than 20,000 \u201cpotentially or actually dangerous\u201d Americans who could be seized and locked away at the president\u2019s command. \u201cCongress secretly financed the creation of six of these [detention] camps in the 1950s,\u201d Weiner notes. Hoover specified that \u201cthe hearing procedure\u201d for the detentions \u201cwill not be bound by the rules of evidence.\u201d<\/p>\n

The more power the FBI captured, the more craven Congress became.<\/strong> \u201cCongress fawned over Hoover during his annual appearances before the leaders of the judiciary and appropriations committees,\u201d Weiner notes. Hoover fed buckets of leaks to favored politicians, helping spur the rise of Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy.<\/p>\n

From 1956 through 1971, the FBI\u2019s COINTELPRO program conducted thousands of covert operations to incite street warfare between violent groups, to get people fired, to smear innocent people by portraying them as government informants, to sic the IRS on people, and to cripple or destroy left-wing, black, communist, white racist, and other organizations. FBI agents also busied themselves forging \u201cpoison pen\u201d letters to wreck activists\u2019 marriages. FBI agents were encouraged to conduct interviews with antiwar protestors to \u201cenhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and further serve to get the point across that there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox.\u201d COINTELPRO was only exposed after a handful of activists burglarized an FBI office in a Philadelphia suburb, seized FBI files, and leaked the damning documents to the media.<\/p>\n

While Weiner\u2019s history of the FBI\u2019s first half-century is masterful, he downplays or excludes some of the bureau\u2019s worst modern abuses. His less-than-a-paragraph thumbnail summary of Waco could have been written by the FBI Office of Public Affairs: \u201cThe FBI had used tear gas against the barricaded and heavily armed group, giving its leader the apocalypse he desired.\u201d Weiner notes that 80 Davidians \u201cdied in the fire that followed.\u201d<\/p>\n

He neglects to mention that the CS gas was delivered via 54-ton tanks driven by FBI agents. The tanks smashed through much of the Davidians\u2019 home and intentionally collapsed 25 percent of the building on top of the huddled residents. The FBI knew the Davidians were lighting and heating their residence with candles and kerosene lamps and had bales of hay stacked around the windows. The FBI also knew that \u201caccumulating [CS] dust may explode when exposed to spark or open flame,\u201d as a U.S. Army field manual warned. Six years after the assault, news leaked that the FBI had fired incendiary tear gas cartridges into the Davidians\u2019 home prior to a fire erupting. Attorney General Janet Reno, furious over the FBI\u2019s 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\u2014with one exception. On the day after the Waco fire, FBI on-scene commander Larry Potts explained the rationale for the FBI\u2019s final assault: \u201cThose people thumbed their nose at law enforcement.\u201d<\/p>\n

Weiner justly excoriates Louis Freeh as one of the FBI\u2019s most inept directors. The FBI\u2019s pervasive failures prior to 9\/11 \u201ccontributed to the United States becoming, in effect, a sanctuary for radical terrorists,\u201d according to a congressional investigation. Freeh had promised Congress in 1997 that he would \u201cdouble the \u2018shoe leather\u2019\u201d for counterterrorism investigations. But walking was no substitute for thinking.<\/p>\n

The FBI\u2019s ability to decipher terrorist plots was thwarted by its profound aversion toward modern technology.<\/strong> Though Congress had deluged the FBI with almost $2 billion to upgrade its computers, many FBI agents on 9\/11 had eight-year-old machines that were incapable of searching the web or sending email. One FBI agent observed that the bureau ethos is that \u201creal men don\u2019t type. The only thing a real agent needs is a notebook, a pen and gun, and with those three things you can conquer the world\u2026 . The computer revolution just passed us by\u201d because of that mindset. (FBI computer upgrades continue to flounder, billions of dollars and a decade later.) As usual, the FBI\u2019s failures did not prevent the agency from receiving vastly more power and funding after the disastrous attacks.<\/p>\n

At times, Weiner is like a prosecuting attorney who marshals a vast array of evidence of perfidy\u2014and then suddenly announces that the defendant\u2019s good intentions absolve all his crimes. Weiner declares, \u201cOver the decades, the Bureau has best served the cause of national security by bending and breaking the law.\u201d<\/p>\n

But many of the FBI\u2019s illicit operations were complete disasters. Hoover perpetually falsely assured presidents that the Soviets or other communist regimes were bankrolling the civil rights movement. Hoover\u2019s reports also fed the fantasies and paranoia of both LBJ and Nixon that the communists were behind the antiwar movement, thereby helping deepen and perpetuate the Vietnam quagmire.<\/p>\n

Hoover pioneered the art of assuming that the bureau was entitled to use any powers that had been delegated to it by a president or attorney general. The Supreme Court repeatedly ruled that warrantless wiretaps were unconstitutional. Hoover found one shady pretext after another to continue breaking the law. FDR authorized Hoover to use any means necessary to go after fascists, communists, or other subversives, and Hoover ever after cited that \u201cauthority\u201d for black-bag jobs, bugging bedrooms, and other abuses.<\/p>\n

Former Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach explained to a Senate Committee in 1975 how the FBI justified scorning the law:<\/p>\n

As far as Mr. Hoover was concerned, it was sufficient for the Bureau if at any time any Attorney General had authorized [a particular] activity in any circumstances. In fact, it was often sufficient if any Attorney General had written something which could be construed to authorize it or had been informed in some one of hundreds of memoranda of some facts from which he could conceivably have inferred the possibility of such an activity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hoover conveyed this attitude to his agents, and they acted accordingly. After COINTELPRO abuses were exposed, two top FBI officials were convicted for \u201cblack bag\u201d jobs and other abuses. (President Reagan gave them full pardons.) Weiner recounts the justification offered by the FBI\u2019s chief of intelligence, Edward Miller, who \u201ctook his argument from the common law of centuries gone by. A man\u2019s home is his castle, he conceded. But no man can maintain a castle against the King.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was bizarre that any American could attribute such a doctrine to the common law. The English in the 1600s fought a civil war, executed one king, and deposed another to banish that notion from their land. William Pitt, speaking in Parliament in 1763, famously declared: \u201cThe poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the forces of the crown. \u2026 [T]he storm may enter\u2014the rain may enter\u2014but the King of England cannot enter.\u201d The English common law was adapted as the foundation of American jurisprudence at the time of this nation\u2019s founding, and Pitt\u2019s dicta helped guide American courts.<\/p>\n

But the FBI long operated on a presumption that the law did not apply to the king\u2014or anyone the king designated to break the law. FBI badges were presumed to provide the same exoneration that Cardinal Richelieu reputedly gave agents sent on dastardly deeds: \u201cThe Bearer of This Letter Has Acted Under My Orders and for the Good of the State.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

The \u201cexcept for the king\u201d theory of law has mightily expanded since 9\/11. Justice Department lawyer John Yoo assured the Bush White House that the president was \u201cfree from the constraints of the Fourth Amendment\u201d and its prohibition of unreasonable, warrantless searches. The Obama administration has taken up the same tune with its contortions on the president\u2019s prerogative to order the killing of Americans without a trial or other judicial niceties.<\/p>\n

The biggest surprise in Enemies is Weiner\u2019s lionization of current FBI director Robert Mueller, who took over in 2001. Mueller earned his halo from Weiner for his refusal in April 2004 to rubberstamp the extension of the post-9\/11 wiretapping regime. Bush purportedly modified his \u201cTerrorist Surveillance Program,\u201d and Mueller stayed contentedly on the job. Without knowing the details of the policy change, it is unclear why Mueller is sainted. The revised system continued vacuuming up thousands of Americans\u2019 phone calls and emails and was widely condemned as illegal after the New York Times exposed it in December 2005.<\/p>\n

Mueller is portrayed as a steadfast defender of liberty in part because of the just-released 460-page FBI guideline for running intelligence operations, which Weiner labels the \u201cfirst realistic operating manual for running a secret intelligence service in an open democracy.\u201d The new rules require \u201crigorous obedience to constitutional principles.\u201d Sounds good\u2014but at the same time, the FBI was teaching its agents behind closed doors that they have \u201cthe ability to bend or suspend the law.\u201d<\/p>\n

We have probably not seen the tip of the iceberg of the FBI\u2019s post-9\/11 abuses. The FBI has almost always been more abusive than it appeared.<\/strong> It took decades before Americans learned of Hoover\u2019s secret list with the names of tens of thousands of people who would vanish into federal stockades at the drop of a presidential memo. Americans did not learn of the breadth of COINTELPRO\u2019s outrages until almost 20 years after the program started. We have no idea what personal info has been vacuumed up by the 400,000-plus National Security Letters the FBI issued in the past decade. Weiner notes that the FBI has more than 700 million terrorism-related records and a suspected terrorist list with more than a million names.<\/p>\n

For most of its history, the FBI has been one of the most venerated of federal agencies. The FBI has always used its \u201cgood guys\u201d image to keep a lid on its crimes. <\/strong>There are many competent, courageous FBI agents who do fine work and make America a safer place. But the bureau\u2019s vast power and pervasive secrecy guarantee that more FBI scandals are just around the bend.<\/p>\n

James Bovard is the author of Attention Deficit Democracy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Following is a review essay I wrote for the American Conservative – A Stasi for America By James Bovard A ripple of protest swept across the Internet in late March after the disclosure that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was teaching its agents that \u201cthe FBI has the ability to bend or suspend the law […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[658,17,47,674,45,673,11,662,657,665,26,661],"class_list":{"0":"post-3648","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"tag-congress","8":"tag-elective-dictatorship","9":"tag-fbi","11":"tag-freedom","13":"tag-justice-department","14":"tag-lying","15":"tag-rule-of-law","16":"tag-surveillance","17":"tag-terrorism"},"yoast_head":"\nFBI: "A Stasi for America" - James Bovard<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/30\/fbi-a-stasi-for-america\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"FBI: "A Stasi for America" - 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The Wall Street Journal called Bovard \\\"the roving inspector general of the modern state\\\" and Washington Post columnist George Will called him a \\\"one-man truth squad.\\\" His 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, received the Free Press Association\u2019s Mencken Award as Book of the Year. His Terrorism & Tyranny won the Lysander Spooner \\\"Best Book on Liberty in 2003\\\" award. He received the Thomas Szasz Award for Civil Liberties work, awarded by the Center for Independent Thought and the Freedom Fund Award from the Firearms Civil Rights Defense Fund of the National Rifle Association. Bovard\u2019s writings have been publicly denounced by FBI director Louis Freeh, the Secretary of Agriculture, the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Postmaster General, and the chiefs of the U.S. International Trade Commission, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, as well as by many congressmen and other malcontents.\",\"sameAs\":[\"http:\\\/\\\/www.jimbovard.com\",\"https:\\\/\\\/www.facebook.com\\\/jim.bovard\",\"https:\\\/\\\/x.com\\\/jimbovard\"],\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/jimbovard.com\\\/blog\\\/author\\\/admin\\\/\"}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"FBI: \"A Stasi for America\" - James Bovard","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/30\/fbi-a-stasi-for-america\/","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"FBI: \"A Stasi for America\" - James Bovard","og_description":"Following is a review essay I wrote for the American Conservative – A Stasi for America By James Bovard A ripple of protest swept across the Internet in late March after the disclosure that the Federal Bureau of Investigation was teaching its agents that \u201cthe FBI has the ability to bend or suspend the law […]","og_url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/30\/fbi-a-stasi-for-america\/","og_site_name":"James Bovard","article_author":"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jim.bovard","article_published_time":"2012-05-30T12:41:50+00:00","author":"Jim","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","twitter_creator":"@jimbovard","twitter_misc":{"Written by":"Jim","Est. reading time":"13 minutes"},"schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Article","@id":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/30\/fbi-a-stasi-for-america\/#article","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/30\/fbi-a-stasi-for-america\/"},"author":{"name":"Jim","@id":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/79550830ad81c14be529a2c37469974f"},"headline":"FBI: “A Stasi for America”","datePublished":"2012-05-30T12:41:50+00:00","mainEntityOfPage":{"@id":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/30\/fbi-a-stasi-for-america\/"},"wordCount":2618,"commentCount":2,"keywords":["Congress","Elective Dictatorship","FBI","FBI","Freedom","Freedom","Justice Department","Lying","Rule of Law","Surveillance","Terrorism","Terrorism"],"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"CommentAction","name":"Comment","target":["https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/30\/fbi-a-stasi-for-america\/#respond"]}]},{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/30\/fbi-a-stasi-for-america\/","url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/30\/fbi-a-stasi-for-america\/","name":"FBI: \"A Stasi for America\" - James Bovard","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/#website"},"datePublished":"2012-05-30T12:41:50+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/79550830ad81c14be529a2c37469974f"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/30\/fbi-a-stasi-for-america\/#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/30\/fbi-a-stasi-for-america\/"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/30\/fbi-a-stasi-for-america\/#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"FBI: “A Stasi for America”"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/#website","url":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/","name":"James Bovard","description":"","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/jimbovard.com\/blog\/#\/schema\/person\/79550830ad81c14be529a2c37469974f","name":"Jim","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/d95466cfd0934e38803c5035629df727ae4ec1f3f96c6883c05b5c52e2044505?s=96&d=mm&r=r","url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/d95466cfd0934e38803c5035629df727ae4ec1f3f96c6883c05b5c52e2044505?s=96&d=mm&r=r","contentUrl":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/d95466cfd0934e38803c5035629df727ae4ec1f3f96c6883c05b5c52e2044505?s=96&d=mm&r=r","caption":"Jim"},"description":"Bovard's homepage is at http:\/\/www.jimbovard.com He can be contacted at jim@jimbovard.com James Bovard is the author of ten books. 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