The Ashcroft Helix: Failure Equals Bigger Budget, more Power
Saul Landau
Progreso Weekly, 13 June 2002
What’s wrong with this logic from Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller III? Cede your civil liberties and Constitutional rights and we’ll protect you more efficiently from the next terrorist attack.
The answer is that the supposed logic of Ashcroft and Mueller belies the facts. The enjoyment by US citizens of their rights and liberties played no part in impeding the Bureau from discovering that Al-Qaeda operatives had begun to conspire to do their foul deed. Prior to 9/11 FBI Special Agents had already learned that Al-Qaeda no-goodniks had enrolled in flight schools to pilot jumbo jets, that these unlikely flight students showed no interest in taking off or landing, only in steering the plane once aloft. The Bureau knew that they had behaved suspiciously enough to provoke flight school managers and instructors to notify the FBI.
Field agents in Phoenix and Minneapolis had put the proverbial two and two together and filed their perceptive reports to their superiors who, in turn, sat on their proverbial asses as the plotters continued on their path of destruction.
As documents now reveal, the FBI’s own top officials simply disregarded solid information and analysis provided by their own field agents-all of whom, by the way, operated under the old guidelines of respecting the basic privacy rights and freedom of the citizens. Worse, Coleen Rowley a supervisor of the Phoenix office got punished-demoted-for writing a clear and cogent memo to her boss, in which she stated that national security issues should prevail over the Bureau’s traditional huffy response to criticism: outraged denial as a means to cover your ass. But, what should a woman Agent expect when she criticizes a Bureau directed by men-well, sort of, if you recall J. Edgar Hoover’s alleged passion for wearing tutus in his living room.
Like the Bureau field agents, CIA gatherers also collected good material on the perps. But, as the June 10 Newsweek reports, CIA upper echelons also failed to send files to the Bureau on two men who became part of the skyjacking team.
As reports emerge from the files of both agencies, it appears that the top dogs simply didn’t pay attention to the intelligence reports from the field, or didn’t know enough to interpret them correctly. Why should the boss know anything? All he needs is solid Republican credentials. And, rather than communicate with each other about truly serious issues, the apparatchiks in both agencies remained stuck in their decades-old bureaucratic turf wars. Hey, what’s a top government post about anyway if not the size of budgets and staff and the thickness of office carpets?
Yes, the intelligence agencies, the INS and the federal police had enough information to have stopped the hideous deeds from happening, but because of incompetence at high management levels they did nothing. Now, after their miserable failure, instead of resigning in disgrace for malfeasance, they demand expanded powers meaning they want to take our liberties away.
Ashcroft should quit because he and his immediate underlings proved incompetent in the face of the nation’s most serious security issue. Bad management, not restrictions on the FBI because of our rights and liberties, prevented the Bureau from doing its job. Ashcroft might well recall the famous line of another Missouri politician: "the buck stops here". Instead, the Puritanical Attorney General, who signed on to a major cut in the Bureau’s counter terrorism budget, passes the buck to our two centuries plus tradition of personal freedom. Yes, Ashcroft’s logic leads us to believe that instead of his and his immediate subordinates negligence, the FBI failed to protect the nation because we were enjoying our constitutional freedoms.
The Democrats in Congress should never have confirmed the humorless, inept and ultra right wing Senator from Missouri, who lost in is re-election bid to a dead man. The voters turned down this dour and unhappy looking prude. H. L. Mencken defined Puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone somewhere might be happy". Ashcroft fits the description. Happiness, or the pursuit of it, as I interpret the Declaration of Independence, means that we better do what we need to do to stop extremists like Ashcroft from trampling on the basic notion of rights and liberties. I wonder whether Ashcroft really wants to pursue Al-Qaeda or if he just hates freedom in almost any form that might yield pleasure and happiness-like looking at a well-crafted statue in one’s work place, even if the statue is based on someone of the female persuasion. According to news reports, last year Ashcroft, a kind of Protestant version of a Taliban, spent more than $8,000 of our money to place a burkha over the bare breast of a statue that has long stood and been appreciated in the Department of Justice.
Indeed, true conservatives, those that care about preserving liberty, should by now have had enough time to observe this man and decide that he’s not one of them. We don’t expect President Bush, who shares some of the Attorney General’s religious zealotry, to remove this incompetent anti-libertarian, so we must focus on Congress and its oversight function. New York Times columnist William Safire, June 3, 2002, says: "it should be called undersight".
Indeed, Congress failed to exercise control of the FBI during its attempts to simulate the Gestapo in the 1960s and 1970s. Before approving any of Ashcroft’s "new" requests Congress should recall how the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover battered civil liberties until they were barely recognizable. COINTELPRO, under the guise of counterintelligence, set out to disrupt the anti-war and civil rights movements. It sent "informants" into meetings, had them join and then, report back to the FBI on the details of legal assemblies. Some of the Bureau’s informants turned out to be agents provocateurs. One enthusiastic Special Agent ordered a young informant to burn down a dormitory at the University of Alabama, so it could be blamed on the radicals. This act stopped far short of the Reichstag fire, but it was only one of a series of FBI crimes done in the name of collecting information on those who advocated for civil rights or against the Vietnam War. As former FBI Special Agent Robert Wall said after he resigned from the Bureau in the early 1970s: "I spent countless hours spying on citizens exercising their basic rights, people who had committed no crime".
Other Special Agents went further. In their zeal to please the FBI Director, they ordered informants to plan bombings of bridges and post offices so as to stain the reputation of the anti-war movement. These "excesses" became public when someone broke into FBI offices at Media, Pennsylvania and stole Bureau files that included instances of informants engaging in "law breaking" in the course of their supposed penetration of political movements. Many of the informants, of course, faced drug charges, and the FBI recruited them by promising to have the charges dropped if the informant would do what the Bureau wanted.
Because of the well-documented history of its abusive practices, the FBI accepted a set of guidelines that all three branches of government seemed to agree on as the best way to do their job without abusing State police power.
Now Ashcroft and his deputy Mueller simply inform us that in order to prevent future terrorist acts, we must scrap these guidelines. They report as if having discovered a mathematical equation, that the freedom of citizens to exercise their rights under the Constitution negates the ability of the FBI to collect and analyze information.
Ashcroft neglected to consult with Congress; nor did he ask for the Courts’ opinion. He simply declared that the old rules no longer apply and that from now on the Bureau will no longer need, in Safire’s words "a scintilla of evidence of a crime being committed". FBI agents now can investigate for up to one year because they might have a suspicion or two about this or that individual.
Before we allow Rush Limbaugh and his comrade charlatans and mountebanks to overpower us with bombast on the right wing AM talk stations, we should read what the FBI actually had collected and analyzed under the old guidelines. Special Agents in Phoenix and Minneapolis wrote memos that should have rung the alarm bells in headquarters. The facts literally stared Ashcroft and his top brass in the face and they did nothing.
Now, this incompetent enemy of freedom invents excuses for his department’s past failures and he soft pedals his ambitious plans to crack down on privacy. The FBI doesn’t need new guidelines to slip an agent into a mosque or a public rally. But try to imagine that as you sign on to read the latest Progreso Weekly magazine, an FBI agent also signs on to screen what you’re reading, or the Bureau monitors phone calls between you and your attorney and uses it against you.
Ashcroft, like all pious hypocrites, denies all evil thoughts. But just think of what this fanatic in power would do if he convinced himself that you, your wife or teenage kid might have terrorist links- which might mean wearing a bikini! Goodbye privacy. Adios Bill of Rights! Ashcroft, like his counterpart at the CIA, adheres to the old Washington adage: nothing succeeds like failure. The bigger the screw up, the more you’re entitled to a budget raise. Remember, of course, to label the demand for a bigger budget by some euphemism like "reorganization for the new security threat".
Congress! Ashcroft needs a new equation. How about: the real agents of the terrorists equal those who seek to erode our freedoms in the name of efficiently combating terrorism.
Copyright 2002 Radio Progreso
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