Yes, The FBI Is America"s Secret Police

Authored by James Bovard via TheHill.com,

Politifact delivered a “pants on fire” slam to Fox News on Friday because one of its commentators asserted that the Federal Bureau of Investigation “has become America"s secret police.”

The FBI has legions of new champions nowadays among liberals and Democrats who hope that its probes will end Donald Trump’s presidency.

This is a stunning reversal that may have J. Edgar Hoover spinning in his grave.

In order to boost the credibility of the FBI’s investigations of the Trump team, much of the media is whitewashing the bureau’s entire history. But the FBI has been out of control almost since its birth.

A 1924 American Civil Liberties Union report warned that the FBI had become “a secret police system of a political character.”

 

In the 1930s, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court feared that the FBI had bugged the conference room where justices privately wrangled over landmark cases, as Tim Weiner noted in his “Enemies: A History of the FBI.”

 

In 1945, President Harry Truman noted that “We want no Gestapo or Secret Police. FBI is tending in that direction.”

 

And FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover compiled a list of 20,000 “potentially or actually dangerous” Americans who could be rounded up and locked away in one of the six detention camps the federal government secretly built in the 1950s.

 

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 smear innocent people by portraying them as government informants, to sic the IRS on people, and to cripple or destroy left-wing, communist, white racist, antiwar, and black organizations (including Martin Luther King Jr.). These operations involved vast numbers of warrantless wiretaps and illicit break-ins and resulted in the murder of some black militants. A Senate Committee chaired by liberal Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) issued a damning report on FBI abuses of power that should be mandatory reading for anyone who believes the bureau deserves deference today.

According to Politifact, the FBI is not a “secret police agency” because “the FBI is run by laws, not by whim.” But we learned five years ago that the FBI explicitly teaches its agents that “the FBI has the ability to bend or suspend the law to impinge on the freedom of others.” No FBI official was fired or punished when that factoid leaked out because this has been the Bureau’s tacit code for eons. Similarly, an FBI academy ethics course taught new agents that subjects of FBI investigations have "forfeited their right to the truth." Are liberals so anxious to get Trump that they have swept under the rug the 2015 Washington Post bombshell about false FBI trial testimony that may have sentenced 32 innocent people to death?

Politifact absolved the bureau because “The FBI doesn’t torture or carry out extrajudicial executions.” Tell that to the Branch Davidians — 80 of whom died after the FBI assaulted their ramshackle home with tanks and pyrotechnic devices and collapsed much of the building on their heads even before fires burst out.

Politifact quotes a professor who asserts that “any use of unnecessary violence (by the FBI) would be met with the full force of the criminal law." Is that why an internal FBI report claimed that every one of the 150 shootings by FBI agents between 1993 and 2011 was faultless?

FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi gunned down Vicki Weaver in 1992 as she stood in her Idaho cabin doorway holding her baby. After I accused the FBI of a coverup in a Wall Street Journal oped, FBI chief Louis Freeh denounced me for twisting the truth. But after a confidential Justice Department report leaked out revealing the FBI’s deceits and unconstitutional rules of engagement, the feds paid a $3 million wrongful death settlement to the Weaver family. When an Idaho County sought to prosecute the FBI sniper, the Justice Department invoked the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution to torpedo the case.

Politifact asserts that “just because the FBI sometimes operates in secret does not mean that it’s a ‘secret police.’" But the FBI’s secrecy is profoundly skewing American politics. More than a year after the 2016 election, Americans still have no idea the true extent of the FBI"s manipulation of the presidential campaign. Did the FBI wrongfully absolve Hillary Clinton on the email server issue? What role did the FBI have in financing or exploiting the Steele dossier? Will we ever learn the full truth?

The so-called fact checkers insists that any comparison of the FBI and KGB is “ridiculous” because the FBI is “subject to the rule of law and is democratically accountable.” But there is little or no accountability when few members of Congress have the courage to openly criticize or vigorously cross-examine FBI officials. House Majority Leader Hale Boggs admitted in 1971 that Congress was afraid of the FBI: “Our very fear of speaking out (against the FBI) ... has watered the roots and hastened the growth of a vine of tyranny ... which is ensnaring that Constitution and Bill of Rights which we are each sworn to uphold.” The FBI is currently scorning almost every congressional attempt at oversight. Thus far, members of Congress have responded with nothing except press releases and talk show bluster.

Politifact repeatedly scoffs at the notion that the FBI is “a secret police agency such as the old KGB.” And since the FBI is not as bad as the KGB, let’s mosey along and pretend no good citizen has a right to complain. A similar standard could exonerate any American president who was not as bad as Stalin.

In the 1960s, some conservatives adorned their cars with “Support Your Local Sheriff” bumper stickers. How long until we see Priuses with “Support Your Secretive All-Powerful Federal Agents” bumper stickers? But those who forget or deny past oppression help forge new shackles for the American people.

McMaken: Dismantle The FBI, And Give Its Money Back To The States

With James Comey"s firing, we"re told the FBI is in turmoil, and Washington DC cocktail parties are all atwitter over the excitement of the scandal. But don"t worry about the FBI. If history has proved anything, the Bureau, no matter how much chaos it may endure, can always rely on a fat check from Congress — funded by the American taxpayers. 

But why does the US need a huge national police force at all? Can"t state police forces do just as well? The FBI continues to assert never-proven claims that bigger governments are better at law enforcement than smaller onces. This myth is not only untrue, but very expensive for taxpayers. 

The FBI"s Gravy Train

The FBI is very well paid. The 2017 budget request for the FBI, for instance, is for $8.7 billion. That"s up from 2014"s budget of $8.4 billion. That may not seem like a lot compared to say, the Defense Department"s typical haul of $500 to $600 billion. But as far as law enforcement agencies in the United States go, the FBI is awash in money.  

It"s so much money, in fact, that if the FBI were abolished, and the sum were divided up into 50 even portions for the states, each state would receive $174 million dollars.

That"s not chump change. The entire public safety budget for the Illinois State Police in 2016, for example, was $242 million. Even if every state got an equal share of the FBI"s budget back, the Illinois state Police could increase their public safety budget by 71 percent. 

Illinois, though, is the sixth largest state (by population) in the Union. Just imagine what smaller states could do with a similar amount were those monies not used to pay for the FBI"s latest efforts to raid peaceful political gatherings in Texas, or provide private luxury jets for politicians.  The total budget of the Colorado State Patrol, for instance — including everything from salaries to public relations — is $144 million.

But what a great racket the FBI has going. As an arm of a federal government that prints its own money, the FBI need never worry about any meaningful budget cut. Moreover, it keeps getting bigger budgets regardless of its ineptitude. And ineptitude is easy to find. As James Bovard reported this week in USAToday:

Before the 9/11 attacks, the FBI dismally failed to connect the dots on suspicious foreigners engaged in domestic aviation training. Though Congress had deluged the FBI with $1.7 billion to upgrade its computers, many FBI agents

ad old machines incapable of searching the Web or emailing photos. 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. (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.)

In the late 1990s, the FBI Academy taught agents that subjects of investigations "have forfeited their right to the truth." This doctrine helped fuel pervasive entrapment operations after 9/11. Trevor Aaronson, author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism, estimated that only about 1% 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. The bureau’s informant program extends far beyond Muslims.

It bankrolled an extremist right-wing New Jersey blogger and radio host for five years before his 2009 arrest for threatening federal judges.

And then there are the other scandals — the perpetual false testimony from the FBI crime lab, its use of National Security Letters and other surveillance tools to illegally vacuum up Americans’ personal info, its whitewashing of every shooting by an FBI agent between 1993 and 2011, and its operation of dozens of child porn websites (another entrapment operation gone awry).

But don"t worry, the FBI still has plenty of time to spy on ordinary peaceful Americans and antagonize them. Bovard continues:

From 1956 through 1971, the FBI’s COINTELPRO (counterintelligence programs) 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, 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. 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 journalists.

But, the FBI"s defenders will surely tell you that every penny of that 8.7 billion is there to keep you "safe." This naive position relies on the decades-old mythology behind a government agency that has long been, as Bovard has called it, a "stasi for America." Last year, I noted: 

Of all federal police forces, the FBI is the most romanticized, and every FBI agent is assumed to be the modern embodiment of a fictionalized version of Eliot Ness: incorruptible, professional, and efficient. Decades of pop culture has driven this home with TV series and movies such as The Untouchables, The FBI Story, and This Is Your FBI have long perpetuated the idea that when local police fail, the FBI will step in to be more effective and simply better than every other law enforcement agency. Corruption cannot touch the FBI, we are told, and they apply the law equally to everyone. 

This mythology was necessary to overcome decades-long opposition to a federal police force which was long properly viewed an an unconstitutional usurpation of state and local prerogatives. 

We Don"t Need Vast Government Agencies for Quality Policing

The advocates for national police also often claim that without a national police force, the individual states of the US would be overrun by criminals. The US states are too small and weak, we are told, to mount any effective opposition to sophisticated crime operations. 

So, by this reasoning, small countries should have more criminal activity than larger, more powerful countries. 

But where"s the evidence for this? Is Switzerland crime infested while much-larger Mexico is crime free? Nope. Does Poland have sky-high homicide rates while much-more-powerful Russia is serenely peaceful? Wrong again. Indeed, no relationship whatsoever has been demonstrated between the size and scope of a country"s regime, and the amount of crime it has. Brazil, after all, is an immense state both in geography and in regulatory vigor. Yet crime there is a major problem. 

Moreover, even if there were some optimum minimum size for countries (which there is not) many US states have more than enough wealth, population, and power to fund immense police operations. 

Texas, for instance, has approximately the same GDP and population size as Australia. If Australia is not ruled by drug runners and terrorists — as we"re supposed to believe would happen to Texas without the FBI — why is Texas too small to obtain the same level and quality of law enforcement? With more than 20 million inhabitants, Florida and New York have GDPs similar to those of a mid-sized European country. Pennsylvania has a GDP equal to that of Switzerland. California has both a population and a GDP larger than that of Canada. 

Moreover, without the FBI not even very small US states would be on their own since no FBI is necessary to coordinate information-sharing between states. INTERPOL, of course, has been around for decades as a body that helps police organizations share information and apprehend suspects. INTERPOL itself, however, has no agents who make arrests, and INTERPOL"s budget is much, much smaller than that of the FBI.

Not even the European Union has gone so far as to create a police force that resembles the FBI in its vast power. Europol, like INTERPOL, assists in coordination among police agencies, but Europol officers do not conduct independent investigations in member countries as the FBI does in American states. Europol"s budget is only a small fraction of the FBI"s. 

So why is the FBI necessary? If you"re a DC politician, the FBI may be quite useful in terms of settling scores, finding cushy jobs for your friends, and for living out one"s control-freak fantasies as appears to be the case with Jeff Sessions" revived drug war. 

For ordinary Americans, though, the FBI doesn"t do anything that smaller and more responsive governments can"t do on their own.

Why the FBI Has Always Been a Political Tool of Suppression

Via The Daily Bell

There is a dangerous myth that permeates the political arena that government agencies and bureaucrats can somehow be non-political and independent.

How absurd. On the one hand, there are obvious political appointments, like Eric Holder as Attorney General under Obama, or Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State under Trump. Each was clearly chosen to advance the interests of the President, Holder for his radical leftist views and Tillerson for his business ties.

And then there are scarily independent agencies like the CIA and NSA who pretty much do whatever they want, regardless of who heads the Department.

But the FBI is a sketchy mix of independence and politics, and it always has been. From its inception, the first FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover made the agency a hotbed of political suppression, arresting anarchists and communists sometimes without warrants, and deporting thousands of immigrants based on minimal evidence of subversion.

But that’s not how the mainstream media is selling it. Will Trump Be The First to Politicize the FBI? asks Politico Magazine. Their concern is that Trump might appoint someone to the position with a political background, rather than a law enforcement background.

From its founding over a century ago until Tuesday afternoon, when James Comey was summarily fired as director, the FBI has been led exclusively by nonpartisan career law enforcement professionals with no background in elected politics.

The bureau, in fact, has been perhaps the last bastion of nonpolitical leadership in Washington—an agency whose powers are so extensive and potentially damaging to American citizens that it has been kept clear of direct political influence.

Of course, this statement is ridiculous, you cannot separate a government agency from politics. They are conflating not having been elected with being nonpartisan or apolitical

If anything the “independence” of the agency is a political wildcard. It wasn’t for political purposes that the FBI sent a letter to Martin Luther King Jr. encouraging him to kill himself?

But really Politico inadvertently touches on the main problem with the FBI: it was created to target Americans domestically. The FBI was given broad powers that were not just “potentially damaging to American citizens,” that is exactly who they targeted.

Hoover compiled a list of disloyal Americans after WWII and had a plan, which was never put into practice, to suspend habeas corpus and detain thousands of Americans for not being loyal enough to the United States government. For being a “nonpolitical” leader, he certainly did a lot to suppress political opposition to those in power.

But Hoover was just doing the only thing he knew. That is how he started in government, during WWI.

President Woodrow Wilson created the political monster, appointing Hoover to the War Emergency Board during WWI and tasking him with arresting foreigners without trial who seemed disloyal to the United States. The raids took place without search warrants, and even though Hoover was the man behind the “Palmer Raids” he escaped the political backlash and was even appointed to clean up the Bureau which would become the Federal Burea of Investigation.

J. Edgar Hoover shaped the FBI to be the organization it is today.

…he created the Counter Intelligence Program, or COINTELPRO. The group conducted a series of covert, and oftentimes illegal, investigations designed to discredit or disrupt radical political organizations…

Hoover also used COINTELPRO’s operations to conduct his own personal vendettas against political adversaries in the name of national security…

In 1971, COINTELPRO’s tactics were revealed to the public, showing that the agency’s methods included infiltration, burglaries, illegal wiretaps, planted evidence and false rumors leaked on suspected groups and individuals. Despite the harsh criticism Hoover and the Bureau received, he remained its director until his death on May 2, 1972, at the age of 77.

So what’s all this silliness from Politico claiming that the FBI has never been a politicized organization? Anything that Hoover did to “remove politics” from the organization simply gave him all the more power to play politics. He wasn’t making the agency immune to political influence, he was ensuring the agency only responded to his own political influence.

Politico actually recognizes the fact that Hoover abused his power at the FBI, but still, goes on to say the organization has never been political.

The FBI’s power over the life, freedom and liberty of the American people is unparalleled in U.S. government, and at key points in the bureau’s history—from Hoover’s attempts to blackmail Martin Luther King Jr., to its pursuit of political activists in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s —we have seen the cost of the FBI’s abuse of Americans’ civil liberties…

In the FBI’s entire centurylong history, it has never had an expressly political director. Hoover, for all his machinations as director, had actually spent his career at the Justice Department.

Politico talks about finding a director who is above reproach, who has a stellar record, and who will keep the agency independent, and trustworthy. Their solution is to simply find someone who is non-partisan, and who has always worked in the Justice Department… just like J. Edgar Hoover.

But wait, isn’t J. Edgar Hoover the main example of a guy we don’t want running the FBI? Even while fitting all the criteria Politico lays out for who would be the perfect independent head of the agency?

Perhaps their definition of the term political is different than ours, but in that case, what does it matter if the FBI Director is political or not? What matters is if the FBI can abuse their power, which they clearly can. That is a great reason to abolish the agency altogether, not to simply choose a director who has never been in electoral politics.

As Milton Friedman said, “Is it really true that political self-interest is nobler somehow than economic self-interest? …I think you’re taking a lot of things for granted. Just tell me where in the world you find these angels who are going to organize society for us?”

If a political organization requires the right person in power in order to not be corrupt, then it is a bad organization. It is dangerous, and should not exist because it is impossible to find angels to put into those positions of power.

Perhaps the mainstream media is more concerned over who will be targeted by the FBI. Maybe Politico is not afraid of the FBI targeting innocent Americans. The FBI started as a tool of the government to use against the civilians; it has always been that way.

But what if it turned into a tool of one government faction to be used against another political faction?

Politico’s article could be summed up like this:

The FBI has long been an enemy of the citizens of the United States and abused their authority by suppressing dissent and intimidating political opposition to the government. But now, the FBI risks becoming the exclusive tool of one political party, at which point others in government and politics may be targeted! Can’t we all agree that the proper target of the FBI is the peasantry and not the political classes?

The FBI has always been political, and always will be. Trump’s choice will not be inherently better or worse for the American people than picking someone who is not a politician. But Trump’s choice will be pretty scary for those in the government on the left.