President Trump’s firing of FBI chief James Comey on May 9
spurred much of the media and many Democrats to rally around America’s most
powerful domestic federal agency. But the FBI has a long record of both deceit
and incompetence. Five years ago, Americans learned that the FBI was teaching
its agents that “the FBI has the ability to bend or suspend the law to impinge
on the freedom of others.” This has practically been the Bureau’s motif since
its creation in 1908.
The bureau was small potatoes
until Woodrow Wilson dragged the United States into World War I. In 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 disgraced when the vast majority of young men who had
been arrested turned out to be innocent.
In January 1920, J. Edgar
Hoover — the 25-year-old chief of the bureau’s Radical Division — was the point
man for the “Palmer Raids.” Nearly 10,000 suspected Reds and radicals were
seized. The bureau carefully avoided keeping an accurate count of detainees (a
similar pattern of negligence occurred with the roundups after the 9/11
attacks). Attorney General Mitchell Palmer sought to use 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
for why people had been arrested. Federal judge George Anderson complained that
the government had created a “spy system” that “destroys 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.”
After the debacle of the
Palmer raids, the bureau devoted its attention to the nation’s real enemies:
the U.S. Congress. The bureau targeted “senators 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,” as Tim Weiner recounted
in his 2012 book Enemies: The History of the FBI. The chairman of the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee was illegally targeted because the bureau feared he
might support diplomatic recognition of Soviet Russia.
Hoover, who ran the FBI from
1924 until his death in 1972, built a revered agency that utterly intimidated
official Washington. The FBI tapped the home telephone of a Supreme Court
clerk, and at least one Supreme Court Justice feared the FBI had bugged the
conference room where justices privately discussed cases. In 1945, President
Harry Truman wrote in his diary, “We want no Gestapo or Secret Police. FBI is
tending in that direction…. This must stop.” But Truman did not have the
gumption to pull in the reins.
The bureau’s power soared
after Congress passed the Internal Security Act of 1950, authorizing massive
crackdowns on suspected subversives. Hoover compiled a list of more than 20,000
“potentially or actually dangerous” Americans who could be seized and locked away
at the president’s command. Hoover specified that “the hearing procedure [for
detentions] will not be bound by the rules of evidence.” “Congress secretly
financed the creation of six of these [detention] camps in the 1950s,” noted
Weiner. (When rumors began circulating in the 1990s that the Federal Emergency
Management Agency was building detention camps, government officials and much
of the media scoffed that such a thing could never occur in this nation.)
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 portray innocent
people 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. The FBI
set up a Ghetto Informant Program that continued after COINTELPRO and that had
7,402 informants, including proprietors of candy stores and barbershops, as of
September 1972. The informants served as “listening posts” “to identify
extremists passing through or locating in the ghetto area, to identify
purveyors of extremist literature,” and to keep an eye on “Afro-American type
bookstores” (including obtaining the names of the bookstores’ “clientele”).
The FBI let no corner of
American life escape its vigilance; it even worked to expose and discredit
“communists who are secretly operating in legitimate organizations and
employments, such as the Young Men’s Christian Association and Boy Scouts,” as
a 1976 Senate report noted. The FBI took a shotgun approach to target and
harass protesters partly because of its “belief that dissident speech and
association should be prevented because they were incipient steps toward the
possible ultimate commission of an act which might be criminal,” the Senate
report observed. That report characterized COINTELPRO as “a secret war against
those citizens [the FBI] considers threats to the established order.”
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 the media. The revelations were briefly shocking but faded into
the Washington Memory Hole.
FBI haughtiness was showcased
on national television on April 19, 1993, when its agents used 54-ton tanks to
smash into the Branch Davidians’ sprawling, ramshackle home near Waco, Texas.
The tanks intentionally collapsed 25 percent of the building on top of the
huddled residents. After the FBI pumped the building full of CS gas (banned for
use on enemy soldiers by a chemical-weapons treaty), a fire ignited that left
80 children, women, and men dead. The FBI swore it was not to blame for the
conflagration. However, FBI agents had stopped firetrucks from a local fire
department far from the burning building, claiming it was not safe to allow
them any closer because the Davidians might shoot people dousing a fire that
was killing them. Six years after the assault, news leaked that the FBI had
fired incendiary tear-gas cartridges into the Davidians’ home prior to the
fire’s erupting. Attorney General Janet Reno, furious over the FBI’s 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 — with one exception. On the day after the Waco fire, FBI on-scene
commander Larry Potts explained the rationale for the FBI’s final assault:
“These people had thumbed their nose at law enforcement.”
Terrorism
FBI counterterrorism spending
soared in the mid to late 1990s. But the FBI dismally failed to connect the
dots on suspicious foreigners engaged in domestic aviation training prior to
the 9/11 attacks. Though Congress had deluged the FBI with almost $2 billion to
upgrade its computers, many FBI agents had ancient machines incapable of
searching the web. 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. Former
National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft groused that “the safest place in the
world for a terrorist to be is inside the United States; as long as they don’t
do something that trips them up against our laws, they can do pretty much all
they want.” Sen. Richard Shelby in 2002 derided “the FBI’s dismal recent
history of disorganization and institutional incompetence in its national
security work.” (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.)
The FBI has long relied on
entrapment to boost its arrest statistics and publicity bombardments. The FBI
Academy taught agents that subjects of FBI investigations “have forfeited their
right to the truth.” After 9/11, this doctrine helped the agency to entrap
legions of patsies who made the FBI appear to be protecting the nation. Trevor
Aaronson, author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on
Terrorism, estimated that only about 1 percent 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.
In the Liberty City 7 case in
Florida, FBI informants planted the notion of blowing up government buildings.
In one case, a federal judge concluded that the government “came up with the
crime, provided the means, and removed all relevant obstacles” in order to make
a “terrorist” out of a man “whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in
scope.”
The FBI’s informant program
extended far beyond Muslims. The FBI bankrolled a right-wing New Jersey blogger
and radio host for five years prior to his 2009 arrest for threatening federal
judges. We have no idea how many bloggers, talk-show hosts, or activists the
FBI is currently financing.
The FBI’s power has rarely
been effectively curbed by either Congress or federal courts. In 1971, House
Majority Leader Hale Boggs declared that the FBI’s power terrified Capitol
Hill: “Our very fear of speaking out [against the FBI] … has watered the roots
and hastened the growth of a vine of tyranny…. Our society cannot survive a
planned and programmed fear of its own government bureaus and agencies.” Boggs
vindicated a 1924 American Civil Liberties Union report warning that the FBI
had become “a secret police system of a political character” — a charge that
supporters of both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump would have cheered last
year.
The FBI has always used its
“good guy” image to keep a lid on its crimes. The controversy swirling about
Comey’s firing should spur the American people, media, and Congress to take the
FBI off its pedestal and place it where it belongs — under the law. It is time
to cease venerating a federal agency whose abuses have perennially menaced
Americans’ constitutional rights. Otherwise, the FBI’s vast power and pervasive
secrecy guarantee that more FBI scandals are just around the bend.
Originally
published by the Future of Freedom Foundation.
Note: The
views expressed on Mises.org are
not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.
James Bovard is the
author of Public Policy
Hooligan, Attention
Deficit Democracy, The Bush
Betrayal, Terrorism and
Tyranny, and other books. More info at www.jimbovard.com.
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