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Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
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Sri Lanka: One Island Two Nations
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Thiranjala Weerasinghe sj.- One Island Two Nations
?????????????????????????????????????????????????Sunday, May 14, 2017
Espionage: Dethrone the FBI, Not Just Comey
by James Bovard-
( May 13, 2017, Boston, Sri Lanka Guardian) President
Trump’s firing of FBI chief James Comey provides a welcome chance to
dethrone the FBI from its pinnacle in American politics and life. Last
September, Comey denounced Twitter “demagoguery” for the widespread
belief that the FBI was not “honest” or “competent.”
The FBI has a long record of both deceit and incompetence.
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 bureau “has the ability to bend or suspend the law to impinge on the
freedom of others.” This has practically been the FBI’s motif since its
creation.
Dirty Deeds
Edgar Hoover, who ran the FBI from 1924 until his death in 1972, built a
revered agency that utterly intimidated official Washington. In 1945,
President Truman wrote: “We want no Gestapo or secret police. FBI is
tending in that direction. … This must stop.”
But 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.
“Congress secretly financed the creation of six of these (detention)
camps in the 1950s,” noted Tim Weiner in his excellent 2012 book,
Enemies: A History of the FBI.
No FBI agents were penalized or prosecuted for their fatal assault against American civilians.
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.
Watch the FBI Director James Comey speech at 2017 Boston Cyber Security Summit
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.
FBI haughtiness was on display on April 19, 1993, when its agents used
armored vehicles to smash into the Branch Davidians’ sprawling,
ramshackle home near Waco, Texas. The tanks intentionally collapsed much
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 the
Chemical Weapons Convention), a fire ignited that left 80 children,
women and men dead.
The FBI swore it was blameless for the conflagration, but six years
later, an investigation revealed that the FBI fired incendiary
cartridges into the building before the blaze erupted. No FBI agents
were penalized or prosecuted for their fatal assault against American
civilians.
21st Century Scandals
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 had 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.”
Only about 1% of the 500 people charged with international terrorism offenses in the decade after 9/11 were bona fide threats.
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).
Unleashed Power
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 bureau’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.”
Comey’s fall provides an excellent opportunity to take the FBI off its pedestal.
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 alternatively cheered last year.
If Trump fired Comey to throttle an investigation into Trump
administration criminality, that is an impeachable offense. Otherwise,
Comey’s fall provides an excellent opportunity 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.
Reprinted from USA Today.