Bush & Republicans Gut FBI’s Crime-Fighting Capabilities

not only this, but as you know my son is a cop in a city that is very crime ridden. They do not have the luxury to fight against the gun control of the NRA that lets guns that kill cops all go free. When a cop gets shot when responding to a domestic in the head when the door was answered. What is happening is this crime ridden administration is showing the criminals how to get by with crime. It is a perfect example of teaching the wrong message to the right ppl…;o( They are up for election of a new mayor in this city that my son works and I hope he gets the chop. He has not been a good mayor for the longest time…the only reason he gets re-elected is because of his skin color and his ignoring the reason of crime. Well now they have another same skin color person who thinks he can do better for the community as a whole…we will see what comes of this. I am not racist, BTW, but we do have to look at the reality of this area of the country. We must survive the race bait and get on with preserving the country or the city, here as it might be, and bring ppl back to being responsible for themselves and their behavior.

I hope I have not confused the issue here at hand.

As your son surely sees every day, a hell of a lot more Americans are affected by crime than they’ll ever be by any terrorist. (And Larry has been saying this for years: That terrorism per se is not nearly the major threat to the world that the Bush administration et al. make it out to be for political purposes. There are far greater threats to people’s safety and well-being.)

As for white-collar crime: It isn’t just the Enrons and the sub-prime mortgage thieves. There are white-collar crimes occurring every day in small and large cities of this nation that the FBI is uniquely able to investigate. I know of one case in which an insurance agent/investment manager bilked numerous seniors out of hundreds of thousands of dollars of their life savings. It was a time-consuming, tedious case for the FBI, but they got him. Yet there was much more they didn’t uncover, probably because they didn’t have the manpower or budget.

And, without intensive investigations ongoing all the time, how can people know which mortgage lender to trust, which investment plans are on the up-and-up, and so on?

Oh I do understand what you and Larry are saying. BTW, I haven’t mentioned this recently but a few years ago I am not sure about the time frame, but the FBI or some federal agency had parked their car to go in to eat at one of the local eatery in Memphis, and the car was broken into and their bunch of armor was stolen. They to this day have not recovered them…I do not know the rest of the story, but every time I ask about this incident, my son says there has not been a conclusion to this incident. Also, a lot of the white collar crime is so prevalent that it seems to have been nomenclature, so it seems…this is why I say this administration has made it like ok to do this kind of stuff….Like in San Diego with the fired AG there and how the AG from LA or San Fran went to the law agency that was defending the crooked person(s) involved….making more money that with the feds. This whole system is rigged it seems. I hope I am rational with my verbage here. I have become so bitter with this administration, if they do try to be law abiding ppl, I would not be able to recognize it one bit!!!!

It’s makes good sense to me that the White House has made a decision to prevent any more investigations like the one that brought their buddy Ken Lay down. Not to mention all the fishy business members of the Bush family have been involved in.

The FBI has been the most effective agency in fighting mafia type organizations. It would make perfect sense that America’s number 1 mafia family – the Bush family – would want to neuter the FBI.

It also would make perfect sense that white-collar crime is the type they most likely want to prevent investigations of, since that is the type they are most likely to commit.

That’s probably putting it kind of bluntly, but I’m just looking at the article (thank you Seattle P.I.!) and asking the obvious question: who would want to disable the FBI and why?

How many FBI criminal investigations into Congressional wrong-doing and Bushie white-collar crime have been short-circuited as a result? How many civil rights investigations are being overlooked?

How many resources are being wasted monitoring domestic advocacy groups, such as PETA, Greenpeace and anti-war demonstrators, as part of the FBI’s counter-terrorism program?

We can spend billions a week fighting a never-ending war in Iraq, but there’s no money to fight crime on American streets, rebuild infrastructure, fund FEMA or provide for children’s healthcare.

correctly, right!

…and then there is this overt reason for this and that is to get back at the head of the FBI for testifying in congress on behalf of the phony AG that headed the DOJ…remember that way back a few months or so ago. In ref: to the AG Ashcroft incident while a pt at GW hospital. The one when Mr. Comey described in his testimony. The same FBI head even took notes of tha tmeeting…well, I say!!!! Geew is back to his best thing ever….get back in revenge….

Then there’s that the FBI is under the purview of the Dept. of Justice which, until very recently, was run by Gonzales who urged that hospital “hit” on Ashcroft.

Ok so they are transfering agents to CT. And what are the fruits of these transfers? Have we really impacted terrorism or are we just lucky that the second shoe has not dropped yet?

Does anyone really know?

Does this possibly show the need of more bodies needed to put down domestic protest of the policies this regime supports? My understanding is Counter-Terrorism now considers american groups against the war and groups against government actions now fall under the veiw of these people. I hope I am just being wrong and we are not fattening up the ranks of an American Gestapo to ensure we will not have a representative republic.

hammer meet head of nail

As a former Honolulu PD officer who worked closely with a number of Federal agencies in Hawaii, including the FBI, I believe that I can speak with some authority with regard to this issues.

The FBI has long been far too bureaucratic, often poorly staffed and led, and incapable of consistently and reliably providing the services it is historically credited with. While Director Robert Mueller is ultimately responsible for these current failures, it is simplistic to lay the blame at his feet. Instead, it is generally failed leadership at sub-director levels that is largely to blame for…

• the 200-plus million dollor SAIC case management and information infrastructure project that utterly failed to produce anything useful for the Bureau

• the deplorable condition of the laboratory operation that initially led to the identification of Portland attorney Brandon Mayfield as a terrorist suspect in the Madrid train bombings

• the unjustified rejection of recommendations of field agents, the most notable of which involved Coleen Rowley and agents of the Portland field office, though literally thousands of such matter routine occur

• the politically driven shift of resources from criminal to counterterrorism efforts, a largely self-defeating proposition

• continued lack of cooperation and ongoing turf wars with other Federal, State and local agencies

The agency is legendary for its hunger for information and intelligence and its stonewalling of the free flow of information in the opposite direction, its reckless operations which have on several occasions led to the death of field agents where local authorities knew nothing of Bureau surveillance and apprehension activities, and the politically driven poaching of cases rightly the purview of the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, the US Secret Service and others. It has also been hampered by the lack of enthusiasm for prosecution by local US Attorneys, and its long standing unwillingness to assume responsiblitity for investigating matters that are not sufficiently ‘sexy’ for lack of a better term reflecting the ever changing priorities of its leaders in Washington DC, both in and outside the bureau.

These are complex problems that call for no less than the overhaul of the agency, and a publicly stated redirection of its missions. So long as the current crop of sub-directors remain at the helm, and without an external call from Congress for a complete examination of the agency, these nagging problems are likely to continue, and to become more accute as time goes on.

With politically driven decisions such as that to hand over the development of an information technology infrastructure to a huge and well regarded—but, clearly incapable—organization such as Science Applications International Corporation, there is little hope that the culture of the agency will change to a sufficient degree to allow the agency to simplify and streamline its structure, focus its resources, and deliver the services it was intially intended to.

So, is what you are saying , the congresscritters are lazy in the fact that they will not address this matter head on or what is the solution to approach. Just look at the Hansen problem they had and the lack of follow-through on this matter for years.

Congressional oversight is critical, and save the efforts of Representative John Conyers, there hasn’t been much effective oversight in either the House of Representatives or the Senate.

But that’s only part of a very large set of problems. If I had to pick a single one, it would be the age-old culture of the agency, in which key personnel see it as superior to all others, creating an evironment of paternalism and effectively isolating the agency from other agencies at the executive and management levels. In Honolulu—as I imagine it was in other locales—cooperation at the street level was often very good, but it required that we circumvent the senior agents in the local field office, and often work around our own managers and executives in the police department. Clearly, this is a waste of effort and represents a myriad of lost opportunities.

The agency has a well deserved reputation for poaching, interference, independent and unilateral action, lack of cooperation and one-way communication that has fostered decades of mistrust and frustrated many cooperative enterprises involving other Federal, State and local agencies.

I have actually had personal experiences in which FBI agents, accompanying us on the execution of an arrest warrant, begged off the effort because they had literally left their sidearms in their briefcases back in the office! Or, where they swoop in just in time to flash their credentials for the press and ‘announce’ the capture of a serial back robber apprehended by uniformed street officers. A capture that they had not remotely been involved with.

Behavior like that creates lasting impressions of the generic ‘special agent’ of the FBI, who is often dimissed and reviled by local officers. And it is highly representative of the attitudes and actions of senior FBI officials, to some degree in the field, and certainly of those at Bureau headquarters. It is in many ways, all about the culture of the agency and the legends that surround it.

These attitudes tend to exclude agency personnel from the constant introspection that is necessary to hold the agency accountable for its actions and its failures, and are dimissive of the recognition that ineffiencies and problems exist, and that self-examination and reform and necessary and healthy.

BTW, love your state and it’s beauty. Was o n R&R there once.

That is MN described on the Maussoui (sp?) case..When Ms Crowley tried to get her message across to the powers that be in the Home Base of DC. They ignored her. Then and by then when she became public with all of this, is when they became “oh we are so sorry to have missed your intent” sortta routine. The same for the agents out in CA. about the taking flight lessons, and on down the line. Why are the bad employees still on board with this agency? They should have been dismissed ASAP over all of this.

Well, all I want to say is Thank You for being so open and honest with your words here today. We just might learn some things from you after all….just like we have learned from Larry and others here.

sorry, it was Coleen Rowley and OR in stead of CA.

Because according to the right wing, terrorism is a military problem and not a law enforcement problem. (Responding to the post.)

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[...] an important update on last week’s post, “Bush & Republicans Gut FBI’s Crime-Fighting Capabilities,” in today’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer — and let’s hear it for the P.I., a [...]

Interesting…