Gertz' View of the FBI Decline

The Washington Times ^ | 8-28-02 | Bill Gertz

[Donald Stone]

Judge demands that FBI explain why it missed emails written by Sept. 11 terrorism defendant.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/740670/posts

[Askel5]

Thanks Patrick. Like Fred, I need to back up and read the other excerpts as well.

[RLK]

I am a supporter of President Bush, but I must confess that I am beginning to wonder if he is just too nice a guy to really wield the broom as forcefully and ruthlessly as it must be to really clean out all the political snakes and incompetent deadwood.

-------------------

This is a major problem. He's let the Clintons off the hook. He wants us to believe Islam is a peaceful benign religion. . Waco and Ruby Ridge have never been corrected. We're in a mess.

[Askel5]

Oh for Pete's sake ...

reading the first installment (supervisors who attributed his theorizing to personal spite against an old girlfriend) you realize how "cutting edge" the intelligence analysis at FR really is these days.

[RLK]

He wasn't elected as a reformer, just as an amiable healer and restorative. While he has some gumptions shown here and there, he has mostly stayed in the electoral persona.

---------------------------------

This nation is infected with a cancer that is destroying it. Cancer can't be cured with aimless amiability. It must be aggressively treated and cut out, otherwise it is lethal..

[OKCSubmariner]

BUMP

Please see replies #17 and #21. Thanks.

[bvw]

Cancer? We are almost like a goose fattened for the slaughter to make a liver pate -- pate d'foie gras. Force fed by easy money and handouts people are shamed for not taking!

[lawdog]

"...The FBI has been and still is lying to COngress, the AMerican people and to Bill Gertz.."

But their PR machine is busier than ever !

[El Gato]

There are really several separate but somewhat related problems identified here. The first is the politization of the FBI under Clinton/Reno, where the FBI was used to suppress the politically incorrect at the expense of the real criminal or terrorist. The second is the diversity over merit policies which were greatly increased under C/R. The third is that the FBI has been converted, starting really from its creation, into a federal police force, at least a branch of it. There is no justification in the Constitution for such a force, other than for a very limited number of crimes, such as counterfiting, smuggling, etc, all of which are primarily handled by agencies other than the FBI. (treasury, customs, Coast Guard, etc). The FBI was to be an investigative and coordination agency, not a direct law enforcement one.

There is a mission and a place for counter intelligence and against other threats from outside the county, such as international terrorism. The Constitution provides for raising Armies and the mission belongs in the Defense Department. But the liberals of the 60s and 70s saw to it that the DoD (and it's stepchild the CIA) could have no operations inside the country, not even against foreign agents operating inside the US. So the mission was handed off to agencies like the FBI, who had and have as their main focus, the enforcement of (mostly unconstitutional) domestic laws, rather than protection from external threats, which after all is one of the two or three main reasons to have a federal, rather confederated, government, the others being to resolve disputes between states, and to protect the rights and liberties of the people. The end result has been a trampling of those rights, resolution of disputes between states via a federal "my way or the highway" sort of operation, and very little protection against foreign threats operating within the country.