August 29, 2022 at 11:04 a.m.
Still the same after all these years: Abolish the FBI
Still the same after all these years: Abolish the FBI
Others have tied opposition to the FBI as a display of blind loyalty to Donald Trump.
None of this is accurate, and we'll start with the last allegation first. The truth is, we have, in numerous editorials over the years, and long before Donald Trump's rise on the political scene, expressed our opposition to the FBI and other federal police agencies, among them the CIA and NSA and the USFWS (U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service).
Way back in 2005, for example, we were critical when then FBI special agent David Mitchell, in a quote appearing in a full page ad in The Lakeland Times, thanked then Minocqua police officer Nathan Ferris for his assistance in apprehending suspects in a 2002 incident in Mercer.
Mitchell cited Ferris's "outstanding professionalism and initiative."
Why were we critical? As it turns out, the FBI never investigated that 2002 incident, in which Ferris wandered way out of his jurisdiction, allowed the apprehended and unarmed suspect to steal his squad car, then fired his weapon seven times, including five rounds at his own car.
In the incident - the theft of an ATM machine in Mercer - Ferris drove into Iron County following a high speed chase, fired twice at the tire of a vehicle stuck in a snow bank in a private driveway, and then, according to sources, opened fire in the direction of a Vilas County police officer arriving on the scene.
The FBI thought this was really good police work.
The point is, we have constantly exposed the rogue conduct of federal agencies - or their approval of such conduct - and we have criticized this behavior no matter who it is directed against. In truth, the FBI makes a routine of setting up political targets, often luring them into plots against the government, only to arrest the target and announce to the world their glorious work in saving democracy by thwarting a plot that they themselves concocted.
Such violations of the constitution are not few and far between; they are on the agency's daily menu.
This gets us to Mike Pence's comment that the FBI just has a leadership problem. That is quite laughable. In fact, the leadership of the agency keeps changing - all the way from J. Edgar Hoover's rule of the FBI - and the agency never course corrects its conduct. That is because it is bathed in a bureaucratic culture that has taken such deep root over the years that it simply cannot be reformed.
We have just recently reminded readers of some of the more infamous incidents, and we'll do so again: They were neck-deep in planning and driving the plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. There was the 2011 arrest of James Cromitie, an African-American convert to Islam who, as journalist Glenn Greenwald wrote, "the FBI attempted to convince - over the course of eight months - to join a terror plot, only for him to adamantly refuse over and over. Only once they dangled a payment of $250,000 in front of his nose right after the impoverished American had lost his job did he agree to join, and then the FBI swooped in, arrested him, and touted their heroic efforts in stopping a terrorist plot."
Here's another. In 2015, the FBI arrested three Brooklyn men, accusing them of conspiring to travel to Syria to fight for ISIS. The only thing is, as The Intercept reported, none of them could have traveled to Syria or supported Syria without the help of the FBI. None of them had any money, and one of the men's mom had even taken his passport away.
Remember Ruby Ridge, in which the FBI repeatedly asked Randy Weaver to sell them illegal shotguns and he kept refusing until the informant "friend" said he was desperate. Weaver sold two shotguns and was promptly arrested. Later, in a siege, the FBI, with orders to shoot on sight, killed Weaver's wife and son and dog. Weaver was later awarded $3.1 million.
There's infamous Waco, of course, and there was the so-called Newburgh sting, in which the FBI arrested four Bronx men for planting three non-functional bombs next to synagogues and for plotting to shoot down military cargo planes. Only thing is, the FBI lured the men into the plot using various enticements, including $250,000. There's Noor Salman, the wife of the Orlando night club shooter, whom the FBI famously and unsuccessfully tried to prosecute on trumped up charges. There was the Hatfield case, in which, as the Wall Street Journal's Holman Jenkins reported, the agency attempted to railroad an innocent scientist over 2001 anthrax attacks.
There's the Russia collusion hoax, and Hillary Clinton herself blamed the agency for her loss when then FBI director James Comey announced four days before the election that he was re-opening an investigation into her use of a private email server.
More recently, Merrick Garland's Department of Justice targeted parents at school-board meetings as domestic terrorists. There were the communist witch-hunts of the 1950s, and, oh, let's don't forget COINTELPRO, the secret FBI initiative from 1956 to 1971 that illegally (as documented by the Church Committee in Congress) infiltrated, spied upon, discredited, and plotted with so-called "subversive" organizations, which in those days were on the Left: United Farm Workers, the Communist Party, anti-war groups, the American Indian Movement, farm workers' unions, feminist groups and more.
Here's how former FBI assistant director Thomas Fuentes talked about the agency's strategy:
"If you're submitting budget proposals for a law enforcement agency, for an intelligence agency, you're not going to submit the proposal that 'We won the war on terror and everything's great,' cuz the first thing that's gonna happen is your budget's gonna be cut in half. You know, it's my opposite of Jesse Jackson's 'Keep Hope Alive'-it's 'Keep Fear Alive.' Keep it alive."
Keep fear alive, that's the FBI vision. The agency has proven time and time again that it cannot be reformed. It must be shuttered.
Now this brings us to the final point. None of this is a call to defund federal law enforcement. Using the FBI's own sleazy tactics, the agency's supporters would have us believe that it is an either-or situation. You either keep the FBI or you have no federal law enforcement.
But a new law enforcement structure, one that is decentralized to avoid the concentration of political power at the top in Washington, can be built. Again, Jenkins of the Wall Street Journal proposed one such option.
"One possibility is a national investigative corps that would be more directly answerable to the 93 U.S. attorneys who are charged with enforcing federal law in the 50 states," he wrote.
There are likely other options. The goal is to annihilate a terminally flawed political organization and then to decentralize federal police power - not to mention shrinking it absolutely.
We don't need to see any more evidence. We don't need to see any more attacks on the fundamental freedoms and constitutional rights of our citizens.
So we'll say it again: Abolish the FBI.
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