Anti-terrorism: how far? - part 1 of debate

National Review, July 10, 1995 by Eugene Methvin

LAST February, a former leader of the Michigan Militia, Eric Maloney, visited the FBI and warned that Timothy McVeigh and the Nichols brothers had attended a ``special operations session'' three months earlier where they talked about blowing up buildings. Maloney told Brian Ross, an ABC News investigative correspondent, that the FBI turned a deaf ear. ``I told them that if they didn't act on this, a whole lot of people are going to get killed,'' Maloney said. But the FBI was not interested because ``there was nothing they felt they could do.'' In the shadow of the Oklahoma City bombing, the campaign to keep America safe for terrorists revived. Rescuers were still digging victims out of the rubble when liberals leaped to their pulpits to warn against reviving the FBI's ``domestic spying.'' They thus continued a twenty-year campaign that has destroyed the nation's domestic intelligence capacity and left Americans pathetically vulnerable to atrocities like the one in Oklahoma. They have erected a false mythology about the agency's past alleged sins. Thus the New York Times wailed about the FBI's and CIA's ``brazen violation of American freedoms'' and ``contempt for the Constitution.'' FBI Director Louis Freeh did mount a modest defense of law enforcement's preventive role. In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee he complained: ``For two decades the FBI has been at an extreme disadvantage with regard to domestic groups which advocate violence. We have no intelligence or background information on them until their violent talk becomes deadly action. . . . I do not support broad and undefined intelligence collection efforts -- but . . . the first rule of self-defense is to know the enemy who intends to destroy you. Intelligence . . . helps to protect the American people. It should not be considered a 'dirty word.'''

Enemy Within

BUT a dirty word it is today. In the 1970s the nation allowed its domestic anti-terrorism apparatus to be crippled and virtually disbanded. Leading the destruction was a coalition of conscientious civil libertarians and radical revolutionaries dedicated to destroying constitutional government in the United States. In 1971, the American Civil Liberties Union announced that ``dissolution of the nation's vast surveillance network'' would henceforth be a top priority. It launched a ``police surveillance project'' headed by Yale Law Professor Frank J. Donner, identified in sworn testimony by three witnesses as a steadfast member of the Communist Party in its worst Stalinist days. The National Lawyers Guild, whose president declared its goal was ``to keep the road clear of legal roadblocks'' for revolutionaries, filed lawsuits wholesale against local police intelligence units, crippling them or destroying them altogether. Old Left lawyer William Kunstler once boasted, ``I stay in this profession only because I want to be a double agent, to destroy the whole -- -- -- - system.'' The Washington Post and New York Times aided these crusades in both news and editorial columns. On December 22, 1974, the Times launched a major ``expose'' of the sins of American intelligence agencies on the domestic front. This ``scoop'' was based on an internal study of the CIA ordered by Director William Colby, in which subordinates were instructed to review the agency's 25-year history and report every activity that might have violated a domestic law. Colby naively handed the study over to Times reporter Seymour Hersh, and the newspaper treated it as a major scandal. The U.S. Senate, meanwhile, created a select committee under the chairmanship of Frank Church (D., Idaho), the Senate's most intense left-wing ideologue. In March 1976, after more than a year of bombardment by Church and others on Capitol Hill, Attorney General Edward Levi, trying to position the weak Ford Administration for the approaching election, imposed ``guidelines'' on the FBI prohibiting any investigation without ``specific articulable facts giving reason to believe that an individual or a group is or may be engaged in'' criminal activities. This requirement for a ``criminal predicate'' totally abandoned law enforcement's preventive and peace-keeping functions. In the words of one jurist, ``It means every terrorist gets one free blast.'' Five days before Levi issued his guidelines, the FBI's intelligence division had 4,868 domestic security investigations going. Six months later there were 626. By August 1982 Congress found the number had dwindled to 38. The high cost of this destruction of domestic intelligence was demonstrated exactly a year after Attorney General Levi issued his guidelines. In Washington, D.C., a black Muslim guru named Hamaas Abdul Khaalis and 11 followers, wielding guns and machetes, seized hostages in the B'nai B'rith headquarters, the Muslim Mosque and Cultural Center, and the District of Columbia Building -- Washington's ``city hall.'' The Hanafi Muslims (as the cult called itself) killed one person and crippled another for life in their violent takeover. The siege lasted two days before the 137 hostages were released. The Metropolitan Police Department revealed that it had withdrawn an informant from the Hanafi Muslims and destroyed their file, in response to pressure from the ACLU and other police baiters. The Senate Subcommittee on Criminal Laws and Procedures in a 1978 report asserted that if the police had had an informer in the Hanafi ranks, ``the chances are 100 to 1 that they would have had intelligence enabling them to take preventive action.'' It was a different story in Maryland in 1978. State Police Sergeant John Cook infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan and fed the FBI reports on its violent plottings. The FBI opened a preliminary investigation under the Levi guidelines, but closed it when nothing had happened in 90 days, as the guidelines mandated. Fortunately, the Maryland State Police did not follow the FBI's lead. They kept Sergeant Cook in place, and he worked his way into a ten-man Klan ``death squad.'' Eventually the Klan attempted a series of bombings, including one at the home of a black congressman, Parren Mitchell. The night of their planned attacks Sergeant Cook had the pleasure of arresting them.