Stunned guns: how we've made the FBI too timid to bug mosques—or Ken Lay's office

Washington Monthly, Nov, 2004 by Richard Gid Powers

Freehfall

Even in the days of its greatest popularity, the Bureau had its detractors. Ever since the Palmer raids, the left had seethed with hatred toward Hoover and his FBI. But Hoover's Bureau arrogantly assumed that its enemies could always be ignored, that they would be without voice or power. In the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, however, the left found a receptive popular audience for its brief against Hoover and the FBI. And that argument--that the Bureau was the sworn enemy of civil liberties, and had to be deranged and declawed--became something approaching political orthodoxy after the 1975 investigations led by Sen. Frank Church of Idaho.

The FBI's abuses of its power during the later Hoover years had been so outrageous that their disclosure in congressional hearings and the manner in which they were exposed, destroyed the public support on which the FBI's effectiveness had always depended. Americans heard lurid tales of a Bureau that had run political errands for presidents and kept tabs on their political enemies; a Bureau suspected of blackmailing legislators who dared to criticize it; that had pursued a vicious vendetta against Martin Luther King Jr.; and that had waged a secret war to destroy the anti-Vietnam War movement. The Church Committee's final report tied all of these abuses together with what it claimed was an "unexpressed major premise" behind the Bureau's actions: that the FBI had taken upon itself "the duty to do whatever is necessary to combat perceived threats to the existing social and political order." The Church Committee's "unexpressed major premise" theory named the prosaic record of FBI abuses into an epic of evil, and led many of us to conclude that the Bureau was doing something wrong when it managed to know anything about anybody. In a phrase borrowed from Noam Chomsky's introduction to an expose of the Bureau, the Church Committee concluded that the Bureau had been waging "a secret war on political freedom."

The public reaction to these revelations caused a deeply damaging shift in the FBI's culture. Though the FBI had repeatedly abused its domestic intelligence investigations, America still needed an agency to gather legitimate domestic intelligence. Someone needed to be keeping an eye on violent groups like the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Weather Underground. But the FBI, after three of its top officials were indicted, and two of them convicted, for authorizing burglaries of the homes of relatives of the Weather Underground, decided that it had taken enough risks for a country that didn't care. Concluding that we simply didn't want the Bureau to be gathering any domestic intelligence any more, the FBI became risk-aversive through and through whenever an investigation might possibly step on someone's civil liberties.

Director Clarence Kelley responded to the Church Committee's indictment by taking domestic surveillance front the Intelligence Division of the Bureau and giving it to the Criminal Investigations Division, so all such cases had to be predicated on evidence that a federal crime had been or was on the verge of being committed. Attorney General Edward Levi further hedged domestic intelligence investigations with such rigid guidelines that he signaled to agents that domestic surveillance, while theoretically still possible, was to be regarded as a career-ender. Former Deputy Associate Director Buck Revell wrote in his memoirs that "the Counter-Terrorism Section was effectively neutralized. After all of the removals and censures, we practically had to order people to work on counter terrorism investigations ... To work counter terrorism was to become a target for the wildest and cruelest of accusations a law enforcement officer could possibly endure."