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

So what was a director to do? Having learned the lesson that domestic surveillance would always be denounced as a violation of civil liberties, Director Louis Freeh, who ran the Bureau from 1993-2001, tried to project an image of an organization that was primarily dedicated to defending civil liberties, even at the cost of not getting its man. Not only did he insist that "constitutional guarantees are more important than the outcome of any single interview, search for evidence, or investigation," but he also told agents that any Bureau lapses from "the highest ethical standards" could set the FBI on a slippery slope to something resembling the German Holo caust--which had begun, Freeh said, "when the law [was] subject to the most horrifying misuse by the police."

Civil liberty for all

SO iris unfair to blame the FBI alone for its reluctance during the 1990s to track down al Qaeda. After all, the public was sending the Bureau a message it could interpret only one way. We said that we wanted the FBI in prevent terror attacks, but we were not willing to tolerate any violations of civil liberties to achieve that aim, even though domestic intelligence gathering has always meant getting some dirt underneath your nails. So the FBI, obeying its highly developed instinct for self-preservation, decided that the real message was that no matter what else it does, even flit means doing nothing, don't mess around with anyone's civil liberties. And so when Congress handed it the right against terror, the Bureau fell back on what it knew was safe, what it was good at, and what had always won it praise in the past. And that was to fight terror through law enforcement, not by gathering intelligence. Instead of stopping terrorists before they hit, it would hunt them down afterwards.

That now seems a woefully inadequate strategy, but at the time it gave the government a way of looking like as if it was doing something about terror, at a time when there was no will to do anything about it militarily. The 2003 Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11 noted that "in the absence of a more comprehensive strategy, the United States defaulted to relying on law enforcement, at home and abroad, as the leading instrument in the fight against al-Qa'ida." Instead of sending in the Marines, "the perpetrators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the plot against New York City landmarks, several conspirators in the 1998 embassy bombings, and several members that planned Millennium attacks were all prosecuted.' Some FBI agents thought this policy was ridiculous, that no law-enforcement agency was going to be effective against a quasi-military threat like al Qaeda. The counterterror instructions, one gruff agent told the Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11, were "like telling the FBI after Pearl Harbor to go to Tokyo and arrest the emperor."

The Bureau's personnel does not take naturally to the tedious minutiae of gathering and analyzing intelligence on terrorist organizations--translation, satellite photo analysis, chatting up friendly imams in Buffalo. After all, the G in G-Men is not supposed to stand for "geek" FBI agents are cops at heart: They typically majored in criminal justice, worked as local police officers for a few years, took as many fingerprinting and gang tactics courses as they could, and applied to the Bureau because they thought it was the best law enforcement agency in the world. And when you look at them, they embody a muscular approach to problem solving. You simply can't find a more imposing bunch of bicep-bulging physical specimens anywhere else in the country-with the possible exception of maximum-security prisons.