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

But the FBI is certainly capable of using its brains as well as its brawn. When the Bureau has felt assured that the public will support it if it unleashes its formidable capabilities against networks of criminals or terrorists, the results have been remarkable.

The FBI campaign against the militias during the 1990s is a case in point. Now, after September 11, the threat of the rural militias can seem almost quaint--camouflaged gun collectors marching around their chicken coops muttering darkly about U.N. helicopters. But a decade ago, these violence-prone private armies represented a significant threat to public safety (and to local governments, since they were usually refusing to pay taxes). Then there were the individual right-wing extremists who bombed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing more than 300 people, the worst act of terrorism committed in this country to that date; dozens of bombings at abortion clinics around the country throughout the '90s; the Centennial Park bombing at the Atlanta Olympics in 1996; and the deadly standoffs with weapons-stockpiling militants at Ruby Ridge and Waco. And after a bloody series of blunders, the Bureau developed a cerebral approach to dealing with such extremism, a sophisticated blend of intelligence gathering and patient sieges, as at Jordan, Mont, that showed it could defuse dangerous threats with minimum bloodshed.

But the FBI was able to succeed in these missions because it had political support. The Bureau learned that even if it made mistakes, as it did most flamboyantly at Ruby Ridge and Waco, the public, and more importantly its traditional liberal critics, would not take those fiascos as a reason to terminate the campaign against the violent right. Those who most objected to the anti-militia campaign were conservative Republicans who could be counted on to come back to the FBI fold in the end, while Democrats saw the Bureau's campaign as furthering the cause of gun control and advancing the political strategy of linking the Republican right to terrorist extremism.

Another example of the FBI's ability to investigate and destroy entire criminal enterprises was its success against the Mafia in the 1980s, when a patient 10-year-long investigation involving undercover agents, a web of informants and tens of thousands of hours of wiretaps resulted in the virtual destruction of a criminal organization that for most of a century had been so impervious to law enforcement that it could, and often did, get away with murder. Why was the FBI able to move so effectively against the Mafia in the 1980s after being unable--and unwilling--take on the mob throughout its history? Not until that decade could the Bureau feel completely sure that its political superiors would really hack, the FBI if it investigated the mafia--a crucial assurance since the mob had sunk deep roots not only in the labor unions (important constituents of local and national politicians), but it in some places such as New York, it even controlled city and state political machines. The Bureau had never known when political pressure would ease off on the mob, or whether should it be caught cutting constitutional corners in its investigations, it would be hung out to dry. The Bureau got a clear public message when it was, in the mid-'70s, armed with legal authority to employ court supervised wiretaps--had been forbidden to wiretap at all until 1968, and before that, the results were considered illegal searches and could not be used in court. The new regulation, combined with Congress' passage of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act of 1970 (RICO) let the Bureau convict mob bosses for the crimes of their underlings. And so the Bureau finally went to war with the Mafia; after 10 years of hard work, the convictions started rolling in.