Revival of Cointelpro, demise of law enforcement. The answer to the massive incompetance in FBI middle and upper management is to… give the FBI more power?
“We are turning the ship 180 degrees from prosecution of crimes as our main focus to the prevention of terrorist acts,” a senior Justice Department official said tonight.
[...] “These new guidelines say to the American people that you no longer have to be doing something wrong in order to get that F.B.I. knock at your door,” Laura W. Murphy, director of the national office of the A.C.L.U., said. “The government is rewarding failure. It seems when the F.B.I. fails, the response by the Bush administration is to give the bureau new powers, as opposed to seriously look at why the intelligence and law enforcement failures occurred.”
[...] Senior officials said today that Mr. Ashcroft's new guidelines addressed some of Ms. Rowley's complaints.
Oo, nice trick, Ashcroft. Rowley's letter ought to nail you & Mueller to the wall, not explain why you need more power… at least, not before a thorough investigation has been made and has found that it was lack of FBI power (rather than incompetance) that prevented Rowley &co from thwarting the 9-11 plotters.
[Under the old rules] Headquarters would often take weeks or even months before deciding whether an inquiry was warranted.
They should find the bottleneck at HQ and clear it out, instead of infringing on the sovereign citizens of the U.S.
Under the current guidelines, the bureau cannot send undercover agents to investigate groups that gather at places like mosques or churches unless investigators first find probable cause or evidence that leads them to believe that someone in the group may have broken the law.
So now it's FBI policy to spy on us at our places of worship.
This must be stopped.
And ACLU lawyer Gregory Nojeim says the FBI are shooting themselves in the foot that was, well, already injured:
“The problem with the 9/11 investigation was a failure to analyze and act on relevant information,” Mr. Nojeim said. “And their solution is to gather exponentially more information that they have no possible way to properly analyze.”
Source: Your civil libs go bye-bye: Government to ease limits on domestic spying by FBI
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