FBI Diagnosed With CIA Disease
American Greatness, Nov 28, 2019

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The FBI used to be different. Unlike the CIA’s faux aristos, the first generations of FBI agents were cops first. They had graduated from places like Fordham, a blue-collar Catholic university in the Bronx. Like all good cops, they knew the difference between the people on whose behalf they worked, and those who threatened them. Like TV’s Sergeant Joe Friday, they wore white shirts and said, “Yes, sir,” and “Yes, ma’am.” Unlike CIA case officers, FBI officers mixed with the kinds of people they investigated, and often went undercover themselves.

The FBI used to take counterintelligence seriously. That made it possible for them to neutralize threats to America—the old joke was that, in any meeting of the U.S, Communist Party or of its front groups, a majority of attendees were FBI agents. The only U.S. intelligence penetration of the Kremlin was the FBI’s recruitment of a U.S. labor activist whom high-level Soviets trusted.

In due course, FBI officials became standard bureaucrats and learned to operate on the assumption that all Americans were equally likely to be proper targets of investigation. They replaced the distinctions by which they had operated with the classic bureaucratic imperative: look out for yourselves by making sure not to displease the powerful.

Webster’s FBI joined the ACLU as the principal sponsor of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which judicially pre-cleared all electronic surveillance operations through ex parte secret proceedings, despite warnings that such pre-clearance amounts to warrants for warrantless surveillance, and hence that it incentivizes political abuse.

The directorships of William Sessions and Louis Freeh, ending in 2001, did nothing to slow the FBI’s devolution. Two additional tendencies developed, which further contributed to the devaluation of what had been scrupulous recruitment and evaluation of sources. First, reliance on pseudoscientific “profiling” vastly reduced the felt need for scruples. But the FBI’s experience with profiles is as powerful an argument as can be made of how debilitating, noxious, and corrupting reliance on them can be. Thus did the bureau practically convict an innocent man, Richard Jewell, of having bombed Centennial Park during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.

Second, the bureau’s increasing adoption of military weapons and tactics further tempted its officials to shortcut intelligence for the sake of, well, war against disfavored persons and movements.

The FBI in 1992 conducted an 11-day war against Randy Weaver and his family in a remote Idaho cabin, in which one law enforcement officer was killed along with the Weavers’ 14-year-old son, and which ended with an FBI sniper killing Weaver’s wife, Vicki, with a baby in her arms—leading to an angry jury acquitting Weaver. A year later, the FBI ran another war against a religious cult in Texas, that cost four lives.

Robert Mueller’s directorship (2001-2013), followed by his friend James Comey’s, made the FBI into the domestic danger it is today.


More: https://amgreatness.com/2019/11/28/fbi-d...th-cia-disease/

The FBI has in essence become the domestic spying branch of the CIA. Time to shut it down?