Is it time to break up the FBI?

Posted by Pointman on February 1, 2019 · 15 Comments 

Every country has its security services. They usually come with a bewildering array of initials but the broad breakdown is they can usually be categorised as being focused on internal or external threats to a country. It’s a natural division of labour since both the skill sets required and the environments they must operate in are fundamentally different.

Internal security is legally authorised by the local government and focused on domestic threats and counter-espionage. It gathers intelligence on the agents of foreign powers and on the activities of home-grown groups such as terrorists who’re trying to undermine the state from within.

An external security service, is usually illegal in the foreign countries it’s operating in, concentrates on ferreting out secrets of state and often indulges in more proactive activities like destabalising the government of the target country or even what’s euphemistically referred to as regime change. In that world, and even leaving aside co-operation deals like the five eyes agreement, there’s no such thing as a friendly country – everybody spies on everybody else irrespective of whether they’re commonly viewed as hostile or friendly.

The eternal problem with both types of service is control.

Foreign intelligence services have a long history of not only dropping the elected government, who’re supposed to be in control of them, into difficult diplomatic situations, but also slipping the leash completely and initiating moves, which if the were overt, would require executive if not legislative approval. An example of the former was it becoming public that Obama was bugging Angela Merkel’s mobile phone all the way through some sensitive negotiations with her.

An example of the latter would be straight after JFK was elected, he was presented with a CIA operation to invade Cuba which he was confidently assured was a guaranteed success and so far advanced, it apparently couldn’t be stopped. It resulted in the Bay of Pigs fiasco which was a disastrous start to his presidency and which so infuriated him he reputedly said he would “smash the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the wind”.

Another problem with foreign intelligence services is their track record of not giving advance warning to their governments of things like the attack on Pearl Harbour, Operation Barbarossa or 9/11. After each disastrous lapse in their prime duty to giving some advance warning of threats or them being caught going completely off the reservation, a few of them get fired, new brooms are parachuted in and a fresh oversight committee is appointed to be gradually snow jobbed over the coming years, but the pattern of too many cries of wolf while totally missing the huge intelligence coups seems to be ineradicable.

The control problem with domestic intelligence services comes from the other direction. The current administration in power seeks to gain control of them, so they can be utilised to spy on political opponents and in extreme cases, be used as secret police such as the Stasi or Gestapo to suppress the citizenry of the country.

It becomes the shadowy force doing the pre-dawn raid of heavily armed-armed men banging on your door, forcing their way into your home and taking you into custody. Fearful though it might be for the victim of such state-sanctioned thuggery, it’s all a show of force designed by the forces in control to intimidate the political opposition. It’s nothing to do with national security.

Once the internal security service is suborned to this extent, it has to be totally thrown away and a brand new service must be created to replace it by an incoming government intent on real reform. The question before the American people is whether the FBI has become nothing more than a political secret police working at the direct behest of political or financial interests rather than doing its mandated job of protecting the country from internal threats?

The rot set in with a vengeance during the eight years of the Obama administration. The FBI together with the DoJ it reported to was weaponised in the service of a president who acted more like a king accepting the uncritical adulation of his subjects than a democratically elected representative of the American people. If you didn’t kiss the king’s pinky ring or he took a dislike to you, you soon found the FBI following you around from one tax audit to the next annual one inflicted on you by a similarly weaponised IRS.

What has come to light about the FBI over the last two years definitely takes it off the path of law enforcement and well on the way to being an oppressive secret police. The head of it, James Comey, told bare-faced lies on numerous occasions to Congress, admitted leaking details to the press of confidential conversations with his president, covered up and refused to pursue criminal charges against prominent Democrat politicians such as Clinton, steered fake documents along a route to artificially force the Russian influence investigation that’s been running for two years to no result. He had to be fired in the end.

His deputy Andrew McCabe, after blatant misuse of his power to destroy individuals supportive of the Trump administration and also lying his head off to Congress and others, was also fired – pointedly on his last day with the FBI before retirement and consequently losing all his pension entitlement.

The reality is the FBI only “investigates” those whose political loyalty they find objectionable. To all outward appearances, the seem to operate outside any control and on the basis of Lavrentiy Beria’s maxim of “show me the man and I’ll find the crime”. For those under their protection, evidence disappears wholesale, eMails get deleted by the thousands, text messages disappear forever and by some accounts, the much too convenient disappearances or deaths of people of interest do not attract their attention .

After the personnel adjustments made by firing the most obviously compromised individuals at the top of the organisation, has anything actually changed?

If Roger Stone, a man in his middle sixties accused of making a procedural evidential error rather than an offense that is legally classified as a criminal offense, ends up in his night-clothes, handcuffed and bare-footed outside his house in the cold of the pre-dawn, and he’s standing beside his 72-year-old wife who’s similarly attired and bare-foot as well, the answer has to be no.

His greatest fear was that his wife, who’s profoundly deaf, might be shot to death for not obeying the shouted orders of masked intruders bursting into their bedroom at night as she slept through the initial ruckus.

All this was done using a team of 29 people dressed in black SWAT gear and heavily armed with assault weapons. Also involved was a small fleet of cars, an armoured vehicle, a helicopter overhead with a searchlight scanning the ground underneath it and would you believe it, two boats. All that was missing was a couple of tanks and a preliminary air strike to soften up Fortress Stone.

If you’ve any doubt this was the FBI indulging in political theater to intimidate others, a CNN camera crew was already on station there an hour before the raid and ready to film. As we all know, CNN is no friend of the current administration and it’s been said of it by Bob Woodward of Watergate fame that it doesn’t do news anymore, it just does Trump. The excuse given by the reporter on the scene about them being there so conveniently was that he lived nearby, which was a typical CNN lie – he actually lives in Washington DC, a long way from Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

Dr. Sebastian Gorka has made the suggestion that the FBI should be decapitated by removing the Washington hierarchy that appears to have moulded the organisation into becoming primarily a political police force. Obviously, some judicial adjustments would need to be made but in its current form, it’s trusted by nobody who isn’t of the Democrat party or even of a liberal bent.

Even on the Right of politics as each latest scandal comes to light, the repetitive excuse is made about a few rotten apples and how there’s a huge body of good people within the ranks who want to rescue its tarnished reputation if given a chance. Quite frankly, judged by their silence and complete inactivity for the last two years, that’s a load of bollocks.

These were the senior people who stood and applauded the now disgraced Deputy Director Andrew McCabe telling them at a symposium “first we fuck Flynn and then we fuck Trump”, and Gen. Flynn was duly fucked by the FBI, but as it turned out, it was McCabe who got fucked by Trump, but the rest of them who were at that speech and applauded it are still in place.

Break it up. Start again with new faces.

©Pointman

Filed under Article · Tagged with FBI, James Comey, Roger Stone