It’s time to break up the FBI

Posted by Pointman on November 21, 2020 · 5 Comments

Starting off a piece with a title like that is like giving away the punchline to a joke before you’ve told it, but it does however get me straight into the reasons why it’s time for it to be done. As always, some history sets the context for the raison d’être of any organisation. Back in the days of free roaming bandit gangs like Bonnie and Clyde, all the gang had to do after doing something like robbing a bank was head for the state line, where the local police jurisdiction ended. Many a chase ended when pursuing police cars had to stop at the state line and watch the dust of escaping bandits on the other side of it. This was an unintended consequence of the founding fathers deep distrust of any pan-country police. It smacked too much of monarchy, or the dictatorial aspects of it which they’d just fought a War of Independence to escape.

The immediate solution to the jurisdiction problem was to classify certain crimes as federal and create a small force that solely investigated that type of crime. Initially it worked very well, but even back then a tendency towards a clubby elitism in dealings with other law enforcement agencies and a thirst for self-publicity to fuel its growth, resulted in it expanding vastly into what amounted to a full blown internal security service – exactly what the founding fathers had feared. Around the world, arranging a nation’s intelligence defenses is usually organised into an internal agency for domestic problems and another agency for foreign intelligence, for example MI5 and MI6 in Britain, and the FBI and CIA in America focusing on those two disparate areas.

The history of being driven by image considerations rather than effectiveness has resulted, nearly since its inception, in a tendency to go after headline grabbing individuals while ignoring the elephant in the room. Bringing down the roving interstate gangs with all Tommy guns blazing certainly grabbed the headlines, but at the same time they totally ignored the Mafia, whose explosive growth at the time exceeded even their’s. Back in the gangster era, it was granted too much power because it was both an intelligence gather as well as a policeman and it operated under federal law, not state. In every other democracy, a careful line is drawn between the internal security service and the police for good reasons – one gathers the intelligence but the latter is the one to actually make arrests.

Rolling up the roles of spy and policeman led to, and still does, flagrant abuses of power. From what amounted to the cold-blooded ambush and murder of John Dillinger to the full on SWAT arrest of Roger Stone at 4 in the morning with CNN just happening to be on the scene to capture the whole thing, which was about 50 agents, an armoured car, two inflatable assault boats, a few local cop cars, lots of flashing lights, bullhorns and a helicopter circling overhead. All that to get their hands on a 68 year old man with no criminal history and not accused of a violent crime. Big result in fake news, but actual result? Two old people standing outside their house shivering in their night clothes with their hands up and Stone pleading at them not to open fire on his wife because she was deaf and couldn’t hear the orders they were screaming at her.

That was a politically motived arrest to aid in the first coup attempt against Trump, but their recent track record is littered with bungles brought on by excessive use of force and playing to the news media. Too often siege situations that could have been defused with a more deft touch have resulted in bloodbaths. Their usual excuses of lessons have been learnt etc etc have worn too thin. Tragic though those blunders were, they are nothing compared to the huge disasters they are specifically charged with ensuring would never happen on American soil. There are many of those but the biggest was 9/11. How that wasn’t prevented, especially after a failed attempt on the same target a few years previously, went on to spark the war on terror. Three thousand dead Americans, and the FBI skipping out of it without a stain on their spotless reputation was a master class in blame reapportionment.

That habit of ignoring huge threats to America was highlighted in the general election just past. With every day’s accumulation of evidence, it’s beyond any reasonable doubt that the election was stolen and yet in the biggest, most organised, disenfranchisement of American cititizenry in its history, it seemingly missed out on picking up any trace of it from their reportedly numerous sources of information. Not one in a vast conspiracy that plainly necessitated utilising hundreds, if not thousands people to pull it off. Perhaps they were too busy withholding exculpatory evidence like the laptop from hell or compiling a huge report that in summary said the biggest threat to domestic security was white supremacy. Not antifa or BLM.

Gimme a break.

Let’s not shy away from saying it plainly. Any internal security force that has powers to investigate, arrest and essentially try a citizen on its own terms is better known as the secret police, especially as it’s been evidenced by Comey, the disgraced one time head of it, that it was part of a coup attempt against a duly elected president. It’s not just totally self-absorbed, but totally politicised.

If you doubt they’re at the beck and call of various influential people at the end of various butt chains, consider the Bidens or what Giulani calls the Biden Crime Family. That he’s massively corrupt has been common knowledge in Washington for decades. As head of the family, the big guy always gets his cut of selling his office and America, while all his feckless siblings have become millionaires several times over in spite of every one of their own independent business ventures ending in disaster, but the Boss always sends in a clean tax return which is never questioned by the IRS who know better than to make waves.

It’s much too late to try tinkering with it to fix it because it’s totally steeped in its own culture, which has become no friend to the constitution or the duly elected servants of the people voted into office. If, after swearing an oath of loyalty and allegiance to the commander in chief and the constitution, then breaking it without a second’s thought to engage in and actually manufacture evidence to effect a regime change to something more to their liking, then that’s got an old fashioned name – high treason.

Senator Trey Gowdy, a former federal prosecutor and an officer of the court I respect, is in the habit of saying things to excuse the FBI’s latest blunder or disaster with words to the effect- “The FBI is good. I’ve worked with them. There are many fine men and women in it, but …”. I’m afraid that trailing “but” has become too widespread when the organisation is under discussion. They no longer enjoy the unqualified trust of the people, state level law enforcement and even foreign intelligence agencies.

Dismembering it judiciously is far from a Herculean task and in fact, is by now necessary. It’s grown into too big a threat to democracy and the ordinary person. It’s gone too far down the path to a secret police. In a previous article, I asked whether it was time to break up the FBI. In the light of their recent anti-American behaviour during the election, I believe that time has arrived.

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:

Is it time to break up the FBI?

What if Biden wins?

Reading the entrails.

List of previous articles about the FBI

The Rule of Law.

Click here for a list of all articles in the Stop the Steal series.

Click for a list of other articles.