George Pilszak rightly reveals the present problems of the FBI in the latest issue of the Oil City Voice-with graphical persuasion! However, he does not recognize that the basic problem of the FBI is not new. It has existed since the beginning of Hoover's reign. That is the problem that because it is more difficult to investigate crime without keeping secrets, those of us more concerned with stopping crime than with maintaining liberty, have willingly traded freedom for security. We allowed the FBI to practice power in the dark.
Whereas power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, relatively unchecked power corrupts only in a relatively unchecked manner. One never knows where he'll find it-and he will very seldom find the abuses when power is practiced in the dark. Thus, the FBI routinely violated the rights of political opponents of the establishment, going so far as to incite them to violence, or to plant evidence of crimes, or to misinterpret evidence in their crime labs when they couldn't create criminals of citizens they unilaterally considered as enemies of the people..
They put great Americans such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy and many leaders of the Civil Rights and Anti-Vietnam War movements under surveillance on the pretenses of suspicions that they were Anti-American. Meanwhile, it generally was the FBI and the right wing groups they protected which were operating against all the principles of freedom, fairness and respect for citizens' rights sought and protected by our American Constitution. They sought out details of people's sex lives to give opposing politicians power to use against their opponents, or to hold over their heads.
What happened at Ruby Ridge, Waco, and in the Jewell and Simpson cases were just tips of the cold dark iceberg where arrogant people ply power in the dark. Hanson was not an aberration, but the standard issue of arrogance that develops in those with power who are unaccountable for their use of that power.
Since the last election there have been repeated attempts by FBI agents to unlawfully chill dissent of those protesting the theft of the election. Some were visited by the FBI and Secret Service agents and told that they would be sent to a psychiatrist if they persisted in their calls for investigations of Bush and Co. The threat of an American Gulag is very real.
Federal agents recently supported attempts by local Republican officials to throw four protestors out of a Tampa, Florida stadium where President George W. Bush was speaking at taxpayers' expense in a supposedly non-partisan appearance. Complimentary signs were allowed all over the place. People with protesting signs were removed. That is par for the course of a politicized police force, generally supporting the fascist right wing as long as it supports and does not attack their power and sources of power.
What we need to do after laughing at the more extreme antics of the FBI that come to light, is to bring the individuals therein who have abused their powers to pay for their crimes. Only by trying and punishing people like Freeh can we replace the arrogance of power with the humility of service. But that can only be done by denying them and all investigators the privilege of secrecy and the practice of insisting on internal loyalty and cover-ups of abuses.
No, this is not a problem peculiar to the FBI but to all supposed "crime-fighters." Understandably, they want the power to make their jobs as easy as possible, ev en when that leaves innocent people prone to prosecution and leaves many guilty on the streets to keep them necessary. But the price is too high. They end up generating and participating in enough unsung sins to make up for all the real one's they get punished, crimes done in the name of the people, crimes that often are only discovered years later or in the brink of time before executions, if ever.
It was the federal agents advocating a second round of outlawed Prohibition, a war on drugs, that had the same effect as the first Prohibition: Their ill-advised incursions into liberty increased lawlessness and a scoff-law attitude against lawfulness-thereby giving crime fighters much more crime to fight than they ever would have had if combating drugs had been left to doctors. Rather, they assured their own necessity, by enticing a major rise in crime. Of course the Dixiecrats who needed an efficient means of repressing black people to replace the outlawed poll tax were pleased to grant federal police the power to destroy generations of young black men.
The federal police used our fears of the "crime wave" resulting from that reprise of unjust Prohibition to justify further grabs for powers to unconstitutionally violate personal liberties. They were given the right to confiscate from citizens any money the feds chose to call "drug money" without the citizens being criminals convicted of a crime. That was money which citizens could not get back without spending small fortunes in court to battle an organization with inexhaustible resources and intimidating power and threats to oppose him, including the possibility of trumped up evidence and charges of drug violations.
What we need to do is strip all crime fighters of their extra-Constitutional martial-law powers. Make them fight real crime with real investigatory skills, not with the methods of the SS or KGB! Give them the resources they need to openly investigate real crimes and to really protect citizens willing to risk themselves to help law enforcement. But make everything they do and say open to the Sunshine law, except secrets needed to protect innocent (not criminal) citizens.
Stop all secret, undercover work and scams which involve government agents in violations of any law and in lying and cheating-in whatever they can not proudly do in the open. But get rid of laws against victimless crimes which just give organized and disorganized crime an opportunity to develop new lucrative areas to exploit, and crime fighters an excuse to cry for more men, money and malfeasant powers.
Fine, outlaw pimps and other parasites who pull people into what amounts to sexual slavery. But please protect prostitutes from abuse. They are to be pitied since few would choose such a life in a perfect world where they had other real opportunities. Punish prostitutes who don't protect their clients and themselves with proper hygiene and precautions, but never punish any adults to protect them from themselves.
Take the same approach with all other victimless crimes. Instead of adding cigarets and ecstacy and oxy-stantin to lists of proscribed substances, fund clinics where people who do not wish to commit suicide by addiction can get the help they need to get clean. And punish the abuse of rape drugs with worst punishment than other forced rape. Assure the cheap availability of pure drugs that will not kill due to impurities and mistakenly wrong dosages, and assure safe places where people can take such substances under watchful eyes. No one plays with snakes unless they really want to die. Create a society in which people don't want to die to spite the rest of us, or because they are given no help to avoid it.
At least the original Prohibitionists had enough respect for the Constitution to get an 18th Amendment passed to Constitutionally deny law-abiding citizens their rights to intoxicating liquors. It is time that our law enforcement organizations were made to admit that the spirit of the 1933 21st Amendment repealing prohibition is a tacit recognition that our government has no right to be trying to save people from themselves without Constitutional authority. All that such police wars do is create criminals to fight, and give the "crime fighters" excuses to take freedoms from the rest of us who would never condone the use of such dangerous substances or their dangerous tactics if we realized they are being used against us and our innocent neighbors.
So make our police at all levels fight crime fairly and openly and not create criminals in order to protect people from themselves. Don't have such a hypocritical society that will allow people to use the most dangerous and addictive substances like cigarets but one where police lie and cheat to create criminals in an attempt to keep those who prefer less dangerous drugs from abusing themselves, and in the process, create a whole criminal society to fight-and thereby assure themselves to be needed. Sometimes we are as absurd as the FBI!