Blog for a Better World

For nearly seven years, scientist Bruce E. Ivins and a small circle of fellow anthrax specialists at Fort Detrick’s Army medical lab, in tactics that the researchers considered heavy-handed and often threatening, were interviewed and polygraphed as early as 2002, and reinterviewed numerous times. Their labs were searched, and their computers and equipment carted away. The FBI eventually focused on Ivins, whom federal prosecutors were planning to indict when he committed suicide.  Colleagues and friends of Ivins remained convinced that he was innocent; he had neither the motive nor the means to create the lethal powder that was sent by mail to new outlets and congressional offices in 2001.  They contend that the FBI has no evidence and that a lot of the tactics that they used were designed to isolate him from his support. The FBI just continued to push his buttons.

Former President Gerald Ford secretly advised the FBI that two of his fellow members on the Warren Commission doubted the FBI’s conclusion that John F. Kennedy was shot from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas.  The new details were included in 500 pages of the FBI’s large file on Ford, released in part last August in response to requests under the Freedom of Information Act that the Associated Press and others made on the day Ford died in December 2006.  Apparently, the fact that Ford served as the FBI’s eyes and ears inside the commission has been known for years. Long ago, the government released a 1963 FBI memo that said Ford had volunteered to keep the FBI informed about the panel’s private deliberations, but only if that relationship remained confidential. The FBI agreed. It was also well-known that Ford was an outspoken proponent of the bureau’s conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald killed Kennedy while acting alone.

According to current and former bureau officials, the FBI is struggling to find enough agents and resources to investigate criminal wrongdoing tied to the country’s economic crisis.  The bureau slashed its criminal investigative work force to expand its national security role after the Sept. 11 attacks, shifting more than 1,800 agents, or nearly one-third of all agents in criminal programs, to terrorism and intelligence duties. The cutbacks have left the bureau seriously exposed in investigating areas like white-collar crime, which has taken on urgent importance in recent weeks because of the nation’s economic woes. The cutbacks have been particularly severe in staffing for investigations into white-collar crimes like mortgage fraud, with a loss of 625 agents, or 36 percent of its 2001 levels. 

Attorney General Michael Mukasey has given the FBI new authoritative powers to freely investigate Americans without any cause or suspicion that a crime has been committed to warrant such spying.  One of the techniques that the FBI can now use is that agents can interview neighbors or friends without informing them of who they are.  Some feel that opening the door to even more invasive and overreaching spying techniques would give the government the freedom to spy on people based on their race, religion or political activities.  The government has after all instituted the warrantless eavesdropping program, a spying program that many feel has breeched Americans’ civil liberties.