Fuckups and Bad Ideology

The FBI has declared that law enforcement is no longer its primary function. To be more specific, where the FBI used to say that law enforcement was its primary function, the FBI now says instead that its primary function is "national security". The replacement of one with the other means that the FBI will now place its own interpretation of "national security" above law enforcement. The problems with this are almost too numerous to mention.

As a practical matter, the FBI's record of involvement in national security is horrible. During the 1990s, the FBI was involved in "intelligence" in a way that was recognized as detrimental to both intelligence and law enforcement. The solution, the wall of separation that is generally blamed on Jamie Gorelick but for which the implementing bureaucrats certainly also deserve some criticism, was even more detrimental. "Intelligence" and law enforcement operations were segmented and forbidden from sharing information with each other. This directly hampered the investigation into September 11 hijacker Khalid al-Mindhar who was a high-priority target of the FBI's law enforcement branch due to his involvement in the USS Cole bombing, yet the FBI's intelligence branch refused to share its information on him with the rest of the FBI. After 2001, the FBI's solution to this problem was for the FBI to stop following the rules of evidence. As told by Ali Soufan in his book The Black Banners, FBI lawyer Spike Bowman was sent to deliver the message to outraged FBI agents who knew that the evidence they gathered would be inadmissable in court. By 2006-2008, the last of the criminal investigations into the September 11 attack were shut down due to the lack of evidence. The lesson of recent history is that the net effect of mixing law enforcement with "national security" is to let the bad guys get away. Al-Qaeda could not do better if they had a deep-cover operative at the top of the FBI guiding the creation of these policies.

There are also signs that criminal and foreign intelligence organizations have embedded themselves into the national security apparatus and mask their criminal activities as military or intelligence operations. Stories have gone around about the Colombo and Bulger crime networks in New York and Boston, the "octopus" that Danny Casolaro was looking into, the Mena operation, Wally Hilliard's flight school, and the infamous Cocaine Importing Agency. If the FBI has an official policy of deferring to "national security", then these crime networks will be in a far stronger position. FBI officials who do not know any better will accept the line of military or intelligence involvement as grounds to end an investigation of criminal activity inside the military or intelligence community. The FBI already has a curious record of retaliating against its own investigators, some examples being Robert Wright, Sibel Edmonds, and John M. Cole. With the new policy, the situation will become worse.

The philosophical problems with this change are just as serious. What seems to go unrecognized by whoever ordered this change is that is that there is no national security without uniform enforcement of the law. Secondly, national security is everybody's responsibility so an interest in national security should go without saying. Thirdly, a dedicated internal security organization already exists in the DHS. These elements of basic civics are known to the guys on the ground. What can we say about the people at the top of the FBI?