You get what you tolerate, whether it be good or evil.
#1 is Attitude. Attitude unlocks judgement.
#2 Judgement opens the door to action. Action is where most people give up.
#2 Return to #1
Viz, Que sera sera...
: Is the FBI Constitutional?
:
: http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/politics/item/24559-is-the-fbi-constitutional
: Written by Joe Wolverton, II, J.D.
: Is the FBI Constitutional?
: Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) James
: Comey is again under fire, this time by supporters of
: Hillary Clinton for permitting the re-opening of the
: investigation into her use of personal servers to store and
: send classified material, the second round of a scandal
: that could prove fatal to the Democratic nominee's chance
: to occupy the Oval Office in January.
: Republicans had their own go at Comey when he declared after
: the original investigation of Clinton's mishandling of
: classified documents and information that there was
: insufficient evidence to charge her with any criminal
: violation.
: Comey, it seems, has become a punching bag being worked over
: by partisans on both sides of the political aisle.
: Regarding the sound and fury coming out of the Clinton camp,
: they don't see that their candidate has fallen into a pit
: she dug for herself. She knew, or should have known, that
: there are rules governing the treatment and transmission of
: data that could place U.S. national security in danger.
: She broke those rules, and despite what Comey claimed, whether
: she did so knowingly or not is irrelevant, as the requisite
: mental state codified into the regulation is
: "negligence." That is to say, in order to be in
: violation of the relevant statute, one need only fail to
: take reasonable care in the behavior in question.
: It is beyond dispute that there was a duty of care, and
: Hillary Clinton's behavior fell well below that bar.
: What is also beyond dispute is that neither the Republicans —
: when Clinton was exonerated — or the Democrats — when the
: whole affair was brought back into the light of
: investigation — ever questioned the authority of the FBI to
: carry on as a federal police force.
: The larger question, the constitutional question, is why does
: the federal government have an armed police force with
: nearly unlimited authority (at home and abroad) and with
: the power to conduct most of its work in secret, beyond the
: oversight of the American people, whose interest they
: ostensibly serve?
: Perhaps Ryan McMaken has hit upon the answer to that question
: in an article published on the Mises Wire blog. McMaken
: writes of the federal government's law enforcement agency:
: Of all federal police forces, the FBI is the most
: romanticized, and every FBI agent is assumed to be the
: modern embodiment of a fictionalized version of Eliot Ness:
: incorruptible, professional, and efficient. Decades of pop
: culture has driven this home with TV series and movies such
: as The Untouchables, The FBI Story, and This Is Your FBI
: have long perpetuated the idea that when local police fail,
: the FBI will step in to be more effective and simply better
: than every other law enforcement agency. Corruption cannot
: touch the FBI, we are told, and they apply the law equally
: to everyone.
: According to a piece penned in 2012, "A Stasi for
: America," reporter James Bovard painted a darker, less
: egalitarian picture of the FBI's application of the law: A
: ripple of protest swept across the Internet in late March
: after the disclosure that the Federal Bureau of
: Investigation was teaching its agents that “the FBI has the
: ability to bend or suspend the law to impinge on the
: freedom of others.” This maxim was inculcated as part of
: FBI counterterrorism training. The exposure of the training
: material — sparked by a series of articles by Wired.com’s
: Spencer Ackerman — spurred the ritual declaration by an FBI
: spokesman that “mistakes were made, and we are correcting
: those mistakes.” No FBI officials were sanctioned or fired
: for teaching lawmen that they were above the law.... At
: least the FBI has been consistent. Since its founding in
: 1908, the bureau has rarely let either the statute book or
: the Constitution impede its public service. Tim Weiner, the
: author of a superb exposé of the CIA (Legacy of Ashes) has
: delivered a riveting chronology of some of the FBI’s
: biggest crimes with his new book, Enemies.
: There's no question that in its roughly 100 years of
: existence, the FBI has seen its reputation rise and fall.
: McMaken recites a bit of recent history in support of his
: assertion that the creation and the continuation of the FBI
: as a federal secret police force is an assault on the
: liberty of the United States: The reality and the romance,
: of course, have always been two totally different things,
: and it's helpful to remind ourselves that it was the FBI
: that was in charge of the Waco massacre where 26 children
: were killed. It was the FBI that led the raid on Randy
: Weaver's house where an FBI sniper shot a woman dead while
: she was holding a 10-month old baby. It was the FBI that
: spied on Martin Luther King, Jr., and targeted peaceful
: anti-war organizations for political reasons during the
: 1960s and 70s. It was the FBI that came of age arresting
: opponents of the First World War.
: Naturally, in all of these cases, the FBI has actively covered
: up the facts and denied wrongdoing.
: Next, the history lesson looks further back to the beginnings
: of the FBI to illuminate the transformation of the FBI from
: crime-fighting force (albeit no less unconstitutional) to
: powerful partner in the surveillance state: Thanks to war
: hysteria during World War I, the FBI rose to prominence as
: Woodrow Wilson's shock troops against
: "dissidents" (i.e., peaceful opponents of the
: war). Indeed, persecuting and prosecuting political enemies
: of the American state would become something of the forte
: of the FBI, with the role of the agency being expanded ever
: more during times of perceived national crisis. The idea of
: the FBI as a crime-fighting organization — the primary
: message of fawning treatments of the FBI such as The
: Untouchables and The FBI Story — for decades served as
: cover for the FBI's political activities. As Foreign Policy
: pointed out in 2014, though, the FBI quietly dropped its
: claims of being a crime fighting organization and began
: declaring itself a "national security"
: organization. Down the memory hole goes the FBI's original
: claimed raison d'etre.
: This point is borne out in the FBI's own description of its
: purpose. On the "Questions and Answers" section
: of its official web page, the agency describes itself as
: "an intelligence-driven and threat-focused national
: security organization with both intelligence and law
: enforcement responsibilities."
: Where, one wonders, does the Constitution grant the federal
: government or any of its associated agencies any
: intelligence gathering and federal law-enforcement power?
: Finally, not only is the FBI's assumption of its current role
: as federal police force and armed branch of the federal
: surveillance apparatus unconstitutional and a persistent
: threat to freedom, but it represents yet another example of
: the inability of the government to perform any task on par
: with a privately owned entity with the same or similar
: objective. Again, from the Mises Wire: "The
: unreliability of metropolitan police, with their strong
: local and partisan ties, prompted major businesses and
: industrialists to establish the Pinkertons and other
: private police forces. The Pinkertons ultimately functioned
: as a de facto national detective and policing service until
: the 1920s, when the FBI finally came into its own."
: As one scandal blends into the next, and as each generation
: sees the occurrence of some serious act of FBI abuse of
: power, perhaps it is time to consider the abolition of the
: agency and the return of its assumed duties to the private
: sector.