FBI and CIA coming on-line with new powers

By Thomas C Greene in Washington- The Register

May 30, 2002

The FBI has assumed new powers to investigate people and organizations not even suspected of crime, with blessings from the US Department of Justice and its terror-terrified Lord Protector John Ashcroft.

FBI Director Robert Mueller laid out the preliminary sketch during a Washington press conference Wednesday. After cleverly castigating himself for the bureaucratic bungling which caused warnings from the Phoenix field office about foreigners taking pilot training last Summer to go unanswered, and which also allowed Zacarias Moussaoui to go without a thorough investigation while he was in custody before the September atrocity, Mueller slickly concluded that the Bureau has got to go about things in a more direct manner, which is of course a scheme he's been rigging for some time. The FBI couldn't have leaked evidence of these failures more cleverly. Once the mainstream press had a chance to be outraged by the shocking revelations which the FBI no doubt deliberately fed them, Mueller beat himself up in public to bolster his arguments, win sympathy among journalists and citizens, and pave the way for his new regime.

These sorts of failures will be inevitable and on-going if the FBI isn't allowed to operate outside the law, was the subtext. Calling anti-terror investigations the FBI's new and primary crusade, he proposed to re-organize the Bureau and transform it into a premier national secret-police force as it had been under J. Edgar Hoover.

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