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Date: Tue, 15 Jul 1997 09:51:11 -0700
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From: Paul Andrew Mitchell [address in tool bar]
Subject: SLS: Can we trust the FBI? (fwd)
<snip>
>
>What blows my mind is that this came from READERS DIGEST! Not exactly a
>foaming at the mouth anti-government publication that critics would say
>something like this would appear ....
>
>----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Can We Trust the FBI?
>
> As scandals mount, more and more
> Americans want to know
>
> by Brock Brower
>
>
> Three days after he found a deadly bomb in
> Atlanta's Centennial Olympic Park in July 1996,
> Richard Jewell was invited by the local FBI bureau
> to take part in a "training video." Agents told him
> they wanted to show how he was able to detect the
> bomb. Would he help? Jewell agreed, cooperating
> fully as they questioned him about the bomb. Then
> they asked him to waive his Miranda rights.
> Shocked, Jewell realized the "training video" was a
> ruse: they thought he was the bomber.
>
> Soon headlines were naming Jewell the suspect.
> For most of the next 88 days, despite finding no
> evidence of his guilt, the FBI tailed him
> around-the-clock with a three-car surveillance team.
> Only after his lawyer publicized the lack of evidence
> did the Bureau finally acknowledge that Jewell had
> been cleared of suspicion in the case.
>
> The Jewell harassment reflected badly on
> the nation's premier law-enforcement
> agency--in a period when it was already
> under a cloud. The FBI's chief counsel was involved
> in questionable dealings with the White House.
> Long-simmering problems at the FBI Laboratory
> were boiling over, raising doubts about the evidence
> in important cases. And a scandal dubbed Filegate
> had erupted as hundreds of secret FBI files, many
> on prominent Republicans, were found to have been
> sent to the White House.
>
> Can the FBI be trusted? That's a question most
> Americans would once have regarded as
> unthinkable. But the controversies have taken their
> toll on the Bureau's credibility. "We lost some
> ground," warns former FBI director William
> Webster, who singles out Filegate. "The public
> doesn't like to think that politicians have easy
> access to their FBI files."
>
> A Sauna and Six Big Macs. The problems at the
> FBI are not what anybody expected from the man
> President Clinton called "a law-enforcement
> legend." That was in 1993, when Clinton appointed
> Louis Freeh as FBI director, replacing William
> Sessions, who had been fired by the President after
> a controversy concerning the misuse of perks.
> "With Louie," says Oliver "Buck" Revell, a past
> associate deputy director, "we thought we had
> things fixed."
>
> Freeh was not only a respected federal judge and
> former prosecutor but also one of the Bureau's own.
> He had joined the FBI in 1975 straight out of
> Rutgers Law School.
>
> During his early days as director, Freeh made a
> demand for right conduct. "We have been too
> tolerant of certain types of behavior," he said,
> calling on agents to uphold "core values such as
> integrity, reliability and trustworthiness."
>
> Freeh also sent 600 agents with desk jobs back to
> the streets. That's where he had made his own
> reputation.
>
> As a rookie agent, Freeh went undercover and
> joined a Brooklyn health club where "Big Mike"
> Clemente, a mob capo, did business in the sauna
> to avoid wiretaps. Clemente took a shine to the
> "out-of-work lawyer" he knew as Luigi Rossi and let
> him see fat envelopes change hands. They held
> marked bills--solid, if damp, evidence of payoffs. At
> his arraignment, Clemente still didn't know Freeh
> was an agent. Spotting "Luigi" in the room, he sent
> his lawyer to the prosecutors with a message:
> "Leave the kid alone. He had nothing to do with it."
>
> Soon afterward Freeh succeeded in bugging the
> office of mobster William "Sonny" Montella by
> befriending his four vicious guard dogs; he fed them
> six Big Macs every night. Faced with incriminating
> tapes, Montella agreed to wear a wire that resulted
> in the successful prosecution of Tony Scotto, a
> leader of the Gambino crime family.
>
> In 1981 Freeh moved up to prosecuting cases.
> Hired by crime-busting U.S. Attorney Rudolph
> Giuliani of the southern district in New York City, he
> put together the biggest Mafia drug case ever. "The
> Pizza Connection" involved a string of pizzerias
> used as drug drops by a ring headquartered in
> Sicily. Of 18 defendants, 16 were convicted on drug
> charges. (Another was murdered by his partner.)
>
> Then came the Nail Bomber Case. In December
> 1989 nail bombs wrapped as Christmas gifts killed
> a federal judge and a civil-rights lawyer. The FBI
> suspected Walter Leroy Moody, a loner previously
> convicted on federal bomb charges. After the
> suspect's arrest, Freeh convinced the court to let
> him bug Moody talking to himself in his cell. The
> man's taped admission to mailing the bombs
> earned him seven life sentences plus 400 years.
>
> Helping Freeh win the case were FBI Special Agent
> in Charge (SAC) Larry Potts and a new assistant
> U.S. attorney named Howard Shapiro. Two years
> later, as SWLs--colleagues who have "Served With
> Louis"--they would help Freeh take over leadership
> at the Bureau.
>
> Blind Spots. That original headquarters team of
> SWLs, critics charge, split Freeh from the rest of
> the FBI and led to many of Freeh's subsequent
> problems.
>
> The first involved Potts. Freeh made him acting
> deputy director, even though Potts had yet to be
> cleared of responsibility for the 1990 deaths of an
> unarmed woman and her son, shot by an FBI sniper
> in Ruby Ridge, Idaho.
>
> After reviewing the case, Freeh removed the
> on-scene commander, Eugene Glenn, from his FBI
> post, but only reprimanded Potts. Glenn fought
> back, claiming that a missing post-incident analysis
> would prove the Ruby Ridge standoff with tax
> resisters was run by Potts's people at
> headquarters.
>
> It turned out that document had been shredded by a
> Potts assistant. Freeh had to suspend Potts,
> confessing "a blind spot" toward his deputy. "He
> was my friend," Freeh candidly told Congress. "He
> still is." Potts is among five agents still under
> Justice Department investigation for mishandling the
> incident.
>
> The "blind spot" defense has raised concerns out in
> the field. Freeh suspended Jim Fox, SAC in New
> York City, two weeks before his retirement for
> talking on TV about an FBI informant. Freeh then
> suspended SAC Jim Ahern in Phoenix just as
> abruptly for making remarks about Janet Reno. Yet
> Freeh would fire Potts only after long agonizing and
> under pressure. As former FBI director Webster
> cautions, "You can't have any appearance of a
> double standard."
>
> Still, Congressional critics gave Freeh the benefit of
> the doubt, since Ruby Ridge had occurred before
> his watch. Many were impressed with his
> achievements on the job, including the capture of
> Unabomber suspect Ted Kaczynski and the
> peaceful resolution of the standoff at a Montana
> ranch, where 60 "Freemen," including women and
> children, had threatened another Waco.
>
> Questions of Conduct. Then came the explosion
> that took two lives in Atlanta's Centennial Olympic
> Park--and Richard Jewell's peculiar interrogation.
> "To do it the way we are told it was done just blows
> my mind," a veteran agent told Reader's Digest.
> Throughout Jewell's "interview," the agents were on
> an open phone line to FBI headquarters. And later
> that month, when agents searched his mother's
> home, Jewell says he heard them talking on the
> phone to a "Louis." Freeh denies he was in contact
> with the agents.
>
> More Bureau embarrassment was to come.
> Last summer Congressional investigators
> discovered that someone in the FBI had
> sent the White House hundreds of sensitive
> personnel files, primarily on former Republican staff
> members. They contained information protected by
> the Privacy Act, and they were handled at the
> White House by two low-level political operatives,
> Craig Livingstone and Anthony Marceca. In the
> subsequent Congressional investigation, Marceca
> pleaded the Fifth Amendment, then dropped out of
> sight.
>
> Freeh took the blame for "egregious violations of
> privacy." But while Freeh's personal integrity was
> not questioned, new revelations lessened his
> support in Congress.
>
> Freeh's old friend, FBI chief counsel Howard
> Shapiro, had given a heads-up to the White House
> of an FBI report linking First Lady Hillary Clinton to
> Filegate figure Livingstone. In the report, then-White
> House Counsel Bernard Nussbaum was quoted as
> saying that Livingstone came "highly recommended
> by Hillary Clinton."
>
> Nussbaum denied saying this to the FBI. Shapiro
> sent agents to question the FBI agent, Dennis
> Sculimbrene, who had interviewed Nussbaum.
> "They would have liked to have had me say I made
> it up," remembers Sculimbrene, who had been
> doing background checks for the FBI at the White
> House and Congress for 16 years. "They asked me
> so many times it became embarrassing."
> Sculimbrene stood by his report. That same day,
> other agents searched Sculimbrene's office.
>
> Comments former CIA head James Woolsey, "It's
> one thing to try to intimidate a member of the Cali
> cartel. It's another to try to intimidate one of your
> own agents."
>
> Meanwhile, Gary Aldrich, for five years an FBI agent
> at the White House, published Unlimited Access,
> alleging security breaches by White House staffers.
> The White House immediately launched a media
> counterattack. They had been alerted to Aldrich's
> charges by Shapiro, who delivered a copy of the
> manuscript to the White House counsel's office
> while the FBI was still vetting the book.
>
> A Justice Department investigation found that
> Shapiro had used "very poor judgment." He
> resigned last June without any discipline having
> been imposed.
>
> Trouble at the Lab. Another blow to trust came
> when FBI chemist Frederic Whitehurst alleged
> gross deficiencies at the FBI Lab, which analyzes
> evidence for police departments nationwide--some
> 600,000 pieces of evidence a year. A subsequent
> probe revealed evidentiary problems in at least 50
> cases, including the Oklahoma City bombing.
>
> Shapiro wrote Whitehurst in 1994 that the Bureau
> would "fully investigate" his charges. But when
> Freeh removed three officials responsible for errors
> at the lab, he also suspended whistle-blower
> Whitehurst.
>
> Freeh is fierce in asserting his
> independence, even refusing an
> Administration request for intelligence that
> he concluded would compromise the FBI's
> investigation into campaign finances. He maintains
> his fidelity to civil liberties, emphasizing in an
> interview that "if we can't perform our functions
> according to the Constitution and the law, we'd be
> better without a police agency."
>
> Nevertheless, morale throughout the Bureau has
> fallen. Last summer dozens of supervisors with vital
> field experience chose to retire--many because, as
> one agent claimed, Freeh "is surrounding himself
> with people who aren't agents."
>
> That charge is seconded by former associate
> deputy director Revell. "Freeh has put people in
> places of authority who have no management,
> leadership or investigative experience," he says.
>
> "Thousands of good, decent men and
> women serve their country as FBI
> employees," says Sen. Charles Grassley
> (R., Iowa), chairman of the Senate Subcommittee
> on Administrative Oversight and the Courts, which
> oversees the Bureau. "Those agents, along with the
> American people, deserve leaders who have
> integrity and credibility. Today, the FBI is buried
> under a mountain of evidence showing that it cannot
> police itself."
>
<snip>
========================================================================
Paul Andrew Mitchell : Counselor at Law, federal witness
B.A., Political Science, UCLA; M.S., Public Administration, U.C. Irvine
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