FUMBLING,
BUNGLING, INCOMPETENTS
FBI Director
Robert Mueller: Maybe time for him to be
let go.
(Friday April 26, 2013 New
York City) Sadly, nothing seems to have
appreciably changed in the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the 12
years since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. The scrutiny and examination of the myriad
“intelligence” failures conducted in the aftermath of that infamous day
revealed the wide spread, systemic, endemic incompetence, antiquated methods,
lack of imagination and overall
dysfunction in the country’s well-funded inept intelligence community including
some glaring deficiencies in the FBI and the Central Intelligence Agency
(CIA). Despite a host of purported
improvements in how each agency functions and cooperates with each other and with
federal, state and local Law Enforcement Agencies (LEA), the last 10 days has
provided ample evidence that the FBI remains riddled by ineptitude and has
fallen back into its insular posture regarding communicating with the Law
Enforcement Community (LEC) at large.
Since the CIA is not purposed for domestic intelligence collection, the
highly regarded 9-11 Kean Commission Report exposed the fatal lack of
cooperation between their efforts overseas and coordinating leads with the
domestic sentinels at the FBI. As became
common parlance after the Commission Report was published, “The FBI and CIA
just did not connect the dots.”
SOUTH ON 95
The 210 mile drive southbound
on Interstate 95 from downtown Boston to Midtown Manhattan can be made in less
than four hours. New York City Police
Department (NYPD) Commissioner Ray Kelley is acutely aware of this fact. He is particularly disturbed, actually
“pissed off” that the FBI failed to notify him that while the two Boston
marathon bombers where still on the loose, they had planned to make that ride
and set off pipe bombs and a pressure cooker explosive device they had in their
possession in Times Square. The FBI
became aware of this information after conducting a second interview with the
surviving suspect, 19 year old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev this past Monday. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg
expressed his dismay at the failure of the FBI to notify him that his City had
been a potential target of the two Chechan-born brothers.
Mayor Bloomberg commented that
this most recent development in the case is a “horrific reminder that we remain
targets for terrorists.” Bloomberg continued, “Upon news of the explosions in
Boston we immediately mobilized the New York City Police Department’s
counterterrorism operations because we thought there was a possibility that
they could attempt a related attack here. We now know that possibility was, in
fact, all too real.” The silence on the
part of the FBI is inexplicable and someone in that troubled agency should be
held accountable. Hopefully, at least,
some explanation will be provided so this kind of “Major league error never
happens again,” commented an NYPD Intelligence Unit Detective not authorized to
speak for attribution. The Detective
added, “Yes, we have seen this before and because the federal agencies were so
poor at what they did, this City suffered 9-11-01. It is for that reason that this Unit exists
today.”
JAILHOUSE CROCK
Overshadowed by the events in
Boston last week, the FBI suffered another black eye when they mistakenly
arrested a man from Corinth Mississippi, Paul Kevin Curtis, who makes his
living as an “Elvis Impersonator”.
Ricin-laced letters had been mailed to President Obama as well as
Republican Mississippi Senator Roger Wicker and Lee County (MS) Justice Court
Judge Sadie Holland. The FBI was quick
to arrest Curtis alleging that he had been the source of the ricin letters based,
apparently, on flimsy circumstantial evidence that was quickly proven
erroneous. The FBI has since identified
a second suspect who they “briefly lost” track of yesterday. This new suspect, J. Everett Dutschke who is
currently charged with sexual abuse crimes against a 7 year old girl, has since
been located after his attorney phoned the FBI to inform them of her client’s
whereabouts. The investigation into this
strange matter remains fluid.
G-MEN GET AN “F”
It has been quite some time
since the glory days of the FBI when they enjoyed the public’s respect and were
held in high regard. Their best days may
have come in the period between the early 1970’s through the early 1980’s when
they reached the heights of success in their campaign against organized
crime. After the dark days of the long
tenured J. Edgar Hoover and his paranoid wanderings that lead to a host of
malfeasance over the course of decades, the FBI aggressively sought to
prosecute organized crime, drug dealing, money laundering and other offenses
with their new tool known as the RICO Predicates. RICO, an acronym for Racketeer Influenced and
Corrupt Organizations Act became effective in October 1970. RICO provided the FBI with the legal
mechanism to conduct surveillance and investigations with more latitude than
ever before.
It was also during that period
of time that the Behavioral Sciences Unit of the FBI pioneered the methodology
of what would go on to become the highly successful art and science of criminal
profiling. The Forensics, Ballistic, and
Evidence Laboratories of the FBI were on the cutting edge of their respective
disciplines and literally wrote the books that became the standards for Law
Enforcement Agencies across the country.
But the FBI began to stumble due to institutional inertia, poor
management, a failure to adapt to the ever increasing sophistication of
technology employed for criminal purposes, and a stale mindset coupled with a
work force more concerned with protecting their pensions than thinking “outside
the box”. Many former FBI Agents blame
the decline of their former employer on the awful directorship of Judge Louis
Freeh who was appointed Director by President Bill Clinton in 1993. Freeh’s eight years as Director saw some of
the biggest embarrassments for the once highly touted Bureau including the
exposure of gross incompetence in the FBI Laboratories, man of which resulted
in retrials and dismissals of cases based on shoddy work by the Bureau. By 2001 whatever small sheen of luster
remained on the Bureau was forever gone.
Barely three months after Freeh’s resignation 19 Muslim extremists
successfully perpetrated an attack on United States soil in New York City and
Washington DC. The man appointed by
George W. Bush to lead the troubled Bureau, Robert Mueller was at the helm for
only seven days before 9-11-2001. He
still serves as Director and, as many former Agents readily admit, “He (Mueller)
was never an Agent. He has never
understood the actual mission of the FBI, its process, and you see the
results. Mueller is a bureaucrat, a
‘manager’, a lawyer, not a law enforcement guy.
He did some positive things for the FBI insofar as upgrading the
antiquated computer networks that we were working with as of September 11, 2001
but other than that he has been a huge disappointment, a failure.”
BIG FEET GETTING IN THE WAY
One of the longest running knocks
on the FBI is their failure to interact with local LEA smoothly and
productively. That was not the case in
Boston last week but has been a problem that infected many investigations in
the past. The FBI has a very well
defined mission in what crimes are within their purview and in other types of
crimes they must be specifically “invited” by the local LEA to offer
assistance. Typically the FBI wastes no
time in their efforts to wrest control of an investigation from the host LEA
and, in so doing, usually ends up alienating the local agency instead of
working in a cooperative manner. Local
police Departments that have had long running acrimonious relationships with
the FBI derisively refer to the Feds as “Big Feet”. “What the FBI fail to realize is that the
local Police know the territory and is intimately familiar not only with the
turf but also the people,” commented a retired NYPD Detective who worked in the
Organized Crime Unit from 1979 to 1991.
He continued, “I can recall the FBI sending young Agents up to New York
City to work with us on Organized Crime operations who had never even been in a
big city before. They stuck out like
sore thumbs and simply could not assimilate as people in NYC and certainly not
as Agents involved in sensitive on-going investigations.”
There have been numerous
incidents where the FBI has blundered into long term efforts such as undercover
and “sting” operations and have destroyed what was sometimes years of
painstaking old fashioned Police work. In
some of these cases the FBI’s incompetent bungling would have appeared like a
comedy of errors if the stakes had not been so high and the investigations
totally “blown”. Lately the FBI has suffered
more failures and embarrassments than they have victories. Famed New York criminal defense attorney Gino
Palermo commented, “ The FBI does a very few things well and a great many other
things extremely poorly. Often in their
haste to bring prosecutions they have cut corners, mishandled legal elements of
cases from interrogations to evidentiary chain of custody protocols. We have all read of the systemic deficiencies
in their once highly touted forensic laboratories and we have all witnessed the
results of the Agencies recalcitrance, refusal to share information with others
Agencies and continue to “stovepipe” what solid leads they do develop.”
WHAT’S NEXT?
It is safe to concede that
most Americans have been lead to believe there have been dramatic changes in
our bloated, convoluted, top heavy, risk averse “intelligence community” from
the CIA, Department of Defense (DOD), Department of Homeland Security (DHS),
Transportation Security Agency (TSA) as well as the FBI and, this has simply
not been the case. In the rush to
correct the multitude of dysfunctions at the FBI haphazard modification were
made. The benchmark standard of their abject uselessness was exposed for all to
see in the aftermath of one of their greatest, most fatal failures that made it
possible for 19 foreign nationals come to the United States, live here among
us, lose track of several of the perpetrators after they were embedded among
us, receive aviation training while carefully planning their high jacking
terrorist attack carried out virtually flawlessly on that bright September
Tuesday morning 12 years ago. Hopefully
in the “after action assessments” that will no doubt be conducted in the
future, the FBI will identify what went wrong – if anything - prior to the Boston Marathon bombing.
There are statutory mechanisms
in place that protect the Constitutional and civil right of Americans from overzealous
Law Enforcement Agencies including the FBI.
Ther FBI by its charter and mandate is a domestically empower
organization while the CIA is forbidden from conducting operation on our home
soil; their realm exists in operating overseas but there must be a true
increase of the seamless cooperation between the two so that dots are connected
and there are no gaping cracks for foreigners already of terror “watch lists”
to fall threw as has so often been the case in the last 20 years.
Many of the most glaring
deficits in intelligence gathering, analysis, and dissemination were supposed
to be eliminated by the creation of the National Intelligence Agency which has
only served to blur the lines of command and has in many ways made coordination
among its 22 assorted member Agencies even more complicated. If anything according to insiders in the
diverse and to a degree disparate members organizations under the auspices of
the NIA and DHS have lost their primary sense of mission and rather than having
the DHS be a stronger all-in-one concern it suffers from profound weaknesses in
which it is clearly not as robust and functional as the sum of its parts.
TAGS: FBI ERRORS IN RICIN LACED LETTERS INVESTIGATION, FBI
BLUNDERS, FBI INCOMPETENCE, BOSTON MARATHON BOMBING INVESTIGATION, FBI
INTERFERENCE WITH LOCAL LEC, UNCOOPERATIVE WITH LOCAL JURISDICTIONS.
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