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As for the
mysterious missing McVeigh documents, this was the FBI's biggest
case ever--an $82 million effort that at one time occupied
half the agents in the entire bureau--and the bureau still
couldn't get it right. It is easy to blame FBI officials for
all this, but there are reasons that stretch well beyond their
control. For years they have been chasing a moving target.
First the mission was to catch bank robbers, kidnappers and
Russian spies; then came the war on drugs, then on racketeers,
then on Islamic terrorists. Then came campaign contributions
from Chinese nationals, and meanwhile those Russian spies
were back. The bureau lurched and lunged from task to task
but had trouble keeping up, while open borders, open markets
and open computer networks made the job ever harder.
So has our
deep ambivalence, our awkward love for both order and liberty.
We don't want people stockpiling weapons and holding children
hostage in Texas religious sects, but we don't want tanks
firing on church camps in Waco either. We want something done
about hate groups, but we don't want FBI sharpshooters killing
militants' wives on Idaho mountaintops. We don't want China
stealing our nuclear secrets, but we don't want a racial-profiling
witch hunt. We don't want organized crime to hide its computer
files online, but we don't like the idea that the FBI has
developed a way to read our e-mail. Much more than in Congress
or the White House, the FBI--like the Justice Department of
which it is part--is a place where our values are daily in
collision.
And that
leads to a third problem: the time-honored, nonsensical way
we choose FBI directors. No self-respecting mayor would pick
a police chief who had never been a cop. It would be counterintuitive
for any large enterprise, but it is dangerous in an organization
in which people wear guns to work and have the power to put
other people in jail. But the habit, shared by Presidents
and cheered by the press, is to select an FBI director who
knows virtually nothing about managing a 28,000-strong institution
like the FBI--that secretive, hidebound clerisy. The last
three FBI directors have been federal judges, wisemen trained
to balance law enforcement with civil liberties. Judges are
good at that, but they also spend most of their days in the
presence of a clerk or two, and have never run a complex bureaucracy
with enormous power to trample individual liberties.
Keeping
scattered agents in line is all the harder when each field
office is its own fiefdom. Individual agents have tremendous
autonomy; they depend so much on their secret informants that
they resist sharing information up and down the food chain.
That need-to-know mentality has suffused the whole bureau;
agents investigating Wen Ho Lee didn't even know that he and
his wife had been paid FBI informants a few years earlier.
During Louis Freeh's eight-year tenure (he is stepping down
next month), the bureau was often at war with the Clinton
Justice Department, largely over Janet Reno's hands-off approach
to the serial Clinton scandals. Congressional Republicans
cheered Freeh on--and gave him little oversight. There was
plenty of fresh young talent entering the ranks, but mid-
and senior management was a huge problem, as veteran agents
left for better-paying jobs or were driven out by the politics
of the place. "This is not a guy who breeds healthy skepticism
and dissent," says a Clinton White House official of Freeh.
"He got rid of a lot of people. He surrounded himself with
yes men, and he believes in his own righteousness. And therefore
people don't stop to think and say, 'Hey Louie? Are we doing
this right?' This is a pretty monumental screw-up, and it
feels like no one was in charge."
"How did
it happen?" aides said Bush asked Friday morning. "Why are
we finding out now?" Which were trenchant questions, given
the fact that this was the biggest investigation the FBI had
ever pursued and that McVeigh was just six days away from
execution. The discovery rules had been set at the start of
the case: Turn over to McVeigh's defense everything you find,
which ultimately amounted to 43,500 leads, 28,000 interviews,
7,000 lbs. of evidence and 15,661 leads on the phantom accomplice
known as John Doe No. 2. It was an extraordinary deal between
prosecutors and the defense, this total disclosure of even
marginal material; but it was designed to instill the greatest
possible public confidence in the outcome of a trial of homegrown
terror--an act staged in supposed retaliation for questionable
acts by federal officials, like Waco and the Ruby Ridge shootings.
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May 21, 2001 | No. 20
COVER
STORIES
Justice
Delayed
Does the hitch in Timothy McVeigh's execution point to deeper fbi problems?
The confessed bomber may get what he is due in the end, but he may also
have met one of his goals: making Americans doubt the way their government
pursues justice
TRAVELER'S
ADVISORY
SOUTH
PACIFIC
NEW ZEALAND: Loved to Death...
A top tourist spot's popularity has become a threat to its beauty
Defense: The focus shifts from force
to service
THE
ARTS
ART: Kathleen Petyarre's Utopia Dreamings
BOOKS: A Harry Potter wannabe cries foul
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