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June 5, 2002
FBI's new powers: sky remains intact
L. Gordon Crovitz writes in the WSJ today that in order to connect the dots, the FBI needs to collect the dots. The FBI guidelines were anachronistic and particularly bizarre to the folks at Dow Jones during the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl.
Back when they were written, the guidelines were a reaction to complaints that the FBI had unfairly targeted civil rights leaders and antiwar protestors. But instead of simply controlling how information was used, the rules banned access to the information, period. Before files could be gathered on suspects, including potential terrorists, there had to be hard evidence of a crime. Even news clippings could not be kept, but a few waivers were granted.
Meanwhile, David Limbaugh argues in his column today that civil liberties remain unaffected by the new FBI rule changes and the sky isn't falling. And he thinks he's figured out the liberal chicken littles. [But what to say about William Safire's objections, as we point out in R21?] Excerpt:
Let’s get a grip. The FBI is changing no laws, but is merely lifting self-imposed restrictions it implemented following its illegal wiretaps and other questionable activities against Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders, mostly during the '60s.Since there is nothing specific in the critics’ objections and not a shred of legitimacy to their panic-ridden assertions that the sky is falling on the Constitution, what is behind their hysteria? Well, I think I’ve figured it out.
What they really fear is a slippery slope that may ultimately lead to the suppression of their political dissent. They ignore that investigations under the new rules are specifically limited to rooting out terrorism.No matter. From the New York Times to the ACLU, the critics are worried that the nefarious right wing (all of us deep down being little J. Edgar Hoover protégés) is out to invade their homes and bedrooms and muzzle their speech. This is abundantly ironic, since most measures aimed at restricting religious and political expression in modern America -- not to mention the collection of FBI files on political enemies -- have come from the Left.
I think I need only say this: that for the first time since the Civil War, habeus corpus has been effectively rescinded. That as I write, hundreds of men of Middle Eastern descent are in prison in the United States or in detention in Git'mo Cuba. That they are neither prisoners of war, with all the rules that implies, nor have they been charged with a crime, told what their crime is, nor been allowed to see an attorney or their families.
It is frightening. It is Kafka-esque. And it is not crying up the "phantoms of lost liberty" to say so.