Bureau of Intimidation

The FBI's culture of hostility to constitutional rights, its lack of respect for civil liberties, and its devotion to enhancing its own unaccountable power isn't likely to change much by its new director.

THE FBI IS the luckiest agency ever.

In February of this year, the Bureau suffered the humiliating disclosure that Robert Hanssen, a senior agent in its vaunted and secretive counterintelligence unit, had been spying for the Soviets and Russians for more than 15 years, and that his perfidy had gone undiscovered despite a number of clues. Three months later, the agency drew criticism from all three branches of government when it disclosed at the 11th hour that it had failed to turn over thousands of pages of investigative reports to the legal team defending Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, causing an embarrassed Attorney General John Ashcroft to postpone McVeigh's execution for a month. And last month the Bureau admitted that an internal inventory had disclosed that hundreds of weapons and laptop computers, including at least one with classified data, could not be accounted for.

How can such high-visibility revelations of gross incompetence be deemed luck? Well, it's simple. Just as the FBI was attracting unprecedented public, media, and congressional criticism and even suspicion, these scandals suddenly popularized the notion that the FBI's problem is one of poor executive management. In fact, the real problem is the agency's culture of hostility to constitutional rights, its lack of respect for civil liberties, and its devotion to enhancing its own unaccountable power. And the confirmation last week of Robert S. Mueller III as the new director -- replacing the incompetent but Teflon-coated Louis Freeh -- isn't likely to change much.

Over the course of its existence, the Bureau has demonstrated the somber truth of a statement made, ironically, by then-director Freeh during testimony before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime in June 1997. " We are potentially the most dangerous agency in the country, " he said, while trying to persuade legislators that he and his agency should be given even more power -- an undertaking at which Freeh excelled and almost always succeeded.

Last week, Freeh passed to his successor an agency as dangerous today as it was during the nearly 50-year more-terror/less-error reign of the infamous founding director, J. Edgar Hoover. Yet despite the unprecedented amount of scorn and skepticism directed toward the Bureau, Mueller's confirmation hearing was utterly uneventful. No senator seemed to have either the historical perspective or the will to ask any really tough questions. From the current spin, you would think that all the FBI really needed was a good manager, someone to do for it what Jack Welch did for General Electric; the Bureau came across as an agency more bungling than dangerous.

Nothing could be further from the truth. In seeking to promote its own peculiar notion of law and order, the Bureau is a ruthlessly efficient machine.

If Mueller's confirmation hearing was a love-fest, the tone had already been set by June's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on " Oversight: Restoring Confidence in the FBI " (as if there had ever been a time when we had a basis for real confidence), which the committee's chairman, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont), called to examine the agency's embarrassments of recent years. Former Missouri senator John Danforth, who headed a 14-month, $17 million investigation into the FBI's conduct of the Branch Davidian siege at Waco, Texas, solemnly assured the committee that he found no evidence of serious FBI wrongdoing, other than a " lack of openness and candor " meant " to avoid embarrassment " of individuals and of the Bureau itself. " A long-standing value of the FBI is not to embarrass the FBI, " he intoned. But, he assured the senators, " I am sure that systems for managing information can be improved. " Danforth's testimony never even touched on the fundamental question of why the FBI got involved in a situation that could and should have been left to local law enforcement, and how and why the Bureau convinced then-attorney general Janet Reno that an assault on the community was essential in order to stop the alleged child sex abuse by leader David Koresh. (Reno's obsession with child sex abuse was well known from her days as Dade County district attorney, and her law-enforcement advisers knew precisely how to push her buttons.)