Tuesday, July 01, 2008
The “F” Doesn’t Stand for “Fantastic”
I am about as pro-law enforcement as one can be, but this is just sad...
A former FBI agent has come forward to describe just how poorly handled the 2001 Anthrax investigation really was and why the guilty party still remains at large.
The anthrax investigation, almost from the beginning, was hampered by top-heavy leadership from high ranking, but inexperienced FBI officials, which led to a close-minded focus on just one suspect and amateurish investigative techniques that robbed agents in the field the ability operate successfully.
I’ll sum it up for you: micromanagement from the Director, over-aggressive surveillance, leaks, and too much public focus on one suspect. Given the high profile of the case, I could almost forgive the political-types for involving themselves, but the idea of information being leaked to the media by a law enforcement agency as professional as the FBI is troubling. I mean, we expect this kind of thing from the over-politicized CIA and State Department, but the FBI?
What bothers me most about this story is that of all of the counter-terrorism agencies in the United States, the FBI should have been the most prepared to handle such a domestic terror plot (if that is what it was) given their ultimately successful investigations of the Oklahoma City and the 1993 World Trade Center bombings, among others. The suspect, Dr. Steven Hatfill, won a 5.8 million dollar settlement last week against the FBI for violating his privacy and harrassment. How could the FBI forget the example of the unfortunate Richard Jewell so soon?
Granted, this happened seven years ago and the investigation is still underway, but my confidence is hardly bolstered in FBI Director Mueller when he pops off with something this inane:
FBI Director Robert Mueller on Monday criticized the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling that Americans have a right to own guns for self-defense and hunting, saying it may harm efforts to deter violent crime.
Specifically, he claims that his interest is in keeping lawfully owned firearms away from campuses. Why?
He said college campuses and small communities could be “potential incubators of terrorism” even while major cities such as New York and Los Angeles remain primary targets for terrorists.
That’s right. There may be some maniac running loose right now with anthrax that the FBI cannot seem to find, but we are supposed to believe that the real problem is honest citizens who choose to protect themselves with firearms? Frankly, the major concern I would have about terrorism on college campuses has more to do with cyberterrorism than a shooting spree carried out by a lone nut. It is well-known that gun-free zones do little more than disarm would-be victims. Armed citizens have proven quite effective in the past against active shooters, while there is not one example of an active shooter being stopped by either a university police officer or even a school resource officer in a public school that I am aware of.
As one researcher found:
In RTC (Right-to-Carry) states, civilian justifiable homicides were relatively more common when compared to the number of police justifiable homicides.
Also:
In RTC states, a firearm was used in 86.9% of all civilian JH, compared to 64.6% in non-RTC states.
Finally:
Criminals were 27.3% more “successful” in completing violent crime, and 33.3% more “successful” in completing murder attempts, in non-RTC states which highlights the effectiveness of employing a firearm as a self-defense tool (as opposed to becoming a violent crime statistic).
Does the Director of the FBI not read his agency’s own statistics on self-defense with firearms?