FBI Needs to Get Its Act Together

Then came the real bombshell: turns out that the FBI ignored a court order to turn over all of its documents in the Timothy McVeigh case, withholding thousands of pages of evidence from the defense.

Here was a guy who had blown up a building in broad daylight and then confessed to his crime in a national bestseller.

Yet unbelievably, the FBI managed to mess things up. This is your tax dollars at work ladies and gentlemen: an FBI that is so inept that it can't even tag all the bases after hitting a home run. The evidence in the McVeigh case was overwhelming. McVeigh himself was the remorseless, self-confessed perpetrator of the bombing and the FBI still dropped the ball.

The surprising thing is that people are actually surprised.

Despite its carefully crafted public image -- who could hate the guys on the X-Files team, the ones who beat the mob with Elliot Ness and Company, the impeccably dressed G-Man keeping the world safe from evil -- FBI screwups are the rule instead of the exception.

Robert Hanssen and Tim McVeigh are only the most recent examples.

There's Waco and Ruby Ridge -- two events that Tim McVeigh says led him to commit the Oklahoma City bombing. Whether the actions of the FBI were criminal in these cases is debatable, but most people seem to agree that the situations could have been handled better.

The FBI lied about the use of incendiary devices at Waco and bulldozed the site in an attempt to make sure no one could contradict them. The FBI killed an unarmed woman and an infant at Ruby Ridge, adding to the body count of a 14-year-old boy and a U.S. Marshall.

This isn't paranoid right-wing militia fantasy material - you can get this stuff right off the pages of the New York Times or Washington Post. The siege at Ruby Ridge was even made into a network movie, starring Kirsten Dunst as white separatist Randy Weaver's daughter.

The fact is that the FBI comes out smelling stinky if you take a hard look at either of these events.

Anyone remember Eric Rudolf? He's the guy implicated in bombings throughout the south, including the Olympic Centennial Park bombing during the Atlanta Olympics. After one of the largest manhunts in FBI history, the mad bomber remains at large, probably somewhere right here in North Carolina.

How's that for our state's tourist image?

Hundreds of man-hours notwithstanding, the FBI has not yet been able to catch one of America's Most Wanted.

Did I mention the Olympic bombing?

What about Richard Jewell, the hapless security guard who made the mistake of actually warning the crowd at the Park that he had found a bomb.

His reward for helping move people away form the blast and save lives?

A grueling three-month investigation from the FBI, publicly naming him as the prime suspect in the bombing. While he was eventually cleared, it wasn't before the FBI had tricked Jewell into making incriminating statements about himself. Speaking of prime suspects, let's talk about Wen Ho Lee, a man that the FBI once described as "one of the most dangerous threats to national security that our nation has ever seen."

Lee was kept in jail for nine months in part due to the testimony of an FBI agent -- an agent who later recanted his testimony because he "repeatedly erred" when he originally convinced the judge of Lee's danger. These "errors" were so egregious that the judge in the case eventually apologized to Mr. Lee for the way that he'd been treated.

The apology from the judge took place the day Mr. Lee got out of jail.

He was released as part of a plea bargain because the FBI couldn't prove its case. Louis Freeh's FBI couldn't be bothered to polygraph whitebread Robert Hanssen to see if he was a spy, and instead throws an Asian man into solitary for nine months because they "think" he might be selling secrets to China.

Here's the punch line: it turns out that they got the wrong guy. While the FBI was out on a veritable hate-crime holiday against Wen Ho Lee, it was really one of their very own that was the spy. Go figure.

This type of behavior is as much a part of the FBI's institutional history as Carolina Blue is here in Chapel Hill. Just look at the discredited COINTELPRO operations of the `60s and `70s - operations where the FBI blatantly disregarded the Constitution to infiltrate and destroy suspected "radical" groups.

Jailed American Activist Leonard Peltier is another example of an FBI gone wrong. Peltier and two of his friends were accused of killing two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation in 1975. Peltier fled to Canada and fought extradition, while his two accomplices were tried here in the U.S.

After Peltier's co-defendants were acquitted, the FBI produced a fake affidavit to secure his return to the U.S. Between the trial of his friends and Peltier's trial, the FBI miraculously found new evidence, evidence which more strongly linked Peltier to the murders.

The only problem is that the evidence was falsified by the FBI. Worse, the record strongly suggests that the FBI encouraged false testimony from fake eyewitnesses at Peltier's trial.

Peltier was convicted and his appeals have been exhausted. He has served 24 years in Federal Prison for a crime that he did not commit. And, as in the McVeigh case, the FBI has withheld thousands of pages of documents from Peltier's defense. Yet unlike the McViegh case, the FBI continues to hide over 6,000 documents, including ballistic evidence that might prove Peltier's innocence.

Louis Freeh may be leaving, but I'll bet money that the FBI doesn't change a bit.

Bill Hill's e-mail is now monitored by the FBI. Stand up to "the Man" and reach him at wbhill@unc.edu.