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We need FBI secrecy to defeat nutcases
By Bob Fields
Contributor
Published November 5, 2009
Nat Hentoff is at it again. Recently, he ranted about how President Obama is carrying on the electronic secret surveillance techniques aimed at possible terrorists that President Bush began and how all our freedoms are being eroded.
Obama has extended the technique of secretly spying on spies because it works. Terrorist plots have been foiled.
The secret spying has not morphed into widespread abuse by the Federal Bureau of Investigations and Central Intelligence Agency with the accompanying loss of our freedoms that Hentoff forecast. The nation has not suffered another major attack by Islamic Jihadists.
Hentoff continued his outrage in his bombast “If you’re ‘hinky’ the FBI may be onto you,” (The Daily News, Oct. 16).
His latest worry is about the “unbounded expansions of the FBI’s domestic surveillance powers” ushered in by the Bush administration and now sanctioned by Attorney General Eric Holder under Obama.
Hentoff wrote that FBI operations allow the bureau, without going to court, “to open investigative ‘assessments’ of any American without any factual predicate or suspicion,” to “surreptitiously collect information on people suspected of no wrong doing,” to “infiltrate lawful civic and political groups along with religious places of worship” and “to use informants in political, civil and religious organizations.”
In his unbounded and unfounded fear the FBI will be carrying off innocent Americans by the score, he would handcuff its secret operations to infiltrate the enemies in our midst.
Remember when the left accused the Bush administration of “not connecting the dots“ and preventing the Sept. 11 attack in 2001? Everything Bush did in that aftermath was to make sure we collect all the dots in the first place, so we are never again blindsided by a well-planned secretive attack.
By necessity, that requires surveillance. That is done secretively. You can’t foil plots if you know nothing about them.
As our enemy plans to kill Americans in massive numbers, you cannot wait until the deed is done, and then launch a policing action to find out what happened, unless you want to follow the rather useless dictums of people like Hentoff and if it doesn’t bother you that many Americans would die, in attack after attack, because we did nothing to prevent the lunatics’ actions.
The war on terrorism is not over, even if Obama doesn’t want to call it that any more. We haven’t won that war. It may never actually be “won,” as you can’t totally eradicate religious fanaticism. However, Bush reduced its strength around the world.
We are bound to keep fighting this scourge, and secret surveillance of nutcases in our own country is a necessary part of that fight.
Bob Fields lives in Santa Fe.
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