CROIX DE GUERRE WITH WINGS

THE VICHY FBI

By: Daniel Sargis

Well, it’s official. The United States government, under the auspices of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, is peeping on you with French supplied armaments.

In Dumb and Dumber redux, the FBI admitted to having more than 80 aircraft in the skies over America to guard their pensions …uh…I mean… to keep you safe. In a statement as comprehensible as a banker refusing to tell you your balance, the FBI will not disclose exact figures on the nature of its (spelled "your") air fleet. No doubt this, along with being groped at airports, is for purposes of national security.

Confirmed sources report that among this Keystone Cop air armada are a number of Nightstalkers. No, no, no…a Nightstalker isn’t some ghostly aberration of J Edgar Hoover trying to fondle you under your bed sheets. Although, it is French and it can look under your covers. The technologically advanced surveillance airplane, Nightstalker, is a modified HU-25 GUARDIAN; a variant of the Dassault-Brequet FALCON 200 biz-jet. It can look at you in the dark with its infrared eyes and listen to your every communication with its electronic sensors. The airframe is as French as a hunk of Camembert and smells even worse.

With the same mandate as Stalin’s NKVD, our Constitutional protectors at the FBI clearly understand their mission, "You don’t have a criminal case. You don’t necessarily have a terrorism case. You want to know what they are doing….". But rest assured, FBI agent James Davis is clear on this point, "There should be no concern that the aircraft is doing anything other than assisting with physical surveillance." Only in the demented kingdom of perverts is peeping differentiated as a higher form of morality than is groping.

And…of course the word of the FBI can be trusted…just look at their long record of credibility in protecting the Constitution. During the lazy pre-9-11 days, according to an internal FBI memo, agents illegally videotaped suspects, intercepted e-mails without court permission and recorded the wrong phone conversations during sensitive terrorism and espionage investigations. Of course this memo was marked "Top Secret" and it required Congressional action under media pressure to declassify it. Ever noticed that screw-ups and lies are usually buried under a "Security" classification? Too bad Enron couldn’t use that scam.

In August of 2002, Congress released documents revealing that the very secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court (FISA) found, "the FBI acknowledged making more than 75 mistakes in applications for espionage and terrorism warrants under the surveillance law, including one instance in which former director Louis Freeh gave inaccurate information to judges." "How these misrepresentations occurred remains unexplained to the court," the FISA court said. Is that a polite way of saying that the FBI violated the law and continued its illegalities before the court in a top-down cover-up?

In furtherance of their quest for a Merit Badge as Constitutional protectors, the FBI developed the notorious Carnivore system. Carnivore monitors all of the Internet and voice over Internet protocol (VOIP) data that flows through hyperspace. The FBI claims that Carnivore filters traffic and delivers to its agents only information that they're lawfully authorized to obtain. But because the details remain proverbially secret, the taxpayer must trust the FBI in its assertion that it's complying with the law. Perhaps we also could have trusted Jeffrey Dahmer for a Spring Break at Father Flanagan’s Boys Town?

The threats against this country are serious business. The war this country is waging against terrorism is serious business. And, the FBI should and deserves to be serious business. But, somewhere along the path, there has been a serious disconnect of mission.

America is nothing but a heap of scrap without its Constitution and Bill of Rights. There is no protecting the nation without first protecting these two documents. Otherwise, there is no nation as we know it. Without Constitutional integrity, we are just another landmass in the historical junk-pile of egocentric totalitarianism.

Just like a cop on the beat, the FBI must earn the respect of its community to be truly effective. Its mission mandates service to the Nation above service to the agency. Understanding and protecting the law is priority number one. This is impossible without professional integrity. And, professional integrity is impossible without pristine and unyielding internal standards and external accountability. The FBI is essential in enforcing the law, but it is not "The Law".

As brave Americans stand fast in defense of this nation on desert sands, isn’t it about time for the FBI to stand as equally fast on the soil of the heartland in the same defense against tyranny? You get what you give in this world and the American citizen would be glad to give all to a FBI that earned and deserved its trust. How about a little quid pro quo in the name of the Constitution?



"Published originally at EtherZone.com : republication allowed with this notice and hyperlink intact."

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Daniel Sargis is a freelance writer from Connecticut and is a regular columnist for Ether Zone

Daniel Sargis can be reached at inosome@snet.net

Published in the March 17, 2003 issue of Ether Zone. 

Copyright © 1997 - 2003 Ether Zone.

...are allowed to be classified out of view you no longer have effective oversight.

One of the problems with the FBI and the "Cult of Secrecy" in general is that they are allowed to claim something is "classified" and therefore deprive citizens of the right to know what is going on in government.

When a "Law Enforcement Agency" is allowed to act in complete Secrecy it is no longer in the business of Law Enforcement. They have thus become just another tool of controlling people through fear and intimidation.