ZGram - 7/14/2004 - "CSIS as a template for America?"

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

Zgram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

July 14, 2004

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

If America is dumb enough to go for a Canada-style/CSIS domestic spy 
agency, American can truly kiss their vaunted "freedom" good-bye. 
While there is time, they ought to learn how it is done - or better, 
why it should not be done - from their good neighbors to the North. 

[START]

The FBI and civil-liberties groups are worried that Edwards, and 
possibly Kerry, will use their campaign to promote the formation of a 
new domestic spy agency

WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
Updated: 6:55 p.m. ET July 07, 2004
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/5388509/site/newsweek/

July 7 - The selection of Sen. John Edwards as John Kerry's running 
mate has raised concerns inside the FBI and among civil-liberties 
groups that the North Carolina senator will use the campaign to 
promote his controversial proposal to create a new domestic spy 
agency.

For the past 18 months, Edwards has been perhaps the Senate's 
foremost champion of a much-debated proposal to strip the bureau of 
its intelligence-gathering functions and turn them over to a new 
domestic spy agency patterned after Britain's M.I.5.

Edwards's promotion of the idea has created friction between him and 
FBI Director Robert Mueller who, along with other bureau officials, 
has warned that such a move would spark renewed turmoil within the 
U.S. intelligence community that would hinder the war on terrorism. 
It also has stirred the fears of civil-liberties groups, who believe 
such an agency would inevitably end up spying on political dissidents 
and religious groups.

But Edwards has refused to back down-and there are signs that Kerry 
himself may be warm to the idea. "He thinks it's still the way to 
go," said Mike Briggs, Edwards's Senate press secretary on Wednesday 
when asked about the M.I.5 proposal.

Indeed, in an  op-ed article for a North Carolina newspaper as 
recently as two months ago,  Edwards wrote "that the FBI has failed 
as an intelligence agency." He also dismissed Mueller's own efforts 
to reform the  FBI to make it more attentive to intelligence 
gathering, as opposed to strict law enforcement.

Despite receiving numerous briefings from the FBI director on the 
subject, which Edwards would have received as a member of both the 
Senate Judiciary Committee and Senate Intelligence Committee, "I have 
heard nothing that gives me confidence that the proposed changes will 
enable the FBI to more effectively collect intelligence on the plans 
and intentions of terrorists,"  Edwards wrote in a May 2, 2004, op-ed 
in the Raleigh News and  Observer.

Although Kerry himself has talked more vaguely about reforming 
intelligence in his major campaign speeches,  a little noticed 
"Defending the American Homeland" plan on his campaign Web site seems 
to reach a similar conclusion as Edwards on the subject.

"Many of the examinations of 9/11 have raised serious questions about 
whether the FBI is the right agency to conduct domestic intelligence 
collection and analysis," the Kerry plan states in a section entitled 
"Reforming Domestic Intelligence." "America needs an independent 
intelligence capability that  focuses explicitly on domestic 
intelligence."  A senior Kerry campaign official said that 
language-taken from a fact sheet handed out after a Kerry speech to a 
firefighters' group in March 2003-was not intended to specifically 
endorse an M.I.5 over a beefed up intelligence function within the 
FBI. "We've been back and forth on this issue-and it's still not 
determined," the campaign official said.

The idea of creating a new domestic spy agency first received wide 
currency in the wake of the September 11 attacks and has been debated 
intensely by the 9/11 commission. The panel is due to make its 
recommendations for intelligence reform later this month. But sources 
inside the commission say the prospect of such a major overhaul-along 
with its profound implications for civil liberties-has caused many 
panel members to shrink from such a  step and favor less sweeping 
recommendations to improve intelligence gathering inside the country.

Indeed, top FBI officials had until this week concluded that 
Mueller's own reform efforts-including a recent proposal  to create a 
new "intelligence directorate" within the FBI-had pretty much put the 
matter to rest. "We're not too worried about that," said one senior 
bureau official about the M.I.5 proposal.

Now, however, the prospect that the Kerry-Edwards ticket might push 
the M.I.5 idea could swiftly change the political dynamic. Since late 
2002, in speeches and on the Senate floor, Edwards has argued that 
the failures of the FBI to pick up the trail of the 9/11 hijackers 
graphically shows the bureau's fundamental deficiencies in 
intelligence gathering. As a law-enforcement agency, the FBI is by 
culture and practice focused on arresting, prosecuting and convicting 
criminals-not collecting fragmentary bits of intelligence about 
potential terrorists and then analyzing the information to make sense 
of it, he has said.

"Asking a law-enforcement agency to  manage intelligence is like 
trying to jam a square peg into a round hole," Edwards said in a 
December 2002 speech to the Brookings Institution. "The FBI Š builds 
cases rather than connecting dots, and it keeps information secret 
rather than getting it to those who can use it stop the terrorists."

Edwards's repeated pounding away on the subject early last year 
annoyed top FBI officials. Some privately expressed irritation, 
suggesting   that the politically ambitious first-term senator had 
seized on the idea as a vehicle for his presidential campaign. At one 
point, Mueller appealed to Edwards to hold off introducing 
legislation on the subject until the FBI director could brief him 
about what he was doing to correct the problem. Edwards went ahead 
and introduced his bill anyway in February 2003-and then took Mueller 
up on his offer, a sequence that did not go down well among some of 
Mueller's deputies.

Mueller's own reform efforts have revolved around making terrorism 
the FBI's top priority, beefing up the bureau's own intelligence and 
analytic functions and bringing in fresh managers with backgrounds in 
the intelligence community. But bureau officials argue that creating 
an entirely new agency dedicated solely to spying inside the United 
States would only create new bureaucratic rivalries-especially 
because the bureau law-enforcement agents would still be needed to 
develop evidence for criminal prosecutions. "You can't separate 
criminal prosecutions, terrorism and foreign intelligence," said one 
top FBI manager.

Civil-liberties groups have other concerns about the Edwards plan. 
For decades, FBI agents who seek to develop evidence about potential 
domestic threats have operated under tight Justice Department 
guidelines; those guidelines require there be grounds to believe 
targets are engaged in criminal acts. A new domestic spy agency would 
not be so encumbered, the critics say.  In an effort to insulate 
himself from such criticism, Edwards had proposed steps to curb 
potential excesses by a domestic spying agency, such as requiring 
approval from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for 
infiltrating domestic political or religious groups. But some 
civil-liberties advocates say such steps would be insufficient-the 
FISA court has historically acted as a rubber stamp, critics say-and 
that a domestic-intelligence agency such as Edwards has advocated 
would inevitably be tempted to spy on legitimate dissenters.

"Senator Edwards's proposal ignored the serious civil-liberties 
problems it would have caused," said Kate Martin of the Center for 
National Security Studies. She said she hopes the Democratic 
candidates will await the full report of the 9/11 commission before 
pushing the idea any further and "not make this a political issue."

Ironically, others say Edwards's selection could be the political 
kiss of death for the M.I.5 plan-at least within the Bush 
administration. Until recently, there had been strong indications 
that some White House officials, especially national-security adviser 
Condoleezza Rice, were leaning toward adopting the idea once the 9/11 
commission comes out with their report. But now, with Edwards so 
strongly identified with it, it would be highly unlikely the Bush 
administration would be tempted to pursue such a course-if only 
because administration officials would then be accused of stealing 
from one of their rivals, said Jim Dempsey, the executive director of 
the Center for Democracy and Technology.

"They'll never support it now," said Dempsey.

[END]