Pubdate: Thu, 06 Dec 2001
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Page: A39
Copyright: 2001 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Joseph A. Califano Jr
Note: The writer is president of the National Center on Addiction and 
Substance Abuse at Columbia University. He was general counsel of the Army, 
special assistant for domestic affairs to President Lyndon Johnson and 
secretary of health, education and welfare from 1977 to 1979.

TOO MANY FEDERAL COPS

As defense lawyers and civil libertarians huff and puff about Attorney 
General John Ashcroft's procedural moves to bug conversations between 
attorneys and their imprisoned clients, hold secret criminal military 
trials and detain individuals suspected of having information about 
terrorists, they are missing an even more troubling danger: the 
extraordinary increase in federal police personnel and power.

In the past, interim procedural steps, such as the military tribunals 
Franklin Roosevelt established during World War II to try saboteurs, have 
been promptly terminated when the conflict ended. Because of its likely 
permanence, the expansion and institutionalization of national police power 
poses a greater threat to individual liberties. Congress should count to 10 
before creating any additional police forces or a Cabinet-level Office of 
Homeland Security.

Pre-Sept. 11, the FBI stood at about 27,000 in personnel; Drug Enforcement 
Administration at 10,000; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms at 4,000; 
Secret Service at 6,000; Border Patrol at 10,000; Customs Service at 
12,000; and Immigration and Naturalization Service at 34,000. At the 
request of the White House, Congress is moving to beef up these forces and 
expand the number of armed air marshals from a handful to more than a 
thousand. Despite the president's objection, Congress recently created 
another security force of 28,000 baggage screeners under the guidance of 
the attorney general.

In 1878 Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act to prohibit the military 
from performing civilian police functions. Over Defense Secretary Caspar 
Weinberger's opposition, President Ronald Reagan declared drug trafficking 
a threat to national security as the rationale for committing the military 
to the war on drugs. (Weinberger argued that "reliance on military forces 
to accomplish civilian tasks is detrimental to . . . the democratic 
process.") Reagan's action gives George Bush a precedent for committing the 
military and National Guard to civilian police duty at airports and borders.

Given the president's candor about the likelihood that the war on terrorism 
will last many years, the administration and a compliant Congress are in 
clear and present danger of establishing a national police force and -- 
under either the attorney general, director of homeland security or an 
agency combining the CIA and State and Defense intelligence (or some 
combination of the above) -- a de facto ministry of the interior.

The fact that George Bush has no intention of misusing such institutions is 
irrelevant. You don't have to be a bad guy to abuse police power. Robert 
Kennedy, a darling of liberals, brushed aside civil liberties concerns when 
he went after organized crime and trampled on the rights of Jimmy Hoffa in 
his failed attempt to convict the Teamsters boss of something. He bugged 
and trailed Martin Luther King Jr., even collecting information on the 
civil rights leader's private love life, until Lyndon Johnson put a stop to it.

Bureaucratic momentum alone can cross over the line. After President John 
F. Kennedy privately berated the Army for being unprepared to quell the 
riots when James Meredith enrolled at the University of Mississippi, we (I 
was Army general counsel at the time) responded by collecting intelligence 
information on individuals such as civil rights leaders, as well as local 
government officials in places where we thought there might be future 
trouble. We were motivated not by any mischievous desire to violate privacy 
or liberties of Americans but by the bureaucratic reflex not to be caught 
short again.

In the paranoia of Watergate, the CIA followed a Washington Post reporter 
for weeks, even photographing him through the picture window of his home, 
because he had infuriated the president and the agency with a story 
containing classified information. Faced with our discovery (I was The 
Post's lawyer at the time), CIA Director William Colby readily admitted 
that "someone had gone too far."

All 100 members of the Senate voted to create the newest federal police 
force under the rubric of airport security. In its rush to judgment, the 
Senate acted as though a federal force was the only alternative to using 
the airlines or private contractors. Quite the contrary, policing by the 
individual public airport authorities, guided by federal standards, would 
be more in line with our tradition of keeping police power local.

It's time for the executive and Congress to take a hard look at the police 
personnel amassing at the federal level and the extent to which we are 
concentrating them under any one individual short of the president. 
Congress should turn its most skeptical laser on the concept of an Office 
of Homeland Security and on any requests to institutionalize its director 
beyond the status of a special assistant to the president. We have survived 
for more than 200 years without a ministry of the interior or national 
police force, and we can effectively battle terrorism without creating one now.
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MAP posted-by: Beth