When waging war against a seemingly invisible enemy, civil liberties and issues of personal privacy have always been at risk of being pushed aside in the name of national security.
One unfortunate casualty of our last underground battle'the Cold War fight against suspected communists here in the United States'was the privacy and well-being of the great Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Convinced that certain King advisers were card-carrying communists, FBI godfather J. Edgar Hoover allowed his agents to wiretap and keep an eerily watchful eye on the man with the dream.
The surveillance and dirty tricks perpetrated on King were horrid and continued unabated for years, with some operations having been approved by then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy, a supposed King supporter and admirer. King was audiotaped engaging in extramarital affairs, orgies and the like. Once, FBI agents even dispatched a local fire department squad to a house that was not burning. Inside, King was involved with a woman who was not his wife.
Despite these revelations, Hoover never received any intelligence reports indicating that communists were influencing King in his camp. The primary objective was never realized, but the bugging continued.
King is no less of a hero to millions of people because of his dalliances with other women, but Hoover was clearly obsessed with the reverend's private life. The King surveillance was aimed at breaking the civil-rights leader's will and is a horrid example of too much leeway given to law enforcement, if you can call it that.
Such was the mood in the midcentury FBI, an agency that had the audacity to make the life of a great emancipator like King's a living hell. His surveillance was executed under the authority of COINTELPRO, a clandestine domestic spying program that would later play the Big Brother role in the lives of such organizations as the Black Panther Party and even the Ku Klux Klan.
This mood of Hoover-driven paranoia and domestic spying led George Kennan, originator of the containment policy of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, to remark that such activities could turn Americans as a people into \intolerant, secretive, suspicious, cruel and terrified of internal dissension,"" according to Ronald Kessler's new book, ""The Bureau: The Secret History of the FBI.""
The Bush administration'long confirmed as an enemy of dissent'is trying to send the United States back down that same suspicious and perilous path in the name of our shadow war on terrorism.
In the waning days of spring, Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller announced new heavy-handed guidelines for FBI conduct that will allow monitoring of religious institutions, political organizations and Internet Web sites. Taken together, these new regulations call to mind, for some, Joseph Stalin's huge Soviet intelligence-gathering KGB. Everyone's an informant; paranoia rules; all are suspect.
Granted, the restrictions placed upon the FBI during the mid-'70s in response to the COINTELPRO atrocities have hampered the bureau's ability to fight an effective war on terrorism, and have instilled complacent attitudes among agents and managers.
Change is necessary. But the new guidelines should only go as far as to allow agents to monitor public places and freely accessible Web sites. If these new powers are taken too far, dissenting writers seeking to safeguard readers from civil liberties infractions could find FBI agents at their door, compiling dossiers on them.
In order to keep on the straight and narrow in regard to civil liberties and privacies, the Justice Department should establish an audit system that will look for rights violations on a case-by-case basis. The FBI would be wise to do the same, using its Office of Professional Responsibility to keep an eye on its agents' conduct. Someone needs to safeguard our rights, and if this underground terrorism war is to be conducted in a cloak-and-dagger fashion, congressional oversight would be welcome as well.
As readers and responsible citizens, you must be aware of your civil liberties, cherish them and keep a good watch on what official Washington would like to do to them. Sadly, Dr. King is long gone, but the politically motivated surveillance of such a great man is irresponsible and unconscionable.
The need to defend our civil liberties often comes up at inopportune moments. In a time of an invisible war, the FBI has a daunting task ahead of them, and new tools are necessary. But these new regulations are ripe with opportunities for overreaching. Let us not become the suspicious people that George Kennan warned against.
