Bush Talks to the FBI

RestoreTheRepublic.com - Michael Lemieux | On Thursday October 30, 2008, President Bush delivered remarks to the graduating class of the FBI training academy at Quantico, Virginia.

An although a rousing speech by any standard; I had to pause and take a look at not only what he said but what he did not say, or more precisely what it means.

He stated that: “Before 9/11, terrorism was viewed primarily as a criminal matter.” Today, more and more laws have been deemed terroristic and make the perpetrator susceptible to arrest as an “enemy combatant.” As in the “war” on drugs, which also used to be a criminal matter, the “war” on terror is not really a war in the legal sense as we have never declared war. Just as we have never declared war on drug cartels yet we still call it a war. So, who is the enemy in the war on poverty? Hmmm.

He went on to say: “The FBI you join today is focused on collecting and analyzing intelligence so we can figure out what the terrorists are planning before it is too late.” Many would say this is an admirable goal. We need to prevent them from attacking us “before it is too late.” Now let’s ask ourselves the question, what agency in the federal government is tasked with foreign intelligence? CIA! Who is tasked with domestic intelligence? If you said the FBI you would be absolutely wrong.

As of 2002, the President stripped the FBI of the domestic counterterrorism responsibility (domestic spying by court order) and charged the CIA with the responsibility of a new domestic counterterrorism intelligence agency. The FBI was placed in a supporting role to the CIA.

So President Bush really did mean what he said that terrorism “used” to be thought of as a criminal matter for now it is thought of as a matter of the military industrial complex of war where even federal domestic law enforcement agents are soldiers of the war.

The President stated: “Over the past seven years, we have more than doubled the number of intelligence analysts and translators on the force, we’ve enacted the Patriot Act to ensure FBI analysts and investigators have the information they need to protect our nation,” In other words; the government could not lawfully gather all the data they wanted on all the citizens of this country so they enacted the Patriot Act to ensure they could get the information, liberty and the citizen’s rights be damned.

Today nearly every cabinet level department of the executive branch has an intelligence department.  The IRS has an intelligence department and has admitted, in the past, to providing financial data on American citizens to any other government agency simply for the asking. I think George Orwell would be impressed.

Today there is no longer a separation of powers, as was designed by the Constitution. Many of you may remember a little thing called the Tenth Amendment which states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”  There was to be a division of power in which the federal government’s authority stopped at the border of every state of the union.

According to President Bush: “At the local level, we’ve increased the number of FBI joint terrorism task forces from 35 to more than 100. These task forces bring together federal and local law enforcement agents.” We have seen the complete annihilation of the separation of war powers and federal law enforcement. Now we see the inclusion of state and local law enforcement all working under the orchestra of the federal government. Oh, and remember that little thing called Posse Comitatus? Yea, it’s gone, signed away by President Bush when he attached a signing statement to Patriot Act II.

To make my point a little clearer the President continued: “At the national level, we created the National Counter-Terrorism Center, where the FBI is working side by side with the CIA, the Homeland Security Department and other federal agencies to track terrorist threats and prevent new attacks. We created the terrorism screening center to consolidate watch lists from different agencies into one master list.” At last
count there were over 1 million names on this list, the vast majority are American citizens. Here we have the entire federal intelligence system rolled up with the FBI right in the middle of it. Remember, the FBI used to be tied down with the rules of law and evidence. They had to get silly little things like “warrants” and court orders, now
all they need are signing letters that allow them to do a myriad of things that before would be illegal.

Now remember the FBI was created to enforce federal law. They would go after criminals who crossed state lines, committed crimes on federal property, or against federal employees; basically they were the federal rent a cop. But that has all changed now, Bush goes on to explain: “At the international level, we deployed the FBI to foreign countries to help track down the terrorists.” Now like INTERPOL our FBI agents are international, with 16 new offices overseas. And if you don’t think they have been rolled up into the “war on terror” Bush stated the following: “Two of them (offices) are in Kabul and Baghdad, where hundreds of FBI agents are serving alongside our brave men and women in uniform.”

When our nation was formed one of the fears of our founding fathers, and indeed the population of this entire nation, was that of a standing army. They had just won a bitter sweet victory for freedom from the oppression
of the British Throne who used the standing army to suppress and oppress the citizens of the new world.
History has shown us that ANY government can and will expand at the expense of liberty, it always has. Our
founders wanted to keep that from happening by ensuring powers were finite and divested from any one person or group. The federal dealt with other nations and protected the country, as a whole. The states dealt with the federal and with the people. The people dealt only with the states and for the most part had absolutely no involvement with the federal government. However today we are surrounded by the standing army.  The same man that controls the military also controls the police, not just the federal police ALL police as agents of the federal government.

You cannot find any aspect of our lives that is not touched by the federal government. Our local law enforcement is attached at the hip with the federal government. In fact because the federal government provides law enforcement funds to every state in America, the states are contractually bound to uphold federal law.
In essence every policeman in this nation is an agent of the federal government.

The National Guard, which every state has, is thought to be a state asset. That is only partially true. The federal government pays for, trains, equips, and can order at any time the usage of those troops. They have a mission to support the Governor of the state when not under federal control, but make no mistake they are FEDERAL employees, not state.

The bottom line is today we live under undeclared martial law. The federal government has complete and utter control over the entire military and police structure in this nation today. They have done away with due process and individual privacy rights.  They can enter our homes and businesses, read our mail, listed to our conversations, monitor our email and online browsing habits, even know what books we check out of the library.

As our government expands into the health care industry they are mandating that all new medical systems provide for online patient data transfers. They are pushing the Real Id agenda to ensure that everyone’s bio-metric data is on file to make it easier to identify everyone. They are placing RFID chips in products and want to add them to new vehicle production to more easily track vehicles.  There are even new chips that do not require any power cell to operate and can provide GPS positioning.  They can even use your own cell phone as a microphone even if you have it turned off, and they have done it.

Really the only thing missing from Orwell’s vision is the cameras on the street corners, oh wait!

Michael LeMieux is a retired U.S. Army intelligence and imagery analyst, and has served combat tours in Kuwait and Afghanistan with the 19^th Special Forces. He is a Purple Heart recipient for injuries received in Afghanistan.
Mr. LeMieux is the author of  Unalienable Rights and the denial of the U.S. Constitution, published by Publish America and a regular writer for Republic Magazine. You can contact Mr. LeMieux via his website at
www.constitutiondenied.com.