Practically everyone believes that, while curing disease is a worthy social goal, preventing disease is even better. Why don’t we apply the same enthusiasm to preventive police work? Punishing crime is necessary, but preventing crime is more worthwhile.
Most Americans think preventive police work is in the capable hands of the FBI and our dedicated local police. What most Americans don’t realize is that anti-security vigilante groups have succeeded in dismantling our internal security defenses so that our hands are tied until a crime is committed.
Despite the great increase in terrorism, the operative slogan of the FBI and most local police departments is, “Do nothing until the bomb goes off.” Their ability to prevent terrorism, subversion and espionage has been slashed to ribbons by a combination of lawsuits, court orders, executive orders, the Freedom of Information Act, the Privacy Act, widespread anti-security propaganda, and the abolition of the House Committee on Internal Security and the Subversive Activities Control Board.
The FBI’s case load on subversive groups and individuals has been cut from 21,000 in 1973 to only 100 today. In 1975 the FBI had 11,000 security and counter-terrorism informants. Now the FBI has only 42 informants to watch all the subversives in 50 states! No wonder they can’t catch terrorist fugitives who have been at large for years, such as Kathy Boudin.
Although the FBI budget for counter-terrorism and counter-espionage has been drastically cut, the FBI was compelled to spend a million dollars to process and turn over the files of the Rosenberg case to the relatives of the two spies executed 25 years ago.
An anti-security group called the “Alliance to End Repression” filed a lawsuit in 1974 against the Chicago Police Department, which has effectively undermined its intelligence operations. Court orders required the police to make available all police intelligence files to this anti-security group at the taxpayers’ expense.
The anti-police vigilantes then held repeated press conferences making public the identities of informants and undercover police officers, so that the Chicago Police Department was cut off from those valuable sources of information. Since the lawsuit was filed, 17 terrorist bombings have taken place. Like the FBI, the police cannot investigate until a crime is committed and the damage done.
Since the House Internal Security Committee was abolished by a slick parliamentary maneuver without a roll-call vote, the federal government has adopted a strange policy. The U.S. Civil Service Commission now says that “mere membership” in any of the following organizations is not a bar to federal employment: the U.S. Communist Party, the American Nazi Party, the Ku Klux Klan, the Maoists, the Trotskyites, the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, the Puerto Rican Socialist Party, or the Palestine Liberation Organization.
What kind of an upside down world is it in which federal employees are not even asked whether they are members of totalitarian or terrorist organizations? By any common-sense criteria, the rights of the taxpayers to refuse to pay the salaries of federal employees who belong to those organizations should be ranked as of a higher order than the rights of federal employees to refuse to answer such questions.
The best single thing individual Americans can do to rebuild our internal defenses 15 to persuade their U.S. Congressmen to pledge to co-sponsor Congressmen John Ashbrook’s and Larry McDonald’s resolution to reestablish the House Committee on Internal Security in January 1979. Currently, 177 Congressmen are co-sponsors but that’s not enough; 218 are needed.
