European Bias to American Decisions?

The FBI has assumed new powers to investigate people and organizations not even suspected of crime, with blessings from the US Department of Justice and its terror-terrified Lord Protector John Ashcroft.

FBI Director Robert Mueller laid out the preliminary sketch during a Washington press conference Wednesday. After cleverly castigating himself for the bureaucratic bungling which caused warnings from the Phoenix field office about foreigners taking pilot training last Summer to go unanswered, and which also allowed Zacarias Moussaoui to go without a thorough investigation while he was in custody before the September atrocity, Mueller slickly concluded that the Bureau has got to go about things in a more direct manner, which is of course a scheme he's been rigging for some time. The FBI couldn't have leaked evidence of these failures more cleverly. Once the mainstream press had a chance to be outraged by the shocking revelations which the FBI no doubt deliberately fed them, Mueller beat himself up in public to bolster his arguments, win sympathy among journalists and citizens, and pave the way for his new regime.

These sorts of failures will be inevitable and on-going if the FBI isn't allowed to operate outside the law, was the subtext. Calling anti-terror investigations the FBI's new and primary crusade, he proposed to re-organize the Bureau and transform it into a premier national secret-police force as it had been under J. Edgar Hoover.

The anticipated changes will release agents from antiquated constraints such as requiring evidence of criminal activity before launching an under-cover investigation. Nine hundred agents will be recruited by September in furtherance of this scheme. The new anti-terror undercover shock-troops will be permitted to infiltrate groups of which the government disapproves, including religious groups, and trawl the Net poking about for signs of trouble without prior approval from headquarters.

Cyber-terror was another of Mueller's preoccupations. This will involve a new 'cyber division,' as well as an upgrade of the Bureau's hardware and software systems which the traitor Robert Hanssen owned so easily. Agents will be kept busy chasing down teenaged script kiddies defacing government and military Web sites, along with similar international terrorists and evil-doers. One can also expect database and data-mining software to be upgraded for significant enhancements to the Bureau's ability to bury itself in evidence which it can't sort out.

In addition, the FBI has granted itself permission to work more closely with the CIA, a military support organization currently forbidden to operate within the US. Until the 1970's, and the shocking revelations of the Church Commission, the FBI and CIA were permitted a close working relationship which Congress curtailed after being disgusted by the details of their joint escapades. The FBI got into an embarrassing row with Congress over its Cointelpro program, a vast domestic surveillance network which infiltrated groups and monitored individuals suspected of wrongthinking, such as being less than delighted with the Vietnam war, or imagining that J. Edgar Hoover was a cross-dressing mother's boy or that Presidents Johnson and Nixon were a couple of conniving, manipulative grifters in the pockets of defence contractors.

The specifics of the new federal regime will be laid out Thursday by Lord Protector Ashcroft. ®

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Is it just me, or does Europe have bias in their news concerning our policies, government, and our methods of fighting terrorism?

Your thoughts on this?

By the way, sorry if I'm a tad late on the subject, but I only joined up today.

IMO there is much more diversity of opinion in the European press than we can dream of here. The London Telegraph seems to be pretty good.

We need to follow Europe in this one area (and one area ONLY!!!). No journalism is objective. There should be mainstream liberal, communist (a little more leftist than the liberal. Just a tiny bit more, that is), neo-conservative, traditionalist, libertarian, and libertinian newspapers. Don't try and hide it any longer, flaunt your political persuasion.

Fox News tends to be the closest thing to right wing news in the national US news media. I watch them because they are often openly biased. Most of their "news shows" openly disclaim that the people involved have strong political views. Hannity and Colmes is a good example of that. They openly make no attempt to be "fair and balanced" in most of their stuff. It's only in the reporting that they put any effort into that. Everything else? Open season.

I would think the UK papers should be looking to their own roost when it comes to big-brotherism. They have it flowing from every orafice.

I would think the UK papers should be looking to their own roost when it comes to big-brotherism. They have it flowing from every or[i]fice.

Indeed, and it's been growing for the past twenty years. What's interesting, though, is that whenever a new police-state-style provision is introduced, the person behind it (in the 80s it was Thatcher and Tebbit, the 90s saw Michael Howard and Jack Straw, now it's David Blunkett - who has recently been touted both as a future Prime Minister and a potential leader for the Tory party) tells us not only that there's a massive security threat that makes it necessary, but that America already has these kinds of provision and they're perfectly acceptable there. The spin is that Britain is some horrendously free and un-guarded island, compared with "locked-down" America.

Usually, every news outlet in the UK goes along with this fully. Even the two liberal papers (Guardian and Independent) cover it, and do so in the way this item is covered, to contribute to the image that America is much more secure than we are - and, gosh, we need to tighten up if that's the case. But the Register is quite left-wing, so I wouldn't have expected them to play along. Of course, it isn't a newspaper (or something many people in the UK are aware of).