[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 147 (2001), Part 17]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page 24573]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                         TOO MANY FEDERAL COPS

                                 ______
                                 

                             HON. RON PAUL

                                of texas

                    in the house of representatives

                       Thursday, December 6, 2001

  Mr. PAUL. Mr. Speaker, I am inserting in the Record a copy of an 
article by former cabinet member Joseph Califano that appeared in 
today's Washington Post. I call this article entitled ``Too Many 
Federal Cops,'' to the attention of Members. It presents a balanced and 
even-handed assessment of how successive administrations over the 
decades have expanded Federal police powers at considerable cost to our 
endangered civil liberties.
  I wholeheartedly agree with the points raised by Mr. Califano, having 
spoken in this House concerning the same topic on many occasions. I 
wish to commend Mr. Califano for his timely and important piece, and 
recommend it to Members and others concerned with preserving civil 
liberties.

                         Too Many Federal Cops

                      (By Joseph A. Califano Jr.)

       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 report 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.