Terror Suspects

Published Friday, Nov. 10, 2017

Letters to the Editor

The Post & Courier

Charleston, SC

Dear Editor

Marc A. Thiessen’s column (Nov 6) criticizing President Trump for treating terrorists like former President Obama, is truly off the mark and implies the United States would do better to treat these terrorists as “enemy combatants” and send them to Guantanamo, rather than read them their Miranda rights and try them in civilian courts  He wrote this would assist intelligence agencies in gathering data. 

The organization Human Rights First provides reliable information more likely to make Americans sleep better at night. For example, consider just these four points they make: 

(1) Federal civilian criminal courts have convicted more than 620 individuals on terrorism-related charges since 9/11. Military commissions have convicted only eight, three of which have been overturned completely and one partially.

(2) Federal prisons hold hundreds of individuals convicted of terrorism-related offenses. None have ever escaped.

(3) Prosecuting terror suspects before military commissions makes them look like warriors rather than the criminals that they are. As Judge William Young said when sentencing Shoe Bomber Richard Reid, “You’re no warrior….You are a terrorist. A species of criminal guilty of multiple attempted murders.”

(4) Miranda is an effective law enforcement tool that provides valuable information. Phil Mudd, former deputy director of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center and a senior intelligence adviser to the FBI, wrote that he “sat at hundreds of briefing tables for nine years after Sept. 11, 2001, and I can't remember a time when Miranda impeded a decision on whether to pursue an intelligence interview.” 

The next FBI Director

Back in the day, Boston bus tour guides would ride tourists from the Dakotas, Kansas and other parts of middle America past the Boston Shipyard and tell them that during the war the Shipyard was guarded by the FBI. Then with a chortle, he would explain, “Foreign Born Italians.” Jokes aside, a new FBI Director is to be appointed.  

In days to come, President Trump will nominate a person to be FBI Director for the statutory term of ten years. The President begins the appointment process by selecting and vetting his preferred candidate for the position. The vetting process for presidential appointments includes an FBI background check and financial disclosure. 

The nomination will be forwarded to the Senate and then to the Judiciary Committee. The Judiciary Committee usually holds hearings regarding nominations to be FBI director. The committee may then vote to report the nomination back to the Senate favorably, unfavorably, or without recommendation. Once reported, the nomination is available for Senate consideration. If the Senate confirms the nomination, the individual is formally appointed to the position by the President.

At this point, only the President knows who his nominee will be. It is worth considering, however, what the initials F.B.I. represent and what the country has a right to expect from the nominee and should settle for nothing less.

Fidelity: faithfulness to a cause, or belief, demonstrated by continuing loyalty and support: he sought only the strictest fidelity to justice.

Bravery: courageous behavior or character.

Integrity: the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness: he is known to be a man of integrity.

Let the process go forward. 

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Trump 's Very Strange World

The firing of FBI Director James B. Comey via President Trump's letter on May 9 is the latest craziness to come out of President Donald Trump’s administration in recent days. Does the President really believe we need a daily shock or surprise to get through each day, as he seems to?  

Or, is the FBI getting too close to uncovering collusion between Russian President Putin’s government and the Trump campaign team during the 2016 Presidential election? 

Never mind that in the firing letter, President Trump thanked Comey for telling him on three separate occasions he (President Trump) was not under investigation. What the devil does that have to do with “You’re fired?”

Does President Trump believe he is going to get an FBI Director who will do his bidding like the White House butler who brings him coke whoever he presses a red Coca Cola button on the Presidential desk?  Go back and read the fate of L. Patrick Gray who tried hard to please President Nixon, 

Another piece of weirdness the administration sent to congress would butcher the federal tax code to obscenely benefit the rich and cut the corporate rate from 35 to 15 percent. The Alternative Minimum Tax and the Estate Tax would also be scrapped. All of this will enrich the Trump family, if he is as rich as he claims to be. 

More importantly, it will stick working people in America with an additional $7 Trillion in national debt over the next ten years. 

Treasury Secretary Steven Munchin, a well-educated and successful businessman, stepped forward with a straight face, looked right into the cameras and said President Trump’s tax cutting proposal will promote extraordinary growth and “pay for itself.” This bit of pie-in-the-sky wishful thinking has never happened in the history of this country. It is a carryover from the days of Ronald Reagan. (Probably something that card reader in California told Nancy Reagan.)

Of course, by the time the national debt goes up another $7 Trillion, President Trump and the millionaires and billionaires in his administration will be long gone from office and probably sitting around in some country club smoking cigars and drinking 40-year old Scotch while enjoying their windfall gains.

Hooting and hollering galore broke out when House Speaker Paul Ryan said Republicans were keeping their promise when the administration on its second try successfully twisted the arms of enough Republican Congressmen and women to pass a measure to replace the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare. Never mind it will likely cost 14 million Americans their health insurance and screw over those with cancer, physical and mental disabilities, or other pre-existing conditions. 

And that wall that is supposed to be built between Mexico and the United States, well forget it. The latest spending bill did not include any money for the wall. Add to this “minor detail,” Mexico says it will not pony up a dime and then there are pending lawsuits filed by Texans to protect private lands, disruption of wildlife issues which will probably also wind up in court, a 1970 treaty prohibiting blocking a river, erosion and drainage issues, etc. etc.ad Infinitum. 

The Overcoat: Stolen, Worn, Gone

A film editing error

A couple of week sago I went to see Bridge of Spies, a film based on factual events recounting the swap of convicted Soviet Spy Rudolph Abel for U.S. U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers. The film stars Tom Hanks in the role of James Donovan, a New York Attorney, who is pressed into defending Abel when he is caught by the FBI, and is later enlisted by the CIA to negotiate the swap. The time is the late fifties and early sixties: the early days of the late and unlamented Cold War. 

Over the weekend, I bought a DVD copy of the film to add to my collection of such films. Last night I viewed it again,

As the story develops, in 1962, Donovan (Hanks) is on his way to the Soviet Embassy in East Berlin in bitter cold weather when he is stripped of his overcoat by some street thugs. 

In the Embassy he talks with a man who claims to be only a Second Secretary, but we learn later is the KGB chief in Germany, who makes fun of the lost coat. He gives Donovan the address of an East German lawyer named Wolfgang Vogel, representing an East German woman who claims to be the wife of Abel. 

In the meeting with Vogel, Donovan is wearing his stolen overcoat. Later when he is back in the CIA safe house nursing a cold, sipping tea, and wrapped in a blanket he asks the CIA chief to get him a coat since he lost his own doing “spy stuff.”  For the rest of the film he wears a new coat. 

Obviously, as is often the case, scenes were short out of sequence to be later put together in the editing process, and something like this should have been caught by the editors and the scene probably re-shot.  It doesn’t materially affect the fine film that Steven Spielberg has produced but it is an interesting oddity. 

Mark Rylance plays the role of Abel, and for his performance won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor this past Sunday night.

The Abel for Powers swap was only one incident in the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, but this exciting film helps us to understand the dangerous times the Cold War presented for the world. 

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Send comments to: arch@archibald99.com

Paying my dues

In the mail this week came a reminder to pay my annual dues to the AFOSISA: the Association of Former Office of Special Investigations Special Agents. The OSI is the Air Force equivalent of the FBI, the model on which it was created on  August 1, 1948, under the brilliant, innovative and inspiring leadership of General Joseph F. Carroll, a former FBI agent, supervisor, and special assistant to J. Edgar Hoover.

Sixty years ago, I was an airman serving as the Legal Clerk in the 3650^th Air Base Group at Sampson AFB, New York. Sampson had been a Naval Training site during WWII, but when the Korean War started the Air Force took it for basic training of new recruits. The 3650^th was the house keeping group on the base. I wanted to transfer to the Office of Special Investigations and in the spring of 1953 the deputy group commander, Lt. Col. John A. Brock, recommended me for such service.

(In 2013, AFOSI is the second-most requested career-field choice in the Air Force.)

Within a few weeks I was on my way to Washington, D.C., and posted as the Senior Administrative Airman in the Sabotage & Espionage Branch, Counterintelligence Division, Headquarters, OSI. When I arrived in the spring of 1953, street cars were operating on Pennsylvania Avenue, and cherry blossoms were in full bloom around the tidal basin facing the Jefferson Memorial.

Our offices were located in buildings built at McLean Gardens in NW Washington as “temporary” during World War I. The OSI mission in the early fifties was to provide personnel, criminal and counterintelligence investigative services to the Air Force around the world. It was an AFOSI agent who first alerted Gen. Douglas MacArthur's headquarters of the attack from North Korea that began the Korean War in June of 1950.

(Today, OSI is a federal law enforcement and investigative agency operating throughout the full spectrum of conflict, seamlessly within any domain; conducting criminal investigations and providing counterintelligence services.)

In September 1953, I went to the OSI Special Agents’ training school and was graduated in November. For the next six years I served in a variety of assignments, stateside and overseas. My special interest was with counterintelligence and I took advantage of my status and opportunities to learn everything I could. When I left the Air Force in 1959, after eight years of service, I was employed by the United States Navy as a security administrator and director. I was the first civilian security officer hired by the Naval Supply Corps, which in Charleston, SC, had responsibility for world-wide support of the nuclear powered submarine force carrying Polaris-Poseidon missiles as the Navy’s first line of deterrence against the threats posed by the Soviet Union. Later I was elected to the S.C. House of Representatives and was a senior manager at the state’s Department of Corrections.

Looking back it was the totality of my eight years work and specialized training and duties in the Air Force which set the stage for my life’s work. To this end, I will always be grateful for the opportunities I had and the men and women who helped me along the way. That is why I will send off my dues this week and remain in the brotherhood of former OSI Special Agents.

The AFOSISA was incorporated on December 7, 1966, and its objectives are to maintain and further friendships emanating from service with or employment by AFOSI; to assist one another through combined efforts and mutual association; to perpetuate the ideals and principles of AFOSI; to facilitate contact with members on a worldwide basis; and to unite former and present AFOSI Special Agents in the common interest of promoting the security of the U.S. Air Force

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FBI will lie to you and then arrest you

If you are engaged in any illegal, criminal action or activity likely to attract the serious attention of the FBI, let me give you a tip: Don't come downstairs or leave your residence just because a caller says someone broke into your storage locker or your parked car has been hit in an accident. It is probably the FBI lying to you and waiting to arrest you.
On Wednesday, June 22, the FBI ran such a scam on James "Whitey" Bulger, who the Bureau had been looking for for the last fifteen years. Bulger was called on the phone and told his storage locker had been broken into. Would he come and see what was missing? Who wouldn't? When he got outside in the open he was arrested. Bulger will be tried at a later day on a variety of charges.
This old, time-worn Bureau trick was used years ago to lure the retired Navy communications Warrant Officer turned Soviet spy John Walker out of his room in a Montgomery County, Maryland, motel known to be used by prostitutes. A call was placed to Walker's room in the early morning hours and he was told his car had been hit in an accident and would he come down and check it out. Walker shuffled outside and was nabbed by the FBI. He is in the federal prison in Terra Haute, Indian, working on his life sentence.

How the government spends some of your money

At one time or another we all wonder about how the government is spending our money. A portion of that money goes to maintaining and operating the FBI in Washington, across the country and in some foreign lands where we have embassies. One way to get an idea of what you are receiving for your money is to go to www.fbi.gov/ and look in the left hand column. You will find links to receive daily e-mail updates from the Bureau covering activities throughout the country and you can submit your e-mail address for press releases from the Columbia, SC, office (or other field offices in areas you are interested in). The daily e-mails come bullet-like with a summary of the issue and a link to the details. I have looked at these for a few weeks now and find them as interesting as any news magazine I read. One category of crime that surprises me is "public corruption" which gets much attention from the Bureau because of its effect on citizen respect for government, as well as betrayal of public trust for money or other favors. (Corrected copy.)

Touche...

A friend asked: Where did President Obama get the cardboard cutout of Francis Archibald? (See "Fresh Sights and Faces", below). I also stopped long enough recently to be photographed near the FBI building, on Pennsylvania Avenue; our nation's monument to the now-controversial J. Edgar Hoover.