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Over recent months, my stalker has often threatened to have my husband unjustly arrested by the FBI for "spying" unless I cease my search for all materials responsive to my Freedom of Information Act request. (Are the false allegations related to industrial espionage, as he has sometimes alleged? Are they related to other sorts of espionage, as he has sometimes alleged? Who knows?)
To me, it certainly seems as though someone should be arrested. But given that I and my family are entirely law-abiding, it shouldn't be my husband, my sons, or myself.
My perspective is as follows: law enforcement officers who engage in knowingly falsified law enforcement reporting should be charged. Publicly, lawfully, calmly, thoroughly, judiciously charged. After that, they should face due process, with all the rights the Constitution affords them.
I realize that the FBI has great difficulty admitting fault.
And yet.
The FBI's "target of interest" program is engaged in egregious crimes involving falsified law enforcement reporting for anti-democratic objectives.
And this, it must be said, is wrong. Unequivocally, indefensibly, knowingly wrong.
So, I don't want to be hearing from my stalker about false arrest or raids on my home or the manner in which the FBI coerced my gardener into alleging that he witnessed crimes that never happened while leaf-blowing my driveway.
The lives of law-abiding Democrats and journalists are not game pieces with which far right members of the FBI are free to play, causing extensive harms to honorable American citizens with impunity.
The lives of law-abiding Democrats and journalists are their own, according to the Constitution.
Our democracy has granted law abiding Americans that sovereignty, and I don't think Christopher Wray has been lawfully empowered to deprive them of it.
In Wednesday's New York Times, journalists Steve Fisher and Maria Abi-Habib write about the corruption of police in Mexico City, who falsely accuse their targets of everything from homicide to drug possession, unless they can pay exorbitant bribes.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/09/world/americas/mexico-city-police-abuse.html
I have to wonder whether this sort of dystopia is where the United States is headed, given the FBI's as-yet-concealed crimes of falsified law enforcement reporting.
What have I learned from years of being preyed upon by FBI personnel who have been corrupted by the far right?
I have learned that FBI agents in this group readily threaten "informants" that they will "ruin their lives" if they don't comply in signing falsified witness statements implicating "targets of interest" of the crime of the hour -- whatever it happens to be.
Look at the manner in which Ahmad Chebli was told that he and his wife would be falsely accused of "terrorism" if he did not agree to "inform" against his law-abiding friends. After this episode, Mr. Chebli was placed on the "no-fly list" by the FBI, so we must assume the agency made good on its threat.
From my perspective, one of the most disturbing parts of this story is that the agents who threatened Mr. Chebli were never charged with a crime. Those who apparently falsely alleged criminal associations serious enough to place Mr. Chebli on the "no-fly" list were never charged with a crime either.
So, here again, we see federal law enforcement personnel committing crimes with impunity.
Is it worth reminding the public of the crimes committed by FBI agents Jay Abbott and Michael Langeman, who falsified the victim statements of the USA gymnasts while protecting child molester Larry Nassar?
They have not been criminally charged either, though it seems the FBI is more than eager to settle this case with those whom it has harmed in this instance.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/28/us/politics/fbi-larry-nassar-lawsuits.html
My question is this: does the nation really feel safer with criminal FBI agents falsely accusing members of the public of crimes that never occurred?
Do these types of Stasi, secret police crimes really serve the national security interest?
Because I don't believe they do.
In the FBI's style of falsified law enforcement reporting, agency personnel seem to be making abundant use of what I will call coerced denunciations. This is a Russian tactic, where denunciations obtained under torture and threat have long been common practice.
For an example of this, see Megan Stack's excellent New York Times Essay "In Russia, I Learned, The Threats Were Always Real." https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/02/opinion/russia-putin-nemtsov.html Ms. Stack is certainly treated comparatively gently as a foreign journalist, but the implicit threat hangs in the room when her interrogator asks her bluntly, "Will you put Nemtsov behind bars?"
The FBI is not so subtle.
The FBI would like to jail its critics, just like the FSB does.
But the FBI explicitly threatens to "ruin people's lives" if they do not comply. And what does that mean? It means that the FBI is threatening to add one's name to the "target of interest" list, where innocent Americans are implicated of whatever crimes the FBI and its army of contractors and informants care to invent -- all paid for by the national treasury under the pretext of "protecting the democracy."
At first glance, one might reassure oneself with the idea that, if approached by criminal FBI agents, one could easily rebuff them.
But I have just finished reading Stanley Milgram's excellent book, Obedience to Authority, and the alarming fact is that average citizens seldom rebuff authority, even when being directed to harm one another. (The public may remember Milgram's work as the "shock experiments" he undertook while a professor at Yale in the 1960's. The results, that two-thirds of subjects were willing to cause extreme harm to an innocent person because an authority figure calmly told them to do so, were disturbing, to say the least.)
This loss of autonomy in subjects who were asked to victimize the innocent was distressing to all who witnessed the phenomenon. The Second World War was not so far removed that Nazism had faded as a societal monstrosity. Milgram, whose parents, as European Jews, narrowly escaped the death camps by immigrating to the United States in 1938, wondered about the reasons so many otherwise compassionate and honorable people failed in their humanity when faced with Nazi demands.
Milgram concluded that most of us are trained to obey authority, regardless of its origins.
Yet, in the words of Phillip Zimbardo, who authored the preface, "not all authority is just, fair, moral, and legal, and we are never given any explicit training in recognizing that critical difference between just and unjust authority. The just one deserves respect and some obedience, maybe even without much questioning, while the unjust variety should arouse suspicion and distress, ultimately triggering acts of challenge and defiance."
Apparently, my gardener failed this test of his humanity, but he did so under coercion. That makes him a tragic figure, not a trustworthy one.
I suppose I am that rare person who is standing in defiance of far-right members of the FBI who, in their crimes of falsified law enforcement reporting, represent the quintessence of "unjust authority."
There are no "spies" or "terrorists" or "drug dealers" or "predators" among my husband, my sons, or myself. None.
So, I respectfully ask the FBI to halt the false accusations and produce the materials responsive to my FOIA request in their entirety.
More important than wielding your badges, you have wielded the public trust of our nation. If you have misused that trust for anti-democratic ends, your malfeasance must lawfully be illuminated by the upholding of the Freedom of Information Act.
That illumination is overdue, most certainly.
Yet, I will welcome the belated truth of this matter, so long as I and my family receive my FOIA materials with our safety preserved.
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