What's That Old Saying About Power Again?

The news keeps getting worse for the FBI. But as damning as the Inspector General's report is, I'm curious as to why it backs off from making accusations of "deliberate lawbreaking." Because it does include items like this:

For example, the FBI on 739 occasions used secret contracts with three telephone companies to obtain records related to 3,000 phone numbers after asserting — in most instances — that the records were needed because of "exigent circumstances" and promising that requests for subpoenas had already been sent to U.S. attorney's offices.

In fact, many of these claims were false, according to the report: The letters were mostly used in "non-emergency circumstances"; no documentation existed of a connection to "pending national security investigations"; and "subpoenas requesting the information had not been provided to the U.S. Attorney's Office before the letters were sent."

Now I'm no lawyer, but this sounds an awful lot like knowingly lying to get a warrant, which sounds an awful lot like "deliberate lawbreaking." I'm not really sure how you spin this any other way.

Maybe the IG was just as confused as I am about why any agents would feel the need to break the law when issuing national security letters, given that there are so few rules to begin with. And since companies were so eager to comply with the letters that they often provided more information than was asked for, it really does seem odd that these agents felt they had to resort to illegal tactics to get what they wanted.

When confronted with mysteries such as these, it's sometimes best just to chalk it up to "human nature," in this case the tendency of people to become drunk with power, especially power that can be exercised in secret with no meaningful oversight. It's amazing the bad things even good people will do when they think the rules don't apply to them.

FBI agents aren't superheroes, just normal folk working incredibly stressful jobs and subject to the breakdowns in judgment that can bring. Combined with the not-so-thinly veiled contempt for the law that the Attorney General in particular and the Bush administration in general evince, you get an environment that practically begs for scandals like this one to happen.

What cases like this one show is how we all need to stop thinking that the rule of law, due process, and oversight just get in the way of perfect people doing their jobs perfectly. Rather, these are the bulwarks that keep everything from going off the rails in a real and quite imperfect world.