Good
Ole Boys
You don’t have to have crooked teeth, drink cheap beer
straight from the bottle and have a coon dog named "Dixie" to be
considered a "good ole boy."
There’s a whole network of ‘em hard at work at the FBI
offices in Washington, D.C.
Thanks to Sunday’s Washington Post, we got another
good look at them in action, as they circled the wagons in defense of
retiring FBI Director Louis Freeh.
If ever a man deserved dismissal for mishandling his job, it
was Director Louis. America is blessed to be "freeh" of the man.
But we’ve covered all those bases in previous reports.
What’s new and blatantly unjust are the lengths to which
Freeh’s associates went to protect him from censure in the closing days of
the Clinton administration.
As it turns out, an FBI oversight panel had been continuing
its investigation of the 1992 Ruby Ridge incident and illegal shoot on sight
orders that left Vickie Weaver with a .30 caliber slug lodged in her skull
as she held her baby on the front porch of the family’s Idaho cabin.
One investigation after another had exonerated the key FBI
officials responsible for the decisions and the way they were carried out.
Finally, the individuals charged with FBI oversight had enough proof to nail
Freeh, demanding that he be censured for his participation in the whitewash.
Last January, the censure recommendations formulated by
three FBI agents assigned to the Office of Professional Responsibility
reached the desk of Assistant Attorney General for Administration, Stephen
R. Colgate. He quietly squashed the findings and accepted the contrary
advice of Assistant FBI Director Michael De Feo to let Freeh go free.
Had Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy not asked the proper
questions July 18th at a meeting of the Judiciary Committee, we
would probably never know how active the "good ole boys" network
still is, today.
The scuttlebutt we’ve heard indicates that Robert Mueller,
the newly appointed FBI director, has ties to the same bunch of incompetent
insiders that populated that agency for the past eight years. Since Mueller
was overwhelmingly approved for the position by the U.S. senate, we’ll
have to let his actions tell us whether he wears a white hat or a black hat.
All we can hope for outgoing director Louis Freeh is that
his unnecessarily long and undistinguished career of public service is
finally at an end.