I come to praise the FBI

FBI: Still disconnecting all the dots

Friends, Americans, countrymen, lend me your ears;

I come to praise the FBI, not to bury them.

The good that men do lives after them;

The evil is oft interred with their bones;

So let it be with the FBI.

Dear FBI,

In the wake of the Boston Marathon bombings, some people have been attacking your credibility. This is bad for your agency, and bad for the nation, too. I’d like to suggest you answer honestly a few questions in the interest of clearing things up for us.

I know it’s been a long time, but what really happened in the Judi Bari bombing in 1990? Why did Judi say all those bad things about you? Why did she claim that you and/or the Oakland police had put the bomb in her car? You definitely owe us an explanation, especially because a jury apparently agreed with her allegations. You guys don’t have a history of setting people up, do you? I certainly hope not.

More recently, what really happened during the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995? Was there a John Doe No. 2, or not? Why do the surveillance tapes you released that might have shown Tim McVeigh and any accomplice(s) getting out of the truck all go blank at that exact time? You didn’t erase them, did you? And why were two people fitting the description of John Doe No. 2 killed while in federal custody? Wouldn’t it have been better to conduct a useful interrogation of the two to discover whether or not Tim had any help? And why is Terry Nichols saying that an FBI operative provided the Kine-Stick detonators used to explode the OKC bomb? Is it okay with you if we ask Terry a few more questions to put such lingering issues to rest? I sure hope so, and it would be nice if nobody killed him before we got there.

And what’s up with that first World Trade Center bombing in 1993? If an FBI informant knew about the bomb, why didn’t you jump in and foil the plot? Some people are claiming you wanted the bomb to go off, but that’s not what happened, is it?

9/11 is the one that really has me stumped. Why didn’t you listen to Coleen Rowley and others who saw the attack coming and tried to warn you? In spite of such pointed warnings, the public actually believed that you knew nothing at all prior to the attacks. How then did you within a day or two recover from your apparent incompetence to discover so quickly who all the perpetrators were and how and why they did it? That seems really strange. But the part I really don’t get is why you didn’t stop the burying of physical evidence from the World Trade Center in landfills and the shipping it off to China and India to be melted down before it could be examined. Was it because people like Mayor Bloomberg said, “Just looking at a piece of metal generally doesn't tell you anything”? Is that the official position of the FBI crime lab? I’ve also always wondered about that video of what happened at the Pentagon. Just what is that crashing into the building? It could be an alien spaceship for all we know. Do you have any better videos, or do they all go blank just as the UFO approaches the building? You didn’t erase those too, did you?

That brings us up to the Boston Marathon bombing. If one or both of the brothers were on the watch lists, why weren’t you watching them? Isn’t that what “watch lists” are for? And why didn’t you heed the warnings you got from the Russians? That part makes it seem like you haven’t learned a damn thing from the tragedy of 9/11. I can understand if you haven’t; institutional change is a difficult thing to achieve. But do you really want to have a reputation of still disconnecting all the dots?

Whatever the case, there’s at least one more crucially important question you have to answer, and you better get this one right. Who provided the explosive material used in the Boston bombings? The brothers sure as hell didn’t bring anything back from Chechnya. If they did it would mean the sexually suggestive pat downs, porno x-ray machines, and bomb detectors at our airports are a colossal waste of money. I think you should keep pushing the idea that there’s a Muslim sleeper cell around here somewhere and that they provided the explosives. Just blaming it again on some dumb militia slobs you ensnared in Operation PATCON probably won’t cut it this time, and it better NOT get out that one of your operatives or informants provided the explosives or helped assemble the bombs. You definitely have to find some jihadist rag heads to take the fall on this one.

After all, the American people may be naïve, but they’re not stupid, are they?