Remora

Intelligence and its discontents

LI comes from a long line of cop Pyrrhonists. In our family, the announcement on tv or in the newspapers that the police have come to the conclusion that X is guilty is usually provoked the comment that X was probably being railroaded. This attitude was re-enforced by my brothers' experience of the policeman's art. Both of my brothers worked, at one time, in the apartment game, as maintenance supervisors. Now apartment complexes sometimes acquire security on the cheap by letting a cop have an apartment free. In return, the moonlighting gendarme was supposed to keep an eye on things. In this way, my brothers got an anthropologists eyeful of cops. For instance, they learned the phrase, "patroling the residence." This meant going home and watching tv of a lazy week day afternoon. Another thing they learned was detection. Robberies and the occasional suicide liven up apartment life. In the case of robberies, the policeman's first suspicion usually fall on the robbed. Insurance, surely. This saves shoe leather. Also, since nobody in an urban area is going to get their stuff back, the cops feel they haven't done their duty if they don't finger some suspect. And hey, they are serving the powers that be -- i.e. insurance companies. Cops have instinctive status quo-o-philia.

One of the reasons LI is big on gun rights is that we think it is simply naive to allow an armed police force to confront a disarmed populace. Gun control advocates, who never tackle this issue, are exuding that typical American exceptionalism thing -- it can't happen here because we have such nice white suburbs.

However, that's the milder form of our skepticism. Even my bros accept the need for the local cops. But we'd like to politely suggest that the world would be a better place if the FBI, the DEA, the AFT, and the CIA were disbanded. These are minions of the worst kind of state power. Their injuries to the nation they supposedly serve have been massive, their countering benefits few. Collectively, they have roots in the kind of militaristic, bureaucratic empire-building that has always done the worst things in America and around the world.

Which is why we were interested in this column by Paul Foot about the Lockerbie explosion. We lazily assumed that the Lockerbie case was, at least, all sewn up. The Libyans did it, and Qaddafi, after being squeezed, has basically shrunk into a petty, absurd despot. Paul Foot disagrees. His column leaps from the recent embarrassment about Mr. Bond -- a retired businessman in South Africa who was slung into jail after the FBI mis-identified him as an absconding felon -- and attaches to the mysteries of Lockerbie:


"The reliability of the FBI was tested in a case I knew something about: the biggest mass murder in British history - the bombing of a plane over Lockerbie in 1988. For a long time the authorities on both sides of the Atlantic believed the Lockerbie bombing was in retaliation for the reckless destruction by a US warship of an Iranian plane six months earlier. Suspicion fell on a group of terrorists based in Syria.

But then Syria joined the US and their allies in the first war against Saddam Hussein and suddenly vanished from the Lockerbie frame. In its place as chief suspect was Libya. The forensic link to Libya was allegedly established by a tiny piece of circuit board from a timer, mysteriously found in remote countryside after the bombing, and traced by the FBI to a Swiss manufacturer who sold timers to Libya.

The genius behind this detective work was FBI agent Tom Thurman. For reasons that were never clear Mr Thurman was not called to give evidence to the hugely expensive trial of two Libyans three years ago. The US authorities and their media, however, were full of praise for Thurman and his work. In November 1991, for instance, he was named "Person of the Week" on the TV Network ABC. The rivers of praise dried up rather suddenly when The Person of the Week's work at the FBI Explosives Unit was investigated by the Department of Justice. Their inquiry found that Thurman "had been routinely altering the reports of scientists working in the unit". Fifty-two such reports were investigated. Only 20 had not been altered."

As Foot then points out, America, which is the brave New World of second chances, has accorded one to Mr. Thurman, who is teaching his unique method of detective work as a professor of criminology at some fine American university.

American Radio Works has done a good job in exposing the flaws in the Libyan investigation.-- not that anyone is paying attention.

What, we wonder, would Mr. Pilbeam make of it all?

Mr. Pilbeam P. Frobisher Pilbeam was the appalling detective who refused the case of the purloined pig in Wodehouse's Summer Lightning. You will remember that Ronnie Fish stole Lord Emsworth's prize pig in order to restore it, at the critical moment, in order to receive the benefit of Lord Emsworth's undying gratitude, plus a little of the ready, which would make it possible for him to marry Sue Brown, whom he suspected was dancing behind his back with his best friend Hugo. But even Pilbeam, odious as he was (it turned out that he was madly in love with Sue himself) knew better than to frame Libyans for the caper.

So -- here's the plan. Let's find some modern day Pilbeam, and turn the detecting -- all of it, the whole lot, everything the FBI does -- over to his capable hands. First thing he'll do is disgard the profiling crap --from racial profiling to the pseudo-science of psychologically profiling serial killers. Second thing he'll do is buckle down on the anthrax case -- after all, we know that the killer was mailing things off from a little post office in New Jersey in the hyper-aware autumn of 2001 -- Pilbeam would be on the spot, asking questions and looking at maps. And thirdly, he'd get rid of the colors for the security alerts -- surely the government can make money, a la David Foster Wallace, by selling the alerts to various corporations? We are going to need that money for the tax cuts and our Middle Eastern arabesque. Surely.