TOO MANY FEDERAL COPS

As defense lawyers and civil libertarians huff and puff about Attorney
General John Ashcroft's procedural moves to bug conversations between
attorneys and their imprisoned clients, hold secret criminal military
trials and detain individuals suspected of having information about
terrorists, they are missing an even more troubling danger: the
extraordinary increase in federal police personnel and power.

In the past, interim procedural steps, such as the military tribunals
Franklin Roosevelt established during World War II to try saboteurs, have
been promptly terminated when the conflict ended. Because of its likely
permanence, the expansion and institutionalization of national police power
poses a greater threat to individual liberties. Congress should count to 10
before creating any additional police forces or a Cabinet-level Office of
Homeland Security.

Pre-Sept. 11, the FBI stood at about 27,000 in personnel; Drug Enforcement
Administration at 10,000; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms at 4,000;
Secret Service at 6,000; Border Patrol at 10,000; Customs Service at
12,000; and Immigration and Naturalization Service at 34,000. At the
request of the White House, Congress is moving to beef up these forces and
expand the number of armed air marshals from a handful to more than a
thousand. Despite the president's objection, Congress recently created
another security force of 28,000 baggage screeners under the guidance of
the attorney general.

In 1878 Congress passed the Posse Comitatus Act to prohibit the military
from performing civilian police functions. Over Defense Secretary Caspar
Weinberger's opposition, President Ronald Reagan declared drug trafficking
a threat to national security as the rationale for committing the military
to the war on drugs. (Weinberger argued that "reliance on military forces
to accomplish civilian tasks is detrimental to . . . the democratic
process.") Reagan's action gives George Bush a precedent for committing the
military and National Guard to civilian police duty at airports and borders.

Given the president's candor about the likelihood that the war on terrorism
will last many years, the administration and a compliant Congress are in
clear and present danger of establishing a national police force and --
under either the attorney general, director of homeland security or an
agency combining the CIA and State and Defense intelligence (or some
combination of the above) -- a de facto ministry of the interior.

The fact that George Bush has no intention of misusing such institutions is
irrelevant. You don't have to be a bad guy to abuse police power. Robert
Kennedy, a darling of liberals, brushed aside civil liberties concerns when
he went after organized crime and trampled on the rights of Jimmy Hoffa in
his failed attempt to convict the Teamsters boss of something. He bugged
and trailed Martin Luther King Jr., even collecting information on the
civil rights leader's private love life, until Lyndon Johnson put a stop to it.

Bureaucratic momentum alone can cross over the line. After President John
F. Kennedy privately berated the Army for being unprepared to quell the
riots when James Meredith enrolled at the University of Mississippi, we (I
was Army general counsel at the time) responded by collecting intelligence
information on individuals such as civil rights leaders, as well as local
government officials in places where we thought there might be future
trouble. We were motivated not by any mischievous desire to violate privacy
or liberties of Americans but by the bureaucratic reflex not to be caught
short again.

In the paranoia of Watergate, the CIA followed a Washington Post reporter
for weeks, even photographing him through the picture window of his home,
because he had infuriated the president and the agency with a story
containing classified information. Faced with our discovery (I was The
Post's lawyer at the time), CIA Director William Colby readily admitted
that "someone had gone too far."

All 100 members of the Senate voted to create the newest federal police
force under the rubric of airport security. In its rush to judgment, the
Senate acted as though a federal force was the only alternative to using
the airlines or private contractors. Quite the contrary, policing by the
individual public airport authorities, guided by federal standards, would
be more in line with our tradition of keeping police power local.

It's time for the executive and Congress to take a hard look at the police
personnel amassing at the federal level and the extent to which we are
concentrating them under any one individual short of the president.
Congress should turn its most skeptical laser on the concept of an Office
of Homeland Security and on any requests to institutionalize its director
beyond the status of a special assistant to the president. We have survived
for more than 200 years without a ministry of the interior or national
police force, and we can effectively battle terrorism without creating one now.