Our children will be ashamed that common integrity will look like courage.” (Yevgeny Yevtushenko, quoted by attorney Mike Tigar on CNN’s “Burden Of Proof”)

Within two weeks of news of outright FBI complicity in two horrendous crimes — J. Edgar Hoover’s order to thwart investigation into the infamous bombing of Birmingham, Alabama’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, and the ruination of Joseph Salvati’s life by thirty years of imprisonment on a murder charge that the FBI *knew* was false, all along — comes now the revelation that over three thousand pages of evidentiary documentation from forty-six FBI field offices were witheld from defense attorneys for Timothy McVeigh.

Who could possibly argue for moderation of outrage in this matter?

By dint of nothing but sheer obstinate habit by now, the Federal Bureau of Investigation is regarded by the senseless as the premier criminal investigative body in the world. For thirty years, that reputation has been has been an impenetrable mystery to me. If a fish rots from the head down, this one was *born* rotten, and it will be only my boundless personal grace and charity that permits me to entertain in the least any sort of incompetence defense of this organ of the Amerikan state.

I am not a fool. I do not, and will not, ignore the blazing contradictions between the mythic popular hype and the “mistakes were made” blandishments routinely offered as rationale for what is summarily dismissable incompetence, in the best possible consideration.

Let us consider, as far as possible, what could be the currently prevailing state of mind among those who revealed this evidence in the Oklahoma City bombing case. If these people are not mortified to their very bones, then they are monsters. That’s all there is to that. Even if they are not monsters under these qualifications, they are not qualified to hold the jobs that they hold, which is to say: they can in no way be trusted with the *power* that they wield.

This is an institution with the power to arbitrarily de-rail the lives of Americans — nationwide — in stark defiance of every rational concept of justice. We know this because they *have*. This is not some airified theoretical construct open to abstract dispute. This is a plain matter of fact, in practice. Any dispute of the point must dispute obvious facts.

The instant matter of the documents missing from the McVeigh prosecution has little or nothing important to do with the fate of McVeigh himself. The whole point of outrage over this has to do with understanding that the truth is not important to an investigative body whose value purports to be devotion to justice. The purpose of such a body is to render facts before a judicial body charged with determining what they *mean*. The judicial body includes all officers of the court, whose responsibility it is to try these facts for their meanings against accusations of crime.

It is simply common sense to understand that investigative bodies cannot be permitted discretion – deliberate or inadvertant — among the facts they render for trial. If the state were to set out on a course of tyranny, what else could possibly be the first step along the road but to represent as truth anything except every pertinent fact of any given case?

And if they cannot do that, then what are we paying them for?

Once that question is addressed, the next one, darker yet, is begged by nearly ten recent years of positive accelerated mendacity at the FBI. Who will call the roll? Why should it be necessary?

Why was Deputy Director Larry Potts permitted his retirement with full pension after he destroyed evidence of flat-out predatory “rules of engagement” at Ruby Ridge?

There are innumerable such questions written in the darkness of the past decade alone. How many can stand the light of day before the average eye glazes-over in boredom or fatigue at the danger they represent?

With numbing regularity, officials of this agency have gone before congress pleading for and even demanding greater investigative powers in a land that was not born to general investigation. Even if we extend them the consideration that they might not be evil to the core, conceding that they are only bumbling fools unable to do their jobs, why in the world would anyone trust them with such power over us?

Does it *matter* whether anyone trusts them?

The necessary implication of that necessary question is that they will have their way with investigative facts, in any case. Is this really the way things are, now? If it is, then it cannot represent anything but an intraversible gulf between the ordinary citizen whose powers are restricted to those common to the limits of his singular existence, and the massed force of governments known throughout history.

Forget, for a moment, the entire litany of outrages perpetrated by this Federal Bureau of Investigation, and consider one essential:

Why can’t these people deal in the truth?