When Fox News starts to question the wisdom of current FBI strategy dealing with potential terrorists, it's time for the country to listen. Civil rights advocates, right-wing anti-government zealots and assorted leftists have long complained about FBI tactics when it comes to political dissidents. The arrest of Alexander Ciccolo on July 4 seems to have awakened Fox. Can the rest of the nation be far behind?
Ciccolo, the 23-year-old son of a longtime Boston police captain, was one of the dozen or so "terrorists" arrested in the weeks leading up to July 4. FBI Director James Comey proudly announced their arrests at the bureau's headquarters a few days later. He claimed that the action of his bureau had prevented several Independence Day attacks and had saved lives.
What Comey didn't say was that some, if not all, of this could have been prevented had his agency followed an entirely different approach to cracking down on potential terror suspects.
That, of course, is not the policy of the FBI. Instead of neutralizing would-be or suspected bombers or shooters, Comey's agents spend millions of dollars and waste countless hours carefully weaving a case that has sent dozens of misguided young Americans to long prison sentences for plotting to kill Americans or aiding designated enemies.
The Ciccolo case is typical in many respects, although it differs from the others in one significant way. Last fall the young man's police officer father informed the FBI that his mentally ill son was increasingly captivated by ISIS propaganda. Instead of picking him up for a serious talk about where that would eventually lead him, the FBI began to monitor his activities. An informant recorded Ciccolo's pro-ISIS comments for the agency. When Ciccolo bought a gun, he was arrested for violating a law that prohibits someone convicted of a drug arrest from owning one.
After his arrest, the FBI reported that Ciccolo intended to build a pressure cooker bomb and explode it at an unnamed university. The bureau is very good at developing a long list of crimes, often involving conspiracy since no actual violence occurred, and Ciccolo will probably face a much longer list of charges than that simple gun possession on which he was arrested.
One doesn't have to be a flaming liberal to realize that something is wrong with the FBI's current strategy of building an airtight case against people like Ciccolo. On July 15 Fox News commentator Neil Cavuto interviewed former CIA intelligence officer Joshua Katz regarding the Ciccolo case. Katz sounded almost like a leftist except that he politely criticized the bureau for not following another course of action against these homegrown dissenters. He suggested that the bureau could have intervened earlier so that it wouldn't have to make an arrest.
So why doesn't the bureau, and others, adopt a policy of early intervention? Why, in the Riverside case last fall, did the FBI pay a convicted drug dealer about $250,000 to infiltrate a ragtag gang of four young men? That wasted countless hours of their agents' time at a cost approaching $1 million, when they could have just as effectively ended their plan to join ISIS by intervening early on.
Arrests, trials and convictions are more exciting, newsworthy, and justification for promotions and bigger budgets than quietly warning potential terrorists that their conduct could lead to long prison terms. But that warning would have been a lot cheaper for the government and would have saved many young people, like Ciccolo, from the ruin they now face.
Ralph E. Shaffer is professor emeritus of history at Cal Poly Pomona.
