| August 1, 2008 | - Bruce E. Ivins, a top biodefense researcher at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, in Maryland, died in an apparent suicide. Ivins was the prime suspect in an FBI investigation into the fall 2001 anthrax attacks, which killed five people and were widely linked at the time to Saddam Hussein. “He was going to go out in a blaze of glory,” said Jean Duley, a social worker who claimed that Dr. Ivins shared his homicidal fantasies with her. “He was going to take everybody out with him.” Ivins also wrote letters to his local newspaper about his religious views. “You can get on board or be left behind,” he wrote shortly after the 2004 election, “because the Christian Nation Express is pulling out of the station!” Some scientists doubted that a vaccine researcher like Ivins would have the skills needed to make inhalable anthrax, and others questioned the FBI's methods, which included using bloodhounds to track the mail. “I think the pressure got to him,” said Ivins' brother Tom. “He's not a man like I am.”
| Source 1:
Frederick News-Post
Source 2:
WP
Source 3:
LAT
Source 4:
Baltimore Sun
Source 5:
Salon
Source 6:
Salon
Source 7:
NYT
Source 8:
NYT
Source 9:
NYT
Source 10:
Baltimore Sun
Source 11:
LAT
|
| May 21, 2008 | - The FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force, concerned about the risk of terrorist activity at the upcoming Twin Cities Republican National Convention, was recruiting spies to infiltrate vegan potluck dinners.
| Source:
City Pages
|
| May 7, 2008 | - The FBI raided the headquarters of the Office of Special Counsel, a federal watchdog agency charged with protecting government whistleblowers, and the home of its director, Scott J. Bloch, after Bloch was accused of destroying evidence on government computers.
| Source 1:
The Washington Post
Source 2:
The New York Times
|
| April 5, 2008 | -
Doctors in Al-Anbar province connected a deadly malarial infection to Blackwater, whose contract the U.S. State Department recently renewed and who are currently under investigation by the FBI for the killing of 17 Iraqi civilians.
| Source 1:
IPS.org
Source 2:
BBCnews.com
|
| March 8, 2008 | - A bomb went off at a military recruiting station in New York's Times Square, shattering glass doors and breaking a window but injuring no one; surveillance camera footage showed a hooded bicyclist near the scene of the attack. Suspicions briefly fell on a man who sent antiwar letters, containing a picture of the station and the text “we did it,” to more than 200 Democratic congressmen, but the FBI said the message referred to the Democrats' victory in the 2006 election. “This was a citizen,” said FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller, “exercising his right to make a political comment to his representatives.”
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| January 27, 2008 | - George Piro, the FBI field agent who interrogated Saddam Hussein, recalled his last meeting with the Iraqi dictator, when the two smoked cigars and Saddam kissed Piro on the cheek three times. “It made me feel,” he said, “somewhat awkward.”
| Source:
CBS News
|
| July 27, 2007 | - Attorney General Alberto Gonzales testified that no one in the Bush Administration had voiced objections to the NSA's wiretapping program. FBI director Robert Mueller testified that the surveillance program was “much discussed” by other officials, and Senate Judiciary chair Patrick Leahy of Vermont sent Mr. Gonzales a transcript of his testimony and asked him to “mark any changes you wish to make to correct, clarify or supplement your answers so that, consistent with your oath, they are the whole truth.”
| Source:
New York Times
|
| June 14, 2007 | - An internal FBI audit revealed that during its domestic surveillance efforts, the bureau potentially violated the law or agency rules more than 1,000 times, with 90 percent of the FBI's national security investigations since 2002 still remaining unaudited.
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| May 8, 2007 | - The trial of Rafiq Sabir, a physician charged with conspiring to provide medical care to Al Qaeda, began. Evidence presented in the case included a recording of jazz bassist and martial-arts expert Tarik Shah, a good friend of Sabir's, teaching an FBI informant how to rip out a throat. “It fills their lungs with blood,” he explained.
| Source:
NYT
|
| March 9, 2007 | - An audit by the inspector general of the United States Justice Department charged that the FBI has engaged in “serious misuse” of the USA Patriot Act to collect the confidential phone, bank, and credit records of U.S. citizens without first obtaining a search warrant.
| Source:
CNN.com
|
| January 5, 2007 | - Newly released FBI files revealed that the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist checked into a hospital for sedative dependency in 1981. During his rehabilitation, Rehnquist spoke of “a CIA plot against him” and tried to escape from the hospital clad in his pajamas.
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| September 21, 2006 | - Nawar Shora of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee said that “the average Yousef” thought of an FBI agent as a “middle-aged white guy talking in their sleeve.”
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| July 7, 2006 | - The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security claimed to have foiled a plot by foreign terrorists, in Lebanon, to bomb the Holland Tunnel in New York.
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| May 24, 2006 | -
President Bush ordered that the documents seized by the FBI in a raid on the offices of Representative William Jefferson, a Louisiana Democrat, must be sealed for 45 days, so that Congress and the Justice Department can determine exactly how material seized from Congressional offices should be reviewed. The Justice Department denied reports that Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (who publicly criticized the FBI for raiding Jefferson's offices) was under investigation for his relationship with former lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Hastert said that the FBI was planting stories in the media to discredit him.
| Source 1:
ABC News
Source 2:
ABC News
|
| May 12, 2006 | - The FBI searched the home of former number-three CIA official Kyle "Dusty" Foggo; Foggo is under investigation for his relationship with defense contractors linked to the Randy "Duke" Cunningham bribery scandal.
| Source:
Bloomberg.com
|
| April 28, 2006 | - It was revealed that in 2005 the FBI had, without court approval, obtained from bank and credit card companies and telephone and Internet companies information on 3,501 U.S. citizens and legal residents.
| Source:
CNN.com
|
| March 24, 2006 | - It emerged that the Bush Administration had quietly issued a "signing statement" on the Patriot Act; the statement indicates that the President intends to ignore oversight requirements built into the act, such as the requirement that the President inform Congress of how the FBI was using its new spying powers.
| Source:
Boston.com
|
| February 2, 2006 | - A librarian in Newton, Massachusetts, was being criticized for asking FBI agents to produce a warrant before they impounded library computers. "Getting a warrant," said U.S. Attorney Michael J. Sullivan, "is very time-consuming."
| Source:
The Boston Globe
|
| January 25, 2006 | - The FBI was spying on vegans in Georgia.
| Source:
11Alive.com
|
| January 16, 2006 | - America celebrated the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Al Gore compared the FBI's spying on King to the Bush Administration's authorizing spying on American citizens.
| Source:
The Raw Story.
|
| December 21, 2005 | - The FBI was spying on Greenpeace, Catholic Worker, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and PETA.
| Source:
Democracy Now!
|
| November 6, 2005 | - The FBI, under the Patriot Act, was issuing 30,000 “national security letters” a year, 100 times as many as it has issued historically. The letters, which recipients are ordered never to discuss, often demand the release of banking data, credit reports, and other private information.
| Source:
The Washington Post
|
| October 10, 2005 | - The FBI was thinking it might start hiring people who have admitted to using illegal drugs.
| Source:
Chicago Sun-Times
|
| August 26, 2005 | - A member of the American Library Association sued the Justice Department regarding an FBI demand for library records. The identity of the plaintiff, the records sought, and most other details regarding the case were unavailable because of the USA Patriot Act.
| Source:
The Washington Post
|
| May 31, 2005 | -
Deep Throat turned out to be a ninety-one-year-old former FBI official named W. Mark Felt.
| Source:
Washington Post
|
| April 2, 2005 | - Nearly ten years after the Oklahoma City bombing, an FBI search found explosives in a crawl space in Terry Nichols's former home.
| Source:
AP
|
| January 13, 2005 | - The FBI announced that Virtual Case File, an incomplete, $170 million software application intended to help agents share information, was likely to be scrapped. A British contractor was hired to define requirements for a new system.
| Source:
LA Times
|
| December 29, 2004 | - the FBI named its sixth counterterrorism chief in three years,
| Source:
The Washington Journal
|
| October 26, 2004 | - A newly released document revealed that F.B.I. agents witnessed Iraqi prisoners being abused at Abu Ghraib but failed to report it because they saw nothing unusual about the abuse. One agent said that what he saw at Abu Ghraib was similar to what goes on in prisons in the United States.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| September 30, 2004 | - A federal judge struck down a provision of the USA Patriot Act that permitted the FBI to carry out secret searches of Internet and telephone records but prevented companies from revealing that the searches had taken place. John Ashcroft said that the act is "completely consistent with the United States Constitution."
| Source:
Associated Press
|
| September 28, 2004 | - The FBI was having a hard time translating all its intercepted terrorism-related wiretap conversations.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| August 29, 2004 | - The FBI was still investigating a possible Israeli mole in the Pentagon.
| Source:
Telegraph
|
| June 15, 2004 | - Attorney General John Ashcroft, perhaps worried about his recent bad press, announced that the FBI has a new terrorist in custody, a Somali man who was arrested in November, and said that he planned to blow up a shopping mall in Ohio. The purported terrorist was linked to another purported terrorist who allegedly planned to cut the cables on the Brooklyn Bridge.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| May 29, 2004 | - The FBI sent out a warning of an "imminent" terrorist attack but then retracted the warning within a few hours.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| April 26, 2004 | -
Administration lawyers asked a judge to prevent a former FBI translator from testifying in a lawsuit brought by families of September 11 victims; the translator told the 9/11 commission that the government had considerable evidence months before the attacks that Al Qaeda was planning to use aircraft as weapons in the United States.
| Source:
Independent
|
| April 2, 2004 | - A former FBI translator claimed that she could prove that the Bush Administration did in fact receive warnings in the spring and summer of 2001 that terrorists were planning to use aircraft to attack American cities.
| Source:
Independent
|
| March 28, 2004 | - The FBI was investigating whether it withheld or destroyed evidence pertaining to the Oklahoma City
bombing.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| February 6, 2004 | - The FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force subpoenaed Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, to hand over records concerning an antiwar conference sponsored by the university and the National Lawyers Guild.
| Source:
National Lawyers Guild
|
| December 29, 2003 | - The FBI issued a national alert to watch out for people carrying almanacs, because almanacs, which contain all kinds of useful information, could be used by terrorists.
| Source:
Associated Press
|
| December 19, 2003 | - Thomas H. Kean, the chairman of the commission investigating the September 11 attacks, said that the hijackings probably would not have occurred if the FBI and the immigration service had been doing their jobs.
| Source:
New York Times
|
| December 14, 2003 | - Other tapes revealed that Nixon was planning to use the Justice Department and the FBI to take revenge on his enemies once the Watergate scandal blew over. Nixon also thought that New York City "should go through a cycle of destruction."
| Source:
New York Times
|
| October 25, 2003 | -
FBI agents at the Norfolk, Virginia, airport took anal swabs from a mechanical farting dog to make sure it did not contain explosives.
| Source:
BBC
|
| June 5, 2003 | - Dennis Hastert, the speaker of the House, said he expected the weapons to turn up eventually and pointed out that it took the FBI five years to catch Eric Rudolph. Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, blamed it all on Bill Clinton.
| Source:
Minneapolis Star Tribune
|
| January 14, 2003 | -
The F.B.I. called off its manhunt for five Middle Eastern men who were supposedly smuggled into the United States for unknown sinister purposes and admitted that the story was a big lie made up by a snitch eager to ingratiate himself with the agency.
| |
| December 4, 2001 | - Attorney General John Ashcroft said he wanted to rewrite the FBI's guidelines to allow the agency to spy on domestic political and religious groups; the rules in question were imposed in the 1970s because of significant civil-rights abuses that occurred under the J. Edgar Hoover regime.
| |
| December 4, 2001 | - Critics said that Ashcroft's new antiterrorism tactics were in fact old tactics that the FBI discarded because they did not work. “It is amazing to me that Ashcroft is essentially trying to dismantle the bureau,” a former FBI executive director said. “They don't know their history and they are not listening to people who do.”
| |
| December 4, 2001 | - Former FBI director William Webster said that long-term surveillance and undercover operations were much more effective than mass arrests and led to 131 prevented terrorist
attacks between 1981 and 2000.
| |
| November 6, 2001 | - Robert S. Mueller III, director of the FBI, admitted that he had no idea who was sending anthrax through the mail and appealed to ordinary Americans to help figure it out: “If you know somebody is doing different things with anthrax than they should be and it's somewhat suspicious, we're asking you to let us know.” Consensus was beginning to form that the anthrax was not only the same strain used in American bioweapons programs (the “Ames strain”) but that the spores were prepared using the top-secret American “weaponization” recipe.
| |
| October 23, 2001 | - The FBI was moving to require all internet service providers to reconfigure email systems to make them more accessible to government spying.
| |
| October 9, 2001 | - The FBI suspected foul play.
| |
| August 28, 2001 | -
Scientists found that people who eat a lot of snacks are more prone to macular degeneration, the leading cause of blindness in the U.S. The FBI uncovered a six-year scam in which eight people rigged McDonald's contests, embezzling $13 million in cash and prizes.
| |
| July 24, 2001 | - The FBI noticed it was missing 184 laptops, some containing classified information, and 449 guns.
| |
| March 27, 2001 | -
Moscow warned the United States about its new Cold War rhetoric; the Russians were upset over remarks by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who said that “Russia is an active proliferator” of dangerous weapons
technology which “seems to be willing to sell anything to anyone for money.” The United States expelled 50 Russian diplomats, four of whom were thought to have been working with Robert Philip Hanssen, the FBI agent recently arrested for spying; Russia in turn said it would expel the 50 diplomats most precious to America.
| |
| February 27, 2001 | - The FBI arrested a Russian spy, one of its own senior counterintelligence agents.
| |
| February 6, 2001 | - An innocent man who spent thirty-three years, two months, and five days in prison was released after documents were presented that proved not only that he was innocent but that he had been framed by Federal Bureau of Investigation informants, who themselves committed the murder in question. F.B.I. agents knew that their informants were guilty of the crime but remained silent to protect their sources.
| |
| January 23, 2001 | - A sixteen-year-old Montreal hacker called Mafiaboy pled guilty to charges stemming from a series of major attacks on commercial websites last year; the FBI claimed Mafiaboy caused $1.7 billion in damages.
| |
| November 28, 2000 | - The FBI's packet-sniffing computer, Carnivore, can indeed capture and archive all the email that passes through an internet service provider's servers, according to a new report.
| |
| August 29, 2000 | - Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee, who will be tried for mishandling nuclear secrets, made bail after FBI agents admitted making inaccurate statements in previous bail hearings.
| |
| August 22, 2000 | - An FBI agent admitted that he had given false testimony in a bail hearing for Wen Ho Lee, the Los Alamos scientist who has been held without bail for nine months for mishandling nuclear secrets; civil rights groups argue that Lee was singled out for prosecution because of his Chinese ancestry.
| |
| July 25, 2000 | - The Federal Bureau of Investigation admitted the existence of Carnivore, a specially designed computer that allows the agency to search for criminal activity by plugging into an Internet service provider's “backbone” and reading people's email.
| |
| July 25, 2000 | - A hard drive containing a book manuscript critical of the government's handling of nuclear secrets was seized by the FBI, who claimed the manuscript contained classified material.
| |
