Looking Out For Their Own At Our Expense (Again)

It looks like the Bushco beat will go on with Mike Mukasey as the new AG, seeing as how he refused to consider water boarding as torture today (nice).

And the way this regime does business of course is to basically screw over anyone who isn’t in the club (the vast majority of this country) and make life cushy for the favored few, as we know. And given the comparatively blind eye Dubya and his pals have cast towards white collar crime as part of that (h/t Think Progress), I think we can count on more of the same from Mukasey (ironic to say the least given his Giuliani connection).

You want the gory details? OK…

The prosecution of all kinds of white-collar criminals is down by 27% since FY 2000, before President Bush came to office.

Also substantially down were federal prosecutions against individuals the government accused of various kinds of official corruption. They dropped in the same period by 14%.

Charges against organized crime figures were slightly up in the last year, but their number currently is about half (48%) of what it was in FY 2000.

While the decline in federal filings against drug violators was less precipitous, such prosecutions were still 20% below where they were a decade ago.

The drop was even more pronounced for drug and weapons cases where the FBI was the lead investigative agency. For drugs, the number of such prosecutions credited to the bureau dropped from 5,014 in FY 2000 to 2,414 in FY 2006. Based on the first nine months of FY 2007, these prosecutions appear to be continuing to drop — down to an estimated 2,332 — less than half of the 2000 total. FBI weapons prosecutions are down around 30 percent over this same period.

The only major enforcement area where federal prosecutions were sharply higher is immigration, where the number of individuals charged with criminal offenses has undergone a 127% jump.

Given that, it tells you how stupid the wingers are for screaming about what they thought was the lax immigration bill, when in reality that was the one area of law enforcement where Bushco was actually doing its job.

So what does the future hold? Do you even need to ask (here)…

A larger budget battle is brewing between the White House and Congress, leading lawmakers to challenge the cuts to the FBI, which could take effect as soon as Monday, the start of the federal fiscal year.

But the Democratic majority's spending plan -- under the ever-present threat of a presidential veto -- restores only a small fraction of the FBI agents needed to keep the criminal program at current levels.

Through accounting sleight of hand, President Bush's plan concentrates the loss of thousands of unfilled staff positions across the FBI on its criminal program by transferring hundreds more agents to counterterrorism operations -- continuing a trend that started after 9/11.

"This is gutting the criminal program. Incomprehensible. Just plain dumb," said one recently retired top FBI official who requested anonymity.

Echoing the concerns of many within the bureau, as well as state and local law enforcement officials, the former official said the impact of the cuts will reverberate nationwide.

"At a time when fraud is a huge undercurrent of the subprime mortgage crisis, this will completely wipe out the FBI's white-collar program," the source said. "The ability to investigate cases like Enron will be severely handicapped. And look at public corruption. Those are complex investigations that take about five agents to work one case."

The White House and FBI Director Robert Mueller did not respond to requests for comment.

…

Former FBI officials agree that cutting criminal agents will actually reduce America's ability to detect and deter terrorist attacks.

"This shows a very short memory of 9/11," said the retired FBI official. "They've not been paying attention to what is disrupting terrorist activity. It's criminal investigations that are disrupting terrorist activity all over the world."

Our Gal Condi Rice and her dunderheaded boss each once said something about “the smoking gun that could turn into a mushroom cloud” concerning Saddam Hussein’s alleged nuclear capability prior to the Iraq war.

We now know that was hyperbole, but with these cuts in law enforcement, something akin to that could become yet another horrible reality before we know it.