(FinalCall.com)��I think that we need as much or more oversight than any other agency in the country. We are potentially the most dangerous agency in the country if we are not scrutinized carefully. I welcome your scrutiny, and I certainly look forward to that.�

Former FBI Director Louis Freeh spoke those words before a House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime hearing in 1997. With the recent directives of U.S. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft giving the FBI even more powers, it is safe to say that the agency now officially is �the most dangerous� agency in the country.

But, Mr. Ashcroft�s decision to rewrite longstanding restrictions on domestic spying by law enforcement agencies is not a new thing. William French Smith, the attorney general under former President Ronald Reagan, abused his authority by instituting rules that led to the infamous �Iran-Contra Affair��the government covert plot of selling crack cocaine and other drugs in the Black community, then using the money from those sales to pay for weapons of mass destruction and the proliferation of war abroad.

What has the current attorney general planned? The American public should always be skeptical when failure is rewarded with new powers. The expanded surveillance powers coupled with the newly formed FBI-CIA alliance against alleged domestic terror threaten core civil liberties guaranteed under the Constitution and Bill of Rights. In addition, it also demonstrates Mr. Ashcroft�s seemingly insatiable appetite for new powers that will do little to make us safer, but will inevitably make us less free. It goes a long way in squashing dissent in the land of the free, home of the brave.

What led to September 11 is a series of internal blunders, not things that would require expanded powers for the FBI. If recent reports are true, then the FBI and CIA had plenty of warning that something terrible was being planned. Special agents were sounding the alarm but the big brass were the ones asleep at the wheel. And the FBI and CIA failed to communicate.

Congressman John Conyers, Jr. (D-Mich.), the Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, deserves recognition for warning of the detriments associated with the Ashcroft decision. He has single-handedly forced his peers in both the House and Senate to rethink what the decision actually means when the act of listening-in on online chat rooms and reading Internet message boards�when there is no evidence of criminal activity�is ruled procedural.

�The Ashcroft Guidelines� abolish the congressional response to law enforcement excesses in the 1950s and 1960s as well as the deemed illegal work of late FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover�s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO). The Attorney General Guidelines of 1976 were put in place after the FBI illegally spied on and persecuted the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the Honorable Elijah Muhammad and other political dissenters, as well as infiltrated religious and political organizations.

The new guidelines will trash a central protection against government fishing expeditions by ending the requirement that law enforcement agencies have at least a scintilla of evidence of a crime before engaging in certain investigative activities.

ACLU Director Laura Murphy said, �When the government fails�as it increasingly appears to have done before September 11�the Bush Administration�s response is to give itself new powers rather than seriously investigating why the failures occurred.�

The Ashcroft-Mueller power grab is on. Black organizations, political groups, mosques, churches, synagogues, temples and other houses of worship�beware!!! This turning back the clock coupled with the earlier anti-terrorism legislation dismantling client attorney privilege only means that a new �affair� is in the wings.