Chutzpah from the FBI

This was one of those weeks when you could not throw that metaphorical cat without hitting an act of chutzpah. It is probably just as well that my schedule was too busy for me to even start thinking about the weekly award until the week had run its course (as opposed to last week, when we had a clear winner on Wednesday). However, I figured at all of the time I have spent picking on the State Department and those who sail under its (also metaphorical) flag, it is time to turn to the domestic front and the lack of "equal time" for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. This week's award gets a special there-they-go-again acknowledgement (in memory of all the ways that the Reagan administration managed to "go again") and a far more serious debt of thanks to Brian Ross' Investigative Team, that has provided us with so many wonderful excuses to hide under the bed in their Blotter Web site. Here is their latest scoop on the FBI:

As part of its growing intelligence operations within the United States, the FBI has increased its surreptitious entry and search missions since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, according to an unclassified bureau document.

"The refocusing of FBI operational priorities and the new emphasis placed on intelligence-based activities. . . has resulted in a dramatic increase" in the demand for so-called 'black bag" jobs, in which teams of highly-trained specialists covertly enter a home or office, search its contents and leave without indicating they had been there, states the budget document. It does not detail how many of the secret searches it carries out, and the FBI did not respond to comment.

Don't you love the bureaucratic language? Don't think of this as an abuse of the Bill of Rights. It just a "refocusing of … operational priorities!" (It sounds a lot like the language you hear when you lose your job to downsizing, doesn't it? The moves are always the same. It's just the game-board the keeps changing!) So you can certainly try to hide under the bed, but don't be surprised if you find the FBI there looking for who-knows-what!