No one can say that Attorney General (and possible Supreme Court nominee) Alberto Gonzales doesn't keep his promises.
When Sen. Sam Brownback held forth on pornography at Gonzales' confirmation hearing, saying, "There's been criticism of the Department of Justice for not enforcing obscenity laws, work on these issues on community standards. I would hope that this would be something that you would take a look at, maybe make some personnel shifts within the Department of Justice, to address this from the law standards, on community standards, look at the addictiveness in the nature of it. There are ... these laws that have been upheld by community standards, upheld by the Supreme Court, that can be, and I really think should be, enforced, given the nature of this very potent -- what one expert called it, delivery system, of -- in this country. And I hope you can look at that," Gonzales replied, "I will commit to that. I will look at that, Senator."
And now, apparently, he is.
According to a story in today's Washington Post, the FBI's Washington Field Office, at the urging of the Attorney General's office, began recruiting in late July for a new "anti-obscenity squad" that will allegedly target "bestiality, urination, defecation, as well as sadistic and masochistic behavior" in "a variety of jurisdictions" where there have been "past successful cases"; that is, prosecutions. Those would, for the most part, be local prosecutions, since the feds have brought very few obscenity cases, as opposed to child porn cases that pled to obscenity, in the past 14 years.
"They're going to look for cases like Extreme Associates, the rape and the fisting and all that kind of stuff," summarized attorney Paul Cambria.
But given the squad's stated objective, what are the chances it could accomplish what it wants?
"It wouldn't hurt the real target, the mainstream adult industry," Cambria opined, "because it would just be a bunch of garage people they'd be arresting; you know, people shooting in their backyard garage, putting this stuff out."
"If they're really interested in the major companies, which they say they are," he continued, "none of them produce this kind of material, so they're either going to have to expand their horizons or be happy knocking out a bunch of inconsequential operators. Of course, Meese went after the biggest companies, and I think that that's what they would like to see happen. It doesn't do them any good to see the little guy in the garage get it, which puts not even a little dent in the adult industry."
That contradiction isn't lost on the FBI agents themselves. According to anonymous sources within the Bureau who talked to Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman, joining the squad would not be considered a career enhancement.
"I guess this means we've won the war on terror," Gellman reports one 'exasperated' FBI agent as saying. "We must not need any more resources for espionage."
Others joked that, "I already gave at home," and recognizing that many agents watch porn themselves, one agent said, "Honestly, most of the guys would have to recuse themselves."
Those assessments jibed with attorney Clyde DeWitt's experiences when he was a prosecutor in Texas.
"A Justice Department attorney who I knew some years back and who was involved in high-level drug cases in Washington during the '80s, indicated to me that the obscenity unit was the laughing stock of the whole department," DeWitt recalled. "Apparently that hasn't changed. Imagine a young FBI recruit, tackling the obstacle course at Quantico and thinking, 'After I have conquered all of the great challenges here, I too will be qualified to spend endless hours sleuthing for images of 'bestiality, urination, defecation, as well as sadistic and masochistic behavior', all while remembering the first on the Academy's list of Guiding Principles: 'Rigorous obedience to the United States Constitution'."
Cambria's assessment was along the same lines.
"These agents are people who are out on the front lines every day, fighting crime for America, and they're like, 'What are you doing?'" Cambria said. "And it's obvious that these are people who see what the real threat is, and are balking because they can see that they're getting a political agenda rather than an agenda of necessity."
The recruiting memo itself suggests the ambivalence within the FBI's highest ranks of pandering to the religio-conservatives' "War on Porn."
"All other field offices may investigate obscenity cases pursuant to this initiative if resources are available," the memo said. "Field offices should not, however, divert resources from higher priority matters, such as public corruption."
The formation of the squad may represent another step in the process begun in the spring of 2002, when then-Attorney General John Ashcroft convened his first anti-obscenity training seminar in Columbia, South Carolina, which was attended by nearly all of the Assistant U.S. Attorneys. At about that time, the Justice Department's attorneys manual was changed to require that all potential obscenity cases be coordinated through Washington, rather than assessed by the U.S. Attorney of the district in which the charges would be brought... or perhaps dismissed if that attorney felt the evidence did not justify bringing charges.
In the past, one of the considerations attendant to the decision of whether to bring federal obscenity charges was whether the government could recoup from the defendant(s) the costs of taking the case to court, but DeWitt noted that the strictures set on the new porn squad would likely guarantee a net loss to the Justice Department's budget.
"If they really focus their efforts on what the memo says, like bestiality and defecation," DeWitt observed, "most of the people they prosecute will be represented by local public defenders, so the government will be paying for both the prosecution and the defense, plus the cost of incarceration and post-incarceration supervision [probation and parole]. And the people who want to watch that stuff on the Internet will just have to rely on Web sites outside the United States, which I gather is most of them, anyway."
And with President Bush having just committed over 200 billion tax dollars that won't be offset by tax increases to clean up after Hurricane Katrina, and the upcoming budget already far in the red, DeWitt sees the formation of a unit specifically to fight garage-bred obscenity as a complete waste.
"They ought to modify the cover of this week's Newsweek to read, 'No Big Easy: Katrina + Iraq - Taxes + Porn Prosecution = How Much?'" DeWitt suggested.
