Systemic Integrity Challenge Pervades FBI
By: Administrative Account | Source: Larry Pratt - Guest Commentary
November 26, 2003 5:15PM EST

by Larry Pratt

Whistleblowers have seldom been popular in the federal government,
and the FBI is no exception.  In fact, in violation of the law,
whistleblowers frequently find themselves targeted for retaliation.

Dr. Frederick Whitehurst (a Ph.D. in chemistry) was no exception.
For several years, Whitehurst was a supervisory special agent in
charge of explosives-residue analysis.

Whitehurst saw a disturbing number of cases in which the laboratory
tailored its "science" to fit the conclusions of the investigating
agents (described as "working backwards").  In other words, the lab
would ask "What did the suspect do?" and then proceed to fit their
findings to the pre-determined conclusion.

This resulted in innocent people being tried, and in some cases put
in jail.  Whitehurst later discovered that some non-scientists up
the command chain were, unbeknownst to him at the time, changing the
results of his laboratory reports.

Whitehurst also found that the FBI laboratory would often break a
chain of evidence, thus making it impossible to prove that the
"evidence" had not been planted.  In some cases, it was planted.
One example was that of the crime scene at Ruby Ridge, Idaho where
U.S. Marshals and an FBI sharpshooter murdered a mother and her son
and wounded two other family members.  The physical record of the
firefights did not support the depositions of the Marshals and FBI
Agents, so one bullet was planted in a key spot to frame a family
member and make it seem like he had been involved in the firefight
when, in fact, he had not.  Unfortunately for the government's case,
the bullet was planted in two different directions in two different
photographs.

Whitehurst found that the record keeping at the lab, not to mention
its lack of safety and absence of controls over contamination of
evidence, mean that even the vaunted identification capabilities of
DNA are illusory.  One study of fingerprints found a 30% error rate.
This means that convicting somebody on the basis of an FBI
fingerprint match is not beyond a reasonable doubt.  Even more
simply put, FBI fingerprint analyses are not proof.  An additional
problem involves the lack of definition for a fingerprint "match."

Lack of definition of "match" also plagues the effort to develop a
"science" of ballistic fingerprints.  How many individual variations
can be found before there is not a match?

It is disturbing that in the face of the pro-prosecution bias in the
lab, the FBI has steadfastly refused to subscribe to a code of
ethics or have the lab subject to outside certification.
Whitehurst's sin was to challenge the ethics of science being
prostituted to serve the whims of agents who were in turn seldom
subject to accountability for their actions.  (None of the perjury
committed by FBI agents during the Ruby Ridge trial, let alone the
murder committed under color of law, was ever subject to criminal
prosecution.)

The bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City resulted
in the conviction of two perpetrators.  Excluded from the stand were
any witnesses who could not be dissuaded from reporting that they
had seen middle eastern-looking men with Timothy McVeigh.  "Working
backwards" by one of the FBI's incompetent bomb experts, Dave
Williams, excluded any investigation into why columns of the
building collapsed which could not have been toppled by a fertilizer
bomb parked on the street.

Dr. Whitehurst was part of a team of experts assembled to evaluate
the government's insistence that David Koresh and the Davidians at
Waco committed suicide.  The experts examined the considerable
evidence that government marksmen had assassinated Davidians as they
attempted to flee a building which burst into flames for still
debatable reasons.  The expert team's conclusions are laid out in
the video, Waco: A New Revelation, which is available at
http://www.gunowners.com/videos1022.htm from the Gun Owners
Foundation bookstore.  For a detailed account of some of the cases
in which the FBI broke the law in the name of the law with the
assistance of perjured testimony on the stand by FBI lab
representatives, see Tainting Evidence: Inside the Scandals at the
FBI Crime Lab by John F. Kelly and Phillip K. Wearne.

Since being forced out of the FBI, Whitehurst has studied law and
is now in private practice in North Carolina.  The taxpayers are
paying for the remainder of his salary he would have otherwise
earned until retirement from the FBI under the terms of a court
ruling against the FBI's treatment of Whitehurst.

Whitehurst was interviewed on my Live Fire radio show, archived at
http://gunowners.org/radio.htm.

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