But it is war we are talking about. It isn’t funny. It is not a partisan political issue. And no one in the current administration has the right to claim that Democrats or reporters or plain old vanilla citizens care less about American security that they do. I’m not talking about whether Rumsfeld or Cheney or Bush feels some obligation to divulge the war plan or spill secrets. They don’t and it doesn’t bother me at all that they don’t. But there is something very wrong with the chumminess itself: On the one hand, the news media is captive to a 1,500-pound gorilla who has marked his territory and created his own reign of terror over a leaking ship called the Pentagon. The media tries to get the story to fulfill their mission, but in the presence of the great one, reporters can’t be too aggressive or offensive or their access might be taken away. In theory. As another friend of mine in the media said: I don’t have access anyhow so it doesn’t matter if they punish me. But you understand that there is a certain dependency in the relationship here. So the chumminess is so strange because we are at war. But it is in what Bush and Rumsfeld say that I think makes them terribly wrong-headed and inappropriately arrogant. Before Sept. 11, this arrogance manifested itself in turning the United States’ back on its treaty obligations, in pooh-poohing a military presence overseas, in condemning nation-building, even in ignoring terrorism as a priority.

When the attacks on Sept. 11 occurred, the administration didn’t think it needed to muster the “evidence” it had about Osama bin Laden for the American public or the rest of the world. Let me be clear: It wasn’t as if there wasn’t evidence. Any sane person in the public now knows that al-Qaida was responsible and that it seeks to do us great harm. The problem is that the Bush team feels that it doesn’t need to convince anyone of what it is doing. Its attitude is that there is such a grave threat to America, and that the threat is so different than any we’ve face in the past, that they, the custodians of our national security, not only are doing what is right, that only they know the truth, and moreover, that they have no obligation to convince the American public, that no one has a right to question them.

The Bush team’s attitude is the same now when it comes to Iraq: The American public is supposed to consent to the use of force but the administration doesn’t think it needs to “convince” the public of its certainty about the need for, or the method of, going to war. They seem to think it is enough to just repeat that Saddam Hussein is evil, that he is pursuing weapons of mass destruction, that he supports international terrorism, and therefore he has to go. I suspect that the administration has plenty of “evidence” about the Iraqi regime’s pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. I suspect if the administration made its case that the American public and the Congress and even most of the world would consent and support military action. I think what we are talking about here the attitude, an atmosphere in which the Bush inner circle believes that it knows what is best, and that it won’t be forced into having to deign to make its case, particularly not if pushed by foreigners or the United Nations or the Congress or the evil institution of the liberal media.

Again, let me make my position clear: I believe that Iraq is a danger to its people, to the region, and to the United States. There is probably even tippy-top secret intelligence to connect Iraq to al-Qaida, maybe not specifically with regard to Sept. 11, but certainly over the years. No doubt there are al-Qaida operatives in Iraq today. On the one hand, it would be such a home run to just lay out the case: so why not reveal it? The answer I think is not that the Bush administration fears heading down a slippery slope of answering too many questions or feels like it needs to protect intelligence sources and methods; it is more again the mindset of the administration that it just doesn’t have to, and won’t, justify its actions.

So let me get this straight. The Bush team failed to predict the events of Sept. 11. Score one for bin Laden. They weren’t competent enough to detect or stop what happened that day. Score two and three. The end result of Osama bin Laden’s war is that our economy is in the toilet, that the airline industry is dying — a pretty good achievement if you head a terrorist cell that wants to put the hurt to America. Score four. We’ve been at war for almost a year in Afghanistan and around the globe and the Bush administration didn’t choose a smart enough strategy to stop bin Laden and the Taliban leadership from either escaping, or at least they can’t prove that these dangerous people were killed. Score five and six. It seems today that as many if not more people hate us in those hopeless sectors of the Islamic world where the terrorists originate. Score seven for bin Laden.

The bad guys have arguably done fairly well under this administration, and there are a lot of questions about strategy and ultimate outcomes in Iraq, and we are supposed to accept blindly that the administration knows what it is doing?

Let me also say before the tomatoes start flying and you question my own patriotism or tune out because you think I have my own partisan views that I also believe that the popular and dominant criticism of the war on terror is wrong. We are a year later and for whatever reason, there has not been a terrorist strike against the United States nor a major one against Western interests in the world. You have to give the administration credit for what it has achieved. That is, if it has achieved this. Which is to say that maybe a major terrorist attack on American interests over the past year was not in al-Qaida’s calendar. The strikes have always been spaced out by a couple of years. We just don’t know. What is more, Rumsfeld and Cheney and others say that though they believe that the war on terror has been successful, they also are certain that there will be a major terrorist attack on the United States in the future. So their assurances aren’t very comforting.

I’m going to try to put two hats on now at the same time: the policy wonk know-it-all hat and the typical American citizen hat. Policy wonks, of course, aren’t supposed to have emotional or visceral reactions; they are merely supposed to be able to see things through a lens of consequences for American interests. And typical Americans aren’t supposed to have policy preferences when it comes to national security. Typical Americans are supposed to pledge allegiance and stand behind their president and elect their representative in Congress and hope that the checks and balances work. Of course it is more complex than that, but you get my point.

So, what I find difficult with both hats on is that I take all of the evidence about Iraq — the nature of a regime that I’ve actually had the opportunity to see first-hand and experience in more than eight weeks in country, Iraq’s violation of its solemn treaty obligations prior to the invasion of Kuwait in using chemical weapons against the Kurds and Iran, its cynical and evil evasion of its treaty obligations relating to nuclear nonproliferation, its illegal development of grotesque biological weapons, its unprovoked invasion of not one but two neighbors, its shooting missiles during the Gulf War not only at Israel, but also at Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain, and Qatar; its record of war crimes and genocide against the Kurds, its own people, and then against the Kuwaitis, whom it claimed were its own people; its signing of yet more cease-fire and disarmament obligations in 1991 with no intention of honoring those agreements, its unmistakable support for international terrorism …

I look at all of this evidence and history, and the policy wonk in me ponders not just the question of Iraqi evil but also what our obligation is under international law, what the implications for us and the rest of the world are if we carry out our policy of uniliteralism or preemption. I ponder the impact, short- and long-term, of military action on our coalitions and our allies. I think about the strategic position it will put us in the Arab world. I calculate military and civilian casualties, put odds on the likelihood of success, think through the messiness of occupation and democratization.

And I can’t help but feel cynical about the fact that we are going to war to enhance the economic interests of the Enron class. The policy wonk position over-analyzes and dispassionately examines sorties and ground divisions and cruise missiles and targets and capabilities and equipment failure rates. It gets muddled in the details and loses all sight of the visceral and the emotional. Yet.

Yet when war skeptics or Bush administration opponents argue that the son is merely atoning for the failures of the father, when they say that the administration hasn’t given inspections a “chance” to work, when they condemn the notion of preemption or unilateral action, when they say it is all about oil, my answer to them is this: So are you saying that if the administration did give inspections a chance to work and they didn’t work that you would be writing editorials saying: “Now that the administration has given inspections a chance, we support war”? I think the answer is no. Are you saying that if the U.N. crafted some resolution, no matter how vague, consenting to the use of force in order to implement Security Council resolutions, that you would sign up for war? The answer I think for them is still no.

Not only are these arguments disingenuous, but they are also lacking in any knowledge of history. This is the same crowd who argues that we should avoid or shrink away from war because of long-ago disproved arguments: that weapons won’t work, that the Iraqis are some efficient killing machine, that too many civilians die in war. There are some who will never support war. Those I respect. But there is also a huge segment of the American elite who don’t support war because it is Republican war, and that is twisted.

In the past decade, the world has experienced at least two more major modern wars: in Yugoslavia and now Afghanistan. These, like the Gulf War, were war dominated by a new form of military power, air power. Despite the changes in war that have been demonstrated now in three wars, the orthodoxy, including evidently that of the Bush administration and of Gen. Tommy Franks’ Central Command, is that magnificent armies with stunning maneuvers won the Gulf War. Many even in the national security community remain convinced that air power alone could not achieve NATO’s goals in Yugoslavia, that it was only the “threat” of a ground war that finally convinced Milosevic. The official line these days is that air power facilitated the success of a combined special operations and proxy ground war in Afghanistan. As Gen. Franks said recently about Afghanistan: “The sure way to do work against the enemy is to put people on the ground.” In short, our way of modern war is just not war.

Peoples and nations have been fighting wars — we don’t even need to say ground wars — as long as peoples and nations have existed. To most people, “real” war is ground war, so much so that we don’t even use the term ground power. The “field” commander is automatically assumed to be a ground officer. Modern air power defeated the Iraqi army before the front lines were ever crossed by coalition armored and mechanized divisions in 1991, Yugoslavia was exhausted by repeated bombing in 1999, the Taliban were toppled and al-Qaida routed from their caves by bombs. Sure it is true that airplanes can’t occupy a country, that not as many things are ever destroyed as pilots and analysts claim, that intelligence isn’t good enough to find biological and chemical weapons or Scuds, that the bad guys got away from Kandahar and Tora Bora.

Yet something profound has happened in the last decade of war. Nothing really went as predicted by most who were doing the predicting: The costs to the American public in 1991 weren’t bank-breaking, the environment survived, chemical and biological weapons weren’t used, no significant terrorist attacks occurred, Israel was not dragged in, there were not tens of thousands of coalition body bags. Those who stated that the value of air power was exaggerated and that the war would drag on Vietnam style were proven wrong. High-tech weapons worked, and the U.S. military performed brilliantly. Air power won in a magical display. The hyper-professionalism of the U.S. military was repeated again in Yugoslavia and in Afghanistan.

Yet despite the U.S. military’s performance, Saddam Hussein also won by losing. He could say to himself and to the Arab world that he survived the best that the entire world could throw at him. We may have followed a brilliant choreography, accumulating impressive statistics, flying invisible airplanes, but we completely failed to understand our opponent. We ended up with an incomplete victory that left U.S. forces cemented into the Saudi desert, where radicals and fundamentalists like bin Laden were spawned because we were “defiling” the holy places. We maintained a sanctions regime for more than a decade, doing no perceptible harm to Saddam Hussein or his regime, and allowing the evil ones the opportunity to manipulate their isolation to kill the most vulnerable of Iraqi society in order to make a point. We have been bombing the country under the mini-wars of 1993, 1996, and Desert Fox in 1998.

There was, and is, some fiendish Iraqi prestige in being the victim and in defeat by a form of warfare that they portray as both distant and inhumane. Yours is a society that cannot accept 10,000 casualties, Saddam bragged before the Gulf War, baiting the United States to fight the Iraqi version of some ancient grotesque grinding land battle. Saddam was right. And it’s not a bad thing. But I think we are also a society that really can’t stomach preemption. The very reason that the World Trade Center was so outrageous, like Pearl Harbor, is that it is just not the American way.

The Bush administration in the past year thought it had a free ride on Iraq after Sept. 11 and it has learned a lesson about its own citizenry and this country anew. I think that despite the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, this administration now realizes that they cannot just act because they want to.

Of course we need to win in the immediate sense and we need to win in the long term. Would an Iraq war be complicated in terms of our allies and coalition partners? Sure. Is there a possibility of a quagmire once we defeat Iraq on the battlefield? There is. Will there be loss of life: American lives, Iraq civilian lives, and Iraqi military lives in what will transpire? There will be. Could it be some spark for a broader war in the Arab world or even for World War III? It could be.

Boy, if you try to cover all of the bases of what could happen, and only take action when we can control the outcome, it seems like there would never be action. The wonk in me says that smart people in uniform and in the intelligence community are thinking through these issues, that they are doing the best that they can do to cover all of the possibilities, to try to create the best outcome. But the American in me also says that they have failed so many times in recent memory and have so many strikes against them that I don’t trust them.

And here’s where I come back to Rumsfeld and his arrogance and that of the administration: I’m sure that there are brilliant insiders with great insights and ideas. I am not in the least bit confident that they are being heard, any more than I think the administration hears the debate in the news media or hears Al Gore or cares about the roots of terrorism or has a vision or a plan to not just eradicate the current generation of terrorists, but also to create the conditions under which future generations will have reasons not to pursue this line of business.

As a “normal” American, an American who likes to win, who is as competitive as the next guy, as an American who likes to believe that we are on a global mission and have a superior system of government and life, what I think viscerally is that we should kick their butts. But the bottom line is we should not go to war merely because the President or Dick Cheney or Donald Rumsfeld says we should. Nor should we go to war with Iraq merely because the regime is evil and they are developing weapons of mass destruction. Nor should we even go to war with Iraq because Baghdad is connected to bin Laden.

Yet to put my two hats back on –policy wonk and American — let me say that I also don’t want to have my life or the lives of my children in the hands of a bunch of flunkies in security guard uniforms at airports. I don’t trust them one bit and I believe that terrorists will always seek to go after our weakest points, not the places in our defenses that we’ve beefed up. I also don’t trust my government. I don’t blindly believe that they know what is best. I won’t pledge allegiance like some Stepford citizen. I firmly believe that the public doesn’t know enough and doesn’t pay enough attention to war because the military has become so good at what it does that the price of using it is virtually free for most Americans.

As a patriot, as a supporter of the military, as an air power advocate, as a human rights professional, I believe that the war against terrorism is overstated. It is not the core United States national security interest today. If we hope to secure our pride and economy, and our way of life, if we hope for physical security that comes not merely in projecting power but also in making those around us feel secure in their lives, we have a lot of other work to do in the world, work that is pushed aside because we are at war. After Sept. 11, it should be clear that some people are just plain evil. Some hate us for good reason. Some are just confused. Most have hopeless lives and think rightly or wrongly that it is our fault. But we are not doing very well at convincing them or the world that we are good friends and good neighbors and that we are not the root of the evil in their lives.

What makes me uncomfortable about a war with Iraq on the one hand is war, an eye for an eye; it is the oldest story that there is. I worry that we are taunting tomorrow’s warrior to find the next World Trade Center equivalent because of our arrogance, because of our military superiority, because of our seeming indifference to the views of others. On the other hand, what makes me uncomfortable specifically about Iraq is the question: Why now? What compelling evidence is there that we must take action now, that Saddam is an immediate threat, that he is not adequately stuck in a box? Why isn’t the policy of “containment until regime change” adequate enough as a way of avoiding war? If there is evidence, we certainly haven’t seen it.

One year ago, like you, I remember exactly where I was on the morning of Sept. 11, and I remember exactly how I felt. Though I grew up in New York City, I didn’t know anyone who worked in the World Trade Center. And though there was great tragedy that day, and no one could help being inspired by the human stories and the enormous bravery and sacrifice of the firefighters and rescue workers who rose to the challenge that day, both as a professional who works in a world of death and destruction and as a citizen, I wasn’t immobilized by fear or sadness, and I didn’t feel overwhelmed by emotions.

Maybe just because of my own cynicism, I’ll admit that my first instinct was not to wrap myself up in an American flag. Frankly, I felt angry — angry with my government, angry with those who make careers of and who are supposed to be in charge of protecting American lives. I felt angry on Sept. 11 and still feel that way because people died because of personal and institutional failures perpetuated by arrogant politicians and career professionals who it seems to me have a history of weak decisions and poor visions and arrogant attitudes and comfortable routines.

Three thousand Americans died not just because of Osama bin Laden but because our national security leaders, in and out of uniform, couldn’t see the world clearly, couldn’t predict what our enemies would do, made frighteningly bad decisions, and had terrible judgment. They are why people went to work in New York City and the Pentagon that morning without a care in the world. And why wasn’t there warning? We are told that the government couldn’t have known. The bureaucracies and its leaders insist that the attacks couldn’t have been predicted. We are told that the act was so diabolical and genius in its simplicity that it couldn’t have been stopped. We are insulted in being told that we should accept for the sake of not playing the blame, for the sake of patriotism, because there is a “war” on, that there was simply a breakdown in procedures at all levels that day. We are asked to excuse those who we entrust with our security that the odds of 19 out of 20 hijackers, of three out of four airliners, succeeding was so great, how could anyone really be held responsible?

More than 30 billion of our tax dollars each year go towards government generated intelligence information. We had, and have, a CIA and an intelligence community that has a fantastic history of failure, that is mostly blind to what is going on in the world, that seems to know nothing and at the same time is so bombarded and overwhelmed with stimuli from its millions of receptors it can hardly sense what is happening, and even if it could, it can’t read, it can’t see the signs, it can’t talk to other agencies. Hell, the FBI didn’t even talk to itself. And worst of all, most insulting for us as Americans, is the theme that developed after Sept. 11, that it is our fault: That we, the American people, had grown too soft. It is somehow our fault that we were so naive about our safety. I want my money back, and I want some accountability.

On Sept. 11, a new administration was pursuing a foreign policy that was ABC – Anything but Clinton. Its vision of the future military and national security needs for America was literally in the stars and space and not on earth. On September 10th, our national security leaders were going through Mr. Magoo motions of foreign policy, traveling overseas in five different directions, riding in their limos, reading the newspapers feet up on desks, getting their phantasmagorical top secret briefings. No one was secretly monitoring something going on in some Hollywood-ike vision of government omniscience. Our government failed on Sept. 11, and I was sure a year ago, as I am now, that no one of any consequence will ever lose his or her jobs, and no one of any integrity will ever stand up and take responsibility for the failure.

What did I feel on Sept. 11? Angry. And the American people should be angry. Instead they are cowed by talk of war. They are made to remove their shoes and turn out their belt buckles and leave their nail clippers at home. That is a surrogate for security and it is fighting the last war.

You know the expression, “War is too important to be left to the generals”? These days, it is too important to be left to the national security professionals. Speaking at the West Point commencement this summer, President Bush told the graduating cadets that, like their predecessors before them who had helped to defeat Japan and Germany, like those who “saw the rise of a deadly new challenge — the challenge of imperial communism” — like those who fought and died from Korea to Vietnam or during the Cold War, again America was at war. “History has also issued its call to your generation,” the president said. “In your last year, America was attacked by a ruthless and resourceful enemy. You graduate from this academy in a time of war, taking your place in an American military that is powerful and is honorable.” Is this really a war that is equivalent to World War II or the Cold War? To the naval officers in this room, to their international counterparts, even to the good citizens of the Newport area, I say: I hope you are not so young and gung-ho and wet behind the ears that you accept this characterization. I hope you are old enough to remember the Cold War, and not so old that you forget that there was a time when our national survival was at stake, there was a time when there were enemies out there who could have destroyed our country and our way of life. I hope you remember the tens of thousands who perished in Vietnam and Korea and the hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions of other who died in the Second World War. I hope you are alive and unsentimental enough to look honestly at yourselves as American citizens and say that it is insulting to you and your relatives and your fellow citizens to let Osama bin Laden so dazzle and possess our president and our government and our society that he and his war can so disrupt our economy and our way of life. The war against terrorism, if it is a war at all, is not World War II or the Cold War, and it is grasping at empty patriotism to claim that it is.

So, you may ask: Isn’t my anger and criticism directed at the wrong party? Aren’t I just another leftist, self-hating American? Isn’t it easy for me to criticize when I don’t have to face the responsibilities and complexity of governing? You know, last Sept. 11, what I knew about Osama bin Laden or the Taliban or Afghanistan for that matter, I could fit into a thimble. But I know my Constitution. I know the responsibility of the government to provide for the common defense. I know the military and the intelligence community inside and out. I’m angry because not only did they fail in their fundamental task, but they use fear and their personal declaration of war and their arrogance about being above it all to avoid and deflect any sort of accountability for their actions.

For most Americans, the truth is that the war on terrorism hardly touches their lives. For the few that have friends or relatives in the armed services, there may be some personal connection. But it isn’t like there is a draft or the prospect of significant American military casualties, even in a full-fledged war with Iraq. The economy may be in the toilet, but it is not because of war shortages or changes in industrial production driven by war needs. It is not like there is going to be rationing. Travel has been inconvenienced and tourism disrupted. But in no way are these the dark days of either World War II or the nuclear arms race during the Cold War, when the survival of America was at stake.

So on the one hand, the warfare label is appropriate because wars come in more than one flavor and the debate over whether this is or isn’t war seems so, well, academic. But on the other, the label leads the administration to think that it doesn’t have to explain, and that it can take enormous liberties with American freedoms. As a war in Iraq looms, it appears that the Bush team is caught between an old-fashioned concept of warfare and a response that is appropriate both to the threat and to our day.

On the one hand, it mounts a multi-dimensional civilian effort in response to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida that favors law enforcement methods, financial warfare and worldwide CIA covert actions. On the other, it has thousands of Army and Marine Corps troops stuck in Afghanistan, spending more time feeding and guarding themselves than “fighting.” On the one hand, Rumsfeld and company employs U.S. special forces in modern quick strikes, while at the same time they construct a network of bases and military support installations in the Middle East and Central Asia, a network that does more to sustain itself and create diplomatic headaches and animosities and future threats for America that it does to kill a single terrorist.

Meanwhile, the Bush team postures that it understands al-Qaida and the difference between old and new war by saying that bin Laden and his followers are engaged in a new era of “asymmetrical” warfare, that they have found some inhumane super weapon and could deliver a knockout blow if we fail to be vigilant enough or martial enough in our response to hatred and fundamentalism. If we go to war against Iraq, we will win. No question about it.

But shouldn’t we also ponder the implications of the lopsided military victories that the United States has achieved when it has employed force in the last 12 years? I am not arguing that we need to place ourselves in a position to die in the name of an image of chivalry that comes from the Middle ages. We need, however, to recognize that our use of the remote instrument of air power and modern warfare, our magnificent ability to largely remain above the battlefield and the enemy, now coupled with our seeming arrogance towards the rest of the world, and our tendency to fall back upon secrecy and government control, all feeds a distrust and contempt in our adversaries and potential adversaries.

The next generation of terrorist is being spawned today because of these attributes. The asymmetric strikes of terrorists are spawned at Khobar Towers and USS Coles and World Trade Centers because of the very fact that no terrorist organization or military or state can hope to successfully confront us on our battlefield, a battlefield which is modern and networked and decentralized and chaotic and in space and in the air. Instead they have to use our modernity, our networked society, our media, our openness and exposure, to hurt us.

In our superiority, there is thus a special burden, one that challenges our values and our humanity. If we doggedly hue to the position that we will “win,” that we always win, that we are doing what is right, that we are pursuing our interests, that we will act unilaterally regardless of what the rest of the world thinks, we also are missing the fact that there is intrinsically some spiritual damage done in our action, and by our very greatness, and by the very mode of warfare we engage in. Pursuing interests and pursuing values are two different things.

When we cozied up to Iraq during the 1980s we sacrificed our values and pursued our interests. When we tolerate the Gulf kingdoms and the oil autocracies, we do the same thing. When we look the other way about human rights or treaty obligations or two-faced double dealings, we not only compromise ourselves in the process, but we convey the wrong message, which is that we have no values, that we are for sale, even in the minds of many in the Arab world that we work on behalf of others.

Finally, with regards to our friends, there is real reason for alarm that we are just merely creating a world of permanent confrontation. Bush and company call the war on terror open ended. Such a characterization reveals a lack of ability to foresee an outcome and betrays a muddled sense of strategy, strategy that is based on American values and our aesthetic and our way of life. It is for that reason that they need help in seeing what they are doing. They hardly have all of the answers.

Perlstein contrasts the Ohio arrestees with another recently arrested group: The American Front, a “known terrorist group” of Florida-based white supremacists who — without FBI encouragement — “took a break from training with machine guns for a race war in order to fashion weapons out of fake ‘Occupy’ signs which they planned to use to assault May Day protesters in Melbourne, Florida.” While anarchists, animal rights activists and Muslims pass muster as federal targets, organized hate groups do not.

The distinction between entrapment (which is illegal) and a sting (which is legal) now appears to be a much eroded line in the sand. As Perlstein’s piece points out, it is up to a jury once arrests have been made whether law enforcement set up a trap or a sting. In previous decades, defendants have been acquitted in cases of entrapment; but not in recent years:

Not a single “terrorism” indictment has been thrown out for entrapment since 9/11 – not the Liberty City goofballs supposedly planning to blow up the Sears Tower who had no weapons and refused them when offered; not the Newburgh, New York outfit whose numbers included a schizophrenic who saved his own urine in bottles. (Even the judge who sentenced them said “the government made them terrorists.”)

One of the most famous recent cases of FBI infiltration — which is not mentioned in the Rolling Stone article — hangs over anarchist networks worldwide. Brandon Darby, the once trusted activist and organizer-turned-FBI-informant and now writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government, is the dirtiest name to utter in anarchist circles. Darby infiltrated groups organizing protests around the 2008 Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minn. Darby fed the FBI information, which helped them seize riot shields made by a group from Texas. Enraged by the seizure (but still viewing Darby as a comrade) two young men from Austin, David McKay and Bradley Crowder, bought the materials for and constructed Molotov cocktails with the thought of using them against state vehicles. The two, however, decided overnight that this was a bad idea — and left the devices at home, with no intention of using them.

Darby passed information about the Molotov cocktail plans on to the FBI, and McKay and Crowder were arrested and charged with domestic terrorism. While Crowder accepted a plea deal without trial for a two-year prison sentence for making the devices, McKay went to trial, arguing Darby entrapped him. The trial ended with a hung jury. Before the retrial, however, McKay retracted claims of entrapment and agreed to accept a plea deal (and serve a four-year prison sentence, for making the Molotovs and perjury).

Perlstein notes that “the State is singling out ideological enemies” – and if federal sting targets are much to go by, the State’s position is clear: anti-capitalists, environmentalists and Muslims are threats; racists are not. We can respond by decrying FBI activity, and by arguing that their targets are not real threats. Or, we can take patterns of FBI activity more seriously and ask why anti-capitalists are more threatening than white supremacists. This line of questioning can likely be reduced to two questions, chanted again and again up and down the country when protest front lines are faced with lines of police: “Who do you protect? Who do you serve?”

Five young men from Cleveland are now in jail, accused of plotting to “blow up a bridge in the Cleveland area,” according to the FBI’s triumphant press release/criminal complaint. As is always the case with FBI terror stings, the “sting” part involved the bureau’s informant/agent provocateur mostly inventing the plot the accused have now been arrested for. In this case, the five planned to detonate smoke bombs as a distraction as they “topple[d] financial institution signs atop high rise buildings in downtown Cleveland.” But the informant (as usual, a sketchy unnamed character with a checkered past) strongly pushed the group to seriously consider different, more extreme plots. At the end, some or all of them were going to plant C-4 on the Route 82 Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge over the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.

So what was initially a political action aimed at financial institutions somehow morphed into a supposed attempt to destroy or damage a piece of publicly owned infrastructure in a national park. Anarchists sure do hate bridges, and parks, I guess. (No parliament of men has the authority to designate which spaces are “national parks”! The whole world is the worker’s national park!)

The FBI’s affadavit suggests that there was never actually a serious “plot.” The gang tossed around the idea of “taking out” a bridge in order to stop people from getting to work, but they also thought maybe they could use their (pretend) C4 on a Klan rally, or a neo-Nazi organization, or an oil well, or the Federal Reserve Bank. They eventually decided to maybe sink a ship. All of their many plans were super serious and well-thought out. (“To prevent capture, he suggested getting tacks that they could throw out of the back of a car if they get in a chase.”) Eventually they settled on the bridge thing, sort of, and bought fake IEDs from the guy they already suspected was a cop.

In other words, these are a bunch of dumbasses even by the standards of amateur “black bloc” dumbasses. Do you know how I know these morons weren’t serious? They planned to download the Anarchist Cookbook and follow its notoriously awful instructions. Every experienced anarchist knows that the Feds have a mole in your group house, but these guys were mainly concerned with having someone’s “hacker friend” explain to them how bitcoins work. Without the FBI’s intervention the most damage these idiots would’ve ever caused is a broken Starbucks window. So thank god they’re off the streets, and congrats to the FBI for getting this tale of dangerous, bomb-planting anarchists onto the news broadcasts on the day of Occupy’s big May Day action.

(At least the Feds are branching out from only targeting Muslims in these ridiculous “stings.” Some day all Americans, regardless of creed or color, will have their circle of friends secretly infiltrated by a paid informant.)

You will learn that the Bureau has served first and foremost as a secret intelligence service reporting to the president of the United States. In its first incarnation under J. Edgar Hoover, who ruled the Bureau for 48 years, the FBI was the president’s secret intelligence service. Today, 40 years after Hoover’s death, we still live in the shadow of his legacy. How do you run a secret intelligence agency in an open and democratic society? How do you balance national security and civil liberty? How can we be both safe and free? These are questions that Hoover struggled with, and that we struggle with still.

Your prize-winning book about the CIA, “Legacy of Ashes,” was called “a credible and damning indictment of U.S. intelligence policy” by Publishers Weekly. What are the counts in your indictment, if you agree with that assessment?

I certainly agree that “Legacy of Ashes” is credible, because every assertion is documented. There are about 200 pages of endnotes, and about 80 pages of endnotes in “Enemies.” When I say something, I back it up. But “Legacy of Ashes” is not an indictment of the CIA. The CIA and FBI are reflections of who we are as Americans. We are the most powerful nation on earth. We project our power across the globe, and in order to do that we need good intelligence. When intelligence fails, war happens and people die. When intelligence succeeds, war can be prevented and lives can be saved.

America is not very good at gathering intelligence, but we’re getting better. It’s understandable, because Americans have only been at it in a serious and concerted way since World War II. The British have been at it since Queen Elizabeth I, over five centuries. The Russians have been at it since Peter the Great. And the Chinese have been at it ever since Sun Tzu wrote “The Art of War,” so 26 centuries.

I want my books to serve not as an indictment but as a warning. If the U.S. doesn’t strike the balance correctly between security and countervailing concerns, we may lose our rights and our liberties, and we may not survive as a free republic. We have made many mistakes, the consequences of which can be measured in blood and treasure, but we are improving – particularly over the last three years.

Let’s turn to the books you’ve chosen, beginning with Sun Tzu. Tell us about “The Art of War,” and what an ancient Chinese military treatise has to do with contemporary U.S. intelligence.

Sun Tzu, a Chinese general 26 centuries ago, tells us: “If you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.” That is the mission of intelligence. We can build all the billion dollar spy satellites we want – and we do – but to know your enemy is to talk to him in his own language. That is the job of spies, and that is what “The Art of War” teaches.

Chapter seven focuses on the dangers of direct conflict. How do U.S. intelligence agencies, as Sun Tzu says, “subdue the enemy without fighting”?

Through intelligence. Intelligence is the art of war without weapons.

How about black ops?

Well, you need to define what that is. Is it disinformation, lying, cheating or stealing? Black ops can mean all of those things. It can mean propaganda. It can mean putting a spy in the enemy’s camp. It can mean putting a bomb under the hood of the car of an Iranian nuclear scientist. The phrase “black operations” encompasses a multitude of sins.

All of them committed by U.S. intelligence?

The last one I listed was the work of the Israelis.

Let’s turn to a 1964 book that brought to light the role that intelligence services played in U.S. foreign policy.

“The Invisible Government” was the first reported book that actually described what the CIA did. It was written almost 50 years ago, and was a landmark. It explained that the CIA was not James Bond, which was just then becoming popular – that intelligence was not a matter of flying into a foreign capital in a trench coat, overthrowing a government, having a martini, making love and then catching the next plane. It showed that intelligence was a difficult, dirty, dangerous and at times tedious business which was about information, and how information meant power.

So it’s a very good book that is still vital today. And David Wise is still writing great books about intelligence.

In the introduction, the author defines the invisible government as the “interlocking, hidden machinery that carries out the policies of the United States… a loose, amorphous grouping of individuals and agencies drawn from many parts of the visible government”, with the CIA “at its heart”. Is that 50-year-old description of America’s intelligence apparatus still accurate? How did 9/11 change the structure of U.S. intelligence?

Things got much more complex. There are now 17 different American intelligence services, with a bureaucracy of interlocking directorates above them overseen by the Director of National Intelligence. All of them are required to report to the secretary of defense, who in turn reports to the president. In the last three years things have gotten better, largely due to the author of our next book.

That author is former CIA director and U.S. secretary of defense, Robert Michael Gates.

Robert Gates was the head of the CIA under the first President Bush. Under the second President Bush, at the end of 2006, he succeeded the irascible Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense. He stayed on under Obama until just a few months ago.

Gates, as you can see in “From the Shadows,” really understands how intelligence can serve and do disservice to the president of the United States. He probably had more experience in intelligence than anyone who has ever been secretary of defense. The secretary of defense basically runs the show when it comes to intelligence. We spend somewhere just south of $100 billion a year – the precise amount is classified – on intelligence, and the secretary of defense controls 85 to 90 percent of that.

Tell us more about this book.

Bob Gates basically got off the bus from Wichita, Kan. in 1966 and went to work for the U.S. government. He went from the air force to the CIA. After learning Russian, he became an expert – as we defined it – on Russia during the Cold War. He himself never went to Russia until the Cold War was ending, even though he was considered to be among the leading experts on the USSR. He got off the plane and Gorbachev said to him: “How does it look from the ground?” Because the U.S. had been staring down at the Soviet Union from spy satellites and planes, but we didn’t understand what was going on on the ground. We could count the missiles, but we didn’t see the potatoes rotting in the field because there wasn’t enough fuel to take them to market.

Gates learned through bitter experience, over the course of half a century, how intelligence works. It’s an amazing book. And as secretary of defense he used that knowledge to improve our intelligence services.

What precisely is the relationship between the Department of Defense and the U.S. intelligence apparatus?

Ultimately, intelligence should serve the national security of the United States. When you get up in the morning and open the paper or turn on your computer, you want to know: Is the world safe? Is my country safe? Is my city safe? Is my family safe? That is what the president wants to know too, and that is the job of intelligence.

Can any flow chart explain the relationship between the 17 agencies that are part of the U.S. intelligence service and Department of Defense?

In theory, it’s a bunch of boxes that connect and send intelligence up through the director of national intelligence and the secretary of defense to the president. In the past, it has worked more like 17 different musicians with 17 different scores playing a cacophonous tune with the conductor flailing his arms madly. But we’re getting better at it.

Next you cite one of Barbara Tuchman’s lesser-known works of history, “The March of Folly.” Tell us about it.

In short, this is one of the greatest books ever written. Why did the Trojans take in the wooden horse? Why was America in Vietnam? Barbara Tuchman explores those questions, and the answer is folly – leaders acting against the interests of their constituents.

Folly explains so much of the history of world events. People believe that the world is run by conspiracies because that is what they read in novels and see on cheap TV series. But the course of world events is determined less by conspiracies than it is by stupidity. Why did the British lose the United States? How did the Renaissance popes bring on the Protestant reformation? Folly. Lack of intelligence.

Please connect the dots to our topic of intelligence.

Consider the three meanings of the word intelligence. It is the power of your mind; it is secret information; and it is secret action taken in the name of a nation. If we had more intelligence we would know our enemies, have fewer wars and there would be less folly throughout history.

If the Trojans knew the Greeks were in the horse, they wouldn’t have opened the gates.

Exactly. Why did they let the horse in? Folly.

“The March of Folly” is used to teach blind spot analysis in business schools, a method for uncovering faulty or obsolete assumptions. How do intelligence agencies perform blind spot analysis to prevent the sort of folly that Tuchman described?

“The March of Folly” explains how not to make decisions. Leaders must learn to act only out of enlightened self-interest. To use power wisely, they must make intelligent use of information. If they blunder on based on faulty assumptions, then the Greeks end up inside of Troy and Americans wind up mired in Vietnam for a decade.

Let’s end with George Orwell’s “1984.” Most of us know it, but please explain why you chose it.

None of us love Big Brother, but we all know he is part of the family. Big Brother is like the uncle we don’t like who has to be invited for Christmas. The question is: How do we live with Big Brother without him ruining our lives?

“1984″ described, in 1948, what the modern surveillance state was going to look like. At the time, J. Edgar Hoover was creating that surveillance state. He is the man who invented the fingerprint file. Every camera that stares down on us in Washington, New York and London, and every bit of biometric data collected on us, is a tribute to Hoover. The greatness of Orwell’s book is that he saw it coming and described it in terms we could understand. What Orwell foretold in “1984″ was already happening as the book was being published. And that is what my history of the FBI, “Enemies,” is about.

But you suggest that America’s Big Brother is a bit of a bumbling uncle.

Like I say, we’re relatively new at this. We’ve only been at this in a serious way since World War II. The lessons of Sun Tzu are 26 centuries old and we’re only just internalising them. So give us a chance.

Also, to know your enemy you must talk to him in his own language. Nowadays that might be Arabic or Pashto or Chinese or Urdu. We don’t speak those languages very well. We want everyone to speak English. We want everyone to look like us, think like us and be like us. That isn’t a very good cultural climate for producing successful intelligence, nor for the enduring projection of power.

During a visit to the FBI, as you point out, President Obama proclaimed “we must always reject as false the choice between our security and our ideals.” But you suggest that liberty and security are opposing forces. How has the pendulum swung between liberty and security? And which way is it swinging now?

In the introduction to “Enemies” I point out that Alexander Hamilton, writing in 1787, said almost exactly the same thing. We have to have liberty and security. They are opposing forces and there is a constant tug of war between them. We strive to strike the right balance.

I would argue that over the last three years we’ve been getting it less wrong than we once did. Have we been attacked in a serious way? No. Have we created any new secret prisons? No. It was the FBI who reported the abuses in Abu Ghraib. It was the FBI director, Robert Mueller, who stared down George W Bush and told him to scale back electronic eavesdropping. Robert Mueller is an ex-Marine and also a great respecter of civil liberties. He has said that he is not going to go down in history as the guy who won the war on terror but took away our civil liberties – because that would be a pyrrhic victory.

When the FBI makes mistakes under Mueller, it admits and corrects them. He and the people he reports to must strike the balance between liberty and security every day. Lately, we’re doing a pretty good job. There will always be mistakes. Getting the balance precisely right is extremely difficult and, like democracy itself, is a work in progress.

The film deservedly gives Hoover credit for establishing the first federal police force that used modern forensics to nab bad guys, especially Prohibition-era gangsters whose grisly kidnappings and murders had captivated the public’s appetite for the lurid underworld of criminals and their molls. Eastwood also provides a plausible rationale for Hoover’s lifelong paranoia about Communism:  Soon after World War I ended, the Washington home of Hoover’s boss, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, was bombed by an anarchist.

Fair enough.

But the biopic inaccurately portrays Hoover as a critic of Sen. Joe McCarthy. In fact, the FBI director was a crucial ally of the Red-baiting demagogue.  Indeed, at Hoover’s personal direction, agents spent hundreds of hours perusing FBI files to supply McCarthy with evidence of Communist subversion.   Hoover also coached McCarthy about how to insulate himself from criticism by labeling targets as “loyalty risks” instead of “card-carrying Communists,” which was harder to prove.  A Hoover deputy even instructed McCarthy on manipulating press coverage by releasing his attacks just before news deadlines so that reporters wouldn’t have time to interview the other side.

Nor does the film discuss Hoover’s order to “neutralize” Eastwood’s one-time costar, actress Jean Seberg, by falsely telling journalists that she was pregnant thanks to a leader of the Black Panthers.  Seberg later committed suicide; her family blamed the FBI smear.

The biopic does portray Hoover’s obsession with Martin Luther King Jr., ostensibly because of his ties to Soviet agents, which led to FBI bugs that captured the civil rights leader’s marital infidelity.  But here, too, “J. Edgar” underplays Hoover’s nefariousness.   In fact, the FBI planted listening devices in King’s home, office and hotel rooms, recording more than a dozen large tape reels whose contents Hoover provided to numerous parties: the president and vice president, the attorney general, the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the CIA, the military, the United Nations, members of Congress, and the press.

What vital intelligence did Hoover disseminate?  That King, according to Hoover, was a “tom cat” with “obsessive degenerate sexual urges.”  The FBI claimed to have recorded King in flagrante during group sex parties in which, according to FBI transcripts, he boasted of his prowess (“I am the best pussy-eater in the world”) and invoked Jesus while in the throes of passion: “I’m fucking for God!”

Ultimately, FBI accounts of King’s sexual antics turned out to be embellished.  Although King committed adultery, a Hoover deputy involved in the smear campaign later admitted that the African-American voices captured on FBI bugs may actually have been those  of King’s associates;  to the white agents who made up Hoover’s force, all black voices evidently sounded the same.  Still, that didn’t stop Hoover’s minions from compiling yet another field report that spread the preposterous story that King, after accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, got drunk and chased prostitutes down the hallway of his Oslo hotel — while stark naked.

Hoover stubbornly believed his incendiary leaks would “destroy the burrhead.”  But they didn’t.  Despite Hoover’s best efforts to spread the dirty details, no member of the press reported on them; in the mid-1960s, such gossip-mongering was anathema to the mainstream media.  Still, no journalists had the courage to reveal the FBI’s witch hunt against King, either; news executives feared crossing Hoover no less than the politicians who were routinely blackmailed by him.  (According to author Curt Gentry, Hoover blocked a critical magazine article by circulating photos of the publisher’s wife performing fellatio on her black chauffeur.)

Even King’s assassination didn’t stop the FBI’s vilification.  Indeed, the worldwide grief over his murder made Hoover more determined than ever to resurrect the salacious stories about the martyr’s sex life.  This time, the FBI found a willing outlet: columnists Drew Pearson and Jack Anderson, who quoted from Hoover’s classified files about King’s “illicit love affair with the wife of a prominent Negro dentist.”  (Anderson later decided that Hoover had used him to implicate King in “a posthumous scandal, to turn even his death into a sordid affair.”  Three years later, Anderson paid him back by becoming the first prominent mainstream journalist to turn on Hoover — rifling through his trash, exposing his financial corruption and blackmailing techniques, even hinting that he was gay.)

And what about such gossip, including that Hoover had a secret double-life as a drag queen?  In Eastwood’s movie, the rumor is transformed from the erotic to the morose: Minutes after the death of Hoover’s mother, he grieves near her body, weeping mournfully as he dons her necklace and a favorite dress.  The lawman is not a sexual pervert, you see, just a faithful and bereaved son.

In truth, the outlandish cross-dressing story was circulated more than three decades after it allegedly occurred, when a witness of dubious credibility told writer Anthony Summers that she saw Hoover at a New York orgy, engaging in sex with young boys while reading a Bible. He was supposedly dressed in a red skirt, lace stockings, high heels and curly wig, a black feather boa around his neck and makeup with false eyelashes on his face.

Perhaps the posthumous vilification of Hoover as a depraved sexual hypocrite is only poetic justice; after all, during his lifetime, he was Washington’s consummate master of sexual slander and political blackmail.  But instead of ignoring the baseless transvestite story, “J. Edgar” attempts to sanitize it and rehabilitate Hoover’s image.

Even Eastwood’s depiction of the FBI director’s relationship with his longtime deputy and confidant — and reputed lover — gives Hoover the heterosexual benefit of the doubt.  Although Clyde Tolson (Armie Hammer) is portrayed as Hoover’s loyally swishy sidekick, Hoover returns the adoration with only a manly love, rebuffing Tolson’s overture to turn the relationship physical.  However tormented, Hoover remains in the end closeted even from himself.

To be sure, cinematic license is to be expected in such movies; feature films are not nonfiction biographies.  But given the known facts of Hoover’s life, Eastwood has painted his subject in the best light possible—better than he deserves and infinitely kinder than Hoover ever treated his many enemies, who included some of the most heroic figures of that tumultuous era.

Somewhere, J. Edgar Hoover is smiling: Clint Eastwood has made his day.

I’ll get to the historical and political insults of “J. Edgar” shortly, and they are legion. But most of all it’s a boring and silly movie, which features Leonardo DiCaprio bumbling around his dreary, post-Victorian suite of offices, looking worried under a mountain of latex and makeup (when he plays the 1970s-era Hoover) and talking in one of those unplaceable, old-timey Northeast Corridor accents. (Admittedly, Hoover in life had a strange voice; he lived from birth to death in Washington, D.C., but spoke in an affected manner that sounded nothing like today’s mid-Atlantic accent.) It’s like a combination of acting-school exercises and the History Channel, with all the production values and dramatic intensity that suggests. Hoover’s longtime deputy director and presumed lover, Clyde Tolson, is played by Armie Hammer as — how do I put this delicately? — an absolute flaming queen, who uses the term “fashion-forward” during a department-store shopping expedition set in about 1930. For just a minute there, it looks as if “J. Edgar” is about to become “Queer Eye for the FBI,” and I’m profoundly sorry it doesn’t.

Actually, if there’s one area where Black’s lumpy screenplay, with its awkward chronological backing-and forthing, deserves some credit, it’s in the highly plausible account of Hoover’s relationship with Tolson. From early on in Hoover’s FBI career it was widely assumed that he was gay, but the evidence was always circumstantial and the handful of people who knew him personally always denied it. (The allegations that he was a cross-dresser came from only one source, and don’t match anything else we know about this intensely cautious and private individual. Most historians view them as urban myth.) I think the fairest thing to say is that it seems likely Hoover was primarily homosexual, despite his purported romance with actress Dorothy Lamour, but not at all clear whether he acted on those impulses. Black imagines Hoover and Tolson cohabiting as “confirmed bachelors,” in a state of permanently unresolved erotic tension, which would go a long way toward explaining the secret policeman’s massively screwed-up psychology.

But when we get back to the question of how Hoover’s psychology affected his exercise of power, “J. Edgar” goes from being just a minor melodrama about a conflicted and closeted gay man to being simultaneously stupid, offensive and random. Historical characters appear and disappear in shticky little pieces — Jessica Hecht as Emma Goldman, Josh Lucas as Charles Lindbergh, Jeffrey Donovan doing the world’s worst “pahk the cah in Hahvehd Yahd” accent as Robert F. Kennedy, Christopher Shyer as Richard Nixon — without ever seeming to justify their presence on the stage. You get the feeling they’ve all got a problem with Hoover, but you’re never sure why. Maybe they just found him a weird and distasteful little man, which is certainly how he comes across. On the other hand, it might be helpful if this movie made the point that Hoover was as close as we’ve ever come (so far) to having an unelected dictator, and that the only real reason he didn’t become a Stalin-level tyrant was the constraint of a democratic political system he could not entirely subvert, much as he tried.

Eastwood and Black certainly bring up many of the things that made Hoover so noxious, beginning with the Palmer raids of 1919-20, which resulted in the arrests of thousands of communists and anarchists who had committed no crime. At the tender age of 24, Hoover was appointed to head a special Red-hunting branch of what was then called the Bureau of Investigations, which launched his long career as a self-appointed guardian of American political rectitude, devoted to stamping out dissident opinion wherever it cropped up, and whether or not constitutional rights got trampled in the process. “J. Edgar” makes clear that Hoover conducted secret surveillance on suspected Commies in Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal administration, including first lady Eleanor Roosevelt (who purportedly had a lesbian affair with a reporter); perjured himself before Congress; conducted an especially vile counterintelligence program aimed at undermining the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil-rights leaders; and generally turned a blind eye to organized crime in his relentless persecution of left-wingers.

But you get almost no sense of the extent or intensity with which Hoover mobilized the federal government’s police force to crack down on unconventional political opinion. The second Red Scare of the Joe McCarthy 1950s is never mentioned, nor is the word COINTELPRO, and Hoover’s vicious racism is largely ignored. (Intriguingly, the rumors that Hoover was gay were echoed, during his lifetime, by speculation that he might be partly black.) Furthermore, all this stuff is presented as quirky side info in a story about a weird dude who lived with his mom (Judi Dench, giving the only tolerable performance in the whole film) and had a lifelong boyfriend he maybe never slept with. Oh, and he was way ahead of his time when it came to fingerprinting. Did I mention that? Everybody pooh-poohed his interest in bringing forensic science to law enforcement, and now look! Yes, Hoover was a liar, a cheat, a hypocrite, quite likely a paranoid sociopath and incipient fascist, a terrifying incarnation of many of the worst currents of American political opinion in one individual. OK, yeah, that’s all true — but his real legacy is found in “CSI: Miami.”

Just in case you think I have some kind of personal bias when it comes to J. Edgar Hoover, well, I plead 100 percent guilty. He ruined the lives of countless innocent people and was instrumental in spreading the idea that the Constitution doesn’t apply to people who say bad things about the government. He pretty much built the slippery slide that led to the national-security state of the last decade, when civil liberties have been eviscerated and privacy is a sham. (I will further add that he personally supervised the surveillance and harassment of my mother, her then-husband and many of their colleagues in the 1940s labor movement, and I’ve seen the files to prove it.) If there’s a darker figure in American history since the Civil War, I’m really not sure who it is. Nixon? George W. Bush? Not even close. Dick Cheney? Only in his undead dreams. I only wish I believed in hell so I could believe that it wasn’t hot enough for John Edgar Hoover.

But in all honesty, I’d much rather see a vigorous, propagandistic, right-wing defense of Hoover as a bastion of true Americanism than this tepid, long-winded and phony-looking exercise, which sort of implies that, on the one hand, he wasn’t a very nice man but, on the other, he was an actual human being who suffered pain. But honestly, what can we expect from Clint Eastwood at this point? This movie says a great deal more about him, I’m afraid, than it does about J. Edgar Hoover. And what it says is that one of the greatest American screen actors of the 20th century has squandered much of that legacy in the 21st by becoming a director of indifferent Oscar-bait movies that look handsome on the surface but have nothing to say, and that nobody ever wants to watch twice. Even by the dismal recent standards of “Hereafter” and “Invictus” and “Changeling” this movie is a disappointment, because watching it once is bad enough, and because it may leave younger viewers with the impression that J. Edgar Hoover was mostly important to history because he wasn’t gay enough to have decent fashion sense.