Last year, the FBI shot and killed a Chechen man in Orlando, FL, who was a friend of the 2011 Boston Marathon suspects. According to accounts, Ibragim Todashev, had been speaking for two hours in his apartment to officials from the Massachusetts State Police and the F.B.I when he suddenly grab an object and tried to attack an agent. Todashev was shot seven times and died at the scene.
While claiming to investigate these shootings thoroughly, an New York Times investigation found that between 1995 and 2011 no FBI agent has been found at fault in 150 shootings. So it came as no surprise that the FBI agent who shot Tdashev was cleared of any wrong doing by Florida prosecutors
The FBI isn’t the only agency that has a suspicious habit of clearing its agents in shootings. It seems that the US Customs and Border Protection (CPB) is another agency with little or no outside scrutiny or accountability with complaints of abuse mostly ignored and failed to adequately investigate 28 fatal shootings since 2010. In a scathing report in the LA TImes, independent law enforcement experts heavily criticized the agency for a “lack of diligence” in investigating U.S. agents who had fired their weapons.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which had commissioned the review, has tried to prevent the scathing 21-page report from coming to light.
House and Senate oversight committees requested copies last fall but received only a summary that omitted the most controversial findings – that some border agents stood in front of moving vehicles as a pretext to open fire and that agents could have moved away from rock throwers instead of shooting at them.
The Times obtained the full report and the agency’s internal response, which runs 23 pages. The response rejects the two major recommendations: barring border agents from shooting at vehicles unless its occupants are trying to kill them, and barring agents from shooting people who throw things that can’t cause serious physical injury.
The response, marked “Law Enforcement Sensitive,” states that a ban on shooting at rock throwers “could create a more dangerous environment” because many agents operate “in rural or desolate areas, often alone, where concealment, cover and egress is not an option.”
If drug smugglers knew border agents were not allowed to shoot at their vehicles, it argues, more drivers would try to run over agents.
This week the new head of the Department of Homeland Security, Jeh Johnson removed James F. Tomsheck as head of internal affairs for the CPB. Tomsheck’s defenders say he is being scapegoated for bigger problems.
For years, Tomsheck wrestled with larger, more established watchdog agencies at the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — all with jurisdiction over Border Patrol misconduct.
As a result, Tomsheck’s hands often were tied because of interference from these other agencies and even senior Customs and Border Protection officials, especially when it came to disciplinary action, said James Wong, who retired as Tomsheck’s deputy in late 2011. [..]
In some cases, Tomsheck’s office was kept in the dark about investigations or shielded from information. Wong said the office often was told that the FBI and homeland security inspector general were handling investigations and had minimal access to those cases. It would be months or years before internal affairs could conduct its own reviews of alleged misconduct or shootings to learn whether agents had followed policy.
In particular, Wong pointed to the June 2010 shooting death of Sergio Hernandez Guereca, a 15-year-old Mexican citizen who was gunned down near El Paso, Texas. The inspector general, senior Customs and Border Protection officials and others blocked the internal affairs office from significant information about the shooting, Wong said.
The Justice Department eventually declined to prosecute the agent involved. [..]
Ronald T. Hosko, who recently retired as the head of the FBI’s criminal investigative division, agreed that Tomsheck’s office was undermined by turf battles, and he never knew Tomsheck to back away from an investigation.
MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and John Stanton, Washington bureau chief for Buzzfeed discussed the “opacity” of the CBP and Tomsheck’s dismissal just as he was due to testify before Congress,
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