Topic: Fbi Budget

The hosts discuss how the FBI's exposure of General Petraeus's affair serves as another example of interagency warfare over congressional budget allocations. Rapoport explains that while these battles happen at one level, higher levels of the "pyramid" involve long-range planning by elites. He uses an elevator analogy to describe how different players and objectives become visible depending on how high one goes in understanding global power structures.

The FBI receives approximately $3 billion annually for counterterrorism, which is significantly more than the funding allocated for organized crime or financial fraud. This budget creates a bureaucratic necessity to produce "terrorists" to justify continued funding to Congress. With a near-perfect conviction record and the failure of entrapment defenses in court, the FBI has little incentive to alter its practice of manufacturing cases through mandatory minimum sentencing and guilty pleas.