Executive Privilege Again Six years ago the Rifleman claimed that the F.B.I. had promised him immunity from prosecution for his killings � allegedly including a couple of his girlfriends � but Federal Judge Mark Wolf, in a landmark decision, ruled that nobody in law enforcement had the power to sanction murder. The New England F.B.I.'s long-running abuse of power is "the greatest failing in federal law enforcement history," according to James Wilson, chief counsel to the House Government Reform Committee. Evidence of this sustained miscarriage of justice was the 30-year imprisonment of Joe Salvati, whom F.B.I. officials are said to have known to be innocent of the crime for which he was convicted � but they remained silent to protect Mafia sources. John Ashcroft's Department of Justice does not want Congress to air out this long, shameful story. At the time J. Edgar Hoover belatedly began his war on the Mafia, civil liberty was set aside to meet the perceived emergency � abuses that lasted through three decades. The current F.B.I. chief, Robert Mueller, was U.S. attorney in Boston during the mid-80's and presumably did not have an inkling about the unlawful law enforcement going on around him. Accordingly, the Bush Justice Department induced the president to sign an order asserting executive privilege over its "deliberative documents" that would inform the public of answers to questions like: Why did Justice decline to indict an F.B.I. supervisor who admitted taking money from Flemmi's gang? Why did Justice help defend a hit man in California who killed a man while in the witness protection program? http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/03/opinion/03SAFI.html