anonymous
Kerry and Rangel?
Thu Mar 11 12:30:37 2004
65.146.120.2

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/F?r107:1:./temp/~r107C3Tqrl:e23169:INDEPENDENT COMMISSION NEEDED TO DETERMINE FACTS -- (House of Representatives - May 22, 2002)



John Ashcroft seemed particularly eager to set a new agenda. In the spring of 2001, the attorney general had an extraordinary confrontation with the then FBI Director Louis Freeh at an annual meeting of special agents in charge in Quantico, Va. The two talked before appearing, and Ashcroft laid out his priorities for Freeh, another Clinton holdover (though no friend of the ex-president's),

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``basically violent crime and drugs,'' recalls one participant. Freeh replied bluntly that those were not his priorities, and began to talk about terror and counterterrorism. ``Ashcroft didn't want to hear about it,'' says a former senior law-enforcement official. (A Justice Department spokeswoman hotly disputed this, saying that in May Ashcroft told a Senate committee terrorism was his ``highest priority.'')
That was unfortunate, because Freeh, despite his late-tenure interest in global terrorism, had left behind an FBI that badly needed fixing, especially its antiquated evidence-gathering methods. So fouled up is the FBI's communications system that it is almost impossible for agents to send classified e-mails to another agency like the CIA; the effect is that little is shared.

It wasn't that Ashcroft and others were unconcerned about these problems, or about terrorism. But the Bushies had an ideological agenda of their own. At the Treasury Department, Secretary Paul O'Neill's team wanted to roll back almost all forms of government intervention, including laws against money laundering and tax havens of the kind used by terror groups. At the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld wanted to revamp the military and push his pet project, NMD. Rumsfeld vetoed a request to divert $800 million from missile defense into counterterrorism. The Pentagon chief also seemed uninterested in a tactic for observing bin Laden left over from the Clinton administration: the CIA's Predator surveillance plane. Upon leaving office, the Clintonites left open the possibility of sending the Predator back up armed with Hellfire missiles, which were tested in February 2001. But through the spring and summer of 2001, when valuable intelligence could have been gathered, the Bush administration never launched even an unarmed Predator. Hill sources say DOD didn't want the CIA treading on its turf.

And while most of the current controversy is about what America didn't do defensively, Rumsfeld and Bush didn't take the offensive, either. Upon entering office, both suggested publicly that the Clinton administration left America with a weak image abroad.