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9/11 commission ponders domestic intelligence agency
Mon Apr 12, 2004 03:16
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9/11 commission ponders domestic intellience agency
http://www.knoxstudio.com/shns/story.cfm?pk=911COMMISSION-04-09-04&cat=WW
By LANCE GAY
Scripps Howard News Service
April 09, 2004

WASHINGTON - There is plenty of evidence uncovered by the 9/11 commission that the U.S. government dropped the ball finding out what al Qaeda sleeper cells were doing in the United States before the devastating attacks on New York and Washington.

Now some members of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States are asking whether Washington needs to create a new super-spy agency to ensure it doesn't happen again.

Commission member Fred Fielding, a well-placed Republican lawyer, suggested this week the United States should consider creating a domestic spy agency like Britain's MI-5, which thwarted Irish Republican Army attacks in England and coordinated intelligence for the British constabulary.

An American M1-5 would operate as a super-agency over the FBI and CIA, but have no law enforcement powers itself. Its job would be to bring together intelligence from state and local governments, the CIA and other federal agencies on potential terrorist threats. If a threat on the homeland were uncovered, it would then pass back to the FBI and other federal agencies orders to take action.

Critics say such an agency would be an uncontrolled nightmare, operating in secrecy and outside of the traditional safeguards against government power needed to protect American freedoms.

They point out that the FBI used to have an intelligence unit, called the General Intelligence Division, which was used to crack down on radicals and political dissenters after anarchists exploded a bomb outside the home of Attorney General Mitchell Palmer in 1919. The Palmer raids of 1919-20 rounded up many immigrants who were found innocent of any crimes.

From 1956 to 1970, the FBI also operated a secret surveillance program collecting "racial intelligence" on Martin Luther King, the late Beatle John Lennon and other political activists the FBI thought suspect. More recently, the FBI was bitterly criticized in the 1980s for its investigations of the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador, a leftist group that FBI agents felt was violating the Foreign Agent Registration Act.

Advocates of the proposed agency argue that putting intelligence functions in another agency without law enforcement powers itself would restrain over-exuberant FBI agents from misusing their authority.

Bob Kerrey, a former Democratic senator from Nebraska, said a way around the bureaucratic turf fights between the CIA and FBI has to be found. He believes the terrorists involved in the 9/11 attacks might have been caught if the two agencies had shared information they had independently gathered.

Local FBI field offices gathered evidence that al Qaeda operatives were in the United States in 2000 and were aware some were taking flight lessons. Commission members say they have identified at least 70 FBI investigations into suspected operatives in al Qaeda cells under way before Sept. 11, 2001.

But the commission found that none of the FBI field offices was notified of CIA intelligence reports in August 2001 warning Osama bin Laden was mounting a major attack in the United States. "Unbelievable news in coming weeks" and "There will be attacks in the near future" were some of the CIA reports in the spring and summer of that year.

In the wake of 9/11, the FBI says it has reformed. FBI Director Robert Mueller has created intelligence units in FBI field offices and has established an office at FBI headquarters to coordinate intelligence-gathering activities. Before 9/11, the FBI had only one FBI analyst tracking al Qaeda. By the FBI's own reckoning, 66 percent of agents assigned to intelligence activities were unqualified for the task.

Mueller is fighting any moves to create a domestic agency, arguing it would take too much time in the middle of a war on terror to create more bureaucracy and would result in more turf battles and roadblocks in the way of successful investigations. Mueller said it represents a "step backward in the war on terror, not a step forward."

Others have suggested the authority of CIA Director George Tenet over domestic spying could be increased.

Tenet already has broad authority to coordinate intelligence gathering activities across the government, but the CIA under its 1947 charter is specifically forbidden to engage in domestic activities. President Harry Truman insisted on the prohibition because he feared CIA agents skilled at overseas extortion and blackmail would use their expertise for political purposes in the United States.

In spite of the prohibitions, congressional hearings in the 1970s showed the CIA was involved in domestic spying activities of Americans.

There is supposed to be considerable sharing of intelligence within the government already.

The White House office of counter-terrorism was created to coordinate intelligence reports gathered by domestic and foreign agencies. Richard Clarke, who headed that agency in 2001, said the FBI attended meetings at which CIA reports on bin Laden's plans were discussed, and Clarke is mystified why that information wasn't conveyed to local FBI field offices.

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks, Congress also passed the Patriot Act, which permits the Justice Department to tell the CIA of secret testimony developed by grand juries about possible terrorist attacks. Major provisions of the Patriot Act are slated to expire next year, unless reauthorized by Congress.

Contact Lance Gay at GayL(at)SHNS.com. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.shns.com
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U.S. weighs new agency based on British model
Does the Federal Bureau of Investigation's alleged weaknesses in gathering, sharing and acting on information about terrorist suspects in the United States require the creation of a new domestic intelligence agency based on the British model? Besides civil liberties and constitutional concerns that could arise from a domestic intelligence agency conducting surveillance of protest groups, Dempsey believes a new agency would only make things worse. Founded as part of the British Military Intelligence Directorate, MI5 collects and analyzes intelligence on domestic security threats and shares it with law-enforcement agencies. Britain's secretive foreign intelligence agency is known as MI6.
http://makeashorterlink.com/?D26112EF7

'Homeland' absurdity
NBC pilot flies in the face of logic and exploits the real-world on terror
Only a profound respect for our free-speech guarantees keeps me from advocating a Constitutional amendment that would make it a crime, punishable by imprisonment and forced viewing of "Are You Hot?" reruns, for TV programmers to authorize or broadcast simplistic melodramas that exploit the war on terrorism - for example, NBC's facile, manipulative "Homeland Security." This two-hour pilot for a prospective NBC series actually has slicker production values and a more able cast than last fall's "Threat Matrix," an action-drama from ABC about an "elite" Department of Homeland Security unit that resembled "The A-Team" more than any real government squad. But "Homeland" is more disrespectful - to our intelligence and to the memory of lives lost in this war - because screenwriter Christopher Crowe tries to be all things to all political positions. One minute, he and director Daniel Sackheim show us Office of Homeland Security honchos agonizing over the jail-cell suicide of a wrongly arrested college professor of Middle Eastern origin ("We don't want a national Gestapo," one declares). The next minute, they gleefully blow up a carload of suspected terrorists with an "FDNY"-emblazoned missile even as the cartoonish villains cackle about what pathetic "women" and "kittens" Americans are.
http://makeashorterlink.com/?O2E011EF7

Sacked WMD adviser: I won't lie
A SENIOR Defence adviser has been sacked after refusing to write media briefings that supported claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Ms Errey claims that on the day before the Iraq war started, she was asked to write what she believed was "sexed-up" propaganda about Iraq's capabilities. The next day - March 20 last year - she went on holiday rather than write what she claimed would have been a misleading briefing. But she was sacked last Monday, after more than nine years at Defence, on "performance grounds". "I felt like I was part of the propaganda machine. As a public servant I shouldn't be expected to write propaganda," she told the Sunday Herald Sun. A superior had instructed her to compile media advice on WMDs for Senator Hill, advice Ms Errey said would have misled the public.
http://www.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,4057,9249982%5E421,00.html

Rumsfeld asked to explain role of private security contractors in Iraq
Thirteen of the most powerful opposition US senators on Friday released a letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld asking to explain the role of civilian contractors in Iraq. "The shocking deaths of four American security contractors in Fallujah have revealed the growing role that private security contractors are playing in Iraq," the letter read. It said contractors -- often ex-soldiers -- operate in a fashion similar to special forces, but they are not under US military control and not subject to rules governing the conduct of American forces. "It would be a dangerous precedent if the United States allowed the presence of private armies operating outside the control of governmental authority and beholden only to those who pay them.
http://makeashorterlink.com/?P4F662FF7

Bush 'told' of planned strike before 9/11
President George Bush was told more than a month before the September 11 attacks that supporters of Usama bin Ladin planned a strike within the United States, The New York Times has reported. Citing an unnamed government official, the newspaper on Saturday said the warning came in a secret briefing that Bush received at his ranch in Crawford, Texas on 6 August 2001. A report by a joint Congressional committee last year alluded to a "closely held intelligence report" that month about the threat of an attack by al-Qaida, the paper said. The disclosure appears to contradict the White House's repeated assertions that the briefing the president received about al-Qaida's threat was "historical" in nature and that the White House had little reason to suspect an al-Qaida attack within the US, The Times said.
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/8C92DFD9-B22D-4A74-B7BA-9880DE027627.htm

LIES A SIXTH GRADER WOULD NOT ACCEPT
For independent investigators challenging the government's position on the attacks of 9/11/01, from the start our best gambit has been to maneuver the government and key officials into tripping themselves up publicly in a way that can be understood by the American people as easily as watching an episode of NYPD Blue. No expert witnesses are needed. No scientific evidence needs to be presented or debated. The suspect lied. And if the suspect lied then the suspect's story is not true. And if the suspect's story is not true then the suspect is, in all probability, guilty as hell or withholding material evidence of someone else's guilt.
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/040804_condi_rice.html

Widespread public criticism of Rice testimony
National Security Adviser Ms Condoleezza Rice’s testimony before the commission investigating the 9/11 attacks has come under generally scathing criticism in newspaper columns.
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_11-4-2004_pg7_51

Bush & Kerry: Sick Psychopathic Skull & Bonesmen
Does it matter to you that both of our presidential candidates – George W. Bush and John Kerry – laid in coffins fully naked and relayed the entirety of their sexual histories while a roomful of other men stood above them and videotaped their confessions? Picture that image in your minds. The homo-erotic ramifications are undeniable, not to mention the utter sickness of it.
http://69.28.73.17/thornarticles/sickobonesmen.html

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