Cox News Service
9-11 commission takes FBI to task
Wed Apr 14, 2004 22:38
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9-11 commission takes FBI to task
By REBECCA CARR and GEORGE EDMONSON
Cox News Service
http://www.rockymounttelegram.com/news/content/shared/news/stories/0414_911commission.html;COXnetJSessionID=A9m09m2PtW1z0p3R5KHo3Pl2aZ93w9S32KoE45AbhP7PRv1e8pc1!-244071796?urac=n&urvf=10819928842330.3942282933710256

WASHINGTON -- Attorney General John Ashcroft defended himself Tuesday against charges that he discounted terrorist threats in the months leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and said during the Clinton administration "our government had blinded itself to its enemies."

The national commission investigating the attacks heard day-long testimony from past and current Justice Department officials about the intelligence failures leading up to the al-Qaida strikes on New York and Washington. The day was marked by finger-pointing and one administration blaming the other for the failure to detect that al-Qaida intended to attack.

Former Acting FBI Director Thomas Pickard testified that he warned Ashcroft about a growing number of terrorist threats, but the attorney general said he didn't want to hear about the threats.

Ashcroft sharply denied Pickard's recollection. "I did never speak to him saying that I did not want to hear about terrorism," Ashcroft said.

The testimony followed several weeks of bitter partisan rancor over which administration is at fault for the failure to detect the impending al-Qaida attacks. In a day of harsh judgments and strong assessments, Ashcroft struck hard at the Clinton administration.

"We did not know an attack was coming because for nearly a decade our government had blinded itself to its enemies. Our agents were isolated by government-imposed walls, handcuffed by government-imposed restrictions, and starved for basic information technology," he said. "The old national intelligence system in place on Sept. 11th was destined to fail."

A staff report for the commission, formally known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, portrayed the FBI as an agency that was ill-prepared to confront the emerging threat of radical Islamic terrorists striking the United States.

The bureau lacked focus, the ability to conduct strategic analysis of terrorist threats and the resources to fight terrorist crimes, according to a 12-page report by the commission's investigators.

The bureau operated in a "decentralized" fashion, failing to share key information with other intelligence gathering agencies as well as within its own ranks. The commission's report supports the findings of a yearlong congressional investigation by the join House and Senate Intelligence committees into the intelligence failures leading up to the attacks.

And the FBI failed to address the millions of dollars flowing to extremists such as al-Qaida.

"The FBI lacked a fundamental strategic understanding of the nature and extent of the al-Qaida fund-raising problem within the United States," the staff report states. "As a result, the FBI could not fulfill its responsibility to provide intelligence on domestic terrorist financing to government policymakers. /././FBI agents simply kept tabs on these fund-raisers, even as millions of dollars flowed to foreign Islamic extremists."

Thomas H. Kean, chairman of the commission, said the commission's findings were "an indictment of the FBI over a long period of time."

Ashcroft said he moved decisively to counter Clinton administration policies. He said he immediately addressed a "failed policy" when he took office that required law enforcement agents to capture terrorist leader Osama bin Laden for criminal prosecution, but not kill him.

"This program was crippled by a snarled web of requirements, restrictions and regulations that prevented decisive action by our men and women in the field," Ashcroft said. "Even if they could have penetrated bin Laden's training camps, they would have needed a battery of attorneys to approve the capture."

Within one month of taking office, Ashcroft said he met with Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, on March 7, 2001, to recommend that the policy be expanded to allow "lethal action."

"We should find and kill bin Laden," said Ashcroft recalling the meeting with Rice. Rice agreed and ordered CIA Director George Tenet to make the necessary changes to the Clinton administration policy to capture bin Laden, according to Ashcroft.

Commissioner Slade Gorton, a former Republican senator from Washington, asked Ashcroft whether the orders had been expanded.

Ashcroft said no changes had been made before Sept. 11, 2001, because "a judgment was reached that rather than a specific change, that any change should be made as part of an integrated new set of directives."

"I take that as an answer in the negative," Gorton said.

At least two commissioners told Ashcroft that they believed a memo recently made available to them would counter his view of the Clinton administration's covert activities toward bin Laden.

Fred Fielding, a lawyer who served with George W. Bush's presidential transitional team, told Ashcroft that he believed it "may alter your evaluation of existing authorities in February of 2001."

Richard Ben-Veniste said after the hearing that the document was among those from the Clinton administration held by the White House and recently turned over to the commission.

Ben-Veniste, a former Watergate prosecutor, and others said they could not discuss the contents of the highly classified document. But they left little doubt that it was clear in directing U.S. efforts to kill bin Laden.

In addition, Ashcroft blamed a legal "wall" erected during the Clinton administration for the some of the major intelligence failures leading up to the al-Qaida attacks. The wall essentially separated criminal investigations from intelligence operations.

"The wall left intelligence agents afraid to talk with criminal prosecutors or agents," Ashcroft said. "In 1995, the Justice Department designed a system destined to fail."

Earlier in the day, former Attorney General Janet Reno disputed that such a wall existed. "There are simply no walls or restrictions on sharing the vast majority of counterterrorism information," Reno said. "There are no legal restrictions at all on the ability of members of the intelligence community to share intelligence information with each other."

But Ashcroft released a recently declassified memo written by former Deputy Attorney General Jamie S. Gorelick in 1995, now a member of the commission, that outlined a perceived need to separate criminal and intelligence investigations.

The memo, which was declassified three days ago, is entitled: "Instructions on Separation of Certain Foreign Counterintelligence and Criminal Investigations."

The memo states that the administration officials believed, "it is prudent to establish a set of instructions that will clearly separate the counterintelligence investigation from the more limited, but continued, criminal investigations."

This so-called wall impeded the investigation into Zacarias Moussaoui, the French citizen now awaiting trail for allegedly conspiring with the al-Qaida terrorists who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks, Ashcroft said.

It also impeded the investigation into Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, two of the 19 al-Qaida terrorists who hijacked commercial aircraft on Sept. 11 and turned them into missiles.

When the FBI learned in August of 2001 from the CIA that the pair had slipped into the country, officials at FBI headquarters in Washington refused to allow criminal investigators who knew the most about al-Qaida attacks to join the hunt for the suspected terrorists, Ashcroft said.

Before the al-Qaida attacks, terrorism cases were viewed as the "backwaters" of the bureau, staff investigators found, because they did not yield high statistics in arrests, indictments and prosecutions -- areas of law enforcement that are traditionally rewarded.

As the threat from terrorists grew during the 1990s, former FBI Director Louis Freeh faced the choice of whether to "lower the priority the FBI attached to work on general crime, including the war on drugs, and allocate these resources to terrorism," the staff report states.

While the FBI designated "national and economic security" as its top priority in 1998, the Justice Department's inspector general found that it did not shift its human resources accordingly, according to the report. The FBI's counterterrorism budget tripled during the mid-1990s, but the FBI's spending on counterterrorism remained constant, according to the report. By 2000, there were twice as many agents devoted to drug enforcement as there were to counterterrorism, the report found.

Freeh, who was the director of the bureau during the Clinton administration, acknowledged that the bureau faced significant problems in its ability to analyze terrorist threats.

The staff report noted that repeated attempts to improve the bureau's counterterrorism efforts failed, including one to bolster its analytical abilities. An internal review found that 66 of the bureau's analysts were "not qualified to perform analytical duties," according to the staff report.

"Did we have a deficiency with respect to analytical capability? Absolutely," said Freeh, noting that he raised the issue during congressional appropriation hearings to no avail. The money allocated by Congress was never enough, he said.

Overall, Freeh defended the FBI's handling of terrorist incidents, saying he did not agree with Kean's assessment that the bureau is ill-equipped to handle terrorism investigations.

Freeh, as well as Reno, rejected the idea of forming a domestic intelligence agency like MI-5 in Britain, saying it would be equivalent to creating a "secret police" force and that the American public would not stand for that.

While Reno sprinkled her testimony with praise for Freeh, she also delivered a reserved criticism. "It was common knowledge that the bureau didn't know what it had" and it had trouble sharing what it did have.

"The right hand didn't know what the left hand was doing," she said.

Rebecca Carr and George Edmonson are Washington correspondents for Cox Newspapers.

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