• Pointing fingers Pointing fingers Attorney General John D. Ashcroft is thinner and paler after his gall bladder surgery, but he still plays hardball in the public arena. Faced with claims that he had given terrorism short-shrift before the Sept.
• Pointing fingers
Pointing fingers
Attorney General John D. Ashcroft is thinner and paler after his gall bladder surgery, but he still plays hardball in the public arena. Faced with claims that he had given terrorism short-shrift before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Mr. Ashcroft took the offensive Tuesday by blaming the Clinton administration for FBI failures.
There is truth in Mr. Ashcroft’s assertion, just not the whole truth.
Mr. Ashcroft blamed Janet Reno’s Justice Department for raising the legal wall between criminal investigators and intelligence agents. As a result, he said, “for nearly a decade, our government had blinded itself to our enemies.”
The Justice Department built the wall to make sure criminal investigators complied with constitutional requirements for wiretaps. It is easier to get a warrant for a foreign intelligence wiretap than for a criminal wiretap. The wall was created to keep criminal investigators from using intelligence wiretaps to gather evidence for their criminal cases.
But the 9-11 commission’s staff concluded that the wall contributed to the failure in August 2001, to search the computer of alleged 9-11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui. That computer contained clues that might have led to the German al-Qaida cell involved in the 9-11 attacks. In addition, an FBI intelligence analyst told an FBI criminal investigator that the “wall” prevented him from helping to look for Khalid al-Midhar, one of the two al-Qaida agents known to have reentered the United States. Less than two weeks later, al-Midhar piloted the plane that crashed into the Pentagon.
Former Attorney General Reno had a point when she said that FBI agents often used the wall to justify their natural tendency not to share their information. In fact, the wall shouldn’t have been an impediment to searching Moussaoui’s computer or allowing the FBI agent to look for al-Midhar, who was a criminal suspect in the bombing the USS Cole.
The 9-11 staff’s report praised Ms. Reno’s “extraordinary effort” in mobilizing FBI field offices in a nationwide “orange” alert in 1999 that foiled al-Qaida’s Millennium bomb plot. “Cabinet-level principals” and National Security Adviser Samuel Berger were heavily involved in the effort.
The 9-11 staff contrasted that with the Bush administration’s response to a similarly high level of threats in early 2001. Cabinet-level principals were not as heavily involved. Many FBI field offices were unaware that there was an alert. And Mr. Berger’s successor, Condoleezza Rice was active, but told the commission that before 9-11 she “did not think she had the job of handling domestic security.”
Thomas J. Pickard, acting FBI chief under Mr. Ashcroft, told the commission that after two briefings in the summer of 2001, “the attorney general told him he did not want to hear this information anymore.”
Mr. Ashcroft denied Mr. Pickard’s account. He said that terrorism was his top priority, even though he turned down a request to increase the counter-terrorism budget on Sept. 10, 2001. He said Mr. Pickard had told him there was no intelligence suggesting attacks on the United States. But under questioning, Mr. Ashcroft acknowledged receiving a summary of the Aug. 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Brief that warned of an al-Qaida attack on the United States.
Former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, the commission chair, said of the FBI, “It failed and it failed and it failed, and it failed.” But Ms. Reno and most of the witnesses were right in advising against the creation of an American version of Britain’s MI5 intelligence agency. That would just create another layer of bureaucracy, and further delay an effective U.S. intelligence response to the terrorism threat — once people stop the finger-pointing.
Instead, the FBI should finally fix its famously defective computer system and create an elite corps of counterintelligence agents who have the language, computer and investigative skills to find the terrorists before they strike.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
