Posted on 03/21/2004 8:03:29 AM PST by Brian Mosely
NEWSWEEK: In the Months Before 9/11, Justice Department Curtailed Highly Classified Program to Monitor Al Qaeda Suspects in the U.S.
Sunday March 21, 10:51 am ET
Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism chief of the national-security staff, tells Newsweek that at an April 2001 top-level meeting to discuss terrorism, his effort to focus on Al Qaeda was rebuffed by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. According to Clarke, Wolfowitz said, "Who cares about a little terrorist in Afghanistan?" The real threat, Wolfowitz insisted, was state-sponsored terrorism orchestrated by Saddam Hussein.
In the meeting, says Clarke, Wolfowitz cited the writings of Laurie Mylroie, a controversial academic who had written a book advancing an elaborate conspiracy theory that Saddam was behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Clarke says he tried to refute Wolfowitz. "We've investigated that five ways to Friday, and nobody [in the government] believes that," Clarke recalls saying. "It was Al Qaeda. It wasn't Saddam." A spokesman for Wolfowitz describes Clarke's account as a "fabrication." Wolfowitz always regarded Al Qaeda as "a major threat," says this official.
Clarke tells Newsweek that the day after 9/11, President Bush wanted the FBI and CIA to hunt for any evidence that pointed to Iraqi strongman Saddam Hussein. Clarke recalls that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was also looking for a justification to bomb Iraq. Soon after the 9/11 attacks, Rumsfeld was arguing at a cabinet meeting that Afghanistan, home of Osama bin Laden's terrorist camps, did not offer "enough good targets." "We should do Iraq," Rumsfeld urged.
Six days after the president's request, Clarke says, he turned in a classified memo concluding that there was no evidence of Iraqi complicity in 9/11-nor any relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda. The memo, says Clarke, was buried by an administration that was determined to get Iraq, sooner or later. In his new book, "Against All Enemies," Clarke portrays the Bush White House as indifferent to the Qaeda threat before 9/11, then obsessed with punishing Iraq, regardless of the what the evidence showed about Saddam's Qaeda ties, or lack of them.
The Bush administration is already pushing back. A White House official tells Newsweek that Bush has "no specific recollection" of the post 9/11 conversation described by Clarke, and that records show the president was not in the Situation Room at the time Clarke recalls. "His book might be called 'If Only They Had Listened to Dick Clarke,'" says an administration official.
As soon as Clarke's charges began appearing in print, Sen. John Kerry, the Democrats' presumptive nominee, put them on his campaign Web site. But for Kerry and the Democrats, the catch is that President Bill Clinton did no better to tame the terrorist threat during his last years in office. As Washington Post managing editor Steve Coll recently showed in his new book "Ghost Wars," those in the national-security bureaucracy under Clinton spent more time wringing their hands and squabbling with each other than going after Osama bin Laden.
Clarke was the White House counterterror chief during the late '90s and through 9/11. A career civil servant, Clarke was known for pounding the table to urge his counterparts at the CIA, FBI and Pentagon to do more about Al Qaeda. But he did not have much luck, in part because in both the Clinton and early Bush administrations, the top leadership did not back up Clarke and demand results.
In his new book, Clarke recounts how on Jan. 24, 2001, he recommended that the new president's national-security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, convene the president's top advisers to discuss the Qaeda threat. One week later, Bush did. But according to Clarke, the meeting had nothing to do with bin Laden. The topic was how to get rid of Saddam Hussein. "What does that tell you?" Clarke remarked to Newsweek. "They thought there was something more urgent. It was Iraq. They came in there with their agenda, and [Al Qaeda] was not on it."
I've been down this route before (it's been a long time now) so it's not going to bother me.
Nonetheless, it does annoy me when people emphatically declare: No one knew! or No one could have guessed! or whatever because it's simply not true. .
Like I said, people should believe what makes them happy. It doesn't matter now.
He interpreted the law as it had always been interpreted and he had experienced 75 abuses of the law by Reno during the Clinton administration!
"in the months before 9/11, the U.S. Justice Department curtailed a highly classified program called "Catcher's Mitt" to monitor Al Qaeda suspects in the United States, after a federal judge severely chastised the FBI for improperly seeking permission to wiretap terrorists"
HERE
"In March of 2001 [right after the Bush administration took over], the government informed the [FISA] Court of an error contained in a series of FISA applications. This error arose in the description of a ``wall'' procedure. The Presiding Judge of the Court at the time, Royce Lamberth, wrote to the Attorney General expressing concern over this error and barred one specifically-named FBI agent from appearing before the Court as a FISA affiant. . . . FBI Director Freeh personally met twice with then-Presiding Judge Lamberth to discuss the accuracy problems and necessary solutions.''
As the Committee later learned from review of the FISA Court's May 17, 2002, opinion, that Court had complained of 75 inaccuracies in FISA affidavits submitted by the FBI...
a memorandum dated April 21, 2000, from the FBI's Counterterrorism Division, [] details a series of inaccuracies and errors in handling FISA applications and wiretaps that have nothing whatsoever to do with the ``wall.'' Such mistakes included videotaping a meeting when videotaping was not allowed under the relevant FISA Court order, continuing to intercept a person's email after there was no authorization to do so, and continuing a wiretap on a cell phone even after the phone number had changed to a new subscriber who spoke a different language from the target. "
The article is a continuation of this "big Lie" coverup:Court Cited Clinton-Era Abuses Suppressed by Networks...
That probably isn't very clear LOL!
So to summarize: the "federal judge severely chastised the FBI for improperly seeking permission to wiretap terrorists" probably refers to Lamberth's reaction to the March 2001 report of Clinton and Reno era abuses.
Last year someone posted a Tancredo testimony in which he claimed INS agents told him that catching and deporting illegals "wasn't their job," they were there to find them food stamps and other social services. Astounding, if true.
"We gave at the office."
But I'm sure its essentially business as usual. Muslims are constantly streaming into this country, as a look around any large international US airport will show you.
I say rebuild the World Trade Center and relocate the Immigration authorities to the top 20 floors of each tower. Until then, they'll remain oblivious to their grave duty to the Citizens of the United States.
I don't know what it was. But assuming from the timimg in the article that it was a Clinton administration program, I'd guess it was illegal.
Reno's FBI was constantly in trouble with the FISC court for overstepping it's powers under FISA. "Catcher's mitt" was probably a Clinton surveilance program that was not legal under FISA before the Patriot Act.
Not much, or at least not much of any great consequence. You already mentioned that there is reason to believe we could have detained and possibly deported a few of them (although it's unstated that this would have amounted to a much more involved, comprehensive INS sweep than just picking out a few key individuals, who weren't especially distinguishable from the illegal masses). However, there is little reason to think that this would have prevented the eventual attacks.
Do you really think that banning fingernail clippers at that time would have stopped the attacks?
No. As a matter of fact, my personal opinion is that the only thing that is much likely to prevent comparable attacks at this time is that passengers are now likely to resist and seize or crash the plane.
...do you think the administration would have been able to overcome the bureaucratic inertia and change things before an attack occurred?
Certainly not. One of the key reasons being that there was simply not that much apparent cause for alarm. That's a somewhat cold statement in hindsight, but the fact of the matter is that no one envisioned that the World Trade Center towers would collapse. I mean, it still would have been an ugly event if planes crashed into the buildings, but we are talking about several lower orders of magnitude than what actually ended up happening.
The WTC buildings were designed to remain standing in the event of a plane crash. Everyone who had examined the matter knew that. Some have said that the buildings should have been evacuated immediately but even John O'Neill, the former head of FBI counterterrorism - who was then head of WTC security - did not see fit to order an evacuation on 9/11.
While it was no shock to people long familiar with Al Qaeda's tactics and objectives, it is nonetheless true that a lot of things unfortunately came together just right for them to pull off what actually happened and wreak the level of destruction that they did.
In hindsight, it's easier to just say that no one could have imagined they might fly planes into buildings, even though people certainly did and had concrete evidence to expect just that (as linked above).
"in the months before 9/11, the U.S. Justice Department curtailed a highly classified program called "Catcher's Mitt" to monitor Al Qaeda suspects in the United States, after a federal judge severely chastised the FBI for improperly seeking permission to wiretap terrorists"
Don't lay this at the feet of the judge. The Justice department could have continued the program, merely having FBI agents follow the law. Instead, they bagged the program because, apparently, it was too much trouble to have FBI agents follow proper procedure. Like a petulant child, Justice essentially said, "well, if you won't let us play the game the way we want to, we not going to play at all."
And you think this is the judge's fault?
Bush has done more to fight terrorism in a year and a half than Clinton did in 8 years.
It's personal to me.
My daughter worked in the World Trade Center #2 96th floor in 1993 when the murderers tried to topple the towers the first time.
My next door neighbor, a Cantor Fitzgerald broker, had a habit of driving in early to work to avoid the traffic.
He was murdered on Sept 11, 2001.
Richard Clarke, this morning's media darling, blocked Clinton administration officials at every juncture during the late 1990s when they dared to outguess his so-called expertise and tried to think of ways to take the fight to Al Quaida.
What a laugh that he comes out in an election year with a book to sell.
It's arrogant primmadonnas like him who get US into defensive positions.
That's quite a leap!
Of course we don't know just what "catcher's mitt" was, but it sounds like a wide net surveillance operation that simply would not be allowed under the law no matter how it was dressed up.
There is no reason to think that legally permissable means to achieve the same goal were not continued.
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