Replies

Let me try it this way -- this is recycled crap.

National Review Online
By Mark R. Levin, Contributing Editor
June 3, 2002 8:45 a.m.
Who Blew It?
The recriminations press.

During the last three or four weeks, we've seen a cycle of leaks and spin intended to assign blame for supposed intelligence failures leading up to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. At first, the culprit was President Bush, then the FBI, and most recently the CIA. But how credible are these news stories?

CBS NEWS: BUSH BLEW IT
The first attempt was a leak to CBS News about an August 6, 2001 intelligence briefing in which Bush received generic information about the possibility of terrorists hijacking U.S. airliners. Upon receiving that information, the relevant federal agencies were put on alert.

Immediately, members of Congress, in particular Democratic Senate Leader Tom Daschle and House Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt, claimed that Bush had not shared this information with Congress.

On May 21, 2002, Human Events asked Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham whether he'd received this information prior to Sept. 11. He said: "We've had, we had had reports of hijackings. As to the particular report that was in the President's Daily Briefing for that day was about three years ago. It was not a contemporary piece of information."

There was nothing to this story. And to the best of my knowledge, there are no news reports even suggesting that Bush (or for that matter, Congress) had information predicting, with any specificity, the Sept. 11 attacks.

WASHINGTON POST: FBI BLEW IT
Next, the partial contents of a July 10, 2001 memorandum from Phoenix FBI agent Kenneth Williams was leaked to the press. The media spin at the time was that FBI headquarters failed to act on Williams's warning that suspicious individuals from the Mideast were training at U.S. flight schools, and that the FBI should investigate.

During closed-door testimony ten days ago, some of which was leaked to the Washington Post (May 23, 2002), Williams said he had marked his memorandum "routine" because he didn't expect an immediate response from FBI headquarters, and he never imagined the kinds of attacks that occurred on Sept. 11. That wasn't exactly what administration critics wanted to hear.

TIME: FBI BLEW IT AGAIN
Then came the 13-page, May 21, 2002 memorandum authored by FBI lawyer/agent Coleen Rowley, the media's new darling. Rowley had sought a search warrant to examine the contents of Zacarias Moussaoui's laptop computer. Dare I say, Rowley's memorandum raises a number of questions — about Rowley's actions:

Why did Rowley wait over eight months to write and distribute her memorandum to the FBI director, Time magazine, and Congress? Neither she nor her fawning press provide any explanation. She could have sought whistleblower status on Sept. 12 just as easily as she sought it on May 21. In fact, if she was so certain that the country was in danger, she could have written her memorandum prior to Sept. 11. That would have taken no more courage then writing it on May 21. She did not, and I'd like to know why not.

Item 4 of Rowley's memorandum offers a possible answer to my first question. She writes, in part:

In one of my peripheral roles on the Moussaoui matter, I answered an e-mail message on August 22, 2001, from an attorney at the National Security Law Unit (NSLU). Of course, with (ever important!) 20-20 hindsight, I now wish I had taken more time and care to compose my response. When asked by NSLU for my "assessment of (our) chances of getting a criminal warrant to search Moussaoui's computer," I answered, "Although I think there's a decent chance of being able to get a judge to sign a criminal search warrant, our USAO [United States Attorneys Office] seems to have an even higher standard much of the time, so rather than risk it, I advised that they should try the other route."

Rowley doesn't provide us with some key information. For example, we don't have the full text of the e-mail message she received, in which she's asked why she doesn't pursue a search warrant through the usual channels. We don't have the full text of her e-mail response. And we don't have all the information she provided FBI headquarters in support of a search warrant under the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

The point is that by May 21, 2002, Rowley knew that investigations of events surrounding Sept. 11 had been initiated by congressional committees, with more to follow. In fact, Attorney General John Ashcroft revealed yesterday that the FBI has already turned over thousands of documents to Congress. It's likely that Rowley's e-mail exchange would soon become known. And when it did, it would suggest that there was no sense of urgency by Rowley, and, in fact, that the NSLU lawyer's inquiry to her was dealt with in a rather dismissive manner.

Rowley's memorandum also states:

The truth is, as with most predictions into the future, no one will ever know what impact, if any, the FBI's following up on those requests would have had. Although I agree that it's very doubtful that the full scope of the tragedy could have been prevented, it's at least possible we could have gotten lucky and uncovered one or two more of the terrorists in flight training prior to Sept. 11, just as Moussaoui was discovered, after making contact with his flight instructors. ...

Rowley doesn't say which of the 19 hijackers might have been apprehended, and for good reason. It appears from public reports that the would-be hijackers had completed their flight training by the time Moussaoui was captured on August 16, 2001. In fact, it appears they had already completed their flight training by the time the Phoenix memorandum was written on July 10, 2001. Moreover, while apparently identifying several suspicious Arab flight-school students, the Phoenix memorandum doesn't name any of the Sept. 11 hijackers.

In addition, Moussaoui's laptop computer, the ostensible subject of Rowley's memorandum, contained information about airliners, crop dusters, and wind currents, but apparently no information about the Sept. 11 hijackers.

In other words, rather than — or in addition to — bureaucratic bungling at FBI headquarters, it seems quite possible that Rowley failed to make the case for a search warrant, in which she was required to meet the constitutional probable cause standard.

Indeed, when you cut through the rhetoric and guess work, the Rowley memorandum is far from the bombshell claimed by members of Congress and the media. And the fact that neither Ashcroft nor FBI director Robert Mueller took issue with Rowley speaks more to their political survival skills than to the merits of the memorandum. Both men are under daily assault and undoubtedly thought better of engaging in a public debate with the media's favorite FBI agent.

NEW YORK TIMES: ASHCROFT BLEW IT
Next, Saturday's New York Times (June 1, 2002) reported that

A top secret report warned the director of the FBI in the months before September 11 that the bureau faced significant terrorist threats from Middle Eastern groups like Al Qaeda but lacked enough resources to meet the threat ... [V]irtually every major FBI field office [was] undermanned in evaluating and dealing with the threat posed by groups like Al Qaeda ...

The Times added: "On Sept. 10, Mr. Ashcroft rejected a proposed $58 million increase in financing for the bureau's counterterrorism programs."

There are at least three critical facts the Times ignored:

First, if funding for the FBI and its field operations were inadequate "in the months before September 11," the budget and management decisions that created this situation would have been made by then-attorney general, and current Florida gubernatorial candidate, Janet Reno. Ashcroft had nothing to do with them. Yet, Reno's name doesn't appear in the story.

Second, as for Ashcroft's purported Sept. 10 decision against the $58 million funding increase, how could that possibly have had any consequence since the terrorist attacks occurred the next day — on Sept. 11th?

Third, if Ashcroft had approved the increase on, say, August 10 or July 10 — "in the months before Sept. 11 — "that wouldn't have mattered, either. Ashcroft can only make funding requests. Congress appropriates funds. There's no indication of any kind that prior to Sept. 11 Congress would have acted, let alone approved, a $58 million increase. In fact, as late as Sept. 10, Daschle was still playing politics with the Pentagon's appropriations, claiming that increased defense spending would drain money from the (nonexistent) Social Security trust fund.

NEWSWEEK: CIA BLEW IT
In its current issue (June 2, 2002), Newsweek alleges that the CIA, which had been monitoring the activities of two of the Sept. 11 hijackers as far back as Jan. 2000, failed to track two of them, and failed to inform the INS and the FBI about the suspicious activities of these terrorists. In Newsweek's own words:

[CIA] officials didn't tell the INS, which could have turned them away at the border, nor did they notify the FBI, which could have covertly tracked them to find our their missions. Instead, during the year and nine months after the CIA identified them as terrorists, [the two terrorists] lived openly in the United States, using their real names, obtaining driver's licenses, opening bank accounts and enrolling in flight schools ... [T]he CIA's Counterterrorism Center — base camp for the agency's war on bin Laden — was sitting on information that could have led federal agents right to the terrorists' doorstep. [The two terrorists], parading across America in plain sight, could not have been easier to find.

Let's see if I understand. If the CIA told the INS about these terrorists, they might have been turned away at the border? Is Newsweek talking about the same INS that revealed several weeks ago that it can't locate over 300,000 illegal immigrants in this country, several of whom are suspected of having terrorist ties?

And the most laughable point is Newsweek's assertion that if the FBI had tracked these terrorists, the government may have learned of their mission. Perhaps Newsweek is unaware that in 1995, the Philippine police had already informed our government about a plot to fly U.S. airliners into U.S. buildings; in 1996, the president of the United States deliberately and knowingly refused the Sudanese government's offer to help us capture Osama bin Laden; in 1999, that same president was provided with a federal report reiterating what the Philippine police told us four years earlier, which as recently as two weeks ago he dismissed as opinion and not intelligence information; and in 2000, that same president again ignored an opportunity to capture or kill bin Laden.

Let's get real. Bill Clinton wasn't moved to deal effectively with bin Laden despite his 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, 1996 bombing of U.S. barracks in Saudi Arabia, 1998 bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. The problem wasn't an intelligence failure, but a failure of leadership at the highest level of our government.

In any event, as Newsweek itself reports, by August 23, 2001, "the CIA sent out an urgent cable, labeled immediate, to the State Department, Customs, INS and FBI, telling them to put the two [terrorists] on the terrorism watch list. The FBI began an aggressive, 'full field' investigation." Of course, the FBI didn't apprehend them. This suggests that Newsweek's earlier claim — that the two terrorists "could not have been easier to find" — is false.

I make no excuses for bureaucratic screw-ups or bad decisions. Nor do I accept at face value information from selective leaks, and the accompanying media spin. We deserve the facts ... just the facts, ma'am.