Posted on 05/07/2004 7:51:58 AM PDT by John W
SOUTH BEND -- Former congressman Tim Roemer said here Thursday that the federal 9/11 commission "has opened up a window into the inner workings and secret decision-making of government that's not been seen in 230 years and may never be seen again."
He also said there is "no doubt about it" that the government, including Congress, the Clinton administration, the Bush administration, the national security council advisers, the border patrol, "you name it, we were slow to move from recognizing a state-sponsored threat, like the Soviet Union, to a brand new, transnational threat like al-Qaida."
According to Roemer, the government wrongly thought that Osama bin Laden was just a financier of terrorism "when in fact he was growing an increasingly lethal and poisonous force that wanted to attack America and kill as many Americans as they possibly could."
Roemer is a charter member of the body, which has been investigating events surrounding the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States. The commission is to file a report of its recommendations later this year.
Regarding that report, Roemer said "there will be surprising information in it, there will be revealing information in it, there will be probably shocking information in it."
So far, the 10-member commission has conducted closed door meetings with President Bush and Vice President Cheney, and has presided over televised hearings, such as the questioning of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.
The former congressman from South Bend was interviewed Thursday prior to his appearance as the main speaker for the annual dinner meeting of the LaPorte County League of Women Voters.
"We think that when 3,000 people die, we should find out the facts, hold people accountable and try to right the mistakes," Roemer said of the commission's role.
"We're not in a position to try to blame people, pin the tail on the donkey or look for partisan culpability," he said. "We want to look back to find the mistakes, so that we can move forward and recommend the needed changes."
Roemer said some of the needed changes might be structural and systemic, such as the creation of a national intelligence director who could better coordinate the disparate and spread-out intelligence community.
If that position is created, Roemer said the new director would not oversee the FBI because of the need to separate foreign and domestic intelligence agencies.
Roemer said another part of the recommendations will be about "the nuts and bolts," such as ensuring that we are doing human intelligence that can penetrate jihadist organizations.
"We can't merely rely on billion- dollar satellites in the sky," Roemer said. "We have to do a better job of getting human beings into difficult situations and getting reliable information about where they're going to strike next, what their capabilities are and what their strategies are in the future."
Roemer said the commission will try to determine how the nation can move from "the old paradigm of the guards and the guns and the gates" that the intelligence community focused on in the past.
"With the Soviet Union, it was guards, guns and gates," Roemer said. "With the jihadists it needs to be terrorists in tents with laptops, driving in a pickup truck across Tora Bora."
Tora Bora is a mountainous region in Afghanistan where the U.S. pursued al-Qaida and the Taliban after the attacks.
Roemer said that there is evidence that part of the current jihadist threat might have been created by the United States.
"It's the largest blow-back in the history of blow-backs," Roemer said. "It's the mother of all blow-backs."
Roemer said he was referring to what may have been the largest covert operation in the history of the United States, which he said occurred in the 1980s in Afghanistan.
According to Roemer, the United States sent hundreds of millions of dollars in training and resources into fighting, through proxy, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.
Roemer said the United States helped create an indigenous force of Afghans and other people coming in from Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Africa, "to help bolster that effort to bring down one of the most powerful armies in the world."
The United States also sent money and weapons, such as the Stinger missile.
"That force, assembled and funded in some parts by America, defeated the Russian army and the Soviet Union left in 1989," Roemer said.
"Some of those same people then started to say, 'If we can defeat the Russians we can certainly go after the United States, they're our next target.' "
After that, Roemer said, bin Laden turned his sights from the Soviet Union to the United States.
"We left a vacuum in Afghanistan that allowed, to some degree, some of the Taliban to have a sanctuary to begin to train people and build their efforts to come after the United States."
Staff writer James Wensits:
jwensits@sbtinfo.com
but will ignore X42 and Gorelick
Our enemies are waiting with baided breath.
Isn't that the idea behind Homeland Security? Another boondoggle in the making.
I agree - perhaps liberals shouldn't have eviscerated the CIA.
THIS is news?
Then what the sam hill is it good for? It is status quo...does someone need to remind this idiot about the following:
The memo grew out of the Justice Department's prosecution of the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center -- the act that apparently gave Osama bin Laden the idea to try again in 2001.
"During the course of those investigations," wrote Gorelick in 1995, "significant counterintelligence information has been developed related to the activities and plans of agents of foreign powers operating in this country and overseas, including previously unknown connections between separate terrorist groups." But Gorelick wanted to make sure that the left hand didn't know what the right was doing. "(W)e believe that it is prudent to establish a set of instructions that will clearly separate the counterintelligence investigation from the more limited, but continued, criminal investigations. These procedures, which go beyond what is legally required, will prevent any risk of creating an unwarranted appearance that FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) is being used to avoid procedural safeguards which would apply in a criminal investigation."
The problem, of course, is that the inability to share information is precisely what hampered federal agents in tracking down the 9-11 hijackers. As Attorney General Ashcroft testified, this artificial wall impeded the investigation into Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker, who was arrested prior to the 9-11 attack, as well as Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, both of whom were identified by the CIA as suspected terrorists possibly in the United States prior to their participation in those terrible attacks. "Because of the wall, FBI Headquarters refused to allow criminal investigators who knew the most about the most recent al Qaeda attack to join in the hunt for the suspected terrorists," Ashcroft told the commission.
We still haven't seen Gorelick on the witness side of the table!
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