THE 9/11 HEARINGS

NRO - The Corner ^ | 5/19/04 | Andy McCarthy

[swilhelm73]

THE 9/11 HEARINGS [Andy McCarthy] A friend sent me this last night: "Not helpful was today's hearings. The questions usually began with some rheorical grandstanding and then dissolved into broad assertions that missed most of what happened. Listening to Kerrey for instance, you'd think that the NYPD would have been unaware of Al Qaeda without warnings from the White House."

NB: If this is right, it suggests that some Commissioners (can you, ahem, possibly guess which ones?) are planning to skew their report in favor of Richard Clarke's nonsense about how, when he led the Clinton Admin to "battle stations" in 2000, the purportedly dire (but utterly uninformative and largely unknown) terrorism alerts they put out actually led to things like Ahmed Ressam's arrest in Vancouver just before the Millennium -- which, remarkably, Clarke takes credit for in his book, and Commissioners like Jamie Gorelick have credited Clinton with during the brethren-and-sister's not-at-all-politicized public hearings.

In fact, recall from the media reporting that Ressam (with his trunk full of explosives and map of LA Int'l Airport) was stopped at the border by an alert Customs agent who suspected he might be a drug smuggler, not a terrorist. The Customs agent had never heard about any alerts from the White House. As people involved would tell you if asked, the information flow tends to go FROM the field TO Washington. Only in the self-absorption of Beltway-world is it possible to delude oneself into thinking the reverse could be true. Down here on Planet Earth, if it went the other way around, there would be a lot more 9/11s. Posted at 08:23 AM

RUDY CUTS TO THE CHASE [Andy McCarthy] Giuliani was asked whether he thought American intelligence agencies needed to be reformed or restructured -- something the Commission has seemed itchy to recommend. His prescriptions were both more modest and more substantial (and meaningful):

1) Need more Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTFs), combining FBI and local PDs. JTTF was created in NYC in the Weather Underground days of the late 1970’s. In JTTF cases, federal agents and police officers are partners; they investigate the same cases together, which opens communication flow between the agencies. It demonstrates to the FBI in a concrete way the multiplier effect of local law enforcement. (There are about 11,000 FBI agents in the entire U.S.; there are about 33,000 officers in the NYPD in NYC alone). Rudy pointed out that a terrorist attack on the NYC subways was foiled during his time as mayor because an ordinary citizen saw something suspicious and went in and reported it to a local police precinct. Because there was an open line of communication – the JTTF – the local cop referred the complaint to the JTTF, which used its intelligence and resources to mobilize and thwart the plot.

2) We need more human intelligence. We get mounds and mounds of information, and it all says bad people are threatening us. You need an interpreter to figure out what’s urgent. You need operatives to infiltrate these groups. That’s how we dismantle organized crime families and drug organizations. Over the last several decades – no particular administration is responsible for this – we seem to have fallen in love with our high technology and gotten away from the tough, dirty work of human intelligence. But it’s the human intelligence that we need the most. Posted at 09:51 AM

NO NEW DOMESTIC INTEL AGENCY [Andy McCarthy] Giuliani, following logically on his earlier comments, specifically opined that separating the law enforcement and intelligence gathering functions of the FBI by creating a new domestic intelligence agency was not a good idea. The chance of getting the maximum amount of good intel is a combination of the law enforcement and intel functions with all the walls and legal information sharing barriers down -- as they have been since passage of the Patriot Act. A domestic intel agency would be "isolated" and probably less effective than the FBI was when burdened by obstructions to information sharing. Far more important, Rudy reiterated, was increasing the information flow between the federal and local law enforcement agencies. Posted at 10:29 AM

HEARING ATMOSPHERE [Andy McCarthy] It is once again time to broach the delicate subject of whether it is really helpful for the 9/11 Commission to have public hearings at all. The Giuliani testimony was interrupted twice by cat-calling -- no doubt heartfelt but also rude and distorting -- from victims' families. ("Three thousand people murdered is not leadership" was the harangue at Rudy -- whose exemplary leadership cannot objectively be disputed -- as he left the auditorium.)

The public hearings are being broadcast to the entire nation, but they do not take place in front of an audience representative of the nation. Instead, they take place largely in front of a group of loved ones of those who were murdered. Obviously, if it were one of our husbands, wives, children, parents, etc., who were killed on 9/11, chances are we would never be satisfied with the performance of the involved public officials, no matter how well and heroic their performance was -- and no matter that it was in many instances performed at great risk to their own lives. But the hearings are a television event, and the crowd is as much a part of it as the witnesses and the commissioners -- who would not be human if their performances at the hearings were not affected by what they have to know will be the reaction in the room to the things they say. (And as we know, some of the Commissioners and witnesses have at times succumbed to the temptation to pander.)

It can't seriously be argued that the real important work of the Commission is taking place in the public hearing. The truly important work is being done by the Commission staff in hours upon hours of private interviews -- undergone not only by all the people who testify publicly, but the many, many more witnesses who have been interviewed and who have provided tangible documents and other evidence. What goes on in public -- which is how the country forms its general impression of the Commission -- is really not representative of the Commission's total product. Analogously, the reactions of the audience at those public hearings are really not representative of how the general, objective, interested public would take the same information. It is as if the Super Bowl were being played in front a crowd of the players' families instead of regular football fans -- the game would look and feel much different. Posted at 11:02 AM

[Steven W.]

don't these blog entries become in some ways redundant? ie if I want to read NRO blog I go to NRO blog; if I want to read FR I go to FR ...

[swilhelm73]

And if you want to read the WSJ or TAS you can go read WSJ or TAS. The idea of FR is to collect such thought in an easy to read source here. So your point is???

[MEG33]

Skip it if it annoys you...

[Uri’el-2012]

Gorelick needs to stand down !