'Al-Qaeda Brought The Matches'

After getting the silly e-mail responses from Think Progress' readers, most of whom had failed to even read any CQ posts on the subject of Jamie Gorelick or the wall that discouraged any coordination between law enforcement and intelligence operations prior to the Patriot Act, I received a handful from former members of the intel community. One of the more comprehensive came from a CQ reader whom I will call Big Sea. (Anonymity, in this case, is my idea, not the source.)

Big Sea writes about his experiences in several intelligence agencies, which span from the Reagan era to post-9/11. It's long but a must read:

From 1984 until 2002, I worked as a contractor doing mainly threat assessment and projection for most of the USG intelligence services but primarily CIA, DIA, Air Force and ONI. I assert that the main point about the Wall is that it was not a memo or a directive -- it was a culture. There were many walls, throughout the Intelligence Community, as well as between the Intelligence Community and Law Enforcement. Most of these were of long standing and existed for good reasons -- security and protecting civil liberties. But under Clinton, all the walls got taller and new ones were added.

The reason for all this was that the Clinton Adminstration viewed the Intelligence Community much more as a source of potential embarrassment than as a trusted advisor. Lack of a defined national strategy based on a coherent foreign policy -- the "Holiday from History" as it's been called -- coupled with Clinton's personal animosity towards foreign policy in general and the Intelligence Community in particular devalued intelligence. Intelligence is not a magical function that produces answers for any questions posed to it at random, and it works poorly when used in that way. But that is exactly how Clinton used it, or more accurately, let his proxies use it. [Clinton did not even deign to receive the PDB for most of his tenure; Sandy Berger received it and passed along to his Boss whatever he -- Berger -- saw fit.]

Not believing there were critical national security issuses for which the support the Intelligence Community was vital; acutely concerned about the potential for scandals and political embarassements [as only so scandel-plagued an Adminisrtation could be], and having a strong personal distaste for the whole business, Clinton set out to reduce the risk that the Intelligence Community could do him harm by making it as difficult as possible for the Intelligence Community to do anything. He did this thru his appointments, seeing to it that political animals and risk-adverse adminstrators got key postions; by changing the rules by which intelligence could be collected -- for example, banning using people with crimnal associations or "human rights abusers" as HUMINT sources, which meant that no one in the Intelligence Community could talk to a disaffected terrorist; a huge blow that badly hurt our ability to keep tabs on terrorist organiszation after 1998 -- and by building walls.

To give you a concrete example of how far the "Wall" culture went, I offer the following personal anecdote:

In Oct 1999, my group, of which I was lead analyst, was given a task to evaluate threats from about 6-8 different countries. State-sponsored terrorism was one of the threats. In our proposal, we argued that evaluating state-sponsored terrorism without considering the actual terrorists organizations themselves made little sense. We knew this was a bit dicey because terrorists fell under the rubric of "non-state actors" who tended to be dealt with by different organizations than those who dealt with "state actors." The reason for this was that non-state actors [mainly terrorists, drug lords, and mafias] were seen as law-enforcement problems, to be dealt by the FBI, DEA, and such, while hostile states were obviously the concern of the State Dept, the CIA, DIA, and the other intelligence agencies. So terrorists fell in one camp, while the states that sponsored and supported them fell in a another. And of course those two camps were heavily constrained in how they could communicate and cooperate. But our customer, DIA, agreed with us and thought the "wall" issue could be dealt with, and so terrorists were added to the statement of work.

All such projects have a kickoff meeting where we and the customers go over the analysis plan in detail, discussing data issues, security issues, potential problems and limitations, and the scope of the conclusions we expect to be able to produce. Attending our kickoff meeting were us, the DIA team for whom we were doing the analysis, and a CIA rep acting a liaison. Everything went great until the topic of terrorists came up.

At once, the DIA guys explained that maybe they’d been too optimistic about the "wall" issue. Our tasking included suggestions for threat mitigation, and since that was clearly counter-terrorism in this case, that was right out. We can’t give any counter-terrorist advice, they flatly said. OK, we said, what about assessment?

So we starting giving them examples of things we thought we might be able to say. No, we can’t say that, they would say, it still sounds too much like advice.

Well, what about this? we’d ask. Maybe not, they’d say, such-&-such organization vets those kind of conclusions; they’re the experts and we can’t step on their charter.

This went on for more than an hour and finally, somewhat exasperated, we asked them exactly what we could say; what type of conclusions we were allowed to draw. At this point, the DIA guys and CIA rep got together and basically gave us a dump on who in the government was doing what with respect to terrorism and what the rules of cooperation [or lack of it] were. At one point, they started talking about an organization we recognized as being in DIA. Wait a minute! we said, those guys are DIA! If they are working that, then we can say this and this and this!

"Yeah," the head DIA guy said, a bit sheepishly, "they are DIA, but they’re a different part of DIA and we can’t talk to them." [That's the only quote from the meeting where I recall actual words spoken.]

We blinked a few times, and then all consideration of terrorism was dropped from the task. But not before it was pointed out that we and DIA weren’t really counter-terrorism experts [although we were threat assessment experts], that the problem was probably being worked by so-&-so and such-&-such, and that they probably had better data, more experience, more resources than we did.

That is what Clinton and Gorelik's Wall culture did. It just didn't just prevent more effective cooperation and data sharing; it prevented the whole question of terrorism being addressed in a coherent fashion at all. No one was working the problem effectively, but I bet they all thought -- just like we were told – that someone else was. That’s the "I thought you brought the matches" school of intelligence analysis, and that was the end effect of Clinton's intelligence policy: it turned the whole process of intelligence into one big game of "Who brought the matches?"

In a nutshell, the Think Progress assertions on Gorelick suffer from the same problem as the Clinton Administration approach to intelligence work -- a slathering devotion to parsing the meaning of the myriad of rules and regulations and a failure to see their overall effects.

The bureaucracy is such that no matter how high or low the wall was, I don't think we would have prevented 9/11. If we take a look at our agencies today, right now, have we really improved? I think the answer is yes. And that is because we are actually arresting and looking for terrorist ties among those who reside in our neighborhoods.
But that will only go on for so long. Until the next time we all fall asleep into our apathy. You can see it starting now. The only reason the Patriot Act had a chance in Congress this year was because of the attacks in England. No one wants to be on the wrong side of the issue if another attack occurs here in the US.
But until those attacks all the screaming was about the loss of civil liberties because of the Patriot Act. Does that even make sense? The FBI has more options to go after mobsters than after terrorists?
This article by Debbie Schlussel makes a lot of sense to me but I've only posted part of it.

http://www.debbieschlussel.com/archives/2005/08/fbi_would_have.html

FBI Would Have Ignored Able Danger Warnings

By Debbie Schlussel

Many people have e-mailed asking for my opinion on the emerging Operation Able Danger story--in which army intelligence personnel were barred from notifying the FBI about Mohammed Atta.

While I agree that the Pentagon lawyers who stopped the Able Danger operatives from notifying the FBI are culpable, and their behavior is an outrage, my take is different from most conservative commentators.

I really don't think the FBI would have acted on the information. Instead, today, we'd be sweeping under the rug yet more ineptitude by the, unfortunately, "lead agency" in the War on Terror.

Let's look at what the FBI has done with other similar information they received before and, even worse, AFTER 9/11. Let's look at what the agency and its sleazy allies have done to harm brave men who did what the Able Danger men did not--men like FBI Special Agent Robert Wright, who warned the FBI to do something about the Al-Qaeda funding network.

Here's the FBI record:

* Warnings about 9/11 hijackers Khalid Al-Midhar and Nawaf Al-Hazmi living in San Diego and behaving suspiciously according to their informant landlord. (Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer of Able Danger said his group had info on Al-Midhar and Al-Hazmi, too.)

THE FBI DID . . . NOTHING.

* Warnings by FBI Special Agent Wright about an extensive Al-Qaeda funding network in the U.S. (tied to HAMAS funding network). Wright told his FBI superiors that if something wasn't done to stop them, more people would die. More people did die. Still . . .

THE FBI DID . . . NOTHING. THEN, THE FBI FIRED BOB WRIGHT. (It was Customs, now ICE, that fortunately acted on Wright's info.)

* Warnings by FBI investigators about a man named Zaccarias Moussaoui who wanted to learn how to steer planes but not how to take off or land. Warnings by Canadian and French intelligence that Moussaoui was a terrorist who'd trained in Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. FBI agents, including counsel Coleen Rowley, begged to search the hard drive in Moussaoui's computer.

THE FBI DID . . . NOTHING.

The article continues at the link.

Thanks for the link over to here, Enchante. It paints a better picture in my brain.

I really did skip over most Clinton related stories until after the last election. And I'm pretty irritated that 'those people' have inserted themselves into our lives again and again.

I won't be surprised if we find out in another few years that Clinton didn't really do much president-work day-to-day, but instead goofed off while Hillary and her army of lawyer buddies just tied everything into silly knots.

Remember her Health care plan? I wonder how many departments she organized in a similar fashion behind closed doors...

Pinz

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