Here are some quotes from WILLFUL BLINDNESS (2008) by a key prosecutor of WTC 1993, Andrew McCarthy. They bear on possible lessons learned in WTC 1993 prosecution bearing on the AMERITHRAX investigation.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=WILLFUL+BLINDNESS&x=10&y=20
—”[L]aw enforcement is a very effective propaganda tool in the hands of policy makers who don’t see the need, or who lack the will, to adopt more controversial, preemptive approaches to national security challenges. The criminal justice process presents limitless opportunities to choreograph the ‘illusion of progress.’”
—”To make the case that cried out to be made, to ensure that we were neutralizing the ringleaders, we had to abandon any pretext that time had begun a few minutes after noon on February 26, 1993. We would have to go back. We would have to lay bare the history, the radicals’ ideological bond, and the years of methodical planning... Necessarily, that would mean also laying bare the gory details of government awareness, timidity and incompetence in the face of a gathering threat.”
—”When, moreover, there is any dispute about whether a sensitive piece of information needs to be disclosed, the decision ends up being made by a judge on the basis of what a fair trial requires rather than by the executive branch on the basis of what public safety demands.
—”For agents schooled to regard their very thoughts, never mind their reports, as “top secret” information, it had to be unnerving suddenly to be saddled with prosecutors — attorneys depicted by even the criminal investigators who liked them as defense lawyers in training — entirely too ready, under the rubric of ‘due process,’ to reveal extensive information to the bad guys.”
—”Much of the CIA’s knowledge, particularly that drawn from its covert operations, is top-secret intelligence. When an Agency analyst gives the kind of briefing I needed on Afghanistan, it is certain to be based on at least some classified information, including intelligence from deep-cover operatives, from foreign countries, and from electronic surveillance the CIA was lucky enough to set up on just the right telephone or meeting place. Such intelligence is sometimes confined to a circle so tight its revelation would blow its source.
—”The ‘rule of law’ was our trust. But the very phrase implies that everyone being ruled by the same law. That’s not true outside our country where the CIA operates.”
—”There are — hard as this may be to believe — things more important than legal cases. That kind of information is collected to anticipate the next moves of dangerous actors who mean us harm and can’t be reached by law. It must be accessible only to those who need to know it in order protect the United States.”
—”In Peshawar, both in 1985 and several times thereafter, Abdel Rahman would enjoy the august company of his former student Mohammed Shawky al-Islambouli, a fixture there. A rising jihadist star in his own right, Shawky’s prominence owed much to his mythogenic brother...”
—”Bottom-line: the woeful tale of Abdel-Rahman’s breathtakingly unrestricted travel in and out of the United States, even as he urged Muslim radicals to attack and destroy our country, it is not sinister. It is, instead, a story of inefficiency, political correctness, and incompetence.”
—”[A] consequence of treating the World Trade Center bombing solely as a crime rather than an act of war was the tunnel-vision self-imposed on our intelligence by reliance on the usual process.”
—”[I]n small compass, [Ali Mohammed] is the story of American intelligence and radical islam in the eighties and nineties: the left hand oblivious not only to the right but to its own fingers ... while jihadists played the system from within, with impunity, scheming to kill us all.”
—”There is no way to sugar coat it: Ali Mohamed is a window on breathtaking government incompetence.”
—”In the war against radical Islam, the great calling of our generation, what was true when the enemy declared war fifteen years ago remains true today. If we are too obsessed with law and liability, we are shrinking from our highest duty: to protect lives.”
—”I raised holy hell ... that I strongly suspected Mohamed was a terrorist, that the FBI should be investigating him rather than allowing him to infiltrate as a source ... Because, you know what they say “IMAGINE THE LIABILITY.”
http://www.statesman.com/news/content/news/stories/nation/05/12/0512cornyn.html
“As written, the federal shield law doesn’t provide protection for all bloggers, Goldberg said, nor should it.
‘It favors mainstream journalists — folks who work for papers, TV stations and radio stations,’ Goldberg said. ‘It needs to apply to certain folks who are only operating on the Web. The question is, who?’
***
They say the House and Senate versions of the shield law would encourage leaks of classified information and make it difficult to prosecute bureaucrats and officials who break the law by disclosing top-secret information.”
Is it classified the method used to weaponize the anthrax was “encapsulation”? Is it classified that “siliconized solution” was used? Is it classified that anthrax lab techs Barq and Wahdan were captured? Is it classified that Ibn Khattab was killed by a poison letter from the Russian intelligence service? Is the motive of the looters who killed Bin Laden’s brother-in-law Khalifa in Madagascar classified? Is it classified what Al-Timimi did for the Navy in the late 1990s while at SRA International? Is some of the work Dr Alibek did under the DARPA grants under a contract with USAMRIID involving the Ames strain classified? Should it have been classified that Al-Timimi was suspected of being an “anthrax weapons suspect”? Are the whereabouts and fate of Aafia Siddiqui classified? Mohammed Abdel-Rahman? Is it classified whether the American Type Culture Collection, to which Al-Timimi had access (ATCC jointly sponsored his bioinformatics program), had virulent Ames strain?
I don’t know. But as author Andrew McCarthy urges, “imagine the liability!”