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Probing September 11

Posted on 1/20/02 2:00 AM Pacific by kattracks

Four months have passed since the September 11 attacks, long enough for us to be able to start looking, soberly and intently, at why our intelligence and defense establishments didn't detect the threat and prevent the disasters. America needs to know how the events of September 11 came to pass and what needs to be done to prevent anything like them from happening again. Plans for congressional commissions and all sorts of other inquiries are being tossed around. But, before we get any further along, we need to be sure that the mechanism chosen and the people involved are aimed at an investigation, not an inquisition. In other words, the fault of individuals is one aspect of the investigation, but it is important, as well, that we probe what went wrong with our defenses.

Investigators can learn a lot from the commission that investigated the Pearl Harbor disaster, which is the only comparable event in our history subjected to this type of scrutiny. In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, America wanted to know who was to blame. Obviously someone was: How else could the Japanese catch us unaware and destroy much of our Pacific Fleet so easily? Despite being led by Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts, the investigation made more than its share of mistakes. The Roberts Commission didn't take much of the testimony of senior military officers under oath. The commissioners weren't given access to the secret "Magic" reports, which were decoded Japanese diplomatic and military messages from both before and after the attack. Also, the investigation was done too quickly. Only seven weeks after the attack, the commission reported that the on-scene commanders, Rear Adm. Husband Kimmel and Maj. Gen. Walter Short, were guilty of dereliction of duty. Indeed, they were.

Congress and President Bush will soon have to sort out the proposals for how the events of September 11 will be investigated. One is for the House and Senate Select Committees on Intelligence to conduct a joint investigation, and there are proposals to set up panels of 10 to 12 members. The number of commissioners is less important than who they are and what they are tasked to do. The commission should be composed of experts in intelligence, law enforcement and the armed forces. The commission must not only be given access to all of the secret materials it desires, it should be briefed on and offered access to what we have. It should be given the power to subpoena people and records, include people who are not government employees, and it may need an adjunct panel of representatives of our overseas allies. The commission should be chartered to act in two stages: first, to investigate what happened and report the facts; second, to draft an agenda of changes needed to reduce, if not eliminate, our vulnerability to terrorism. Congress may not be able to resist convening its own investigation, but it probably should do so only after the experts make their report.

CIA 'ignored warning' on al Qaeda

Financial Times
By Gwen Robinson in Washington
Source
January 12, 2002

A former US intelligence agent has alleged that the CIA ignored detailed warnings he passed on in 1998 that a Gulf state was harbouring an al-Qaeda cell led by two known terrorists.

When FBI agents attempted to arrest them, the Gulf state's government provided the men with alias passports, the former agent claims.

The allegation is contained in a controversial new book on US intelligence operations in the Middle East by Robert Baer, a former case officer in the CIA's directorate of operations.

The book, See No Evil, is to be published later this month featuring blacked-out sections which obscure passages that the CIA's publications review board claimed were classified.

An excerpt is being published this weekend by the US magazine Vanity Fair.

After months of acrimonious negotiation last year with the CIA over passages of the book, Mr Baer added further detail after the September 11 terrorist attacks on the US.

Among fresh details are an account of how, after he left the CIA in 1997 and became a consultant in Beirut, Mr Baer was advising a prince in a Gulf royal family.

A military associate of the prince, he said, had last year warned Mr Baer that a "spectacular terrorist operation" was being planned and would take place shortly.

Mr Baer said he also provided him a computer record of "hundreds" of secret al-Qaeda operatives in the Gulf region, many in Saudi Arabia. Mr Baer said that in August 2001, at the military officer's request, he offered the list to the Saudi Arabian government. But an aide to the Saudi defence minister, Prince Sultan, refused to look at the list or to pass them (the names) on.

On the al-Qaeda cell in the Gulf state, which is not named in the book, Mr Baer claims the two men who led the cell, Shawqi Islambuli and Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, escaped arrest and settled in Prague.

The information Mr Baer gave to the CIA was not followed up, he said.

In the book, Mr Baer also claims: That in 1996, Osama bin Laden established a strategic alliance with Iran to co-ordinate terrorist attacks against the US. In 1995, the National Security Council intentionally aborted a military coup against Saddam Hussein, partly orchestrated by Mr Baer, who at the time was working to help organise the opposition. In 1991, the CIA intentionally shut down its operations in Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.

Some of Mr Baer's charges, such as the White House's decision to withdraw support from the Iraqi opposition, are in the public realm.

But a former CIA analyst who specialised in the Middle East said on Friday night: "What's new, and potentially explosive, is the detail - this book will definitely put focus on the issue of the CIA and State Department's handling of the Iraqi opposition."

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Spy Agency Destroys Data, Angering Others In Probe

The Boston Globe
By John Donnelly
October 27, 2001

WASHINGTON - Analysts at the super-secret National Security Agency, acting on advice from the organization's lawyers, have been destroying data collected on Americans or US companies since the Sept. 11 attacks - angering other intelligence agencies seeking leads in the antiterrorist probe, according to two people with close intelligence ties.

Some Central Intelligence Agency analysts and staff members of the House and Senate intelligence committees fear that important information that could aid in the investigation, and perhaps even redirect it, is being lost in the process.

In heated discussions with the CIA and congressional staff, NSA lawyers have turned down requests to preserve the intelligence because the agency's regulations prohibit the collection of any information on US citizens. The lawyers said that preserving the information would invite lawsuits from people whose names appear in the surveillance reports, according to the two, both of whom are former senior US officials.

But people familiar with the NSA, including some who have worked for it, dismiss the idea that the agency needed to destroy the information immediately. Although that's been the NSA's practice in the past, they believe the NSA's own rules allow it to change that practice in the face of the threat of terrorism.

They believe the real reason behind the agency's stance is its longstanding distaste for sharing raw data with other intelligence organizations.

''There are some people in law enforcement who are very unhappy about it, because they need investigative leads,'' said Vincent Cannistraro, former director of counterterrorism at the CIA.

The NSA spies on foreigners and foreign governments, using high-tech operations to intercept phone calls, e-mail messages, and faxes around the world; collecting data from satellite operations; and translating documents in foreign languages.

By law, the NSA cannot spy on a citizen of the United States, an immigrant lawfully admitted to this country for permanent residence, or a US corporation. But it can, with court permission, target foreigners inside the United States, including diplomats.

If, in the course of surveillance, NSA analysts learn that it involves a US citizen or company, ''they are dumping that information right then and there,'' said the second official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

''There's a view of a lot of people in the intelligence community who say, `Wait a minute, it could be useful to the FBI; let them look at it.' It's been the subject of some heated discussion between the agency [CIA] and the NSA,'' said the official.

The NSA yesterday declined to comment on the issue. The CIA also declined to comment.

In the aftermath of the air attacks, former US officials and analysts say that information-sharing has proceeded fairly well between the CIA and the FBI. But their relationships with the NSA have not significantly changed, the officials said. The NSA - which is based in Fort Meade, Md., and operates under the Department of Defense - distributes analysis summaries of its intelligence-gathering to a select number of senior US officials, but it doesn't give its raw data - for example, the transcripts from wiretaps - to anyone. It is such raw data that are especially prized by intelligence analysts because they provide more context and leads than the distilled summaries.

It was unclear whether the government's new Homeland Security Office, led by former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, could help mediate the dispute, current and former officials said.

The antiterrorism bill signed by President Bush yesterday does not address the NSA's sharing of domestic data. It does, however, give the FBI greater freedom to share some of its investigative material with other intelligence agencies.

US Representative Charles F. Bass, a New Hampshire Republican who had served for four years on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said he knows of a long list of problems arising from the rules governing the NSA, as well as the NSA's culture of keeping information in-house.

''I think it could be the biggest information problem that we face,'' Bass said in an interview. ''If somebody is abroad and they even mention the name of an American citizen, bang, off goes the tap, and no more information is collected.'' Once a US citizen or corporation is mentioned, NSA's rules dictate that it must stop that surveillance.

Bass said there should be a further examination of facilitating intelligence sharing. ''For four years, I listened to stories of intelligence failures, and it wasn't due to incompetence of anyone in the system, but that the system is so arcane.''

A congressional outcry in the mid-1970s on US intelligence abuses against American citizens led to many of the federal regulations strictly prohibiting the CIA and NSA from domestic spying.

One senior US intelligence official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said those civil liberty safeguards remain as important today.

''The NSA has good and longstanding reasons to destroy information collected domestically,'' the official said. ''If they do anything short of destroying the information, that smacks of domestic spying, and we have been through that before and don't want to do it again.''

The intelligence official said the NSA did share information ''in cases to ward off a threat.''

But the former US officials said many investigators now were extremely frustrated that many possible leads stemming from the Sept. 11 attack weren't being followed because of the NSA position.

''The intelligence committee staffs on the Hill are pounding hard to get something done on this,'' said one of the former officials. ''It should be done now, but it's going to take this government six months at a minimum to get its act together and get everyone in the intelligences communities in sync.''

Cannistraro said the intelligence agencies have made strides in recent years.

But the issues now with the NSA, he said, illustrate that much more could be done.

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