Posted on 06/05/2002 12:10:46 AM PDT by kattracks
No matter what their politics, many will agree that on Sept. 11, it was still essentially Louis Freeh’s FBI.In the aftermath of Sept. 11, Freeh has been almost an anonymous figure, as far as the media are concerned.
Still, Freeh, a former bureau agent, prosecutor and federal judge, has been the most influential FBI director since J. Edgar Hoover.
And it was Freeh who had been at the helm of the nation’s premier law enforcement agency for more than eight years, compared to the mere days of tenure for newcomer Robert Mueller.
But what kind of FBI was Louis Freeh’s?
What might surprise some is that – remember, this was after the first bombing of the World Trade Center – it was well-funded and clearly understood terror pre-emption as job one.
Bill Clinton's 'Best Possible Person'
Freeh had been launched as director in 1993 as Bill Clinton’s golden boy, "the best possible person to head the FBI as it faces new challenges and a new century.”
Clinton critics noted at the time of Freeh’s appointment that former U.S. attorney Robert Fiske had put forth Freeh’s name to Clinton legal counsel Bernard Nussbaum.
Janet Reno Again
That Fiske was later appointed by then-Attorney General Janet Reno as the special counsel to investigate Clinton, Nussbaum and the Clinton’s Whitewater dealings made some Republicans jittery about Fiske’s and Freeh’s impartiality. At the time of Freeh’s 1993 installation, Clinton emphasized that the FBI "operates in a new and challenging world. Terrorism once seemed far from our shores, an atrocity visited on people in other lands. Now, after the attack on the World Trade Center, we know that we, too, are vulnerable.”
Brave new beginnings for a brave new FBI, but a refrain that is now all too similar to the latest promised renaissance of the bureau.
Today, Freeh heads personnel and security for the Delaware credit card company MBNA Corp., a prosaic position for the former top G-man.
Spurned by New Jersey
Surprisingly, Freeh missed the cut to be head of New Jersey’s homeland security task force, a post made all the more sensitive because of the unhappy fact that some of the 9-11 plotting and recruiting went on in the Garden State.
Despite Freeh’s infamous computer illiteracy (he never used e-mail) and the introduction of an expensive but faulty computer system on his watch that contributed to the Timothy McVeigh file debacle and a one-year backup at the FBI’s crime lab, the bank security executive now sings the praises of those same magic computer boxes as the key tools of the anti-terror trade.
Last month at a speech in Cleveland, for instance, Freeh chortled over the digital age, as if enthralled with a new toy. He noted with wonder that the Internet was an amazing resource for bomb recipes, some made with easily obtained ingredients.
"We know that the potential for use of these weapons is enormous,” he confided.
The Patriot Act is a "mild” response to the terrorist threat, considering the country’s mood, he added.
Just a month after the Sept. 11 attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon, Freeh lamented in a speech to security industry executives that investigators lacked the ability to decipher encrypted messages on the Internet and needed legislation to compel software companies that manufactured encryption programs to unlock the messages’ secrets.
Freeh and Zacarias Moussaoui
In a choice of anecdotes now sublimely ironic because of the recent Zacarias Moussaoui laptop tale of bungled opportunities, Freeh described how Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, convicted in the 1993 bombing of the WTC, disclosed to the FBI a plot to place bombs aboard 11 U.S. air carriers flying over the Pacific Ocean, plans to assassinate the pope, and a terror attack scenario featuring poison-laced explosives planted in the WTC.
Yousef’s maniacal blueprints for the attacks were on an encrypted file left behind in a computer found in a Manila apartment, the director noted, decrying the fact that it had taken agents weeks to decrypt the plan.
"We don’t have a computer, nobody has a computer, that will break it down in real time,” he complained.
Yet just months later, it was Freeh’s FBI that balked at examining the contents of Moussaoui’s laptop, that magic black box coveted by a guy whose keen interest was in learning to fly planes without the benefit of instruction in taking off and landing.
Plenty of Money
And if there was a dearth of hardware and software to swiftly crack the nettlesome Yousef code, was it for lack of funds or resources flowing to Freeh’s FBI?
No, according to the agency’s hefty receipt books. From 1994 to 2001, Congress increased the FBI’s counterterrorism budget from $79 million to $372 million – a nearly 500 percent windfall.
And Freeh effectively lobbied for the largesse by consistently preaching about the rigors of fighting the nation’s first undeclared war on terror.
"In the aftermath of the World Trade Center bombing,” he testified in 1994, "the U.S. must maintain credible defenses and constant vigilance against those groups who would terrorize the citizenry of this country.”
But on his watch, in 1995, a laboratory built with counterterrorism funds was being used to augment the standard forensics operation.
Funds Diverted
That same year, many of the 1,000-plus agents that the FBI hired via $83 million in counterterrorism funds were trained and put on duty as regular street agents.
Also in 1995, about half of a $5 million pot for counterterrorism intelligence analysts was moved over to a computer crime center.
Through it all, Freeh oversaw his bureau as legislation and executive proclamations moved it ostensibly to center stage, where it was to serve as the salient tool to foil domestic terrorist attacks.
And to some extent that evolution brought forth worthy developments, perhaps the most noteworthy being the establishment of legal-attache offices in 44 countries.
To this day these well-conceived mini-bureaus garner valuable intelligence for FBI analysts and maintain liaisons with foreign law enforcement agencies.
Glorified Secretaries
Unfortunately, in Freeh’s FBI too many of those analysts were glorified secretaries, according to former FBI agent and 30-year veteran I.C. Smith.
"They were paid as intelligence analysts,” he notes, "but many times their actual function was more clerical in nature.”
Also on the good side, Freeh established "joint terrorism task forces” designed to bond the famously insular FBI with state and local police and local prosecutors.
But Freeh critics are quick to point out that old bureau habits died hard. While laboring with the Department of Justice to frame a five-year national counterterrorism plan, drafters managed to exclude any role for state and local governments.
By the beginning of the end of the Freeh directorship, despite all the money and good intentions, the bureau’s inertia as a Hooveresque cops-and-robbers institution prevailed.
In 1999, Freeh gamely admitted that his intelligence analysis capabilities were "deficient.”
And the rest is history.
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Otherwise, just demolish the building, and bury the pieces at WACO...........FRegards
Another visit??? Oh no.......
We see this now in the reorganization process recommended by Mueller and Ashcroft. Shuffling the chairs and hiring more individuals is NOT going to make the FBI more efficient or responsible.
In fact it will enable the incompetents to throw more bodies in front of themselves to hide behind. So goes our national security and law enforcement.
Spot-on, meenie! When someone cleans-house, then we'll know they're serious!
GWB can reform the FBI if he wants to, and return it to its original mission, but I don't think that's what he's got in mind!
RepublocRATS piss me off! Stay well and vigilant..........FRegards
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