Posted on 07/12/2002 1:35:06 PM PDT by PatriotReporter
Trulock Sees Cover-up of Intelligence Failures
Wes Vernon, NewsMax.com
Friday, July 12, 2002
WASHINGTON – Battle-scarred whistle-blower Notra Trulock says leftists in Congress and in the media are covering up the intelligence failures before Sept. 11, possibly in the interest of protecting operatives who fell down on the job and "smoothing over” the intelligence meltdown that occurred during the Clinton administration. Trulock took strong exception to a story in Thursday’s Washington Post saying that "after six months of culling through intelligence files and dozens of closed-door hearings,” a joint House-Senate panel had "uncovered no single piece of information” or any evidence "pointing to a single piece on information … that could have prevented disaster” or an intelligence breakdown.
"I think it’s a whitewash. I think it’s a cover-up. And I think it’s a complete charade," said Trulock, whose exposé of the China scandal made him a prime target of the Clinton spin/smear machine and resulted in an FBI raid on his home without a warrant.
Trulock thought the Post’s Watergate-era investigative zeal, evident during the Republican Nixon administration, was missing when it came to holding Bill Clinton accountable. NewsMax.com>
"The metric that the Post is using is that there was no single piece of intelligence that could be construed as a smoking gun. But that is not the way you do intelligence,” according to Trulock, former director of intelligence for the Department of Energy.
"There are bits and pieces that have to be pulled together into a mosaic,” he stressed to NewsMax.com.
Trulock, soon to succeed the legendary Reed Irvine as president of Accuracy in Media, was appalled that any newspaper that takes its investigative responsibilities seriously would put an exculpatory headline like that on its front page after a month of revelations "that clearly would have told people" there had been intelligence failures.
'P.R. Entity'
"For the Post to become nothing more than a P.R. entity for the intelligence community is just a terrible thing to happen at this time in our history,” he said.
In answer to a question from NewsMax, Trulock said a headline in a major mainstream newspaper whitewashing intelligence goofs may hasten the downfall of whistle-blowers such as FBI agents Coleen Rowley and Robert Wright, who have protested the bureau’s failures before the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on America.
The veteran intelligence official had already said it is "a matter of time before Rowley will fall afoul of all of those things that happen to whistle-blowers.” Noting that Rowley has only a couple of years before she’s eligible for retirement, he said, "Hopefully, if she can hang on for two years, then she’ll be safe.
"This is the typical pattern that one sees over and over and over again. There is a flurry, a series of leaks. There is congressional testimony, lots of activity.
"The media then moves on, and sooner or later you have media outlets, particularly the Post, smoothing over the waters, 'Well, this is not really that big a deal, there’s really nothing there, and let’s move forward.'”
NewsMax.com has documented that script playing itself out for decades, going back to Otto Otepka in the 1960s, who was hounded and smeared because he did his job as a State Department security officer and would not give the green light to prospective high-level appointees whose records raised questions as to their eligibility for security clearances
I know that a lot of the Visa's that the terroists had came from the State Department.!!
WASHINGTON – Gary Aldrich, who blew the whistle on shocking security breakdowns in the Clinton White House, says the media are covering up former FBI Director Louis Freeh’s role in the intelligence meltdown during the Clinton years. He also warns that past FBI abuses from that era should serve as a caution signal regarding a willingness in some quarters to sacrifice liberty in the name of security.
In all of the uproar over who knew what and who fell down on the job before Sept. 11, Freeh’s name is rarely mentioned, even though he was the top cop during that entire period, until just shortly before the terrorist attacks on America last fall.
"I don’t see any efforts at all to hold Louis Freeh accountable,” Aldrich told NewsMax.com after a speech sponsored by Accuracy in Media.
He noted that security-minded writers and leaders were making the case for the ouster of Clinton holdover George Tenet as CIA director. But hardly any word about Freeh has turned up in any media discussion of the intelligence failures before 9-11.
There’s "a deeper story here” with respect to the FBI "that people just won’t talk about in this town,” Aldrich said. "And that is the misuse of the FBI resources during the Clinton administration.”
Pursuing Abortion Foes and Movers of Dirt
FBI agents’ activities were micromanaged by Clinton’s Attorney General Janet Reno, the FBI whistle-blower charged. They were told to "investigate such amazingly violent groups as abortion clinic protesters or to have FBI agents going around with camera equipment photographing piles of dirt that had been moved from point A on somebody’s property to point B because this was a major EPA violation.”
Continuing to add up this Clinton-Reno misuse of the FBI, with no apparent protest from then-Director Freeh, Aldrich ridiculed the pattern of "getting agents involved in this organized crime we call deadbeat dads.
"You realize there’s an organized group of dads around this country who are running this cartel designed only for the purpose of avoiding child support payments. Did you know that?” he mockingly asked.
"We’ve had FBI agents chasing these guys all over the country. Of course, the guys we’re talking about here were on the back of garbage trucks or in the lawn care business where they get paid [under the table] cash and are going city to city as transients always do.”
It is this kind of "nonsense that went on during Louis Freeh’s watch," charged Aldrich, whose book "Unlimited Access” blew the lid off the entire lackadaisical approach to White House security under Clinton.
"You people,” he said, addressing his audience of conservative activists, "you people were the people that the Clinton administration wanted to look into to see if you had some plan to drive a truck up to the White House.”
What's Bad for Slick Willie Is Bad for America
In a demonstration of what he called "very self-serving paranoia," Aldrich alleged "the Clinton administration decided that anything that was negative to the Clinton administration was a threat to national security.
"Watch out for that in the current administration,” he added. "Watch out for them using that rationalization to do what they do” in the post-Sept. 11 environment, "because mere protest by citizens is as American as apple pie.”
The veteran FBI agent faults the Bush administration for getting "poor political advice” to avoid raising issues concerning the damage the Clinton people did because "there are some matters and principles that should not be ignored,” among them, the previous administration's abuse of power, such as nearly 1,000 FBI files being given over to a political party for partisan purposes.
It is the Clinton-Reno-Freeh era of abuses that cause Aldrich to view with skepticism part of the Bush-Ashcroft plans for expansion of government power in the wake of 9-11. Many of the problems those proposals attempt to remedy could better be dealt with by applying laws already on the books, he believes.
"We have law on law on layer on layer,” he said in answer to a questioner who stated that he was more concerned right now with whether he and his family would just survive the war on terror than with concerns about abuse of power.
Aldrich responded that laws already on the books are not being adequately enforced in the fight against terrorists. Nor, he said, is it necessary to add a lot of legislation to deal with corporate corruption.
'Take More of Your Liberty'
We have laws "where any one of those executive can be prosecuted and put away for 20 years,” he said. But in fighting terrorists, instead of going after those who pose a danger to us, too many are ready to say, "Let’s go over here and take more of your liberty" of law-abiding citizens.
He cited the GOP congressional primary in Georgia as a classic case of the split between privacy-minded and security-oriented conservatives. Aldrich strongly backed Rep. Bob Barr, R-Ga., who has been redistricted into a race with fellow incumbent John Linder, R-Ga., whom the whistle-blower described as "a fine man,” but one with less emphasis on the crucial privacy issues than is evident with Congressman Barr.
In cover-ups and bias, former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos is "a classic case of what we’re talking about” and "doesn’t even bother to try to hide his politics" in his broadcasts with ABC News, as Aldrich sees it. He recalled that from the time Clinton began his quest for the White House, Stephanopoulos and "Ragin’ Cajun” James Carville "set up a group to do nothing but spin the truth, and hide the truth and lie.”
ABC's 'Professional Liar'
Prior to the election, as well as after he went to the White House, Stephanopoulos was "a professional liar" declared the FBI whistle-blower whose appearance on ABC’s "This Week” after his book's publication in 1996 was allowed over the former Clinton aide’s protest. And when Aldrich did appear, Stephanopoulos put up his colleagues to blindside the author with accusatory questions that attempted to discredit him.
Stephanopoulos is "as good an example” as any of what is wrong with the media today, the former FBI man and current think tank (Patrick Henry Center) executive said.
And yes, he added, you could say he is a living metaphor for the media’s refusal to hold Louis Freeh accountable for what went on at the FBI on his watch.
It seems to me that we would cut off all Visa's and close our boarders.
And let the foreignors pay the price for this terrorists acton America
Not the American citizens.
So when someone's passing out that pixie dust, sprinkle some on me--I'll just say I'm from an island in the Caribbean or South Pacific and DEMAND I be deported immediately.
Just because something comes to light in 20:20 hindsight doesn't imply someone was grossly negligent or asleep on the job. Sure, there were things that the fibbies did that were dumb (aspects of the Moussaoui investigation, the reports of middle easterners getting pilot training) and that might have--MIGHT have--given someone a clue, but the 'mosiac' of facts was a tiny needle in a haystack of data.
The fact is that the intelligence community gets tons of data and has a hard to processing it all in a timely fashion, to say nothing of analyzing and linking it all. Besides, pre-911 we weren't thinking about domestic terrorists attacks by Al-qaeda. Sad to say, but nobody wants to admit the 'failure' is maybe 1% political and 99% technological. Nobody understands the latter so all they can do is scream about the former. Meanwhile the problem is still there...
I'm no apologist for Reno, Freeh or BJ Klinton. All I'm saying is, even with great leadership, that does NOT solve the fundamental problem of 'connecting the dots' when you have billions of dots and very little in the way of tools and manpower to connect them in a timely fashion. We can put better policy and bettter leaders in place and still be very vulnerable: in essence, we're still ignoring the elephant in the middle of the room.
We should construct a 'price list' for what the American People Demand in retribution for the terrorist attacks on our nation. First of course would be Osama Bin Ladens Head on a silver platter followed by the head of Saddam Hussien. Third on the list would be a few Billion Barrels of Oil for free. Extracted by our companies from Iraqi oil reserves. Fourth on the list would be the freezing of all the assets held by Saudi Nationals within this country.
Hows that for a start !
Now if the 'government is always good crowd' would have let independent investigators 'fix' the US governemnt after the Waco and Ruby Ridge incidents, perhaps we would have had a more efficient form of protection from the state. Instead of the bought and paid for lobbyist protective services we have now.
"I think the two dead bodies lying in a pool of blood at LAX on the Fourth of July should give pause to these people who've been relentlessly pushing for 245(i) enactment," Mr. Rohrabacher said.
Mr. Rohrabacher sent a letter to his colleagues yesterday telling them the shooting could have been avoided if Hadayet had been deported while living here illegally. He urged his colleagues to oppose extending 245(i) if it comes up in the House again.
Initially 245(i) was a one-time window of applications, but Congress later extended the deadline through April 2001. Now Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, South Dakota Democrat, has introduced a bill to open another round of applications, and Mr. Bush has on several occasions urged Congress to pass such legislation.
Supporters of another extension say Mr. Rohrabacher is just trying to score political points.
The State Department spokesman yesterday declined to say, as have other department officials, that the department failed to protect the country from the September 11 attacks by issuing those visas.
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The State Department spokesman yesterday declined to say, as have other department officials, that the department failed to protect the country from the September 11 attacks by issuing those visas.
Ok, now think a little harder and you'll find something more substantial to really p*** you off. Airport screening systems flagged about a dozen of these guys for increased scrutiny...but pre-911, the screeners didn't exactly look too hard.
Forget about visas--if the airport screening system in place at the time found them suspicious, but the screeners did not do a thorough enough job...well, that IS a horrendous failure. On the other hand, what did we expect from the high-school dropouts doing airport screening pre-911?
Umm, so, have we replaced them with competent people yet? Oh, you say we now have federal employees doing the screening? Hmmmm...flight insurance...what a bargain...
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