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are you getting any of this?

I'm paying attention. I already told you... I just do not want to be BS'd. I'm making sure, OK? I do not want to get caught up in some other guy's personal feud. And I also do not want to hang some guy for other people's failures. I agree that today at least, it's not possible to claim you don't know who the creeps are. So yeah, a failure to drop these guys like a hot rock now is Not Good. I'm less anxious to hang Norquist for not knowing what Sami al-Arian was doing in his secret life. I didn't know either.

I am happy to hear that you are working on the problem of "it's not my departmnent," because from here it sounds pretty damned stupid to spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year to watch for bad guys, only to have the knowledge of it stop right down the hall from Karl Rove, and the bad guy still gets in to see the President. It is angry-making to hear that stuff, and it is more angry-making to hear the people doing it claim that some K-Street type is supposed to know these things. I think you should lose that part from your presentation. I don't believe for one minute that Grover Norquist is the only guy on L Street who has creepy foreigners trying to be his friends. This stuff is gonna happen, and the system for dealing with it can't be "we rely on the intelligence capabilities of the lobbyists." When I hear that, I want to scream.

I'm less anxious to hang Norquist for not knowing what Sami al-Arian was doing in his secret life.

The people "doing it" are Grover and Saffuri, et al, in this case. We have made that abundantly clear. He DID know who the funders were and so did Saffuri.

As someone who has worked in these vineyards for a long time, and has taken people into two Presidents, I can tell you that it is highly imcumbent on anyone who does so to vet the hell out of the people they bring. When you reach the age and access that Grover has, you are expected to know how to do that and to do so. In this town and level you damned well better know who you are traveling with and who you are hiring and what is attached, as well as imlpied, by your funding.

If you want to speak about "hanging" someone for failures, it is Grover in this case, sorry to say. "Nothin' personal, jes' bi'ness." As we have also made abundantly clear, Al Arian's views and life involvements were very much a matter of public record from the St Petersburg Times to Front Line and myriad articles, books, speeches, etc. not to mention a ten year fight between him and variously the Govt., Emerson, Pipes, et al. Ditto the nature of the NCPPF, which he headed. The fact that you didn't know it means nothing, the fact that Grover did know (or the idea that he failed to find it out) means a lot. Mind you this has gone on since 1998 and several people gave Grover all the information he needed and that you are now learning, including Gaffney, Jack Wheeler, and others whose judgment is quite well respected in such matters, and Grover responded , not by reading or asking for a briefing, but by immediately castigating these fine people in the most despicible manner.

So do yourself and all of us a favor and drop the faux shock about the "claim that some K-Street type is supposed to know these things" or the "every one does it" and "This stuff is gonna happen," exculpations re your L or K street references. The defense is wearing thin, so I seee why you might want to hedge a bit.

I'm glad you are happy I am doing my job. I am glad you want the billions we spend to reach into the White House and tell people who they can meet with or can't whether we have charged them or not --unfortunately the law doesn't allow it. And when the USSS tried, Rove had a fit. (We spent the same money knowing who the "bad" Chinese were, but that didn't stop the Clinton's from letting them in hundreds of times.) I hope you are then also a supporter of Patriot Act and the use of national security evidence that Grover opposes.

I also hope you know want to "scream" at Grover when you hear that he has two weeks ago tried to get the same bunch of "bad" actors into Cabinet level meetings, despite the fact that, as you say, "today at least, it's not possible to claim you don't know who the creeps are. So yeah, a failure to drop these guys like a hot rock now is Not Good." No kidding!

I note that you still have not refuted any facts, introduced any relevant new ones nor otherwise addressed substance.

EXCERPTS of below article to further educate you re procedures, all of which I guarantee you Grover will continue to oppose, just as he opposed the removing of the "wall" which I earlier identified as the single most imporatant change to date and which is reflected below as same. A clue for to answer some of your questions about why certain people are allowed to float awhile//longer:

"We're still interested in the criminal violations that people may be involved in," Pistole said. "But in many cases we are going to put that in the back seat and go down the road until we have all that we need." Solid intelligence approach, Got it? Cheerio.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A60964-2003Dec12?language=printer

FBI Applies New Rules to Surveillance
Many Searches Not Subject To Regular Courts' Oversight

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, December 13, 2003; Page A01

The FBI has implemented new ground rules that fundamentally alter the way investigators handle counterterrorism cases, allowing criminal and intelligence agents to work side by side and giving both broad access to the tools of intelligence gathering for the first time in decades.
......

The new strategy -- launched in early summer and finalized in a classified directive issued to FBI field offices in October -- goes further than has been publicly discussed by FBI officials in the past and marks the final step in tearing down the legal wall that had separated criminal and intelligence investigations since the spying scandals of the 1970s, authorities said.

Senior FBI officials said the changes have already helped the bureau disrupt plans for at least four terrorist attacks overseas and uncover a terrorist sleeper cell in the United States, though they declined to provide details on those cases. The approach also has resulted in a notable surge in the number of counterterrorism investigations, a statistic that is classified but currently stands at more than 1,000 cases, officials said.
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Under previous FBI protocols, terrorism probes could be opened along two separate tracks, one for the purposes of developing a criminal case and one for intelligence gathering. Each was labeled with separate classification numbers, which govern the way cases are tracked and budgeted within the FBI. Sharing between the two categories was sharply limited, overseen by legal mediators from the FBI and Justice Department, and subject to scrutiny by criminal courts and the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
..............
Pistole said that focusing on intelligence gathering will improve the ability of the FBI to prevent, rather than just investigate, terrorist attacks. He and other FBI officials also said the new system will result in less emphasis on bringing criminal charges against suspects in favor of longer surveillance operations. When charges are eventually brought, however, prosecutors will be able to use information gathered through intelligence methods.

"We're still interested in the criminal violations that people may be involved in," Pistole said. "But in many cases we are going to put that in the back seat and go down the road until we have all that we need."
.....
"In the past, it was an absolute cardinal rule that there be a wall between the two cases," Blitzer said. "Now, you will have much broader access to see what is going on. You can see the whole scope of things. . . . We were always afraid that something could slip between the cracks on both sides under the old system, and that did happen."

In one stark example, FBI lawyers refused to allow criminal agents to join an August 2001 search for Khalid Almidhar, who had entered the United States and would later help commandeer the airliner that crashed into the Pentagon. The lawyers said that information about Almidhar's ties to al Qaeda obtained through intelligence channels could not be used to launch a criminal investigation. An angry New York FBI agent warned in an internal e-mail that was later revealed during congressional hearings that "someday someone will die" because of the decision.

In another case, the FBI failed to seek an intelligence warrant to search the belongings of alleged al Qaeda conspirator Zacarias Moussoaui, who had been detained in Minnesota three weeks before the attacks. The legal counsel in the FBI's Minneapolis field office said headquarters officials limited the actions of regular FBI agents in the case because of concerns about breaching the wall between intelligence and criminal cases.
>>>>>> see link