Posted on 05/20/2002 8:17:22 PM PDT by RCW2001
ASHINGTON, May 20 — Attorney General John Ashcroft and the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, were told a few days after the Sept. 11 attacks that the F.B.I. had received a memorandum from its Phoenix office the previous July warning that Osama bin Laden's followers could be training at American flight schools, government officials said today.
But senior Bush administration officials said neither Mr. Ashcroft nor Mr. Mueller briefed President Bush and his national security staff until recently about the fears of an F.B.I. agent in Phoenix that members of Al Qaeda were training at American flight schools, though the two men began daily briefings of the president at the White House immediately after the hijackings.
The disclosure that neither Mr. Ashcroft nor Mr. Mueller told the White House or Congressional leaders about the memorandum when they learned about it shortly after Sept. 11 is certain to magnify criticism of the F.B.I.'s performance, including its failure to act on the memorandum before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Neither Mr. Mueller nor Mr. Ashcroft have said publicly when they learned of the July 10 memorandum, but the officials said senior law enforcement officials grasped the document's significance as a potentially important missed signal within days of the attacks.
Today, several F.B.I. and Justice Department officials said that in the chaotic days after the attacks, discussions between Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Mueller were hurried and that their recollection of events were somewhat blurred by frenetic pace of activity. Some officials said they recalled high-level discussions about how the hijackers had attended American flight schools, but one Justice Department official did not recall a briefing about the memorandum.
Spokesmen for Mr. Mueller and Mr. Ashcroft would not discuss the issue today. A senior Justice Department official said, "The attorney general was not briefed in any detail or with any specificity about the document known as the Phoenix memo until about a month ago."
Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, who was traveling today with the president in Miami, said, "We have nothing that indicates the president had seen or even heard about this memo prior to a few weeks ago."
Mr. Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said last Thursday that the president had not heard about the memorandum before the hijackings and had only recently learned of it. "I personally became aware of it just recently," Ms. Rice said, adding that she asked Mr. Mueller and George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, to review the matter.
The Phoenix memorandum, written by Kenneth Williams, an agent in Phoenix, was sent to F.B.I. headquarters as an electronic computer message on July 10. It was reviewed by midlevel supervisors, who headed the agency's bin Laden and Islamic extremist counterterrorism units.
But the officials said the memo was never sent to top F.B.I. managers, including Thomas J. Pickard, who was acting director in the summer of 2001 before Mr. Mueller took over early in September. Other senior officials were unaware of the memorandum before Sept. 11, including Michael Rolince, who managed the bureau's international terrorism unit, and Dale Watson, his superior, the officials said.
The issue of when top officials knew of the Phoenix memorandum is emerging as a main focus in Congressional inquiries getting under way. Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has asked the F.B.I. to identify anyone at the agency who knew about the memorandum before the attacks.
But lawmakers also want to know when Bush administration officials learned about the memorandum after the attacks. Some lawmakers have asked whether administration officials were told about it soon after the attacks, but were slow to disclose it.
Several lawmakers, including Richard Shelby, a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, have already singled out the F.B.I. for blunt criticism after Mr. Williams's memorandum came to light several weeks ago.
The Phoenix memorandum is one of two documents under heavy scrutiny by Congressional investigators. The other is a daily intelligence report, shown to Mr. Bush on Aug. 6. The report mentions the threat of Qaeda members' carrying out hijackings in the United States. The White House has refused to produce the document, and administration officials have said that the information was too vague to act on.
Mr. Mueller has acknowledged that the bureau's failure to evaluate the Phoenix memorandum fully was an analytical failure that the F.B.I. has tried to correct. "It is a very worthwhile process and a process we are undertaking to change what we do in response to that instance and others where perhaps we did not have the analytical capability," Mr. Mueller said at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on May 8.
"We did not have the people who were looking at the broader picture to put the pieces in place," he said adding that nothing in the memorandum would have enabled the F.B.I. to thwart the attacks.
The memorandum remains classified, and much of its contents are unknown. But officials have confirmed that it expressed concern that Mr. bin Laden and other groups could be using the flight schools to prepare for terror attacks. It urged F.B.I. officials to check the visas of foreigners at American aviation academies. But no action was taken before Sept. 11.
The memorandum was sent to counterterrorism offices in two cities — one copy went to John O'Neill, then the top counterterrorism agent in the F.B.I.'s New York office. Mr. O'Neill retired from the F.B.I. in late August. He had just begun a job as the security chief of the World Trade Center when he was killed in the attacks.
Usually, internal investigative proposals that involve agencywide resources are reviewed by high F.B.I. officials. But in this case F.B.I. officials have said that officials who read the memo were distracted by other cases, a plot against American interests in France and the investigation of the October 2000 attack on the destroyer Cole.
Two or three days after the attacks, Dale Watson, who was then assistant director for counterterrorism, brought the memorandum to the attention of Mr. Pickard, the acting director at the time, officials said. Mr. Pickard and several other agents then briefed Mr. Mueller and Mr. Aschroft on its existence, the officials said.
The Phoenix agent's memorandum was not based on intelligence but on concerns and recommendations based on "conjecture and assumptions," said a senior official who has read it.
"This was just a good investigator taking a look at something," the official said. "It was pure hunch."
For that reason, the official speculated that the memorandum had not set off strong alarms among other law enforcement officials who had reviewed it at the bureau.
Why?
The "Bill of..." what??? lol
Easy: Before 9/11, any attempt to take action against Islamic terrorism - ANY action, no matter how minor - would have immediately been latched onto by Dashole, Gephardt, McAuliffe & Co., and they'd have screamed "RACISM! RACISM!" from the rooftops every hour of every day. Coming right after the Florida mess. This would have sent Bush's popularity, which was only around 50%, down to Nixon-in-'74 levels. And when a president's approval rating gets that low, he can't accomplish anything. Even his own party will desert him on any issue even slightly controversial.
In short, there's nothing Bush could have done unless he had concrete, incontrovertible proof of a plan to attack the US on X date at X hour in X way. And even THEN the Democrats would have attacked him and accused him of making it all up.
By revealing that Dubya's Attorney General did NOT tell his boss about gross ineptitude in the FBI and CIA over the past 8 months, the NYT may be getting Dubya off-the-hook with respect to his being responsible for the sort of coverup that Hillary was hinting his Administration was guilty of just last week. Of course, the Democrats will work overtime between now and 2004 trying to adduce evidence that Dubya knew all about the CIA and FBI ineptitude soon after 9/11, independently of Ashcroft, and chose not to report it to the U.S. public. Knowing the NYT, I'd not be surprised if they first build a story by pointing out the Ashcroft lapse only as a prelude to a later story they have up their sleeve, i.e., first get the attention of the public with this story, and then later, drop the other shoe. Never underestimate the cunning at the NYT, which still festers over the fact that the Washington Post, not the NY Times, brought down another GOP Administration.
Tim Russert made this specific point on MSNBC tonight. The RATS have once again had one of their hateful plans of lies blow up in their face, and been forced to completely abandon their "Bush knew and yet did nothing" attack strategy. He said there's no way now any sort of "Congressional investigatory commission" can be used to attack Bush. The only people that will come out of such an investigation looking bad are the FBI and the Clinton White House.
I am willing to give Mueller more of a pass because he was new on the job and because Ashcroft is his boss, but he STILL should have told Bush, even if he was new and his boss didn't agree with him.
If the President of the United States isn't informed of stuff like this, immediately, it can become a huge embarrassment to his administration. It could even destroy him in the eyes of the American people.
Don't kid yourselves, folks, the dems were on a roll last week. They were sniffing blood, and if Bush and his closest buds hadn't struck back firmly and immediately, we might be singing a different tune today. This story could be part of that response.
I tend to agree with unblinking eye.
Ashcroft has been more of an embarassment to the administration than anything else.
It may also turn out that he deliberately witheld information from President Bush that may have affected the president's decisions on a number of security-related issues, way prior to 9/11. Louis Freeh is responsible for the way a lot of this stuff was implemented.
Maybe Mueller was earnestly trying to clear up the FBI muck, but with Ashcroft, who is afraid to tell anybody anything, how could he?
I have always believed that if the Republicans had forced Janet Reno out then Clinton would of been toast. The AG is the shield for the Presidency IMO. I think we would be better off holding on to Ashcroft than pitching him over the side now that the seas has become rough.
When I was directing a litigation staff of 325 souls...my only directive was 'no surprises'!!! God help those that didn't abide by that rule...
Exactly! Within 48 hours, the investigation had uncovered the flight school connections, etc. By the time Ashcroft and Mueller were told of the memo, whatever info that had been in it, was already common knowledge and reported in the press. This whole thing has been a waste by the Dems, and if they persist in holding hearings on what Bush knew and when, they're going to be mighty sorry pups in November.
Or could it be a diversion to offset an upcoming Dem scandal?
She said how many people who saw The Sixth Sense with Bruce Willis knew that he was really dead the entire movie? Everyone at the end said to their selves "I didn't catch any of the clues" until the movie was over !
9-11 is just like this movie and the clues slap you in the face but during the movie the clues passed everyone by !
I like that metaphor. I tend to like to think in pictures and I like to reduce complex problems to simpler visual allegories so I can manipulate them mentally- it has flaws but I'm comfortable with that. At any rate, I'm always on the look out for new ones and this one you've provided is a good one.
At least the media had a picture to help them.
Exactly. That'll be the question Joe Everyman is going to run through his head- "If he didn't tell him about this, what else didn't he/isn't he telling him?"
I disagree. He did not need to know at that time. There were literally thousands of things more important at that time than this memo. What possible use could it have been for him to know what had become obvious? BTW, Mueller had been on the job a couple of weeks on 9/11.
Great idea. Then what?
I knew he was dead when he went to dinner with his wife and she didn't answer him. I guess I suspected he had died after he was shot in the beginning of the movie.
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