Posted on 05/27/2002 11:47:41 AM PDT by OKCSubmariner
On September 23rd, twelve days after the terror attacks on America, Secretary of State Colin Powell told a Sunday-morning television-news show that the Bush Administration planned to publish a white paper that would prove to the world that Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda organization were responsible for the hijackings. "We are putting all of the information that we have together, the intelligence information, the information being generated by the F.B.I. and other law-enforcement agencies," Powell said.
The information that the White House had available, we now know, included a top-secret briefing, given to President Bush on August 6th, documenting what was known about Al Qaeda's determination to attack American targets. The briefing, prepared by the C.I.A. at the President's request, was reportedly entitled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." It warned that Al Qaeda hoped to "bring the fight to America." Despite Powell's declaration, the Administration never released the white paper. And in October, when the evidence of bin Laden's involvement was made public, by proxy—by the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair—there was no mention of the pre-attack warnings. In fact, the white paper stated, incorrectly, that no such information had been available before the attacks: "After 11 September we learned that, not long before, Bin Laden had indicated he was about to launch a major attack on America."
It is now clear that the White House, for its own reasons, chose to keep secret the extent of the intelligence that was available before and immediately after September 11th. In addition to the August briefing, there was a prescient memorandum sent in July to F.B.I. headquarters from the Phoenix office warning of the danger posed by Middle Eastern students at American flight schools (Robert Mueller, the F.B.I. director, did not see the memo until a few days after September 11th), and there was what Condoleezza Rice, the President's national-security adviser, called "a lot of chatter in the system." Congressional hearings will almost certainly take place in the next few months, given the conviction of Democratic Party leaders that they finally have a viable political issue.
What the President knew and when he knew it may not be the relevant question, however. No one in Washington seriously contends that the President or any of his senior advisers had any reason to suspect that terrorists were about to fly hijacked airplanes into buildings. A more useful question concerns the degree to which Al Qaeda owed its success to the weakness of the F.B.I. and the agency's chronic inability to synthesize intelligence reports, draw conclusions, and work with other agencies. These failings, it turns out, were evident long before George Bush took office.
Neither the F.B.I. nor America's other intelligence agencies have effectively addressed what may be the most important challenge of September 11th: How does an open society deal with warnings of future terrorism? The Al Qaeda terrorists were there to be seen, but there was no system for seeing them.
Several weeks before the attacks, the actor James Woods was in the first-class section of a cross-country flight to Los Angeles. Four of his fellow-passengers were well-dressed men who appeared to be Middle Eastern and were obviously travelling together. "I watch people like a moviemaker," Woods told me. "As in that scene in 'Annie Hall' "—where Woody Allen and Diane Keaton are sitting on a bench in Central Park speculating on the personal lives of passers-by. "I thought these guys were either terrorists or F.B.I. guys," Woods went on. "The guys were in synch—dressed alike. They didn't have a drink and were not talking to the stewardess. None of them had a carry-on or a newspaper. Nothing.
"Imagine you're at a live-music event at a small night club and you're standing behind the singer. Everybody is clapping, going along, enjoying the show— and there's four guys paying no attention. What are they doing here?" Woods concluded that the men were "casing" the plane. He said that his concern led him to hang on to his cutlery after lunch. He shared his worries with a flight attendant. "I said, 'I think this plane is going to be hijacked.' I told her, 'I know how serious it is to say this,' and asked to speak to the captain." The flight attendant, too, was concerned. The plane's first officer came over immediately and assured Woods that he and the captain would keep the door to the cockpit locked. The remainder of the trip was bumpy but uneventful, and Woods recalled laughingly telling his agent, who asked about the flight, "Aside from the terrorists and the turbulence, it was fine."
Woods said that the flight attendant told him that she would file a report about the suspicious passengers. If she did, her report probably ended up in a regional Federal Aviation Authority office in Tulsa, or perhaps Dallas, according to Clark Onstad, the former chief counsel of the F.A.A., and disappeared in the bureaucracy. "If you ever walked into one of these offices, you'd see that they have no secretaries," Onstad told me. "These guys are buried under a mountain of paper, and the odds of this"—a report about suspicious passengers—"coming up to a higher level are very low." Even today, eight months after the hijacking, Onstad said, the question "Where would you effectively report something like this so that it would get attention?" has no practical answer.
Throughout the spring and early summer of 2001, intelligence agencies flooded the government with warnings of possible terrorist attacks against American targets, including commercial aircraft, by Al Qaeda and other groups. The warnings were vague but sufficiently alarming to prompt the F.A.A. to issue four information circulars, or I.C.s, to the commercial airline industry between June 22nd and July 31st, warning of possible terrorism. One circular, from late July, noted, according to Condoleezza Rice, that there was "no specific target, no credible info of attack to U.S. civil-aviation interests, but terror groups are known to be planning and training for hijackings, and we ask you therefore to use caution."
For years, however, the airlines had essentially disregarded the F.A.A.'s information circulars. "I.C.s don't require special measures," a former high-level F.A.A. official told me. "To get the airlines to react, you have to send a Security Directive"—a high-priority message that, under F.A.A. regulations, mandates an immediate response. Without a directive, the American airline industry was operating in a business-as-usual manner when Woods noticed the suspicious passengers on his flight.
On the evening of September 11th, Woods telephoned the Los Angeles office of the F.B.I. and told a special agent about the encounter. In an interview on Fox Television in February, Woods described being awakened at six-forty-five the next morning by a telephone call from the agent. "I said, 'I'll get ready and I'll come down to the federal building,' " Woods recounted. "He said, 'That's O.K. We're outside your house.' " By then, Woods told me, he was no longer certain of the date of his trip. "The first thing I said is 'I'm not sure which flight it was on.' " But he had a vivid memory of the men's faces. When he was shown photographs, Woods thought he recognized two of the hijackers—Hamza Alghamdi, who flew on United Airlines Flight 175, which struck the south tower of the World Trade Center, and Khalid Almihdhar, who was on American Airlines Flight 77, which struck the Pentagon. One of the men stood out because of his "pointy hair," Woods told me, and the other looked like one of the characters in the movie version of John le Carré's "The Little Drummer Girl."
A senior F.B.I. official told me that the bureau had subsequently investigated Woods's story but had not been able to find evidence of the hijackers on the flight Woods thought he had taken. "We don't know for sure," the official said.
Woods's flight was not the only one the F.B.I. looked into after September 11th. The bureau found other evidence that the terrorists from the four different planes had flown together earlier, in various combinations, to "check out flights," as one agent put it. The F.B.I. now thinks that the hijackers flew on perhaps a dozen flights, together and separately, in the summer of 2001.
The hijackers' decision to risk flying together calls into question much of the conventional wisdom about September 11th. The F.B.I. and the C.I.A. have repeatedly characterized the Al Qaeda terrorists as brilliant professionals—what I. C. Smith, who retired in 1998, after a twenty-five-year career at the F.B.I., much of it in counterintelligence, calls "the superman scenario." In a rare public appearance, at Duke University in April, James Pavitt, the C.I.A.'s deputy director for operations—the agency's top spymaster—said of Al Qaeda:
The terror cells that we're going up against are typically small and all terrorist personnel . . . were carefully screened. The number of personnel who know vital information, targets, timing, the exact methods to be used had to be smaller still. . . . Against that degree of control, that kind of compartmentation, that depth of discipline and fanaticism, I personally doubt—and I draw again upon my thirty years of experience in this business—that anything short of one of the knowledgeable inner-circle personnel or hijackers turning himself in to us would have given us sufficient foreknowledge to have prevented the horrendous slaughter that took place on the eleventh.
The point of operating in cells is to insure that if one person is caught he can expose only those in his own cell, because he knows nothing of the others. The entire operation is not put at risk. The Al Qaeda terrorists seem to have violated a fundamental rule of clandestine operations. Far from working independently and maintaining rigid communications security, the terrorists, as late as last summer, apparently mingled openly and had not yet decided which flights to target. The planning for September 11th appears to have been far more ad hoc than was at first assumed.
A senior F.B.I. official insisted to me that the September 11th attacks were "carefully orchestrated and well planned," but he agreed that serious and potentially fatal errors were made by the terrorists. Another official said, "We early on thought that people on flight one did not know anything about flights two, three, and four, but we did find that there was cross-pollination in travel and coördination. If they're so good, why did they intermingle?" A third F.B.I. official said, "Are they ten feet tall? They're not."
The fact that the terrorists managed to bring down the World Trade Center may simply mean that seizing an airplane was easier than the American public has been led to believe. The real message of missed opportunities like the Woods flight may be that, even at a time when America's intelligence agencies had raised an alarm, chatter remained chatter—diffuse noise. There were no mechanisms to either dispose of leads, warnings, and suspicious incidents or effectively translate them into a plan for preventing Al Qaeda from attacking.
By 1990, in the wake of the terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, congressional committees had concluded that the F.A.A. needed more immediate access to current intelligence, and urged that an F.A.A. security official be assigned to the relevant offices in the C.I.A., the F.B.I., and the State Department. Leo Boivin, who was the agency's primary security analyst at the time, told me, "I started the program. Getting into the C.I.A. and State was no problem, but the F.B.I. effectively said no—that it wasn't going to happen. The bureau didn't want anybody in there, and we couldn't fight the bureau." In 1996, after the crash of T.W.A. Flight 800, a commission directed by Vice-President Al Gore also called for closer liaison. This time, according to Boivin, who retired last August, the F.B.I. refused to give the F.A.A. security officer a building pass that would permit unfettered access to F.B.I. headquarters. "The problem with the intelligence community is that you didn't know what you didn't know," Boivin said. " 'If there is a problem,' the bureau would say, 'we'll tell you about it.' " The difficulties continued after September 11th. Boivin said that the F.B.I. sought to get rid of the F.A.A.'s liaison man at headquarters, because, in Boivin's words, "he was seen as too pushy about trying to get information." (An F.B.I. spokesman, when asked for comment, said, "Both before September 11th and after September 11th, the bureau shared information with our law-enforcement partners to the fullest extent possible.")
The airlines, always eager to trim operating expenses, successfully lobbied against many of the safety provisions recommended by the Gore commission, such as more stringent security checks on airline employees and tighter screening of passenger baggage. William Webster, the former F.B.I. director, served as the airlines' lobbyist. "The airlines never wanted to spend a lot of money on security," said David Plavin, who was on the Gore commission and is the president of Airports Council International, the lobbying arm of the nation's more than five hundred commercial airports. "They were always concerned that the government would stick them with the bill." Much of that worry, Plavin told me, was alleviated after September 11th with the passage of legislation creating the Transportation Security Administration, which puts the responsibility for security on the federal government, but the new legislation won't solve the most serious problem: bureaucratic infighting. "More than half a dozen federal agencies are involved in airline travel, and their inability to work with each other is notorious," Plavin said. "Protecting their own turf is what matters."
In the late nineteen-nineties, the C.I.A. obtained reliable information indicating that an Al Qaeda network based in northern Germany had penetrated airport security in Amsterdam and was planning to attack American passenger planes by planting bombs in the cargo, a former security official told me. The intelligence was good enough to warrant the dissemination of an F.A.A. Security Directive, and the C.I.A., working with German police, planned a series of successful preëmptive raids. "The Germans rousted a lot of people," the former official said. The F.A.A. and the C.I.A. worked closely together and the incident was kept secret. "While the threat was on, the F.A.A. was getting two or three C.I.A. briefings a day," the former official said. In contrast, in operations in which the F.B.I. took the lead, "the F.A.A. got nothing. The F.B.I. people said, 'If there is a threat, we'll tell you, but we're not going to tell you what's going on in the investigations.' The F.A.A. told them that it had much more information about threats in Hamburg and Beirut than in Detroit, and they said, 'That's the way it is.' They'd come and give a dog-and-pony show."
Long before September 11th, the American intelligence community had a significant amount of information about specific terrorist threats to commercial airline travel in America, including the possibility that a plane could be used as a weapon.In 1994, an Algerian terrorist group hijacked an Air France airliner and threatened to crash it into the Eiffel Tower. In 1995, police in Manila broke up a terrorist operation that was planning to plant bombs with timing devices on as many as twelve American airliners. They also found information that led to the arrest of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who directed the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Abdul Hakim Murad, one of Yousef's collaborators, told the Philippine police and, later, U.S. intelligence officers that he had earned his pilot's license in an American flight school and had been planning to seize a small plane, fill it with explosives, and fly it into C.I.A. headquarters. Murad confessed, according to an account published last December in the Washington Post, that he had gone to the American flight school "in preparation for a suicide mission." In 1996, the F.B.I. director, Louis Freeh, asked officials in Qatar—a nation suspected of harboring Al Qaeda terrorists—for help in apprehending another alleged accomplice of Yousef, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was then believed to be in Qatar. One of Freeh's diplomatic notes stated that Mohammed was involved in a conspiracy to "bomb U.S. airliners" and was also believed to be "in the process of manufacturing an explosive device."
In late December of 1999, a group of Al Qaeda terrorists armed with knives hijacked an Indian airliner and diverted it to Kandahar, Afghanistan. The hijackers maintained control of the passengers and crew by cutting the throat of a young passenger and letting the victim bleed to death, a tactic that the September 11th terrorists are believed to have used on flight attendants. (Shortly after the Indian hijacking, the F.B.I. opened a liaison office in New Delhi, and has since worked closely with Indian security officials.) The F.A.A., in its annual report for the year 2000, warned that bin Laden and Al Qaeda posed "a significant threat to civil aviation." The F.A.A. had earlier noted, according to the Times, that there was a specific report from an exiled Islamic leader in Britain alleging that bin Laden was planning to "bring down an airliner, or hijack an airliner to humiliate the United States."
The attendance of potential terrorists at flight-training schools in America is not a new phenomenon, either. As early as 1975, according to an unpublished Senate Foreign Relations Committee document, Raymond Winall, then the F.B.I.'s assistant director for intelligence, revealed that a suspected member of Black September, the Palestinian terrorist group responsible for the deaths of eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics in Munich, had explained his presence in the United States by telling the F.B.I. that he had been admitted for pilot training—the same explanation for the presence here of a number of the September 11th terrorists. The suspect was indicted but fled the country before he could be arraigned. Since then, according to Bill Carroll, a former district director for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, thousands of young Middle Easterners have obtained visas to enroll in flight-instruction programs.
Inrecent interviews, three senior F.B.I. officials in charge of responding to terrorism threats did not defend the bureau's past performance, and acknowledged that many of the long-standing complaints had merit. But they insisted that, since September 11th, many things had been done right. The F.B.I. had invested enormous resources in tracking the terrorists' travel activities, and much progress had been made in disrupting the international flow of money to Al Qaeda. The officials admitted that there are still questions about the reliability of some of the information that was collected in the days immediately after September 11th. One unresolved mystery is how many of the nineteen hijackers understood that the mission called for the immolation of all aboard.
The officials maintained that they have correctly established the true identity of all nineteen, by consulting records and going back to their countries of origin. There are, however, lingering questions about at least eight of them. For example, the F.B.I. has identified one of the hijackers aboard United Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon, as Nawaf Alhazmi. A Maryland motel he had checked into under this name had a record of a New York driver's license number and a Manhattan address he had given. But the address turned out to be a hotel, which reported that it had no record of him. And the New York Department of Motor Vehicles said that the number was invalid, and that it had never issued a license to anyone named Nawaf Alhazmi. Similarly, Waleed Alshehri, who was aboard American Airlines Flight 11, was identified by the F.B.I. as a college graduate from Florida whose father was a Saudi diplomat. And yet, last fall, the diplomat told a Saudi Arabian newspaper that his son was still alive and working as a pilot for Saudi Arabian Airlines.
The prevalence of identity theft has also complicated matters. There are an estimated seven hundred and fifty thousand cases of stolen identity in the United States every year, according to Rob Douglas, a leading privacy expert. Saudi newspapers eventually reported that at least four men with the same names as those listed by the F.B.I. as hijackers had been victims of passport theft. A hijacker identified as Abdulaziz Alomari, who also was aboard Flight 11, was reported by the Rocky Mountain News to have the same name as a graduate of the University of Colorado, a man who did not resemble a photograph of the hijacker. That Alomari had been stopped by the Denver police several times for minor offenses while attending college and had given three different birth dates. One of the dates matches the birth date used by the hijacker. Investigators subsequently learned that in 1995 the Colorado student had reported a theft in his apartment; among the items stolen was his passport.
Another hijacker, who used the name Saeed Alghamdi and was aboard Flight 93, was reported last fall by Newsday to have taken the Social Security number of a Vermont woman who had been dead since 1965. The name is a common one in Saudi Arabia. At least four other men with that name have shown up on records at the flight school in Florida where Alghamdi was said by the F.B.I. to have trained. The school reported that it had trained more than sixteen hundred students with the first name Saeed and more than two hundred with the surname Alghamdi. Social Security officials also said that six of the nineteen hijackers were using identity cards belonging to other people.
In April, police in Milan raided the apartment of Essid Sami Ben Khemais, the alleged head of an extremist group based in Italy that has been linked to Al Qaeda. A prosecutor's affidavit, the Baltimore Sun reported, described what was found: a cache of forged Tunisian and Yemeni passports, Italian identity cards, and photocopies of German driver's licenses. The prosecutor wrote, "One of the most essential illegal activities of the group is the procurement and use of false documents . . . to guarantee a new identity to the 'brothers' who must hide or escape investigation." The prosecutor further said that the police had recorded telephone conversations in which Khemais discussed with Al Qaeda members the mechanics of falsifying documents.
The complaints about the F.B.I. are well known to the Senate Judiciary Committee, whose chairman, Patrick Leahy, of Vermont, has been urging extensive reform of the bureau for years. "These are not problems of money," Leahy said last July, during confirmation hearings on the appointment of Robert Mueller as the new F.B.I. director. "We have poured a lot of money into the F.B.I. It is a management problem."
The F.B.I.'s computer systems have been in disarray for more than a decade, making it difficult, if not impossible, for analysts and agents to correlate and interpret intelligence. The F.B.I.'s technological weakness also hinders its ability to solve crimes. In March, for example, Leahy's committee was told that photographs of the nineteen suspected hijackers could not be sent electronically in the days immediately after September 11th to the F.B.I. office in Tampa, Florida, because the F.B.I.'s computer systems weren't compatible. Robert Chiradio, the special agent in charge, explained at a hearing that "we don't have the ability to put any scanning or multimedia" into F.B.I. computer systems. The photographs had "to be put on a CD-ROM and mailed to me."
Part of the problem, former F.B.I. agents have told me, is the long-standing practice by the F.B.I. leadership of "reprogramming" funds intended for computer upgrading. I. C. Smith, who was in charge of the F.B.I.'s budget for national-security programs, told me that his department was "constantly raiding the technical programs" to make up for shortfalls in other areas—such as, in one case, the travel budget.
Mueller, who had been on the job for only a week before September 11th, acknowledged in a speech in April that many of the desktop computers at the F.B.I. were discards from other federal agencies that "we take as upgrades." He went on, "We have systems that cannot talk with other bureau systems, much less with other federal agencies. We're working to create a database . . . that we can use to share information and intelligence with the outside world. We hope to test it later next year"—that is, sometime in 2003.
Clearly, the agents in the field and their superiors at F.B.I. headquarters did not have the optimal tools to cope with the complex world of Middle Eastern terrorism—and the outpouring of intelligence data and warnings about activities inside the United States. (They were not alone. The C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies also contributed to the failure that led to September 11th.) The F.B.I. also found it extremely difficult to field undercover operatives inside the Islamic fundamentalist movement. The situation remains the same today, intelligence officials told me. "They're incapable of it," one former intelligence official said, referring to the F.B.I.'s lack of experience in covert operations. "This is much scarier than the C.I.A.'s inability to penetrate overseas. We don't have eyes and ears in the Muslim communities. We're naked here."
In a recent conversation, a senior F.B.I. official acknowledged that there had been "no breakthrough" inside the government, in terms of establishing how the September 11th suicide teams were organized and how they operated. America's war in Afghanistan, despite success in driving Al Qaeda from its bases there, has yet to produce significant information about the planning and execution of the attacks. U.S. forces are known to have captured thousands of pages of documents and computer hard drives from Al Qaeda redoubts, but so far none of this material—which remains highly classified—has enabled the Justice Department to broaden its understanding of how the attack occurred, or even to bring an indictment of a conspirator. The government's only criminal proceeding filed thus far is against Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen who was already in jail on September 11th, on immigration charges. "It's kind of obvious that we haven't wrapped anything up," a C.I.A. consultant told me.
One senior F.B.I. official argued, however, that the intensive American bombing campaign in Afghanistan and the dramatically improved coördination with international police forces and intelligence agencies have led to a serious degradation of Al Qaeda's command and control, and, he said, "the over-all structure of Al Qaeda has been disrupted." Referring to the heavy satellite monitoring of the many training camps operated by Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups in Afghanistan, he said, "For years, we watched the graduating classes every year at the University of Terrorism." What's left, he went on, are "those fleas—the graduates of the training classes who are spread out in the world. We are going to have problems with them for years to come. Could there be a flea who strikes this week in Kansas City? Absolutely."
In Senate testimony in May, Robert Mueller emphasized how difficult it would have been to thwart the September 11th attacks, noting that fifty million people entered and left the United States in August, 2001. "The terrorists took advantage of America's strengths and used them against us," he said. "And as long as we continue to treasure our freedoms we always will run some risk of future attacks."
"These guys were not superhuman," I. C. Smith noted, "but they were playing in a system that was more inept than they were. If you go back to the aircraft hijackings of the early nineteen-seventies, I can't recall a single instance where we caught a guy"—in advance—"who really intended to hijack a plane." But men like Mueller, Smith added, "can't afford to say that the terrorists stumbled through this."
Mueller has one of the most difficult jobs in government today. He is trying to reorganize a bureaucracy that has resisted changes—and outsiders—for decades. He does not praise the old days, and the old ways of doing business, in his public statements. "We must refocus our mission and our priorities," he told the Senate Judiciary Committee in May. "We must improve how we hire, manage, and train our workforce, collaborate with others, and manage, analyze, share, and protect our information." He added, "I am more impatient than most, but we must do these things right, not simply fast."
Mueller's insistence on centralizing decision-making and control of counterterrorism operations at F.B.I. headquarters has provoked discord in some of the F.B.I.'s fifty-six bureaus across the nation. Senior officers with specialized expertise were reassigned to counterterrorism duty after September 11th, and many still find their new jobs bewildering.
Increasingly, the divisions are becoming public. Last week, a letter of complaint sent to the House and Senate intelligence committees by the F.B.I.'s general counsel in Minneapolis was leaked to the press. It accused F.B.I. headquarters of obstructing the local inquiry into Zacarias Moussaoui and accused Mueller personally of misrepresenting the bureau's handling of the case. Mueller quickly announced that he had referred the matter to the Justice Department for investigation. A Senate aide told me that Mueller's willingness to air the problems—even at the risk of adverse publicity—had won him few friends inside the Bush Administration. "He's had his hand slapped by the Justice Department," the official said, "and he's having problems with the White House."
Mueller does have the support, thus far, of the often skeptical Senate Judiciary Committee. The committee, under Senator Leahy, began extensive oversight hearings into the F.B.I. last year—the first comprehensive hearings in two decades. "He inherited a mess," Leahy said. "The F.B.I. has improved since the days of J. Edgar Hoover. It doesn't go around blackmailing members of Congress anymore. But it still has a 'We don't make mistakes or admit mistakes' culture." Mueller seems to be committed to changing that attitude, Leahy told me. "I have confidence in him, and it will continue as long as we see a bureau that really wants to correct its mistakes. Mueller's best defense—and his best offense—is to be as forthcoming with Congress as possible." The Senator added, "White Houses come and go, but he has a ten-year tenure."
Since the hijackings, the F.B.I. and the C.I.A. have gone to great lengths to improve coöperation, and C.I.A. personnel are assigned to F.B.I. offices. In some basic ways, however, the F.B.I. still doesn't work. The bureau, one of Mueller's aides said, is undergoing an enormous and painful change in its day-to-day approach to investigations. "The mission now is not just to put handcuffs on people and throw them into jail but to stop acts of terrorism in the future. A lot of people here are not prepared to radically change their way of doing business, and it's frustrating for many agents, with their black-and-white way of looking at the world. The F.B.I.'s priority now is to get information to prevent the next event—even if it means we lose the case." The transition will lead to many forced early retirements. "There hasn't been time to build up a cadre of people with the right skills," the aide said. One inevitable problem is that the most significant of Mueller's changes—such as the recruitment and hiring of experts in foreign languages, area studies, and computer technology—will not pay dividends for years.
A longtime clandestine C.I.A. operative was skeptical about the rival agency's ability to transform itself. "They're cops," he said of the F.B.I. agents. "They spent their careers trying to catch bank robbers while we spent ours trying to rob banks."
The Administration did not respond passively to the recent wave of media reports of warnings gone unheeded. It went on the offensive. Vice-President Dick Cheney warned against "incendiary rhetoric," and said that the criticism from Democrats about the missed messages was "thoroughly irresponsible of national leaders in a time of war." Other Cabinet members issued dire public warnings of increased terrorism threats—based not on specific information but on more "chatter," in various corners of the Islamic world. In earlier interviews with me, senior F.B.I. counterterrorism officials had made a point of criticizing such vague warnings. "Is there some C.Y.A."—cover your ass—"involved when officials talk about threats to power supplies, or banks, or malls?" one senior F.B.I. official asked. "Of course there is."
"Puffing up the threat because of a political interest is a disservice," the official added. When such threats are unfulfilled, the result is that "the country lowers its guard. And that kind of flippancy is what we don't need now. The American people are going back to sleep."
Another F.B.I. official depicted the question of when to warn the public as a "lose-lose" situation. "Say we get a report that three Al Qaeda guys are driving up from Mexico to blow up an unspecified mall in Dallas," the official said. "What do you want to be told?" He added, "We know the power of the people. Do we want you calling us if your neighbor is turning in to his driveway at two in the morning?" The bureau responded to three hundred calls about suspicious packages between January 1st and September 10th of 2001. After September 11th, the official said, "we received fifty-four thousand calls and physically responded to fourteen thousand of them." Even now, according to another official, scores of tips arrive every day from overseas, many of them relayed by C.I.A. sources that are known to pay for such information. "And the C.I.A. is happy to forward them to us," he noted. "Then it's not the C.I.A.'s problem."
Stories of supposed terrorist sightings have also become common inside the airline industry—a part of its post-September 11th folklore. One widely repeated tale involves a stewardess who flew with a man dressed as a captain—he had hitched a ride, as crew members often do—whom she later recognized as Mohammed Atta. Many in the industry, it seems, know someone who knows someone who saw one or another of the September 11th terrorists in captains' uniforms in cockpit jumpseats.
There also has been a series of jarring alerts from federal health agencies and the Office of Homeland Security depicting the far-reaching threat posed by biological warfare or the possible use of fissile materials by Al Qaeda. One public-health official who has participated in Homeland Security discussions described the group as being overwhelmed by the potential threat to America's water supply, electrical grids, oil depots, and even the wholesale processing of milk. "Where do we start?" he said. "So many threats. We're like deer in the headlights."
"Traditionally, when Americans have had a war, they go and find the enemy, defeat it on the battlefield, and come home to replant," a senior F.B.I. official said. The war against terrorism is a long-term struggle and has no borders. "We need maturity when it comes to protecting our society," the official went on. "We shouldn't profoundly change our system, but we need a balance. Democracy is a messy business." Meanwhile, the terrorists won't go away. Another senior F.B.I. official said, "They'd like nothing better than to regroup and come back."
Has someone been sitting on the FBI? (FBI Ordered Not To Investigate Saudis)
BBC Transcript | November 6, 2001 | BBC NewsNight
GREG PALAST:
The CIA and Saudi Arabia, the Bushes and the Bin Ladens. Did their connections cause America to turn a blind eye to terrorism?
UNNAMED MAN:
There is a hidden agenda at the very highest levels of our government.
JOE TRENTO, (AUTHOR, "SECRET HISTORY OF THE CIA"):
The sad thing is that thousands of Americans had to die needlessly.
PETER ELSNER:
How can it be that the former President of the US and the current President of the US have business dealings with characters that need to be investigated?
PALAST:
In the eight weeks since the attacks, over 1,000 suspects and potential witnesses have been detained. Yet, just days after the hijackers took off from Boston aiming for the Twin Towers, a special charter flight out of the same airport whisked 11 members of Osama Bin Laden's family off to Saudi Arabia. That did not concern the White House.
Their official line is that the Bin Ladens are above suspicion - apart from Osama, the black sheep, who they say hijacked the family name. That's fortunate for the Bush family and the Saudi royal household, whose links with the Bin Ladens could otherwise prove embarrassing. But Newsnight has obtained evidence that the FBI was on the trail of other members of the] Bin Laden family for links to terrorist organisations before and after September 11th.
This document is marked "Secret". Case ID - 199-Eye WF 213 589. 199 is FBI code for case type. 9 would be murder. 65 would be espionage. 199 means national security. WF indicates Washington field office special agents were investigating ABL - because of it's relationship with the World Assembly of Muslim Youth, WAMY - a suspected terrorist organisation. ABL is Abdullah Bin Laden, president and treasurer of WAMY.
This is the sleepy Washington suburb of Falls Church, Virginia where almost every home displays the Stars and Stripes. On this unremarkable street, at 3411 Silver Maple Place, we located the former home of Abdullah and another brother, Omar, also an FBI suspect. It's conveniently close to WAMY. The World Assembly of Muslim Youth is in this building, in a little room in the basement at 5613 Leesburg Pike. And here, just a couple blocks down the road at 5913 Leesburg, is where four of the hijackers that attacked New York and Washington are listed as having lived.
The US Treasury has not frozen WAMY's assets, and when we talked to them, they insisted they are a charity. Yet, just weeks ago, Pakistan expelled WAMY operatives. And India claimed that WAMY was funding an organisation linked to bombings in Kashmir. And the Philippines military has accused WAMY of funding Muslim insurgency. The FBI did look into WAMY, but, for some reason, agents were pulled off the trail.
TRENTO:
The FBI wanted to investigate these guys. This is not something that they didn't want to do - they wanted to, they weren't permitted to.
PALAST:
The secret file fell into the hands of national security expert, Joe Trento. The Washington spook-tracker has been looking into the FBI's allegations about WAMY.
TRENTO:
They've had connections to Osama Bin Laden's people. They've had connections to Muslim cultural and financial aid groups that have terrorist connections. They fit the pattern of groups that the Saudi royal family and Saudi community of princes - the 20,000 princes - have funded who've engaged in terrorist activity.
Now, do I know that WAMY has done anything that's illegal? No, I don't know that. Do I know that as far back as 1996 the FBI was very concerned about this organisation? I do.
PALAST:
Newsnight has uncovered a long history of shadowy connections between the State Department, the CIA and the Saudis. The former head of the American visa bureau in Jeddah is Michael Springman.
MICHAEL SPRINGMAN:
In Saudi Arabia I was repeatedly ordered by high level State Dept officials to issue visas to unqualified applicants. These were, essentially, people who had no ties either to Saudi Arabia or to their own country. I complained bitterly at the time there. I returned to the US, I complained to the State Dept here, to the General Accounting Office, to the Bureau of Diplomatic Security and to the Inspector General's office. I was met with silence.
PALAST:
By now, Bush Sr, once CIA director, was in the White House. Springman was shocked to find this wasn't visa fraud. Rather, State and CIA were playing "the Great Game".
SPRINGMAN:
What I was protesting was, in reality, an effort to bring recruits, rounded up by Osama Bin Laden, to the US for terrorist training by the CIA. They would then be returned to Afghanistan to fight against the then-Soviets.
The attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 did not shake the State Department's faith in the Saudis, nor did the attack on American barracks at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia three years later, in which 19 Americans died. FBI agents began to feel their investigation was being obstructed. Would you be surprised to find out that FBI agents are a bit frustrated that they can't be looking into some Saudi connections?
MICHAEL WILDES, ( LAWYER)
I would never be surprised with that. They're cut off at the hip sometimes by supervisors or given shots that are being called from Washington at the highest levels.
PALAST:
I showed lawyer Michael Wildes our FBI documents. One of the Khobar Towers bombers was represented by Wildes, who thought he had useful intelligence for the US. He also represents a Saudi diplomat who defected to the USA with 14,000 documents which Wildes claims implicates Saudi citizens in financing terrorism and more. Wildes met with FBI men who told him they were not permitted to read all the documents. Nevertheless, he tried to give them to the agents.
WILDES:
"Take these with you. We're not going to charge for the copies. Keep them. Do something with them. Get some bad guys with them." They refused.
PALAST:
In the hall of mirrors that is the US intelligence community, Wildes, a former US federal attorney, said the FBI field agents wanted the documents, but they were told to "see no evil."
WILDES:
You see a difference between the rank-and-file counter-intelligence agents, who are regarded by some as the motor pool of the FBI, who drive following diplomats, and the people who are getting the shots called at the highest level of our government, who have a different agenda - it's unconscionable.
PALAST:
State wanted to keep the pro-American Saudi royal family in control of the world's biggest oil spigot, even at the price of turning a blind eye to any terrorist connection so long as America was safe. In recent years, CIA operatives had other reasons for not exposing Saudi-backed suspects.
TRENTO:
If you recruited somebody who is a member of a terrorist organisation, who happens to make his way here to the US, and even though you're not in touch with that person anymore but you have used him in the past, it would be unseemly if he were arrested by the FBI and word got back that he'd once been on the payroll of the CIA. What we're talking about is blow-back. What we're talking about is embarrassing, career-destroying blow-back for intelligence officials.
PALAST:
Does the Bush family also have to worry about political blow-back? The younger Bush made his first million 20 years ago with an oil company partly funded by Salem Bin Laden's chief US representative. Young George also received fees as director of a subsidiary of Carlyle Corporation, a little known private company which has, in just a few years of its founding, become one of Americas biggest defence contractors. His father, Bush Senior, is also a paid advisor. And what became embarrassing was the revelation that the Bin Ladens held a stake in Carlyle, sold just after September 11.
ELSNER:
You have a key relationship between the Saudis and the former President of the US who happens to be the father of the current President of the US. And you have all sorts of questions about where does policy begin and where does good business and good profits for the company, Carlyle, end?
PALAST:
I received a phone call from a high-placed member of a US intelligence agency. He tells me that while there's always been constraints on investigating Saudis, under George Bush it's gotten much worse. After the elections, the agencies were told to "back off" investigating the Bin Ladens and Saudi royals, and that angered agents. I'm told that since September 11th the policy has been reversed. FBI headquarters told us they could not comment on our findings. A spokesman said: "There are lots of things that only the intelligence community knows and that no-one else ought to know.
------------------------------------------------- This transcript provides interviews with author Joe Trento and other sources who are knowledgeable about the FBI documents and policies of the FBI being ordered off the investigations of Saudis described in the transcript.
I suspect (but do not know) that Joe Trento (an expert on the CIA) got the FBI documents from someone displeased (either CIA or FBI sources or both) with the way the FBI is being run.
FBI agents Coleen Rowley and Ken Williams went to the CIA after being stonewalled by the FBI in Washington about the FBI agents' informattion on Bin Laden hijacker pilot (Phoenix and Minneapois)training missions prior to 9/11/01. These FBI agents' actions also show their concern about how the FBI is being run and was an obvious effort to enlist the help of the CIA since it is well known that the CIA is still not happy with the way the FBI is being run.
Congress in 1997, determined that the FBI shared most of the blame for the Aldrich Ames debacle rather than the CIA becasue the FBI deliberately sat on important information for years that could have been used by the CIA and others to uncover Ames. There are those in the CIA and FBI who have never forgotten how badly the FBI treated the CIA over Ames.
I strongly recommend that people read the following article "Saudis helped 'sustain" al-Qaida?" from WorldNetDaily posted on FR on March 8, 2002. The link is http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/642487/posts.
The artricle describes how evidence collected by the US Mission in Saudi Arabia showing Saudi support for Al-Qaeda was deliberately not sent by the CIA station to Washington. THe article also has ex-diplomats alleging corruption between US officials and Saudi Government officials.
This article also raises questions about the way the CIA, not just the FBI, was being run to keep Saudi support for AlQeda from reaching Washington. Was it because of a renegade CIA station chief or CIA director, or was it because someone in the White House ordered the CIA not to send the reports to Washignton?
The FBI, the CIA and the present and past administrations (Bush and CLinton) should be asked about and to explain these matters to Congress. The cause of these problems must be identified and corrected to ensure a sucessful war on terrorism.
Were Presidents being sandbagged by their own FBI and CIA or were the Presidents asking that certain investigatory actions not be taken by the FBI and CIA for political reasons, actions that in retrospect may have helped make 9/11 less likely?
I am raising these questions in light of these articles because these are some of the questions which I believe COngress should try to have answered to improve security against terrorism and to maintain the confidence of the American people that they are being adequately protected by the FBI, CIA and their elected leaders in the White House, past and present. We need accoutability in order to correct any problems which could still be on going.
FBI director RobertMueller is in effect a holdover from the Clinton adminstration (appointed by Clinton as a US attorney in California) as is George Tenet at CIA. Are these men repeating any mistakes that may have been made under CLinton, now that they are serving under Bush? Are they getting the same instructions from Bush as they got from Clinton or are they sandbagging Bush? Something is wrong and needs to be investigated and corrected fast in my opinion
We did Mueller back when he was nominated, but because the Love Affair just started he became like another god here. After all he served daddy too. "Under the first President Bush, Mueller was Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Justice Department's criminal division."
"heading up the investigations of the BCCI banking scandal"
From ---- http://www.iwar.org.uk/news-archive/2001/fbi/07-05-01.htm
Mueller did such a good job on BCCI (weren't there some Saudi's involved in that? :-) that EVERYBODY wanted to keep him......and PROMOTE him!
Following a standard pattern, Justice Department officials and the various divisions including the FBI, and other government agencies, kept the lid on the worldwide criminal activities of the bank. It wasn't until law enforcement agencies in Europe and a state prosecutor in New York City prepared to file charges that the bank's corrupt operations were shut down in the United States. By that time billions of dollars were lost by thousands of depositors all over the world.
BCCI was a private bank operating in over seventy countries, including the United States. At one time BCCI had over 400 branches in 78 countries, and assets of over $20 billion. Its holding company was based in Luxembourg and its principal operation in London. The primary bank supervisor for BCCI was Luxembourg Monetary Institute, the central bank of Luxembourg.
The BCCI scandal was related to other criminal activities, including BNL; Iraqgate; Iran and its Contra cousin; and others. BCCI and BNL both played a role in the Iraqi armament buildup, in which funds provided by U.S. taxpayers were forwarded by the Atlanta branch of Italy's Banca Nazionale del Lavoro. There were numerous cross-dealings between the banks. BCCI used its international connections to fund loans to BNL, which funded the Iraqi weapon buildups, which then required the U.S. taxpayer to fund much of the Persian Gulf War.
373) The Abu Nidal terrorist group and others obtained funds through BCCI, which helped to bring about the Pan Am 103 tragedy and others.
MORE ----- http://www.copi.com/defrauding_america/chp_23.htm
I am a gossipy old woman.
I am not a shill for anyone or anything.
I am not a government employee.
I am not an employee of any political organization.
I dislike every politician.
I dislike both political parties.
What I have said for most of my adult life us coming true...this lazy,immoral,illegal,incompetent,treasonous,corrupt government will get us all killed.
I come to my own conclusions by googling the heck out of everything.
Then cross googling.
What I say and post here on FR are my thoughts.
I am not doing anything for anybody but myself.
I believe that the chain of intelligence in America is broken.
I beleive that 9/11 could have been prevented.
I believe that Bush family and friends and current and former government employees ties to Saudi oil and other Saudi businesses have caused investigative stand downs and shutdowns.
I believe that partisan political feelings of all shades have led to this disaster.
I want the bipartisan,bicameral intelligence investigation now going on to dredge up horrific facts.
Both political parties will face the wrath of America for the preventable murder of thousands of Americans by agents,minions,cohorts and soldiers funded by business owners and stockholders and partners of Saudi and other Islamic interests which are co-owned,and held by American citizens,including the Bush family,and other government employess and appointees.
The blowback is "Blowing in the wind."
"The Saudi relationship is so sensitive that, for more than a decade, federal prosecutors and counter-terrorist agents have been ordered to shut down their investigations for reasons of foreign policy."
The Tale of an American Terrorist Network
Arutz 7 | May 29, 2002 | John Loftus
Link:http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/691332/posts
Posted on 5/29/02 9:21 AM Pacific by Nachum
For twenty years I have served without compensation as a lawyer for federal whistleblowers within the US intelligence community. In the last year, I have received highly classified information from several of my confidential clients concerning a Saudi covert operation. The Saudi relationship is so sensitive that, for more than a decade, federal prosecutors and counter-terrorist agents have been ordered to shut down their investigations for reasons of foreign policy.
I am filing a lawsuit in Hillsborough County Court to expose the manner in which Florida charities were used as a money laundering operation for tax-deductible terrorism. The complaint cites specific testimony, including highly classified information which has never been released before.
The government of Saudi Arabia was laundering money through Florida charities run by University of South Florida professor Sami Al-Arian, for the support of terrorist groups in the Middle East. Through the Al-Arian network and others, the Saudi Government secretly funded Al-Qaida, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The Saudi purpose was twofold: the destruction of the State of Israel and the prevention of the formation of an independent Palestinian State.
Two particular terrorist groups, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, were specifically chosen and funded by the Saudis for their willingness to undermine Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. The secret Saudi goal was to create such animosity between Israel and the Palestinian Authority that it would wreck any chance for the creation of an independent Palestinian State. Their tactics specifically called for the intimidation or murder of those Palestinians who were willing to work with Israel for peace.
To put it bluntly, the covert Saudi network in Florida funded the murders of fellow Muslims for the crime of wanting to create the first democratic Arab state. Whatever harm the Israelis may have done, they did build an excellent public education system, including several universities, for the benefit of their Palestinian neighbors. That was the problem.
While literacy in the Arab world is below 50%, in Israel it is 97%. Israel is the only place in the Middle East where an Arab woman can vote. After 50 years, Israel has created the first Arab class exposed to democracy, literacy and western values.
To the Saudis, a democratic Palestinian nation would be a cancer in the Arab world, a destabilizing example of freedom that would threaten Arab dictators everywhere. As King Fahd has said, “next to the Jews, we hate the Palestinians the most.” The harder the Israelis and Palestinians worked for peace, the more money King Fahd poured into his murder for hire program.
The Saudi Government has already begun its spin operations, claiming that this terror network was a rogue operation financed by a radical Saudi businessman without the support or knowledge of the Saudi Government. The truth is that many of the Saudi Princes, notably Prince Bandahar and Prince Alwaheed, are good and loyal friends of America who want to lead Saudi Arabia into the modern world. Unfortunately, they are now in the minority in their own country.
King Fahd is on his death bed, and his nephew and heir apparent, Crown Prince Abdullah, depends on the most radical southern and eastern clans for his political base. The southern faction is the center of popular support for Al-Qaida and the Taliban, because it is the home of the most extreme Muslim sect, the Wahabbis. Ninety nine percent of the Muslim world rejects the Wahabbi religious tenets as utterly repugnant to the teachings and examples of the Prophet as written down in the Hadith. Since most Wahabbis are functionally illiterate, they cannot read about this conflict on their own. Typically, they memorize a few passages of the Koran taken out of context, and never read the accompanying Hadith for explanation.
For example, the Wahabbis are taught by rote that Jews are sub-humans, who should be killed as a religious duty. In contrast, the Hadith explains that the prophet Mohammed honored Jews, married a Jewish wife, forbade forced conversions of Jews, always bowed in respect when a Jewish funeral passed and promised that good and faithful Jews would go to Paradise just as good Muslims and Christians would, and that the Jews would have their Holy Place in the west (meaning Jerusalem) while Muslims would have their Holy Place in the East (meaning Mecca).
Illiteracy is a weapon of oppression. The Saudis, and their Wahabbi proteges, the Taliban, have decreed that women cannot work or even sit in the front seat of a car. In contrast, the Hadith records that the Prophet worked for his wife and that she drove her own caravans in international commerce. The Wahabbis (both in Saudi Arabia and among the Taliban) discriminate viciously against women. The Prophet, who lovingly raised three daughters, insisted that women should have substantially equal rights in contract, ownership, and divorce. The prophet forbade racism, the Wahabbis practice it, especially against their non-Arab, Shiite minority..
The Muslim faith envisioned by the Prophet in the Koran and recorded by his contemporaries in the Hadith is a religion that practices tolerance towards all races and religions, stresses the extreme importance of literacy and education and elevates the status of women to unprecedented levels in many societies. This is the gentle, peaceful Muslim faith practiced everywhere in the world, except in Saudi Arabia and the Taliban provinces of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Muslim scholars speak derisively about the primitive Wahabbi apostasy, but rarely in public.
The reason for this deafening silence is simple, most mosques in the world are impoverished and depend upon Saudi subsidies for their operation. In return, however, the Saudis have gained a foothold for proselytizing and radicalizing the Muslim youth through religious education in the form of militant Wahabbism. Children learn to hate because they are being taught that way.
The Saudi charitable network in America that began with religious education evolved into other areas over the decades. The Saudis dabbled with funding anti-Semitic hate groups as a means of breaking down American support for Israel. After the fall of communism, the Saudis took over funding the most militant terror organizations for direct attacks against Jewish and Palestinian supporters of the peace process.
Year after year, members of the intelligence community warned that a rising wave of terror was coming. Oliver North wrote in his autobiography that every time he tried to do something about terrorism, he was told to stop because it would embarrass the Saudi Government. John O’Neill quit his job as head of FBI counter-terrorism for the same reason. Jonathan Pollard went to jail. Federal agents in Tampa, who had known about the Saudi-Sami Al-Arian connection since 1990, were ordered to drop the investigation in 1995. The Saudi influence buying machine had effectively shut down any threat of criminal prosecution. Those Americans, including a former president, who lobbied for the Saudis have a lot to answer for. So do the Saudis.
With the explosive growth of Al-Qaida and their Taliban allies, the Saudis finally recognized that they had gone too far. As Osama Bin Laden laughingly related on videotape, he was approached prior to the attack on the Twin Towers by his relatives, who offered him $300,000,000 to cancel the operation. Apparently, the Bin Laden family really had not broken off all ties and knew exactly what was coming. So, my clients say, did the Saudis.
Six months later, a much chagrined Prince Abdullah belatedly announced that the Saudis would release the names of the terrorists which their charities had “unwittingly” funded, but only in Somalia and Asia. The main Saudi charities in Herndon, Virginia, and the Al-Arian network in Florida are still untouched.
My clients are betting that the American influence peddlers hired by the Saudis will succeed once again in derailing a federal investigation. They came to me for help in exposing the cover-up. That is why I am filing this lawsuit.
In the months to come, the American public may finally begin to learn why the Saudi-Sami Al-Arian terror networks went untouched for so long. It wasn’t an intelligence failure, it was a foreign policy failure. The orders were not to embarrass the Saudi government. Year after year, the cover-up orders came from the State Department and the White House. The CIA, the FBI and the Justice Department just did what they were told.
No one intended the harsh consequences of letting the Saudi’s get away with it again and again. Only after September 11, when the Treasury Department found the financial transactions linking the Saudi charities directly to Osama bin Laden, did American officials realize the extent of their betrayal.
We are not alone in our grief and anger. Saudi money sabotaged every Israeli initiative to make peace. The bewildered Palestinians may finally realize that they have been stabbed in the back by an Arab brother. The rules have changed after September 11, but the bottom line remains the same: if we want to stop terrorism, we have to tell the Saudis to stop funding it.
---------------------------------- John Loftus, author of the best-selling Secret Wars Against the Jews, is an attorney.
Dear G_d Patrick...A Republic!
As much as I hate saying it you're part of the problem! You don't even know the form of government we are supposed to have! I say "supposed to have" because for all practical purposes you are correct. America is a democracy now.
Our Founders are turning over in their graves!
That is the first RATIONAL thing I have ever seen you post.
Please accept the following correction to my earlier reply:
"In a Constitutional Republic, we the people have the right to demand that even the President himself explain and account for his own actions and not by way of spin meisters out of the White House ,the FBI or DOJ."
In about 90% of my replies I have been using the word Republic myself. I agree with you that in this case it would have been better if I used the word Republic again. However, even in a COnstitutionl Republic like we are supposed to have, there is a constitutional guarantee for a "democratic process" when it comes to elections. But our rights thankfully are not supposed to come from elections or even just rulings by judges, but by constitutional guarantees (Bill of Rights and amendemnts to COnstitution).
I also believe that the Federal government assumes powers that it does not have but instead are given to the states by the Constitution. Some day soon these powers will again be assumed by their rightful owners, the states.
And the states and the Federal government have been assuming many of the powers and rights that are given and left to the people by the Constitution. Some day soon these powers and rights will by assumed by their rightful owners, the people.
To me, the Constitution and Bill of Rights were written and approved by devinely inspired men who believed in God.
ARE NOT!!! I am !
THEY probably are out to get you too, but they'll get ME First!
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