Posted on 05/30/2002 3:44:32 PM PDT by VaBthang4
I have tried for the past day and a half trying to find out exactly who it was in Washington DC's FBI headquarters that were stonewalling Collen Crowley's requests concerning Zacarius Moussaoui.
The media as usual doesnt seem to want to find out...causing me to suspect who they could be...
FReepers have shown an outstanding capacity to find out all kinds of info that cant be found anywhere else.
All help is appreciated.
-SNIP from the POST.
Law enforcement sources said the officials Rowley referred to only by title in her memo to Mueller were Michael Maltbie, a supervisory special agent (SSA), and his boss, David Frasca, chief of the counterterrorism division's radical fundamentalist unit.
Rowley complained bitterly that the unnamed SSA thwarted efforts to obtain warrants for Moussaoui, and that Minneapolis agents were chastised for taking their worries about Moussaoui to the CIA.
Mueller praised the Minnesota agents as "tremendously aggressive" in getting Moussaoui placed under arrest on immigration charges, and said, "We should have been more aggressive here in supporting them."
Maltbie, law enforcement sources said, is no longer working in counterterrorism. He was described as having received a lateral transfer in recent months to the Cleveland field office. Reached at his home yesterday, Maltbie declined to comment on the Rowley allegations, referring all queries to FBI officials in Washington. A spokesman here said the bureau would not comment on Maltbie's actions, noting the inspector general's probe. Frasca did not return a phone call for comment.
Other results of search.
Thanks for the response.
Maltbie & Fresca
Sounds like something on a dinner menu.
Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
May 29, 2002
EDITORIAL; Pg. B6
WARNINGS INSIDE THE FBI
SEPTEMBER 11
THANKS to a gutsy memo from an FBI straight-shooter, we now know that a single FBI counterterrorism office had two key pieces of information last August that might have made a difference on Sept. 11: a Phoenix FBI agent's warning that Osama bin Laden might be sending terrorists to American aviation schools and the desperate pleas from Minneapolis agents to search the computer of Zacarias Moussaoui.
Coleen M. Rowley - 21-year FBI veteran, mother of four and Minneapolis legal counsel turned whistleblower - wrote a 13-page memo to FBI director Robert Mueller in which she says the tips might have saved lives on Sept. 11. Time magazine obtained a copy of the May 21 "bombshell" memo. For months, Mr. Mueller and other top FBI officials had claimed they had no prior warning of an impending attack. Ms. Rowley recounts her efforts to warn Mr. Mueller, through highly placed friends, that his statements were misleading. Finally, Ms. Rowley concluded that "someone, possibly with your approval, had decided to circle the wagons."
Moussaoui was arrested on immigration charges on Aug. 15 after a flight instructor became suspicious of his lack of interest in landing planes. Within days, French intelligence provided information linking Moussaoui to bin Laden. FBI agents "became desperate to search the laptop" computer they had taken from Moussaoui, but ran into stiff resistance at headquarters.
Ms. Rowley accuses the supervisory agent at headquarters, David Frasca, of torpedoing the effort to get a warrant. Headquarters suggested that there might be more than one Zacarias Moussaoui and that the French were confused. Headquarters agents refused to include the key information from the French in the warrant application, seriously weakening it. Even after the attack on Sept. 11, the headquarters agent suggested it might be just a "coincidence" that Moussaoui had been learning to fly airliners. When agents finally got the approval to search Moussaoui's belongings, they found the telephone number of a roommate of Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker.
Ms. Rowley acknowledges that the full scope of the Sept. 11 attack probably could not have been unearthed. But she says there is "at least some chance that discovery of other terrorist pilots prior to Sept. 11th may have limited the September 11th attacks and resulting loss of life."
Ms. Rowley says the nation doesn't need a witch-hunt. But she's insistent that "an unbiased, completely accurate picture emerge of the FBI's current investigative and management strengths and failures." It's hard to believe any American would disagree.
Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion.
WIRE; Pg. A01The Deseret News (Salt Lake City, UT)
May 28, 2002, TuesdayCrucial terror data did exist
The New York Times News Service
WASHINGTON -- The day of Aug. 6, 2001, broke in the capital with the steamy torpor of deep summer. Congress was in recess, and President Bush, away on a working vacation at his Texas ranch, was out jogging before the temperature began its climb above 100 degrees. He later hacked brush in a sweltering gulch and fished for bass in a stocked pond.
Maybe, later, his aides said, he would finish reading a biography of John Adams.
But that morning, not long after his four-mile run, Bush sat down in his ranch house for his daily intelligence briefing. It was delivered not by his usual briefer, George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence but by a low-level CIA officer. At some point, the briefer told Bush that Osama bin Laden's followers in al-Qaida might hijack commercial jets in the United States -- a dated fragment of information based on a single 1999 British intelligence report. What Bush was not told that morning, and what his CIA briefer did not know, was that crucial pieces of al-Qaida's intentions in the United States did exist elsewhere inside the nation's counterterrorism agencies.
A re-examination of events before Sept. 11 clearly suggests that the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the agency most directly responsible for protecting against an attack on American soil, failed to assemble a coherent picture of the available danger signals. Nor did it fully communicate what it knew to the CIA or other intelligence agencies.
Interviews with more than a dozen current and former senior policymakers and law enforcement and counterterrorism officials suggest that in the summer of 2001 the government's counterterrorism apparatus was too lumbering, too compartmentalized and too inattentive to grasp the emerging pattern. Also, perhaps, a bit unlucky.
In addition, recent interviews of intelligence officials by The New York Times suggest that the bureau had a reason for growing cautious about applying to a secret national security court for special search warrants that might have supplied critical information. The FBI, the officials said, had become wary after a well-regarded supervisor was disciplined because the court complained that he had submitted improper information on applications.
"It's too bad that someone had not connected the dots -- they had the dots," said a retired senior FBI official, who would not speak on the record on such a sensitive subject.
Beyond the apparent inability to detect any pattern, a question of willful negligence has been raised. In a memorandum that is the subject of Congressional scrutiny, an FBI agent in Minneapolis argued last week that there was enough evidence in August to obtain the special search warrant for a computer and other belongings of Zacarias Moussaoui, a French-born flight student. The agent, Coleen Rowley, wrote to the FBI director, Robert S. Mueller III, that a search could have yielded significant clues, if not warnings, about the Sept. 11 attacks.
But Rowley, in anguished tones, wrote that officials at the bureau's headquarters repeatedly thwarted the efforts of agents in the field to investigate Moussaoui, a man who officials believe was meant to be the 20th hijacker.
The issues "are fundamentally ones of INTEGRITY," Rowley wrote, making her point in capitals.
Ms. Rowley wrote that the evidence was so persuasive at the time that the bureau could not hide behind a "20-20 hindsight is perfect" argument. A bipartisan group of senators demanded this weekend that Mr. Mueller answer the issues raised in the Rowley memorandum.
While Bush administration officials have said that no information was available that could have thwarted the attacks, Mueller has acknowledged that the bureau paid insufficient attention to the signals. In response to an outpouring of criticism in Congress -- and from his own agent ranks -- Mueller has promised to build up the bureau's analytical ability.
His plans have not deterred Democrats in Congress who have proposed an independent commission to investigate the attacks even as the chairmen of congressional intelligence committees have announced hearings on them for June.
John L. Martin, a former senior Justice Department official who spent a career involved in national security, said he believed that the administration should welcome, not resist, a review of its performance.
"When you see a bad play on a football field, you know it," Mr. Martin said. "And you know the coach has to review it to make it right for the next time."
Bush and his closest advisers never got the information that July 10 an FBI agent in Phoenix had warned in a memorandum that bin Laden might be sending operatives to American flight schools to prepare for terrorist operations. Bush did not learn of the memorandum until long after the attacks.
"They had the concept that this could happen. This guy in Phoenix added some detail, and then you had the Moussaoui case," said the retired senior FBI official. "It was all there for someone to piece together. That's their job."
Aug. 16, an instructor at a Minneapolis flight school called the FBI to report his suspicions about Moussaoui. The next day, Moussaoui was arrested on immigration charges. Two days later, FBI agents in Minnesota asked Washington to obtain a special warrant to search his laptop computer, but the request was repeatedly resisted by FBI headquarters.
Other signs came and went, seemingly without being fitted into the growing file on al-Qaida. For example, in the summer of 2001, Mr. Bush's national security team was told about the extensive FBI debriefings of Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian arrested in December 1999 at the Canadian border by a Customs Service agent in what became known as the millennium bombing plot. Mr. Ressam provided a firsthand account of his training in Afghanistan and his plan to detonate a bomb at Los Angeles International Airport.
"Ressam gave us a template for an al-Qaida operation in the United States," a senior law enforcement official said. "But because it was prevented, because the bomb didn't go off, it didn't set off the alarms like it should have."
The FBI clearinghouse for al-Qaida intelligence was the bin Laden and radical fundamentalist units in its counterterrorism division. The units had complete access to the Phoenix memorandum, the Moussaoui case and the Ressam debriefings. But the agents assigned to these units did not understand the broader meaning of the signs, senior law enforcement officials acknowledge.
"No one was looking at any overall picture," one of the former officials said. "It's hard, scruffy, dirty work to do these analytical things. You get a lot of criticism within the bureaucracy if you send up a paper that someone feels won't carry the day."
The bureau's reluctance to press new applications for national security search warrants stemmed, some officials believe, from an incident late in the Clinton administration.
In the fall of 2000, the seven judges on the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in Washington summoned Attorney General Janet Reno to their secure courtroom. The judges, in a letter signed by Chief Judge Royce C. Lamberth, had complained to her of a serious breach. Misleading affidavits had been submitted to the court, which approves warrants to eavesdrop on people suspected of being foreign agents or international terrorists. At the meeting, Reno agreed that the problem was serious, the officials said. All of the flawed affidavits had been submitted by Michael Resnick, the FBI supervisor in charge of coordinating the surveillance operations related to Hamas, the militant Palestinian group. The judges said they would no longer accept applications from Resnick.
In response, the FBI director at the time, Louis J. Freeh, ordered a broader review of the eavesdropping applications -- including those related to al-Qaida. That review, the officials said, turned up disturbing signs that al-Qaida applications were also flawed.
For Mr. Resnick, who had been a rising star in the bureau, the complaint from the judges and especially their refusal to have him appear before them again was a blow to his career that angered some of his colleagues. Ms. Reno turned over the complaint to the department's Office of Professional Responsibility, which is still investigating Mr. Resnick.
Intelligence officials said the event resulted in making the bureau far less aggressive in seeking information on terrorists. Other officials said the Resnick case prompted bureau officials to adopt a play-it-safe approach that meant submitting fewer applications and declining to submit any that could be questioned.
Several former and current officials said the FBI legal counsel's office may have been correct, based on what was known at the time, in deciding not to apply for a warrant to search Mr. Moussaoui's computer. The office was not given any evidence that Mr. Moussaoui was acting on behalf of a foreign power, a requirement of the law. But the officials said it appeared that the bureau had not stirred itself to fill that gap.
Rowley complained in emphatic language in her memorandum that an official at headquarters was determined to thwart the field office's efforts to obtain a surveillance warrant from the court to examine Moussaoui's computer. She charged that the supervisory agent, to make the application not viable, had played down information obtained from French intelligence sources about Mr. Moussaoui's links to foreign terrorist organizations. Excerpts from the text of the memorandum that were posted on the Time Web site this weekend show Ms. Rowley pleading with Mr. Mueller to be careful not to continue to say that the bureau did not have any information that could have helped prevent the Sept. 11 attacks.
She said that the headquarters supervisory agent had perceived that pressing the application for the warrant was an unnecessary career risk. Although she did not name the official, Senators Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, Charles E. Grassley of Iowa and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania have identified David Frasca, who was in the unit that was assigned to monitor Islamic radical terrorists, as responsible.
A spokesman said the FBI would not comment on Mr. Frasca's role or on Ms. Rowley's memorandum.
"I have deep concerns that a delicate and subtle shading/skewing of facts by you and others at the highest levels of FBI management has occurred and is occurring," Rowley wrote. "The term 'cover-up' would be too strong a characterization, which is why I am attempting to carefully (and perhaps overlaboriously) choose my words here."
She added that she believed certain facts "have up to now, been omitted, downplayed, glossed over and/or mischaracterized in an effort to avoid or minimize personal and/or institutional embarrassment on the part of the FBI and/or perhaps even for improper political reasons."
The issue was whether the information from the French security services identified Moussaoui as someone with radical Islamic ideas, as headquarters officials contended, or described links to specific groups, as the Minnesota office believed.
"That would have been the clincher," said one senior government official familiar with the intelligence court. "The mention of groups would have gotten the bureau the warrant that Minneapolis wanted."
Rowley also wrote that the supervisor threw up roadblocks to a search warrant in the Moussaoui case even after Sept. 11. as a defensive reaction to how his earlier unwillingness would now appear.
Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion.
All Editions; Pg. 006The New York Post
May 27, 2002, Monday
D.C. POLS OUT FOR BLOOD OVER FBI, CIA 'FAILURES'
VINCENT MORRIS in Washington and JOHN LEHMANN in N.Y.(snip)
Pressure is growing on Mueller, who took over the reigns of the FBI less than a year ago, to detail the role of David Frasca, chief of the unit investigating radical fundamentalists, in analyzing terror alerts in the weeks before Sept. 11.
Frasca was sent the July 10 memo from Phoenix about terrorists enrolling in U.S. flying schools and was the Washington liaison with the field office in Minneapolis, where the so-called 20th hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui, was detained in August.
Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) urged his colleagues to schedule public hearings in which Mueller and CIA Director George Tenet would testify.
Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.) said the FBI had been a "disorganized agency with independent fiefdoms" but that Mueller was on the way to shaking things up.
But the bombshell memo, penned by agent Coleen Rowley, blasted Mueller's plans to further centralize FBI decision-making by creating a flying squad of investigators.
Rowley said such plans "fly in the face of an honest appraisal" of the FBI's failures.
I would like to know who and how Frasca was assigned to the supervisory position.
Considering he had access to the Phoenix memo his actions with Mrs. Crowley should be described as "extremely incompetent".
Maybe it is me...
But If I have a memo telling me that Al Qaeda operatives may be training at flight schools and then we nab a guy identified as an Al Qaeda player who is trying to obtain flight training ...how you "at the very least" dont go through his personal belongings.
To loft out the excuse that "perhaps the french are mistaken" is incomprehensible......maybe the french are wrong....maybe they arent....who cares?
Investigate him and and find out for yourself. Since when is it good police work to dismiss someones suspicions and not follow them up with your own investigation?
Also what was this moron doing throughout his working hours....playing pong?
I know we all have hindsight but it takes no stretch of the imagination when you have the phoenix memo in hand and also know that Moussoui wanted flight training only...to discern something is terribly out of order....
Frasca should lose his job period!
....reassignment is BS.
If there was ever a fall guy......he is it. Deservingly.
Frasca's unwillingness to pursue the Zacarias Moussaoui matter apparently didn't just happen in a vaccum; there's more to the story. It seems the FBI supervisors were skittish of asking for surveillance against terrorist groups because of an earlier event involving the FISA Court.
There had been an internal investigation that had allegedly ruined Michael Resnick's "rising career" in the FBI. Judge Lamberth & the FISA Court had refused to accept any more FISA applications from Resnick for some reason (reasons that remain unclear to me). I don't think this particular article mentions it, but I think this all began back when Reno was AJ.
Ping me whenever you figure out who the black-hats are. The whole thing is all very confusing to me. :-)
Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion.
Section B; Page 1; Column 5; National DeskThe New York Times
September 19, 2001
A NATION CHALLENGED: THE INVESTIGATION;
Officials Say 2 More Jets May Have Been in the Plot
By DAVID JOHNSTON and JAMES RISEN
WASHINGTON, Sept. 18
Federal authorities said today that they were investigating the possibility that terrorists might have plotted to commandeer two more commercial flights on the day that four planes were hijacked and used in attacks on New York and the Pentagon.
Law enforcement officials said they were taking the possibility of other hijack targets seriously, based on information from several sources, including citizens' tips and information from cooperating witnesses. One flight under investigation is American Airlines Flight 43, which left Newark International Airport about 8:10 a.m. bound for Los Angeles; it made an emergency landing in Cincinnati after the government ordered all flights grounded.
The other flight is American Airlines Flight 1729 from Newark to San Antonio via Dallas that was scheduled to depart at 8:50 a.m. and was later forced to land at St. Louis.
Attorney General John Ashcroft acknowledged that the authorities were investigating whether other aircraft besides the four might have been targeted. But, Mr. Ashcroft added, "we are not able at this time to confirm that."
Mr. Ashcroft said that 75 people who might have information in the case were in custody on immigration charges, and reports of new arrests came in today from Los Angeles, Detroit and Orlando, Fla.
As investigators continued to make arrests and conduct searches, law enforcement officials acknowledged that the F.B.I.'s efforts to conduct electronic surveillance of foreign terrorists in the United States had been troubled in recent months, prompting an internal inquiry into possible abuses.
Justice Department and F.B.I. officials, who acknowledged the existence of the internal investigation, said the inquiry had forced officials to examine their monitoring of several suspected terrorist groups, among them Al Qaeda, the network led by Osama bin Laden, and Hamas, the militant Palestinian group. Al Qaeda is the group that President Bush and others have cited for last week's attacks.
Senior F.B.I. and Justice Department officials said that they had not allowed the internal investigation of terrorism-related wiretaps to affect their ability to monitor Al Qaeda or Hamas. But other officials said the inquiry might have hampered electronic surveillance of terror groups.
The matter remains highly classified.
The officials said the internal inquiry was opened in part because of legal problems arising from the government's investigation into the 1998 bombings of two American Embassies in East Africa, involving Al Qaeda members
Today, law enforcement officials said that the evidence of a broader plot in the airliner hijackings was suggestive but inconsistent. In the case of American Airlines Flight 1729, the authorities have detained two men from the flight who were arrested aboard an Amtrak train in Fort Worth after their flight had been forced to land in St. Louis. The two men, identified as Ayubali Ali Kahn and Mohammed Jaweed Azmath, were the only people aboard the flight who appeared to be suspicious; each of the other flights had hijack teams of four or five men.
A senior F.B.I. official said today that the authorities were examining hundreds of e-mail messages to and from the suspected hijackers and their known associates.
The messages were mainly in English and Arabic, said the official, who would not describe the content aside from saying that the messages were provided by large Internet service providers.
American intelligence officials also said today that they had received a report that Mohamed Atta, a suspected hijacker on American Airlines Flight 11, which struck the World Trade Center North Tower, met several months ago with an Iraqi intelligence official in Europe. The American officials said the report of the meeting had been received in the last few days.
The officials said they were not sure of the purpose of the meeting, if it did occur, and were investigating the possible connection. They emphasized that it did not prove that Iraq played a role in the attacks.
In addition to the two men who were arrested on the Amtrak train and taken to New York as material witnesses in the investigation, federal agents have also taken to New York for questioning a man who was arrested in Minnesota in mid-August on a passport violation after he sought training on a airplane flight simulator.
The man, Zacarias Moussaoui, apparently raised suspicion at the Pan Am International Flight Academy in Eagan, Minn., although officials with the academy have declined to describe why.
Within days of Mr. Moussaoui's arrest, federal agents showed up at the Airman Flight School in Oklahoma, where he had enrolled earlier in the year, said Dale Davis, director of operations at the flight school. Mr. Davis said the agents took copies of Mr. Moussaoui's immigration form and asked, among other things, whether Mr. Moussaoui had ever made anti-American statements. Mr. Davis said he told the agents that Mr. Moussaoui had not.
At the same time, investigators appeared to be uncertain about the scope of the entire operation, particularly in cities outside the Northeast. Several connections to San Antonio have been developed.
Albader Alhazmi, a 34-year-old radiologist from San Antonio, is being held in New York as a material witness, one official said. Dr. Alhazmi's home and workplace have been searched.
The internal debate at the Justice Department and F.B.I. over wiretap surveillance of terrorist groups ignited in March, prompted by questions raised by Royce C. Lamberth, the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, a little-known panel that decides whether to approve Justice Department applications to permit wiretaps and clandestine searches in espionage and international terror cases.
In a letter to Attorney General Ashcroft, Judge Lamberth raised questions about a wiretap request related to a Hamas member, officials said. Under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the F.B.I. must make applications, through the Justice Department, to the surveillance court to authorize wiretaps and clandestine searches of the homes and offices of suspected terrorists and spies.
The foreign surveillance act, passed in 1978 in the wake of Watergate and other revelations of abuses by the F.B.I. and C.I.A., created a legal framework to allow the government to eavesdrop on people considered dangerous to American national security, even if prosecutors had not yet developed a criminal case against them.
The legal standards that the F.B.I. must meet to obtain court authorization under the act are lower than the probable cause required under most criminal cases. But that flexibility comes with a cost: information gathered under the act can be used only in criminal cases under highly limited conditions.
Civil liberties advocates have frequently expressed concerns about whether the act allows the government to blur the lines between intelligence gathering and criminal prosecutions.
Judge Lamberth's concerns about F.B.I. applications to the court are apparently related to whether the bureau was seeking wiretaps under the act on individuals without informing the court of a subject's status pending criminal investigations.
The Bush administration team at the Justice Department reacted to Judge Lamberth's complaints by opening an inquiry into Michael Resnick, an F.B.I. official who coordinates the act's applications.
Mr. Ashcroft and Robert S. Mueller III, now director of the F.B.I., who at the time was temporarily serving as deputy attorney general, ordered a review of foreign surveillance authorizations. Louis J. Freeh, who was then the F.B.I. director, and Lawrence Parkinson, the bureau's general counsel, ordered a review of several applications in terrorism cases dating back several years.
Disclosure of the internal investigation of the foreign intelligence process comes just as Mr. Ashcroft is seeking Congressional support for an emergency package of anti-terrorism legislation, including an expansion of the Justice Department's ability to use wiretaps in cases of suspected terrorism or espionage.
Under his proposal, law enforcement agents would have broad authority to conduct roving electronic surveillance of suspected terrorists as they move from phone to phone or from computer terminal to computer terminal.
Some officials argue that the current system imposes burdens on the F.B.I. and Justice Department as they seek to obtain wiretaps of suspected terrorists. Under the foreign intelligence act, electronic surveillance authorization must be renewed by the F.I.S.A. court every 90 days, and authorization for physical search warrants must be renewed by the court every 45 days.
Applications surged after Tuesday's attacks, officials said.
On NOW at RadioFR!
6pm PDT/9pm EDT- Listen to Radio FreeRepublic live tonight, as Luis Gonzales interviews G. Edward Griffin and discusses his book 'The Creature From Jekyll Island. A Second Look At The Federal Reserve'. Find out the true nature of our monetary system and how it affects you!
Here's another article that touches on it.
Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion.
Washington Monthly
April 1, 2002
Lone-star justice: conservatives thought Clinton-bashing Judge Royce Lamberth was on their team--until he went after the bushies
Mencimer, Stephanie
(snip)
Last fall, Lamberth came under fire for sanctioning Justice Department lawyer Michael Resnick for failing to provide sufficient documentation for a wiretap application in the FISA court. The FISA court is a top-secret institution created in 1978 to oversee warrants for domestic wiretaps issued for national security reasons rather than criminal investigations. When the FBI wants to tap a phone, break into a house, hack into a computer, or bug the rooms of a suspected terrorist on American soil, it applies to the FISA court for a secret warrant.
A FISA court warrant does not require the same burden of proof that a search warrant in a criminal case does, which is one reason civil libertarians believe the FISA court is unconstitutional. Not only does it allow the government to secretly spy on its own citizens with little evidence of their guilt, its entire book of business is conducted in secrecy, leaving very little public insight into its workings. The statute creating the court contains protections to ensure that the government, in prosecuting criminal cases, does not simply go to the FISA court when it has too weak a case to secure a wiretap from a regular judge. But critics have charged that the seven-judge court is simply a rubber stamp for the government, because, since its inception, the court has denied just one wiretap application out of more than 12,000 made.
At a 1997 meeting of the American Bar Association, Lamberth, the FISA court's chief judge, said he resented the "rubber stamp" charge. He insisted that even if judges did not reject wiretap applications outright, they closely scrutinized and even revised them before approving them. "I ask questions. I get into the nitty-gritty. I know exactly what's going to be done and why," he said. "I have pen-and-inked changes myself on the things."
Lamberth proved he wasn't kidding in March last year when he censured Resnick. Unfortunately for Lamberth, after September 11, when the FBI received unexpected criticism for shoddy counterterrorist investigations, law enforcement officials blamed Lamberth. They argued that his censure had a chilling effect, making lawyers leery of seeking new wiretaps--such as the one critics say the bureau should have requested for Zacarias Moussaoui. Thought to be the "20th terrorist," Moussaoui is the Moroccan man arrested in August after he tried to learn how to fly a plane but not how to land it. (Officially, the FBI has denied that Lamberth had anything to do with the decision not to surveil Moussaoui.)
Because the whole episode is classified, it's impossible for the public to really know whether this was another case of Lamberth going ballistic over a minor bureaucratic snafu or a serious screwup by the Justice Department. Either way, civil libertarians were reassured simply to know that the judge really was exercising his oversight role on the court with an eye towards protecting constitutional rights.
"Lamberth has demonstrated a refreshing willingness to scrutinize government claims and to demand absolute accuracy from the government filings. You'd be surprised how rare that is," says Jonathan Turley, a professor of public interest law at George Washington University and one of the few lawyers actually to set foot inside the FISA court.
Turley says that with its windowless, soundproof, super-secret chamber on the sixth floor of the Justice Department, the FISA court can dangerously warp a judge's perspective. "The trappings of the court can make judges feel like an extension of the intelligence agencies. That would not be the case with Lamberth. He has a healthy skepticism_ It takes a great deal of self-confidence for a judge to send back a FISA application. The good thing about Lamberth is that he has never flinched. He possesses independent judgement that makes him a real protector of constitutional rights. The criticism that has been heaped on him should be a badge of honor."
The Bush administration has apparently been less pleased with Lamberth's independence. Last fall, Attorney General John Ashcroft's office sent Congress the "U.S.A. Patriot Act," sweeping anti-terrorism legislation that called for far-reaching changes in federal law enforcement. Those changes included overturning many of the rules put in place at the FBI, like those creating the FISA court, designed to protect Americans against Hoover-era domestic spying abuses. The bill (which Bush signed in October) also attempted to eliminate the provision that allowed Lamberth to send back Resnick's wiretap application.
(snip)
Frasca should either answer some hard and fast questions in front of a committee or he can be the fall guy.
It is amazing to learn all of this.
GE runs a better ship then the FBI.
Requesting a court order to search the possesions of a Man who French Intelligence officially claimed was a member of Al Qaeda couldnt have been hampered by Lambeth's decision to censure someone else [or at the least...it shouldnt have]....it smells of passing the buck to me.
If they search his computer they find Atta's roommates phone number....they track down his roommate and things begin to shake out...at the very least it would have put Atta on FBI radar...and considering that there were conversations going back and forth between the INS & FBI about Atta prior to September 11th....who knows what would've/could've/should've happened.
One judge rebukes one man for apparent discrepancies and it has a chilling affect so profound that it stops FBI officials from doing their basic job description?
I dont think so.
Frasca has a boss....I would like to know who that is.
I would also like to know "who" reassigned Frasca to Cleveland after September 11th.
All these accusations of one judge bringing operations to an implied halt seems like smoke to me that cannot be proven or disproven given the confidential nature of the proof that would need to be brought to public light in order to completely address the issue.
The Lamberth accusations give off a "Potomac two-step" vibe to me.
Frasca and his immediate supervisors needs to answer for their decisions....reasons vs. excuses.
Personally, I think there's enough blame to go around to just about everyone. The FBI was obviously due for a sever shakeup anyway. They need to send just about everyone in DC out to the field and bring fresh blood into DC. Middle management needs to be cut severely and chain of command needs to be streamlined. In addition, it seems the FBI needs their own internal oversight committee that reviews procedures on a regular basis to make sure that layers are not being added where they're not needed in order to pad jobs.
The first thing congress has to get rid of is the inablility to fire people once they're entrenched in government service. Seems you can only transfer people laterally and that's just not acceptable. You want to see government service pick up in efficiency? All you have to do is make sure that people who are not doing their job can be dismissed.
Exactly. This needs to be followed all the way up the ladder because that's the source. It's my opinion that there's a direct inverse relationship between the administrative level of an FBI employee and his/her basic level of intelligence.
In other words, they need to send those who are in the FBI's upper echelon out to pasture and replace them with the competent field agents!
"Great minds" and all that jazz, except I still like the pasture idea. ;-)
I hope the changes that director Meuller now puts in place can address this problem.
As with most catastrophies...it would seem that there were alot of failures that led up to Sept. 11th...
This time, I believe many of those failures are simply unacceptable.
I am not surprised that most of these failures happened as a direct result of Democrats and their ilk being in the loop and calling the shots.
In hindsight, simply amazing.
Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania have identified David Frasca, who was in the unit that was assigned to monitor Islamic radical terrorists, as responsibleThere is a deep and hidious irony in this I am quite sure.
Like you deduce, there are about a dozen more who should be held to account.
The implication here might be that Lamberth (who was appointed under Reagan, BTW), was pre-disposed to find fault with Resnick. The fact that he pursued the matter into the Ashcroft Justice Department, tends to make me skeptical of Lamberth's motives, and to question whether it was limited to one agent, or whether it extended to Hamas and warrants investigating Muslim/Arab groups in particular, or to the principle of civil rights in general.
Too bad we didn't have more info on exactly what Resnick was doing, in investigating Hamas, that suddenly became so offensive to Lamberth.
I do remember Fox News commenting, soon after 9/11, that a "judge" blocked the warrant for Moussaoui's computer, but, in light of Crowley's memo, I assumed the FBI was simply covering its posterior with that statement. My gut feeling is that it was a combination of CYA and careerism by FBIHQ, and possible obstruction, for motives yet unknown, by Lamberth.
American Muslim/Arab groups have long had lobbyists in Washington, and they have outspoken friends in Congress. It's also no secret that they have been and continue to be courted by elements within the Bush administration. These groups have for years been fighting to eliminate FISA and so called "secret evidence" (with good reason, considering what has come to light about these groups' financial and ideological support of terrorism).
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.