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.
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.
So, how the hell were our intellegence agencies supposed to know if the terrorists didn't even know???!!!
Somebody needs to ask David Frasca today 5 years later!!
Are you an idiot to continuously block the Moussaoui investigation from Aug. 15th 2001 right through the 9/11 attacks??
OR
Did the Bush Administration, Dick Cheney, or the Attorney General John Ashcroft at the time force your department to ignore the Phoenix memo and Moussaoui investigation???
Ms. Rowley writes that FBI supervisory agent in Washington who had been making the decisions on Minneapolis's requests seemed to have been "consistently, almost deliberately thwarting the Minneapolis FBI agents' efforts." On Sept. 11, just minutes after the attacks began, the supervisory agent in Washington headquarters phoned Minneapolis, and Ms. Rowley took the call. In that call, she says, he "was still attempting to block the search of Moussaoui's computer."
Ms. Rowley recounts the conversation this way: "I said something to the effect that, in light of what had just happened in New York, it would have to be the 'hugest coincidence' at this point if Moussaoui was not involved with the terrorists. The [supervisory agent] stated something to the effect that I had used the right term, 'coincidence' and that this was probably all just a coincidence and we were to do nothing in Minneapolis until we got their [FBIheadquarters'] permission." He added, she says, that he didn't want Minneapolis to "screw up" investigations "elsewhere in the country."
Tim Russert, "60 Minutes": This is the story you've lived for. Were there spies in the FBI helping out the other side? What political influences may have dictated or affected their decisions? Why did the FBI ignore all the information coming in from French intelligence, from Phoenix, from Minneapolis, from Oklahoma?