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.
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)