Posted on 09/04/2002 4:40:47 PM PDT by fight_truth_decay
One of the fascinating revelations in the wake of federal hounding of Steven Hatfill in the anthrax case is that Richard Jewell, another one-time FBI target, is still seeking justice from the media. He was falsely labeled a suspect in the Olympic Park bombing and eventually cleared. He sued the media and collected a reported $2 million from NBC News, CNN and other media. But he still has a defamation case pending against the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
On CNN, Jewell’s attorney Lin Wood said the paper has already spent "upwards of $5 million" fighting Jewell in court. How much would it take to send the paper a message? "Well, let's see," Wood said. "Their insurance coverage is $50 million." So before you can send a message, he said, "you've got to get into their pocketbook and beyond their insurance."
Getting accountability from the FBI is even more difficult. Wood said that he has seen little progress in the bureau’s conduct since the Jewell case. He told the Los Angeles Times, "There has been no improvement. No lessons learned. Because there is no accountability for the FBI's wrongdoing." What’s more, Wood told CNN that Congress doesn’t want to hold the FBI accountable. He said there was a congressional hearing on the matter in July 1997 and it became a "photo op" for members of Congress to be seen with Jewell and get on the evening news. Wood said, "They weren't there to talk to Richard and to us about what had happened and what went wrong with the FBI to fix it."
Louis Freeh, head of the FBI, was not fired by Bill Clinton for the Richard Jewell fiasco. It appears that change comes to the FBI through retirements. In the anthrax case, the F.B.I.'s counterterrorism chief, who has overseen the investigation, has now decided to retire. The official is Dale L. Watson, who played a role in every major F.B.I. counterterrorism investigation of recent years, including the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa, the suicide attack on the Navy destroyer Cole in Yemen in 2000, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
He is now taking a job with Booz Allen Hamilton, the business consulting firm, where he will be probably making more money than he did at the FBI. He will also probably surface as a talking head on television, defending the bureau and his own record. But Watson’s bad performance is a matter of public record. In 1993 he told Congress that the FBI had identified "a significant and growing organizational presence" of foreign terrorists in the U.S. but that the bureau had them under control. He said the FBI had an "enhanced capability" to track their activities.
Interestingly, Watson also testified that the FBI was aware of a terrorist plan codenamed Bojinka that had been found in the computer files of World Trade Center mastermind Ramzi Yousef. Watson described it as a plot to destroy U.S. air carriers in a simultaneous operation. In fact, it was also a plan to hijack U.S. airliners and use them as bombs to attack important buildings. We now know that the terrorists were in the U.S. learning how to hijack and fly these airliners. Watson’s FBI failed to stop them.
Reed Irvine can be reached at ri@aim.org
They were too busy stopping pot smugglers.
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