Smackdown!
Man, this is so good, I want to just lift the whole article.
Justice Department Fails to Address 9/11 Intelligence Failures
Kate Martin
Center for National Security Studies
April 19, 2004
The hearings last week before the 9/11 Commission (formally the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States) highlighted domestic intelligence failures by the FBI and CIA before September 11. The independent, bipartisan commission was created by Congress in late 2002 and is due to release a report this July with an account of the circumstances surrounding the attacks and recommendations to guard against future attacks.
The hearings raised two key questions: 1) were legal barriers responsible for the pre-9/11 intelligence failures, and if so, are they still in place; and 2) is there a need for a new domestic intelligence agency? This essay explains why legal barriers were not responsible for the intelligence failures. The Department of Justice's insistence that legal barriers are to blame – and in turn that the Patriot Act was the correct response – is misleading at best and a distraction from the real intelligence failures at worst.
…The Staff Reports describe Attorney General Ashcroft as ignoring these problems before September 11. While the Attorney General did make some public pronouncements about the importance of counter-terrorism, there is no indication that he paid any attention to the red flags raised by Reno concerning the FBI's counter-terrorism work. Even after the CIA briefed him on July 5, 2001 that a "significant terrorist attack was imminent" he did nothing because he said he "assumed the FBI was doing what it needed to do." There is no explanation as to how he could have assumed this, given the multiple documents in the Justice Department's files concerning the FBI's problems and the fact that it only had an acting Director at that time.
Instead of addressing these findings, Attorney General Ashcroft went on the offensive before the Commission on April 13 and testified that the "wall" between law enforcement and intelligence was responsible for the 9/11 intelligence failures and that the Patriot Act has broken down that wall.
Neither claim is correct.
The "Wall." The "wall" metaphor is shorthand for the recognition that separate authorities govern law enforcement and foreign intelligence investigations targeted against Americans. These authorities, designed to prevent a recurrence of domestic spying by the FBI and CIA, always recognized that international terrorism was both a law enforcement and intelligence matter. Contrary to the repeated mischaracterization by the Attorney General and others, the law never prohibited sharing information between law enforcement and intelligence communities; to the contrary, it expressly provided for such sharing. While the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was interpreted to mean that prosecutors could not direct foreign intelligence wiretaps, as opposed to criminal wiretaps, the 9/11 failures had nothing whatsoever to do with the inability of prosecutors to direct such surveillance. [2]
None of the 9/11 failures to share information can be laid at the feet of the law. The claim is being used to obscure bureaucratic failures and to shore up support for the now controversial Patriot Act. As former Attorney General Reno recognized and as confirmed by the Staff Reports, the obstacles were "not legal barriers, but traditional agency cultures and the lack of interoperable technology." She noted that at the FBI, "agents are not trained to share information with other agencies. Nor are they evaluated and rewarded based on their ability to generate and share information that other agencies might find useful." This was true even after the FBI had identified prevention of terrorism as one of its top priorities in 1998 and recognized that it needed to improve its intelligence capabilities. [3]
Thus, Ashcroft's claim that a 1995 memorandum issued by then-Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick created the wall that was "the single greatest structural cause for September 11th" is both false and misleading. Separate procedures for law enforcement and intelligence surveillance have been on the books since at least 1978. . What's more, as pointed out by Commission Member Slade Gorton, Ashcroft's Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson affirmed the Reno Justice Department procedures in August, 2001. And few commentators have noticed that the Gorelick memo in fact required information from a then pending terrorism prosecution to be shared with intelligence officials. [4]
