Justice, FBI Officials 9/11 Testimony.
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| Tue, 04-13-2004 - 9:35am |
Freeh, Reno and Ashcroft to testify.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/04/13/911.commission/index.html
Top Justice Department and FBI officials from the Clinton and Bush administrations are expected to issue spirited defenses of their actions when they face a likely grilling from members of the 9/11 commission which has just gotten under way.
Former FBI Director Louis Freeh signaled his defense with an opinion article Monday in The Wall Street Journal, in which he faulted political leaders for not declaring war on al Qaeda -- the terrorist network headed by Osama bin Laden -- before the attacks of September 11, 2001.
"Short of total war, the FBI relentlessly did its job of pursuing terrorists, always with the goal of preventing their attacks," Freeh writes in the article.
Freeh and former Attorney General Janet Reno are scheduled for the morning session, with former acting FBI Director Thomas Pickard, former director of the CIA's counterterrorism center Cofer Black and current Attorney General John Ashcroft scheduled for the afternoon.
After several weeks of fingerpointing and contention that began when former White House counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke said the Bush administration was too focused on Iraq to give adequate attention to al Qaeda, the commissioners will be looking for answers to what commission chairman Thomas Kean called "probably the biggest question before us now."
"What the FBI did before 9/11, what are they doing now and have they reformed their organization so there aren't going to be the kind of mistakes they made before 9/11," Kean told CNN's American Morning.
Commission member John Lehman said the "single most important question" for him is why U.S. intelligence agencies could not corroborate the more alarmist reports of terrorist activity, as the recently declassified President's Daily Brief of August 6, 2001 -- titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike Inside America" -- reported.
"Why did it fail?" asked the former Navy secretary. "Why could it not corroborate these more alarmist reports?
Lehman said the PDB "distills for the American people almost perfectly a picture of what our problems are."
"The president asked after what Dick Clarke called the summer of alarmist reporting ... and what they came up with was something that did not provide a good look at what was going on," Lehman said.
The commission's vice chairman, Lee Hamilton, said the commission would be seeking answers to questions about law enforcement capabilities prior to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, what kind of changes have been made since and what kind of deficiencies still exist.
Hamilton said the commission is not involved in political fingerpointing and blame, adding that its focus is "the future and to try to make our country safer."
"Our focus is to understand the facts as best we can and then from those facts develop recommendations that will have broad support," the former congressman said. "The blame game we'll leave to other people."
"It's not a question of blame," Kean said. "It's a question of did the president have the information, because presidents act on information. If the FBI was not giving him the information then that's a failure of the FBI."
"The question is, do we have an agency that has failed two presidents now and do we have to reform it," the former governor of New Jersey said. "That's probably the biggest question before us now."
Commission member Richard Ben-Veniste, a former Watergate prosecutor, said, "Despite our extraordinary individuals who work for the FBI and the CIA and other agencies, who would give their lives for this country, somehow the system didn't work properly.
"This is a question of how to fix it and looking at what went wrong so that we know what needs to be fixed. That is the central issue of what we are grappling with."
But Lehman also said the deficiencies of the U.S. intelligence system have been no secret.
"Those of us who have been in the national security field ... have known we have a system that doesn't really work," he said. "There have been commission after commission recommending that this be reformed, and now we have a real threat ... and we have a more dysfunctional intelligence community than ever."
That long-term breakdown in the intelligence systems, Lehman said, made the terrorist attacks in 2001 possible.
"I think you'll find a consensus emerge that it could have been (prevented) but not in the sense that if somebody had done something different in the last few months because then it was already too late," he said.
"There were such failures, such glaring failures in our internal security and air security, immigration and so forth, that had those institutions been doing their jobs the American people thought they were doing, it could have been avoided."
Monday, FBI officials confirmed the existence of 70 investigations relating to al Qaeda in the United States before September 11. Those investigations were referred to in the presidential daily briefing of August 6, 2001, released over the weekend.


"The president asked after what Dick Clarke called the summer of alarmist reporting ... and what they came up with was something that did not provide a good look at what was going on," Lehman said.
This is a perfect summation to date.
I believe that if the CIA, FBI and NSA had been sharing intelligence and information with one another, perhaps a better picture could have been formed beforehand, and the agencies would have been able to see the holes in the information, and tried to fill them PRIOR to giving their final report to the White House.
I guess the commission will have to make its findings on this as well.
I think this will be the most interesting part of the testimony & the most revealing. Will also turn out to be the area most in need of a fix, so to speak. IMO
I thought these agencies FBI, CIA etc. were going to put under one
I thought that was the reasoning behind the Department of Homeland Security.
I think that a lot has to do with the doctrine of the CIA, where they are not permitted to officially act within the United States, while the FBI are allowed to act anywhere there is a need to have them investigate.
This could have something to do with it, but this is probably something that we will never hear about because it is so bureaucratic.
>" I thought that was the reasoning behind the Department of Homeland Security. "<
Me too.
Have you been to England yet or going to go? I was waiting for an invitation.
Quick trip, which killed me on the time issue. Just as I got accustomed to the time change there, it was time to come home.
I guess some things are harder to learn than others.
Maybe they will listen when Washington DC is under a mushroom cloud.