Ashcroft Cites Lapses Years Before 9/11

WASHINGTON —  Criticizing the counter-terrorism policies of the Clinton administration, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft said Tuesday that the United States failed to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks “because for nearly a decade our government had blinded itself to its enemies.”

Ashcroft said that before the attacks, FBI agents “were isolated by government-imposed walls, handcuffed by government-imposed restrictions, and starved for information technology. The old national intelligence system in place on Sept. 11 was destined to fail.”

His testimony represented the most pointed attempt by a Bush administration official appearing before the Sept. 11 commission to pin blame on predecessors in the White House.

But Ashcroft came under scrutiny for his own counter- terrorism efforts, battling suggestions that terrorism was not a high priority for him before Sept. 11.

The question looming over the proceedings Tuesday was whether the FBI should be stripped of its role as the nation’s leading domestic intelligence agency. President Bush gave new urgency to the debate when he said in comments Monday and Tuesday that he was considering an overhaul of the intelligence community.

The commission released new findings Tuesday that provide a damning account of the FBI’s performance over the last decade, citing major failures in the sharing of information, the mobilizing of field offices to face the terrorist threat and the handling of critical clues that commissioners said might have enabled the Sept. 11 attacks to be prevented.

Ashcroft was among four top Justice Department officials to testify before the commission Tuesday. Others who testified included former Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, former FBI Director Louis J. Freeh and former FBI Deputy Director Thomas J. Pickard, who was acting director in the months before the Sept. 11 attacks. J. Cofer Black, a State Department official who was head of the CIA’s counter-terrorism center in the years leading up to the strikes, also testified.

Today, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and CIA Director George J. Tenet are to testify before the panel.

Freeh, who led the FBI through much of the 1990s, urged against creation of a new domestic intelligence service, saying that taking that assignment from the FBI “would be a huge mistake for the country.”

“I don’t think in the United States we will tolerate very well what in effect is a secret -- a state secret police,” Freeh said.

Reno also discouraged the idea, saying that creating a new agency would exacerbate many of the problems that plagued the nation’s counter-terrorism efforts before Sept. 11. A new service like Britain’s MI5 would separate law enforcement agents in the FBI from domestic intelligence collection, and could create a chasm in intelligence sharing that the Justice Department has spent the last three years trying to bridge.

But some commissioners said they were not persuaded by the arguments, and they remained dubious that the FBI could be reformed. Thomas H. Kean, chairman of the commission and former Republican governor of New Jersey, called the commission’s preliminary report an “indictment of the FBI for over a long period of time.”

He said that 66% of the bureau’s analysts weren’t qualified for their jobs, and that even though senior FBI officials said they ordered their field stations on high alert during the summer of 2001, when there was a tremendous intelligence spike warning of catastrophic attacks, few of the stations seemed to get the message. Kean then recounted other FBI embarrassments, including the standoff at Waco and the Wen Ho Lee spy case.

In a break in testimony, Kean told reporters that despite the arguments from Reno and Freeh, he believed the burden was on the FBI and its supporters to prove that it should keep its job as the domestic intelligence service.

“We can’t continue in this country with an intelligence agency with the record the FBI has,” Kean told reporters. “You have a record of an agency that’s failed, and it’s failed again and again and again.”

Freeh was not present when Kean made that comment, but he responded defiantly to the commissioner’s characterization of the commission report as an indictment. “I take exception to your comment that your staff report is an indictment of the FBI,” Freeh said, arguing that the bureau was hobbled for years by inadequate funding and overly restrictive regulations and policies.

The investigation by the commission has also generated questions about the efforts of the Bush administration during its eight months in office before the Sept. 11 attacks. In a hearing last month, former White House counter-terrorism official Richard Clarke said that Bush ignored the terrorist threat and was preoccupied with Iraq, and that senior officials including Ashcroft did little to mobilize the government in the summer of 2001 amid the spike in ominous intelligence.

Ashcroft used Tuesday’s session to respond forcefully and to point blame at policies and programs he inherited from the Clinton administration.

Ashcroft said former President Clinton never authorized covert action to kill Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. Instead, he said, Clinton authorized covert efforts to capture Bin Laden. The restrictions were so severe, Ashcroft said, that “even if they could have penetrated Bin Laden’s training camp, they would have needed a battery of attorneys to approve the capture.”

But Ashcroft’s assertion was immediately challenged by several commissioners who said they recently obtained new evidence indicating that Clinton authorized more than covert capture raids. The commissioners did not elaborate.

Ashcroft also suggested that a particularly harmful policy that prevented FBI agents from seeking secret wiretap authority and sharing intelligence information stemmed in part from a memo drafted in 1994 by one of the members of the commission, Jamie S. Gorelick, a deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration at that time.

Ashcroft declassified what commission aides said was a 1994 memo from Gorelick instructing prosecutors and the FBI in the first World Trade Center bombing case on how to keep criminal and intelligence work separate.

The move surprised and appeared to dismay some of the commission members, although they discounted the significance of its contents.

Ashcroft was forced to acknowledge that he had done little if anything before Sept. 11 to address some of the problems he attributed to his Clinton-era predecessors. And he faced harsh criticism from Pickard, the bureau’s acting director in the summer of 2001.

Pickard told commission staff that he had briefed Ashcroft during June and July 2001, but that the attorney general seemed uninterested in learning more about terrorism. After two such briefings, according to an account that Pickard gave commission staff that was included in its preliminary findings, “the attorney general told him he did not want to hear this information anymore.”

Pickard and other FBI officials also told the staff that Ashcroft’s apparent lack of interest in terrorism was reflected in how he handled bureau budget requests. Pickard said the bureau appealed to Ashcroft for more funding for counter-terrorism. He said he learned on Sept. 12, 2001, that Ashcroft had rejected their appeal.

At the hearing, Ashcroft denied ever having said that he did not want to hear about terrorism. He also acknowledged that he was mainly focused on domestic threats, and that Pickard had provided him assurances that threat information the bureau was receiving at the time pointed to attacks overseas.

Ashcroft also denied that he was shortchanging the FBI, saying he supported increases in counter-terrorism budgets that surpassed any during the Clinton administration.

In preliminary findings contained in new staff reports released Tuesday, the commission provided fresh details on the Sept. 11 plot and the intelligence community’s futile efforts that year to decipher the many intelligence warnings.

The commission cited headlines on a series of intelligence bulletins that summer. One said, “Bin Laden threats are real.” Another said, “Bin Laden network’s plans advancing.”

But the staff report said none of the reporting pointed to the Sept. 11 plot, and that most threats seemed based overseas.

The commission said U.S. intelligence botched numerous opportunities to track San Diego-based hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar, including a failure to follow up on links between the two men and the bombing of the U.S. warship Cole in Yemen in 2000.

The CIA learned early that year that the two men had entered the U.S., but failed to put them on federal watch lists until weeks before the attacks. When the FBI was notified in late August, the commission said, the search was assigned to a single FBI agent “for whom this was his very first counter-terrorism lead.”

The report also portrayed the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen arrested in August 2001 after enrolling in a Minnesota flight school, as a much more serious missed opportunity than previously understood. Moussaoui alarmed agents in Minneapolis because, even though he had little knowledge of flying, “he wanted to learn how to take off and land a Boeing 747.”

Because Moussaoui had lived in London, the FBI sought information from British intelligence, but British authorities did not consider it a high-priority item and provided only basic information. When the FBI renewed the request after Sept. 11, the British responded within 48 hours that Moussaoui had attended an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan.

“Had this information been available in late August 2001, the Moussaoui case would almost certainly have received intense and much higher-level attention,” the report said.