Tag Archives: Liberty Security & the Law

Happy birthday, Patriot Act!

(Washington, D.C.): Today marks the third anniversary of President Bush’s signature of the bipartisan counterrorism law enforcement legislation known as the USA PATRIOT Act. As Attorney General John Ashcroft notes in an op.ed. article in this morning’s Wall Street Journal, the past three years have been safer and freer for America and her citizens, thanks to the tools provided by this act.

The Attorney General reminds the Journal‘s readers that – notwithstanding the saturation bombing advertising/disinformation campaign that has been mounted by the Patriot Act’s opponents – it has proven to be an enormous boon to those responsible for protecting us without infringing Americans’ constitutional rights. He notes that: “The parade of witnesses that appeared before the 9/11 Commission spoke of the importance of the Patriot Act. Former Attorney General Janet Reno and many others credited the Patriot Act with updating the law to deal with terrorists, and, most critically, for tearing down the ‘wall’ in terrorism investigations that restricted the communication and cooperation between law enforcement and intelligence officials….Misleading rhetoric aside, not a single instance of abuse under the Act has been cited by any court, the Congress or the Justice Department’s own Inspector General – not one.”

General Ashcroft met last week over a working lunch at the Justice Department with members of the bipartisan Coalition for Security, Liberty and the Law and signatories of a recently released joint letter to the Congress that was sponsored by the Coalition. The letter strongly endorsed the Patriot Act and urged the congressional leadership to renew its key provisions that will otherwise expire next year.

President Bush, the Congress and, not least, the Patriot Act’s most effective champion, Attorney General Aschroft, deserve great credit for securing the enactment of this critical piece of legislation and for utilizing it so effectively on behalf of us all. With the track record of the past three years, it clearly behooves the Act’s beneficiaries – the American people and their elected representatives – to ensure that this counterterrorism tool remains available for the duration of the War on Terror.

The Patriot Act: Wise Beyond its Years

By John Ashcroft

The Wall Street Journal, 26 October 2004

The Patriot Act turns three today, but its age belies its experience – and its phenomenal success. Over the past 36 months, the Patriot Act has proved itself to be an indispensable tool that the men and women of law enforcement use to combat terrorism and to compile a record of accomplishment that has grown even as their responsibility for the safety of Americans has increased.

The Patriot Act enhanced communication on every level of law enforcement to combat terrorist threats, while also giving investigators the same tools to use in terrorism cases that they were using to combat other serious threats.

Armed with these tools, U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agents have pursued and captured operatives in the war on terrorism from Florida to New York, from Virginia to Oregon and points in between. Since Sept. 11, 2001, 368 individuals have been charged and 194 have been convicted.

Despite the documented successes in keeping Americans safe from terrorism, the Patriot Act rarely receives its due, and indeed is often portrayed in an outright false light.

Take the latest example. Just last month, several major news organizations erroneously reported that a federal judge in New York had overturned “an important surveillance provision” of the Patriot Act. In fact, the judge ruled on the Electronic Communications Privacy Act – sponsored by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D., Vt.) and passed in 1986, 15 years before the Patriot Act. Both the New York Times and the Washington Post were forced to print corrections the next day.

Time and again, the image of the Patriot Act is at odds with the facts on the ground. Three years ago today, Congress passed, and President Bush signed, a piece of long-overdue legislation that has been critical to keeping Americans safe and free. The parade of witnesses that appeared before the 9/11 Commission spoke of the importance of the Patriot Act. Former Attorney General Janet Reno and many others credited the Patriot Act with updating the law to deal with terrorists, and, most critically, for tearing down the “wall” in terrorism investigations that restricted the communication and cooperation between law enforcement and intelligence officials.

This new ability to share information helped U.S. law enforcement, working with German authorities, to break up an alleged al Qaeda fund-raising plot in Germany. Here in the United States, the Patriot Act helped federal, state and local law enforcement dismantle the “Portland Seven” terrorist cell in Oregon, as well as cells in Seattle and New York, and alleged terrorist financers in Florida and Texas.

The Patriot Act has also been successful in updating anti-terrorism and criminal laws to bring law enforcement up to date with technology. Pre-Patriot Act, a new court order was required to continue surveillance of a suspected terrorist whenever he switched phones. The Patriot Act gave anti-terrorism investigators the same authority that investigators in criminal cases had to get a single court order allowing surveillance of every phone a suspect uses. Common sense dictates that tools that help fight the drug lords should be available to protect the American people from terrorist attacks.

The Patriot Act also increased penalties for not only those who commit terrorist acts, but for those who provide support to terrorists as well. In particular, the Act enhanced law enforcement’s ability to crack down on unlicensed foreign money transmittal businesses, a favored method of financing for terrorists. Prosecutors in New Jersey recently used the Patriot Act to convict Yehuda Abraham, whose services were used in a plot to sell shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles to terrorists with the understanding that they were going to be used to shoot down U.S. commercial aircraft.

The Patriot Act has proved its usefulness beyond the war on terrorism in protecting our most vulnerable citizens from harm. During the course of drafting and debating the Patriot Act in 2001, Congress wisely decided to provide some investigative tools for all criminal investigations, including terrorism investigations.

The result? In pedophile and kidnapping investigations, for example, a delay can literally mean the difference between life and death for a child. For years, investigators could subpoena some information from Internet service providers. But filing subpoenas to get information quickly to identify and locate a suspect could cost life-saving time.

Section 210 of the Patriot Act changed that. In Operation Hamlet, sexual predators were using the Internet to exchange photos and videotapes of children being sexually abused. Sometimes the abusers molested children while running a live feed via a Web cam; this allowed other child sexual abusers to watch in real-time online. Investigators used the Patriot Act to quickly obtain subpoenas for information from Internet service providers. The sexual predators were identified, and 19 were convicted. More than 100 children were spared further harm.

The Patriot Act has helped law enforcement achieve more safety and security for the American people without any abuse of civil liberties. Misleading rhetoric aside, not a single instance of abuse under the Act has been cited by any court, the Congress or the Justice Department’s own Inspector General – not one.

The public has expressed overwhelming support for the Patriot Act in opinion poll after opinion poll. They know what the 9/11 Commission affirmed: that for the past three years, America’s families and communities have been safer, and their freedom is enhanced because of the president’s resolve and leadership, the foresight of Congress in enacting these vital tools, and the courageous men and women on the front lines who have used the Patriot Act to protect our lives and liberties.

Don’t do it

(Washington, D.C.): At this writing, there is reason to fear the U.S. Congress will capitulate before the election to the demands of a high-powered and politically connected “special interest” group. Interestingly, if Congress does so in this case, there is likely to be none of the populist demagoguery that usually accompanies legislators’ complying with such parochial demands (for example, that heard recently when an array of election-eve tax breaks were given to “Chinese ceiling fan importers” and other corporate types).

To the contrary, in this case, there will probably be public condemnation only if Congress does the right thing, namely by declining to cobble together under duress and in great haste the most far-reaching changes in the American intelligence community in nearly sixty years. Should that happen, the special interest in question – the 9/11 Commission and vocal relatives of those lost in the attack of September 2001 – threaten to raise Cain and exact revenge at the polls.

Blackmail by Any Other Name

This sort of pressure goes, as they say, with Congress’ territory. That those wielding it are, respectively, a bipartisan group of skilled political operatives and grieving kin, does not alter the fact, however, that what the 9/11 special interests are engaged in amounts to blackmail. Neither does it mitigate an ominous reality: The consequences of their threats could, ironically, be greatly to compound the problems afflicting the Nation’s intelligence community, in time of war no less.

This danger exists even if the legislation sent to the President resembles the relatively benign version of the so-called intelligence reform bill adopted by the House of Representatives at the direction of its Republican leadership. Matters will be infinitely worse, though, if – as the 9/11 special interests insist – the final statute more closely tracks with the Senate-passed version.

More Bureaucracy: For example, both bills fall prey to the classic Beltway proclivity: For any problem, there is a bureaucratic solution. If the intelligence community did not perform as it should have in the run-up to September 11th, the Commission dictated that a new level of management and a staff to coordinate counterterrorism activities was the answer. While the House-preferred approach would be less dysfunctional (for example, ultimate responsibility for defense-related intelligence agencies’ personnel and budget decisions would remain with the Secretary of Defense), even its version of a National Intelligence Director and National Counterterrorism Center seems doomed to diminish competitive analysis – the one proven antidote to the sort of perilous intelligence “group-think” we are supposed to be trying to avoid.

Privacy Police: The Senate reform would greatly compound the counterproductiveness of this exercise by subjecting intelligence agencies to even more insidious bureaucratic layering: yet another oversight board and officers in eight (and possibly all federal) agencies whose job will be to promote privacy and civil liberties.

It is predictable that this back-door effort to appease critics of the Patriot Act will have a particularly chilling effect on those responsible for collecting, analyzing and rendering judgments about U.S. intelligence. They will find themselves constrained by fears of being subjected to criticism – if not actual punishment – for being unduly attentive to the ever-hostile civil liberties community. Our monitoring and understanding of the threat will surely suffer as a result.

Fewer Tools to Counter Terror: The 9/11 special interests are no less adamant that the intelligence reform bill not contain highly desirable language crafted by the House leadership to provide additional law enforcement and immigration tools. Here the argument seems less about the merits of these additions than a pride of authorship. While the authorization of such new weapons in the war on terror would be consistent with the thrust of the Commission’s findings, some in the Senate and among their principally left-wing constituencies insist these provisions be stripped from the bill. Such opposition reinforces concerns that the effect of this legislation will be less a strengthening of the hand of those waging the war on terror than a shackling of it.

The Bottom Line

The 9/11 Commission is owed a debt of gratitude for its thorough reconstruction of the events, and missteps, that led to the worst single episodes of foreign attacks on our soil in the Nation’s history. Those who lost loved ones in those attacks are due our sympathy and consideration. Neither, however, is entitled to ride roughshod over deliberative legislative processes in a way that threatens to make highly consequential and long-duration alterations in what is, at the moment, one of the government’s most indispensable functions: identifying and countering the threat posed by Islamofascist terrorists.

Despite the pressure being brought to bear by the 9/11 special interests to finish the intelligence reform conference and recall Congress to adopt its report before November 2nd, it behooves President Bush and the congressional leadership to allow the larger, national interest to determine when action will be completed on intelligence reform and the contents of such legislation. The old expression “You want it bad, you’ll get it bad” applies in spades to this most sensitive of governmental activities.

To those who insist that no reform will occur if the leverage of an election is squandered, the response should be, if the changes being sought are needed and appropriate, there is every reason to expect that they will pass muster in a more deliberative environment. The only ones who have something to fear from a postponement that will enable such deliberation are those who know their “reforms” will conduce to less timely, accurate and useable intelligence. And to them, the answer should be a resounding “Thanks, but no thanks.”

Spreading Wahhabism

An article in Thursday’s Washington Post examines Saudi efforts to export Wahhabism, noting that the Kingdom’s "outreach is formidable. It pays the salaries of 3,884 Wahhabi missionaries and preachers, who are six times as numerous as the 650 diplomats in Saudi Arabia’s 77 embassies. [Islamic Affairs] Ministry officials in Africa and Asia often have had more money to dispense than Saudi ambassadors, according to several Saudi sources."

This support, moreover, "does not include the hundreds of millions of dollars in personal contributions made by King Fahd and other senior Saudi princes to the cause of propagating Islam at home and abroad, according to a Saudi analyst who insisted on anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. The real total spent annually spreading Islam is between $2 billion and $2.5 billion, he said."

The article also explores the effect of such efforts in the United States, observing that "Scholars of Islam find it difficult to precisely assess the impact of 40 years of Saudi missionary work on the United States’ multi-ethnic Muslim community – estimated at 6 million to 7 million. But survey data are suggestive."

"The most comprehensive study, a survey of the 1,200 U.S. mosques undertaken in 2000 by four Muslim organizations, found that 2 million Muslims were ‘associated’ with a mosque and that 70 percent of mosque leaders were generally favorable toward fundamentalist teachings, while 21 percent followed the stricter Wahhabi practices. The survey also found that the segregation of women for prayers was spreading, from half of the mosques in 1994 to two-thirds six years later."

To read the entire article click here.

Libyan agent who funded Norquist group pleads guilty

Washington-based Islamists and their front-men suffered a humiliating defeat recently when their main political organizer and bankroller pleaded guilty to laundering money from Libya. Abdurahman Alamoudi, who provided seed money for activist Grover Norquist to start a pressure group called the Islamic Institute, allegedly was recruited by Libyan intelligence as part of a plot to assassinate the crown prince of Saudi Arabia.

Alamoudi was behind a number of Islamist groups, including the American Muslim Council (AMC). He wrote checks for at least $20,000 (pictured) to help Norquist found the Islamic Institute, now known as the Islamic Free Market Institute Foundation.

Longtime Alamoudi lieutenant Khaled Saffuri, former "director for Government Affairs for the American Muslim Council," runs the group from Norquist’s suite of offices. Their relationship with Alamoudi has been a cause for concern among many in the national security community and most recently prompted author and journalist Michelle Malkin to ask: "What Say You Now, Grover Norquist?"

Over the last three years the Center for Security Policy has repeatedly raised similar concerns about the cozy relationship between Islamist "activists" and their most influential facilitator, Grover Norquist. See, "A Troubling Influence" by Frank J. Gaffney, Jr., with an introduction by David Horowitz.

Ideologically disarmed

The report issued last week with much fanfare by the congressionally mandated 9/11 Commission is a stunningly comprehensive litany of recommendations aimed at reducing America’s still-acute vulnerability to terror. Commission members, victims’ families and legislators are warning that a failure to act quickly on these prescriptions will translate not only into unnecessary risk of attack, but grave political repercussions.

Decisions, Decisions

As nothing less than the Nation’s security is on the line, such warnings should be given every consideration. Unfortunately, the sheer volume, ambition and costs associated with the panel’s recommendations dictate, as a practical matter, that some are going to receive more urgent attention than others.

Some are sensible, but difficult to do. For example, securing the country’s borders is a vast, if absolutely necessary, undertaking. Others, like the eminently desirable idea of consolidating congressional terrorism-related oversight functions, have proven exceedingly resistant to previous reformers’ efforts.

Then there is the most publicized of the Commission recommendations: the proposal to create a new "intelligence czar." This seems a classic Washington response to a real problem – throw additional bureaucracy at it.

At best, the imposition of a Director of National Intelligence, with new staff and budgetary authority to manage the entire intelligence community, is likely to be disruptive during a time of war. At worst, it may actually prove counterproductive, leading either to new layers of officialdom that impede the efficient flow of information to policy-makers, or the sort of streamlining that precludes competitive collection and analysis of intelligence needed to counter "group-think."

Waging the ‘War of Ideas’

Fortunately, there is a Commission recommendation that is both eminently doable and urgently needed.

The 9/11 Commissioners recognized that what we are fighting is not "terrorism" but a hostile ideology – the radical, intolerant, jihadist faction of the Muslim faith known as Islamism – that employs terror as a political instrument. They concluded:

    The United States has to help defeat an ideology, not just a group of people, and we must do so under difficult circumstances….The U.S. government must define what the message is, what it stands for. We should offer an example of moral leadership in the world, committed to treat people humanely, abide by the rule of law, and be generous and caring to our neighbors. America and Muslim friends can agree on respect for human dignity and opportunity. To Muslim parents, terrorists like Bin Ladin have nothing to offer their children but visions of violence and death. America and its friends have a crucial advantage – we can offer these parents a vision that might give their children a better future….
    "Just as we did in the Cold War, we need to defend our ideals abroad vigorously….If the United States does not act aggressively to define itself in the Islamic world, the extremists will gladly do the job for us. Recognizing that Arab and Muslim audiences rely on satellite television and radio, the government has begun some promising initiatives in television and radio broadcasting to the Arab world, Iran, and Afghanistan. These efforts are beginning to reach large audiences. The Broadcasting Board of Governors has asked for much larger resources. It should get them."

Acute Shortfalls

The need to augment the instruments of ideological warfare is especially acute in Muslim nations where the cancer of Islamism is metastasizing. For example, the United States’ efforts to define itself for critical Iranian audiences is limited to only one-half-hour of television news and information. Currently, the U.S. government has no television service to one of the most pivotal of Muslim nations, Turkey. Its Voice of America radio broadcasts to Pakistan are hampered by obsolescent transmitters in Tajikistan and it has no TV broadcasts in Urdu or other native dialects.

Meanwhile, the America government has no satellite television beamed into Afghanistan, where – as with much of the rest of the developing world – satellite dishes are sprouting like mushrooms after a rain. Its TV and radio are only available in Indonesia for four hours per day. And Arabic-speaking Muslims in Europe are unable to receive programming on one of the few new U.S. government-sponsored international broadcasting initiatives: the Alhurra television network. Meanwhile instruments of enemy propaganda, like al-Jazeera and hostile state-owned media are pumping out anti-American indoctrination in myriad languages around the world and around the clock.

The Bottom Line

The amounts of money required to expand access to the American ideology of freedom, respect for human rights and the rule of law to these and other critically important target nations of Asia and the Far East – and to restore coverage cut off in recent years to the still-emerging democracies of the former Soviet bloc since additional funding was not provided to meet the pressing need for ramped-up Arabic-language broadcasting – are relatively modest. The one-day costs of military operations in Iraq would go a long way towards paying for an entire year’s worth of high-quality U.S. government and "surrogate" broadcasting everywhere we need to be.

While the White House and Congress wrestle over which of the other 9/11 Commission recommendations to implement, and exactly how to do so, they should come together promptly on at least one: Re-arming the United States government with the broadcast vehicles and other instruments needed to wage a war of ideas against an enemy that must be fought 24/7 at the ideological, as well as tactical, levels.

The Faisal Gill affair

Readers may recall a troubling warning issued on FrontPageMagazine.com last November by David Horowitz and Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. (an editorial entitled "Why We Are Publishing This Article" that accompanied a long essay entitled "A Troubling Influence"). What made the warning so troubling was not just that its subject — a political influence operation being mounted during wartime by Islamist organizations against the Bush Administration and U.S. government. Of particular concern was the help it documented that such entities have received from a prominent and well-connected conservative activist, Grover Norquist.

It now appears that Mr. Norquist’s help has extended beyond facilitating high-level access and influence for various Muslim-American and Arab-American entities with troubling ties to, or at least sympathy for, radical Islamofascists – and even terrorists. Reportedly, his association also helped someone affiliated with such a group to gain a political appointment to an exceedingly sensitive post: "policy director" of the Department of Homeland Security’s Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection division.

As the title of this position suggests, its occupant would have access to highly sensitive information about the vulnerability of, among other things, U.S. ports, transportation infrastructure, chemical plants, oil refineries and nuclear power plants to terrorist attack. The incumbent is a 32-year-old lawyer named Faisal Gill.

It is unclear what qualified Mr. Gill for such a post. In response to press inquiries, a DHS spokeswoman declined to describe his qualifications or background so it is not known whether he has any prior experience with intelligence or, for that matter, with security policy.

What is known is that Gill’s political patrons include Grover Norquist, who was listed by Gill as a reference on employment documents. After all, Gill had been a spokesman for the Taxpayers Alliance of Prince William County, Virginia, which is affiliated with Norquist’s group, Americans for Tax Reform. Gill had also worked in 2001 as director of government affairs for the Islamic Free Market Institute (also known as the Islamic Institute), whose founding president was Grover Norquist.

Interestingly, news articles published after September 11 described Gill in another capacity – as a spokesman for the controversial American Muslim Council (AMC).  The AMC was founded and controlled by a prominent Islamist activist, Abdurahman Alamoudi.  Alamoudi was indicted last October on terrorism-related money laundering charges.  While in jail awaiting trial, he has reportedly engaged in plea-bargaining by confessing to participating in a Libyan plot to murder the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.

For some reason, Gill is reported to have failed to list his work with the AMC on his “Standard Form 86” national security questionnaire.  This is a potential felony violation of the full and truthful disclosure required by law of all applying for clearances.

According to two recently published articles in Salon.com, the FBI raised concerns last March about Gill’s non-disclosure of his ties to Alamoudi’s AMC.  At the time, he was reportedly briefly removed from his position at DHS.

Curiously, however, Gill is said to have been reinstated within days.  According to a DHS spokesman, the Department had conducted a "thorough investigation" that found Gill "exceeded all requirements" for his job.

Fortunately, on 23 June, after news reports revealed Gill’s omission, attendant suspension and subsequent reinstatement, the Homeland Security’s Inspector General, Clark Kent Ervin, announced that he would be launching an inquiry into how Gill received a security clearance, despite the omission.  For some reason, though, the IG’s report is said to require as much as six-months to complete. 

Several questions cry out for answers:

Why does an intelligence office require a “policy director”?

Given Gill’s seeming lack of qualifications, how did Gill secure this sensitive position in the first place?

If, as appears to be the case, he did so simply through political connections, did such connections subsequently trump security and legal concerns? Was he permitted to be swiftly reinstated and allowed to this day to have access to very sensitive information  –  even though he apparently failed to live up to his obligations to disclose a work history that might well have disqualified him?

Will political connections also prevent the Inspector General from performing a rigorous and fullsome review of the Gill Affair?

How on earth could it take as long as six-months to answer these and related questions?  If there are, in fact, grounds for believing Gill should not continue to serve in the DHS intelligence organization, it is imprudent in the extreme to have this investigation drag on  – especially if he is going to be permitted to remain in place during the interval.

Gven the sensitivity of Faisal Gill’s position and the information to which it has access, this matter must be addressed and resolved at once.  A failure truthfully to complete security clearance forms is a serious  –  and, normally, a disqualifying  –  offense, particularly if the information withheld is material to decisions about whether the applicant can be cleared.

At the very least, until such time as the Inspector General’s report is completed, it would seem both responsible and consistent with standard operating procedures to suspend without prejudice and with pay the object of the investigation from his position.  Who could possibly object to that?  

The danger next time

(Washington, D.C.): Last Friday, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a unanimous report thoroughly trashing the U.S. intelligence community (IC). According to the Committee, the IC had served up judgments that underpinned the Bush Administrations and congressional decisions to wage war against Iraq which were “either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting.” Reduced to politically charged Washington shorthand by NBC Sunday anchorman Tim Russert: “We went to war on the basis of bogus information.”

The Senators attributed these failings to “a combination of systemic weaknesses, primarily in analytic trade craft, compounded by a lack of information-sharing, poor management and inadequate intelligence collection.” The good news is that first three of these “systemic weaknesses” can, at least theoretically, be corrected by thoughtful, disciplined and concerted leadership. Whether the run-up to a presidential election, the institutional resistance of intelligence bureaucracies and the machinations of those in Congress (who bear no small responsibility for poor oversight that tolerated such failures) will allow the necessary changes to be made quickly, however, remains to be seen.

Not So Fast

The bad news is that the fourth weakness – “inadequate intelligence collection” – is by far the most important. It surely contributed to serious shortfalls in our knowledge of Saddam Husseins Iraq. The same deficiency, arising primarily from a decades-long undervaluing of and under-investment in “human intelligence” (known as “humint” to the professionals and “spies” to laymen), means that we confront similar uncertainties about other closed, despotically ruled societies and the activities they are determined to conceal from us.

Worse yet, unlike changes in intelligence analytic techniques, management or information-sharing, this systemic weakness cannot be corrected quickly. In fact, creating, and then assuring the quality of, the infrastructure required to recruit and run useful spies in dangerous, secretive countries is a painstaking and time-consuming business. George Tenet, the man on whose watch as Director of Central Intelligence much of the mismanagement and other problems occurred, told the 9/11 Commission a few weeks back that it would take “another five years” before our human intelligence capabilities are at the level needed in todays world.

Frankly, that sounds optimistic. If, as the Senate Intelligence Committee found, we did not have a single spy in Iraq after 1998, have we really been more successful in inserting or acquiring agents in places like North Korea, Iran and al Qaeda and similar organizations inner circles? More to the point, in the interim – whether it be five years or longer – are we going to have to rely, as was evidently the case in Iraq, on covert sources of uncertain credibility and/or foreign intelligence services who may or may not be much more reliable?

Uncertainty is an Occupational Hazard

Notwithstanding the Senate Intelligence Committees critique and the best-efforts at corrective action that it will (hopefully) inspire, we confront a hard reality: We must expect that our secret assessments of these sorts of intelligence targets will continue to be based upon imperfect knowledge. As a result, whether our information comes from new human agents or mechanical espionage techniques more favored in recent years, such information will lead some analysts to arrive at certain judgments, and others to conclude differently.

As was true in Iraq, it will be the job of policy-makers, be they in the White House or Congress, to weigh such judgments and make hard decisions based upon them.

The danger is not that policy-makers will be denied the full array of opinion to be found in the IC. Indeed, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Sen. Pat Roberts of Kansas, has acknowledged that that diversity was reflected (as is typically the case) in the now-contested October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on “Iraqs Continuing Programs for WMDs” – albeit not as fully in the accompanying executive summary.

Rather, the risk is that the criticism unleashed by the Senate panel will make analysts even more leery of arriving at judgments of sufficient clarity as to inform policy decisions about how to deal with emerging threats. This is a formula for passivity, if not paralysis, that the Nation can ill-afford in time of war.

Sen. Rockefellers Outrages

Such a danger is, if anything, heightened by the conduct of several Intelligence Committee Democrats, including notably Vice Chairman Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia. They all voted for a report that declared: “The Committee found no evidence that the ICs mischaracterization or exaggeration of the intelligence on Iraqs WMD capabilities was the result of political pressure.”

Yet, in the press conference unveiling the document and subsequent media appearances, Sen. Rockefeller and others have nonetheless castigated the Bush Administration for bringing such pressure to bear and contributing to the failings documented by the Committee. These charges can only impede future interactions and communications between the intelligence and policy communities – contacts made all the more critical when information about emerging dangers, like that of the now-impending terrorist attack on the United States, is incomplete yet worryingly credible.

Sen. Rockefeller also engaged in the policy equivalent of a drive-by shooting: In the 9 July press conference, he announced that the Committee had done “a little bit of work” on activities of the office of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith. He asserted that the Committee would, in the second phase of its investigation, examine whether Mr. Feith was “running a private intelligence failure [sic], which is not lawful.”

These statements are not only mendacious. They are a gross disservice to the national security interests of the United States and a calumny against one of their most effective defenders. They prompted Assistant Secretary of Defense for Legislative Affairs Powell Moore to write an uncharacteristically forceful objection to the Senator last Friday:


    In the course of the last year of investigations into the activities of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, no one on the Committee or its staff, to my knowledge, has charged that anything unlawful had been done. Instead, there were allegations that the line between policy and intelligence may have been improperly crossed. In response to the Committees requests, Under Secretary Feith and his staff have spent more than 1800 hours reviewing thousands of pages of documents for relevance and responding to Committee inquiries. They have provided thousands of pages of materials and scores of hours of testimony, including testimony by Secretary Feith before the full Committee and Committee staff interviews with numerous members of his staff. My understanding is that the information thus far collected by the Committee does not support any of the charges of impropriety, much less any unlawful behavior.


    On behalf of the Department, I request that, if you have any evidence supporting the serious charge you floated during your press conference, you provide it to the Department. If there is not evidence, then a retraction and apology would be appropriate.

The Bottom Line

Improvements are clearly in order for U.S. intelligence. A place to start is with a replacement for George Tenet who comes from outside the government and is willing to take on the systemic changes needed in the IC. At the end of the day, however, we should be under no illusion: Our knowledge of many threats will continue to be imperfect. We can only hope that, in the future, policy-makers will act as courageously – and as correctly – on the basis of available intelligence as George Bush and the Congress did in deciding to remove Saddam Hussein from power.

9/11 Commission fails to connect terror dots

The 9/11 Commission’s conclusion that “We have no credible evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States” does not augur well for the rest of the panel’s inquiry. 

If the members of the commission could not connect dots that are all too obvious – or recognize their staff’s inability to do so – it seems likely that their work will fall short in other important areas as well.

The commission has allowed itself to be used as a political instrument by critics of President Bush and his liberation of Iraq.  This is the ineluctable result of the shortcomings of its staff report, so brilliantly illuminated by Andrew McCarthy in an essay published today by National Review Online. 

The staff’s statement concerning Iraq and Al Qaeda is internally inconsistent; it ignores key facts; it selectively addresses others; and it effectively condemns as incredible the considerable amount of evidence that suggests Saddam Hussein and Usama bin Laden did indeed have a collaborative relationship – as President Bush and Vice President Cheney have insisted.

Particularly egregious is the supposedly conclusive finding that Mohammed Atta could not have been in Prague for his final meeting with an Iraqi intelligence officer simply because calls were made in Florida on Atta’s cell phone during the time period the meeting was to have occurred. Czech intelligence contends Atta was in Prague and attended the meeting, and Mr. McCarthy observes that it would be entirely possible (to say nothing of prudent tradecraft) to have someone – perhaps his co-conspiring roommate – use the phone at a time when Atta could not, because he was overseas where the phone would not work. 

This sort of proof-by-assertion is all too familiar to those who used to confront the unwillingness of some in the U.S. intelligence community to recognize that the Soviet Union was a state sponsor of terror and a serial violator of arms control agreements.  Perhaps, as the communists used to say, the similarity is “no accident.” 

As it happens, the staff member who reported to 9/11 Commission members yesterday that there was no “collaborative relationship” between Iraq and Al Qaeda was none other than Douglas MacEachin – a man who once held senior positions at the CIA, including posts with the Office of Soviet Analysis from 1984-1989, the Arms Control Intelligence Staff for the next few years, and the job of Deputy Director for Intelligence from 1992 until 1995. 

In these capacities, MacEachin appeared to colleagues to get things wrong with some regularity.  For example, he was reflexively averse to conclusions that the Soviets were responsible for supporting terrorism.  He reportedly rejected as “absurd” analyses that suggested Moscow was illegally developing bioweapons.  And, as DDI, he forced CIA analysts to tailor their assessments to please Clinton administration policy-makers. 

In short, in the old days, MacEachin refused to believe the Soviets were a threat. Now, he offers support to those who insist that Iraq was no threat. There may be a role for a "see-no-evil" sort of guy, but it should not be at the Central Intelligence Agency — and certainly not at a commission whose charter is to connect the dots, no matter where they lead.

Even as the press had a feeding-frenzy over MacEachin’s statement absolving Saddam of ties to Al Qaeda, fresh evidence of malevolent intentions toward the United States that would have made anti-American collaboration between Saddam and Al Qaeda only natural was supplied by an unlikely source: another old intelligence hand, Russian President Vladimir Putin.

According to Putin, his intelligence agencies shared sensitive information with the Bush administration after the Sept. 11 attacks and before the United States went to war with Iraq in March of 2003. According to Putin’s intelligence, Saddam Hussein’s regime was crafting plans to execute terror attacks against America, both inside and outside of this country.  Thus far, Putin has not elaborated on whether Al Qaeda was also involved with these particular plans. At the very least, however, this information confirms the Bush team’s contention that Saddam dealt deeply in terror and its judgment that to leave Saddam in power would be to invite murderous attacks in the future.

One wonders whether the 9/11 Commission was exposed to the Putin intelligence before it effectively dismissed the possibility that Saddam Hussein had a hand in the 2001 attacks.  For that matter, did they review the information contained in three highly informative books providing “credible evidence” — of at least a circumstantial nature — that Saddam had already acted on his desire to strike this country? 

Dr. Laurie Mylroie’s The War Against America: Saddam Hussein and the World Trade Center Attacks – A Study of Revenge,  which concerns the first effort to destroy the Twin Towers in 1993; Jayna Davis’ The Third Terrorist: The Middle East Connection to the Oklahoma City Bombing,  which concerns the 1995 destruction of the Murrah Building; and Stephen Hayes’ The Connection: How al Qaeda’s Collaboration with Saddam Hussein has Endangered America, all persuasively support a very different conclusion than that advanced yesterday by Douglas MacEachin. 

It is high time that their conclusions, together with arguments like those presented so cogently by Andrew McCarthy, are given at least a fraction of the media attention — and credibility — afforded a statement that so manifestly fails to connect the dots.

Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. is president of the Center for Security Policy in Washington.

Bin Laden tape shows al Qaeda strategy depending on ‘peace’ movements

Borrowing a page from North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap, Osama bin Laden is making the US and European "peace" movement an instrument of his strategy.

The al Qaeda leader’s most recent tape, aired on Al Jazeera April 15, "appeared to mark a new strategy of trying to manipulate antiwar sentiment in Europe to bring pressure on governments that support the United States," according to the Washington Post.

Spanish voters’ election of an anti-American socialist in the days following the March train bombings in Madrid encouraged al Qaeda. In his tape, the Post reports, "Bin Laden refers to demonstrations in Europe as ‘positive interaction’ and mentions ‘opinion polls, which indicate that most European peoples want peace.’"

Bin Laden is openly trying to exploit politicial divisions in Europe and the US in the way that General Giap counted on the American "peace" movement to weaken the American people’s resolve even though they were winning the war. Former North Vietnamese General Staff officer Bui Tin once said that the "peace" movement was "essential to our strategy."

The open support of Hanoi by Jane Fonda, former Attorney General Ramsey Clark (now head of International ANSWER, which coordinates the largest protests) and others "gave us confidence that we should hold on in the face of battlefield reverses," Bui Tin said. "Through dissent and protest," the US "lost the ability to mobilize a will to win."

20 years: Muslim ‘civil rights’ and ‘anti-war’ activist pleads guilty to terror conspiracy

A Muslim "civil rights" leader and "anti-war" activist who was a spokesman for the Muslim American Society (MAS) has pleaded guilty to federal terrorism charges that he was the ringleader of a Virginia-based jihadist network. A federal judge sentenced him to 20 years in prison.

Randall T. Royer, age 31, says he never intended to harm any Americans, but in a plea bargain he admitted guilt for organizing fellow jihadis to join a Pakistan-based terrorist groups after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

Royer, who called himself Ismail after converting to Islam, served as MAS communications director. A search of the MAS website shows no references to Royer, though the MAS homepage has an article in defense of another federal terrorist suspect, Abdurahman Alamoudi, who financed Islamist support activity in Washington and gave seed money to the Islamic Free Market Institute.

Royer previously worked for the American Muslim Council (AMC) and the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR). He was also an outspoken "anti-war" activist, writing in the MAS magazine in support of International ANSWER-sponsored protests International ANSWER is a front of the pro-North Korea Workers World Party.

After his arrest last summer, Royer sought legal counsel from Hamas lawyer Stanley Cohen, who once said after 9/11 that he would consider serving as a defense lawyer for Osama bin Laden if the al Qaeda leader was ever captured.