Finger-pointing, fingerprints
The hunt for evidence and, hard on its heels, charges about who screwed up
In the spring of 1996, Congress gave law enforcement officials a new and seemingly important tool to combat terrorism. It created the Alien Terrorist Removal Court, assigning the special federal court the task of deporting terrorists operating on American soil. After the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, and the growing suspicion that foot soldiers for Osama bin Laden were slipping into the United States, the establishment of the court seemed an eminently sensible thing to do.
But terrorists had nothing to worry about--because the court is a court in name only. In the five years since its creation, U.S. News has learned, the five-judge panel has never deported a single terrorist. For that matter, it has never even heard a case. The Justice Department, the agency principally responsible for monitoring terrorists' movements within the United States, has never filed an application with the court seeking to deport a terrorist.
Former Justice Department officials say the agency couldn't use the court because the law requires disclosure of sensitive information to terrorists--evidence, they say, that would compromise intelligence gathering and identify sources. But critics say the government's refusal to bring suspected terrorists before the special court is a glaring example of its inability to use its vast counterterrorism resources effectively. In the past few years, Congress has authorized billions of dollars for new equipment and for thousands of personnel in law enforcement and intelligence agencies. This year alone Congress authorized $10 billion before the attacks for counterterrorism efforts.
American law enforcement and intelligence agencies have scored several big wins against terrorists, jailing some and foiling the plots of others. Michael Cherkasky, a former New York state prosecutor who investigated terrorist activities, says federal agents have known for years that suicide bombers had changed their habits, living seemingly normal lives here, but says agents failed to understand the terrorists' deadly intentions.
Cherkasky cites the evidence introduced in a recent terrorist trial in New York--a training manual from bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network. "The al Qaeda manual says you have to act nonreligious," Cherkasky explains, "shave your beards, fit in as middle class."
But it wasn't just behavior; it was targets that went undetected. The government was caught flat-footed in several major terrorist attacks, current and former intelligence officials say. Among them: the bombing of the USS Cole last year, the bombings of the two East African embassies in 1998, and the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. A review of the government's efforts against international terrorism shows that they have been hobbled by bungled investigations and poor intelligence analysis--or, in some cases, no analysis at all of critical documents accumulated by investigators.
That disturbs several former senior Justice Department and FBI officials who were actively involved in counterterrorism investigations during their careers. They believe that U.S. intelligence agencies may have had sufficient information to prevent the deadly attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon--if only they had understood what they had. John Martin, the former top national security prosecutor for the Justice Department, says the government eventually will get to the bottom of why intelligence and law enforcement agencies did not prevent the attack. And, he thinks, they will conclude that government agencies "were collecting the intelligence, they were deciphering it, but they were sending it to the field late and in muddled, ambiguous terms." Jamie Gorelick, the No. 2 Justice Department official in President Clinton's first term, sounds a similar theme. "We have a very robust intelligence collection effort," she says. "But we don't have a commensurate analytical capability. I am certain that when we are able to digest what we have collected, we will find information which surely could have or might have prevented" the attacks.
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