The Same Old Blame Game
With plenty of screw-ups to go around, the 9/11 panel digs deeper
Anyone watching the 9/11 commission hearings on television last week might have missed the jockeying and blamesmanship going on behind the scenes. Commissioners were surprised by Attorney General John Ashcroft's unexpected declassification of a 1995 memo drafted by Jamie Gorelick--a commissioner who served as deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration. Gorelick, Ashcroft charged, had helped erect a damaging "wall" between intelligence and criminal work at the FBI, hobbling the agency. Ashcroft had refused to provide his remarks in advance; when asked for copies ahead of time, his aides put copies of the speech on their chairs and, literally, sat on them.
And so it went. Despite a series of scathing reports by the commission's staff that cataloged institutional failures at the FBI and the CIA, the questioning of officials from the two agencies was generally tentative. Some commissioners seemed less concerned, in fact, with pinning down witnesses on key points than with appearing as statesmanlike nonpartisans after criticism over their last round of contentious hearings.
Learning to fly. In their testimony, past and present leaders of the CIA and FBI blamed many of their pre-9/11 shortcomings on acute shortages of funding and personnel. The FBI's "resources were both finite and insufficient . . . to meet the enemy against us," said former FBI Director Louis Freeh.
Critics, including the staff of the 9/11 commission, blame a lack of prioritization and management's failure to shift resources, especially at the FBI. Funding for FBI terrorism programs tripled from 1993 to 2001, but many agents were assigned not to track Islamic fundamentalists but to investigate cybersecurity breaches and weapons of mass destruction programs. The commission noted that just four years ago, there were twice as many agents working drug cases as investigating terrorism. In the FBI's 16-week training course for new agents, only three days were spent on national security matters, which covered investigations of spies and terrorists.
Most of the commission's criticism focused on Freeh's eight-year tenure, but he emerged relatively unscathed. The FBI's counterterrorism effort was hampered, the commission staff concluded, by "limited intelligence collection and strategic analysis capabilities, a limited capacity to share information both internally and externally, insufficient training," and a lack of funding.
The examples cited were damning. The computer system the FBI installed in 1995 to manage information was based on 1980s technology. Two thirds of the FBI's analysts were unqualified. Even worse, the FBI had never comprehensively assessed the terrorist threat at home. In fact, the White House never received written threat assessments or intelligence reports from the FBI.
Perhaps the most telling example of dysfunction was the arrest, just a month before 9/11, of Zacarias Moussaoui, an Islamic extremist taking flying lessons in the United States. Thomas Pickard, the acting FBI director who took Freeh's place, told commissioners he wasn't briefed on Moussaoui's arrest until after the attacks. Yet the information somehow made it over to the CIA, where it appeared in a memo for Director George Tenet. The item was titled: "Islamic extremist learns to fly."
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