Oh well, at least she forcibly returned Elian to Castro's island
gulag...


Wednesday, April 14, 2004
By Liza Porteus

WASHINGTON — A huge uptick in terrorist chatter in the summer of 2001
suggested a "massive terrorist strike" sometime in the future,
intelligence and law enforcement experts testified Tuesday, but no
specific information pointed to the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Had I known a terrorist attack on the United States was imminent in
2001, I would have unloaded our full arsenal of weaponry against it --
despite the inevitable criticism," Attorney General John Ashcroft
said.

The "simple fact" of Sept. 11 was, Ashcroft continued, in a
thinly-veiled criticism of the Clinton administration, that "we did
not know an attack was coming because for nearly a decade, our
government had blinded itself to its enemy."

Plus, he said that "walls," or barriers between intelligence and law
enforcement agents helped create the kind of culture that allowed
Sept. 11 to happen.

Clinton Attorney General Janet Reno testified earlier before the
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States
(search) that she did not specifically brief her replacement,
Ashcroft, on Al Qaeda threats to the U.S. homeland. Also, former FBI
Director Louis Freeh said the agency didn't have effective resources
to go after terrorists, an argument backed up by other officials
Tuesday.

Other intelligence and law enforcement officials testified that
despite all the chatter in the summer of 2001, all they knew was that
Al Qaeda wanted to inflict harm on the United States.

"None of this, unfortunately, specified method time or place," said
Cofer Black, former director of the CIA's counterterrorism center,
adding that the agency was still actively pursuing Al Qaeda and Usama
bin Laden.

"None of what we knew or learned pointed to the events that happened
on 9/11," added Thomas Pickard, who was interim FBI director at that
time. All threats "were taken seriously but all were daunting," and
most pointed to threats overseas, he said.

Officials said the chatter about possible threats subsided in August
2001 but threats remain.

"Our enemies are still out there preparing to attack us and our allies
in the war on terrorism," Black said.

"The members of Al Qaeda are a formidable enemy," added Pickard,
noting that terror camps in Afghanistan churn out more graduates than
the FBI and CIA training camps combined.

Sept. 11 represented the "high cost of the collective failure of the
United States' government to penetrate the inner workings of Al
Qaeda," he added.

On Wednesday, the commission will hear testimony from FBi Director
Robert Mueller and CIA Director George Tenet, among others.

Ashcroft: Terrorism Was My Priority

Pickard testified that he only met with Ashcroft twice and that he
didn't think terrorism was a budget priority for Ashcroft.

But Ashcroft said he had regular meetings with Pickard.

"I never told him that I didn't want to hear about terrorism," the
attorney general said. "I was very interested about terrorism and
specifically interrogated him about threats to the American people and
domestic threats, in particular."

He noted that on March 7, 2001, he met with President Bush's national
security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and recommended that since there
was no Clinton-era covert-action plan to kill bin Laden but only to
capture -- and even that was proving difficult -- a new tactic be
taken.

"'We should end the failed capture policy,' I said. 'We should find
and kill bin Laden,'" Ashcroft said he told Rice, who agreed and put
Tenet on the task.

The commission released a staff report Tuesday saying the FBI failed
over several years to reorganize and respond to a steadily growing
threat of terrorism. The report said Ashcroft rejected an appeal from
the agency for more funding on the day before Al Qaeda struck.

The report quoted former FBI counterterrorism chief, Dale Watson, as
saying he "almost fell out of his chair" when he saw a May 10, 2001,
budget memo from Ashcroft listing seven priorities, including illegal
drugs and gun violence but not terrorism.

Reno: 'I Never Focused on Just Al Qaeda'

Reno said that after Ashcroft replaced her when President Bush took
office in 2001, she sent him memos saying the government needs to
"connect the dots" in regards to terrorism and to deal with it. But
she said she doesn't recall talking to Ashcroft specifically about Al
Qaeda or bin Laden.

During her nearly eight-year tenure as attorney general, Reno said she
was briefed on the presence of Al Qaeda within the United States but
not on the exact locations of the cells.

"I never focused on just on Al Qaeda because I stood there and watched
the [Alfred P.] Murrah building in rubble," Reno said, referring to
the deadly 1995 attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City. The
blast was pinned on two American men, Timothy McVeigh and Terry
Nichols, but there was rampant speculation at first that it was an act
of foreign terrorism.

"You can't jump to conclusions," Reno said. "You can't say that one
thing's going to be our overriding issue … We have got to be prepared
for terrorism in any form and a focus on one is going to make it
difficult."

But she said the Clinton administration knew of many terrorist threats
when Clinton took office in 1992.

"We understood from early on in the Clinton administration that
terrorism posed a great threat to Americans on American soil," Reno
said, adding that Mueller should be given all the resources he needs
to counter such threats.

Freeh: We Weren't Fighting a 'Real War'

Freeh, who was FBI chief from 1993-2001, said the agency suffered from
a lack of resources to effectively hunt down terrorists. Specialists
in Arabic and Farsi were desperately needed, particular in New York
City, where many Al Qaeda investigations were housed, Freeh said.

Nobody thought investigating terrorism cases was the best response to
"acts of war," committed against U.S. troops overseas in the 1990s
known to be the handiwork of Al Qaeda, Freeh said.

But "in the absence of invading Afghanistan, in the absence of armed
predator missiles seeking out our enemies … we were left with
alternatives that were better than no alternatives … sometimes they
worked," he said.

Democratic commissioner Bob Kerrey hammered Freeh on why more airport
security and other measures weren't taken when there was even the
notion that Al Qaeda was interested in hijacking U.S. airliners.

"Even in the absence of a [formal] declaration of war, why did we let
their [Al Qaeda] soldiers into the United States?" Kerry asked.

"We weren't fighting a real war … neither [the Clinton nor the Bush]
administration put their intelligence or law enforcement agencies on a
war footing" to seal the borders, detain suspicious people or enact
legislation like the Patriot Act (search) that tore down many legal
barriers to going after terrorists, Freeh responded, adding that he
knew of no concrete terrorist plan to use commercial airliners as
bombs.

Freeh said he met once every two weeks with Reno and Clinton National
Security Adviser Sandy Berger to go over "every single piece" of
counterterrorism information. Richard Clarke, former counterterrorism
adviser under Bush and Clinton, suggested during his testimony two
weeks ago that White House national security officials were frustrated
at the lack of information-sharing from the FBI.

Clarke was not present at those meetings with Reno and Berger, Freeh
said.

Freeh's argument that agencies didn't have enough resources was backed
up by other panelists.

"You'll never hear from us, 'we didn't get it ' … we got it all right,
we gave it all we had," Black said. "We didn't have enough people to
do the job and we didn't have enough money by magnitudes.

"Unfortunately, when Americans get killed, it would translate into
more resources. Either you run out or people die. When people die, you
get more money."