Saturday, January 10, 2004

Read "Wall Nuts" ...

... and get a very, very queasy feeling:
There's a quiet scandal at the heart of Sept. 11; one that for different reasons neither the government nor the privacy lobby really wants to talk about. It's this: For two and a half weeks before the attacks, the U.S. government knew the names of two hijackers. It knew they were al-Qaida killers and that they were already in the United States. In fact, the two were living openly under their own names, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. They used those names for financial transactions, flight school, to earn frequent flier miles, and to procure a California identity card.

Despite this paper trail, and despite having two and a half weeks to follow the scent, the FBI couldn't locate either man—at least not until Sept. 11, when they flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon. If we had found them, there is a real possibility that most or all of the hijackings would have been prevented. The two shared addresses with Mohamed Atta, who flew into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, and Marwan Al-Shehhi, who flew into the South Tower. They were linked to most of the other hijackers as well
. So August 2001 offered our last chance to foil the attacks. And if we want to stop the next attack, we need to know what went wrong in August 2001. Despite all the resources of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies, we did not find two known terrorists living openly. How could we have failed so badly in such a simple, desperate task?

We couldn't find al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi in August 2001 because we had imposed too many rules designed to protect against privacy abuses that were mainly theoretical. We missed our best chance to save the lives of 3,000 Americans because we spent more effort and imagination guarding against these theoretical privacy abuses than against terrorism.

I feel some responsibility for sending the government down that road.

In August 2001, the New York FBI intelligence agent looking for al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi didn't have the computer access needed to do the job alone. He requested help from the bureau's criminal investigators and was turned down. Acting on legal advice, FBI headquarters had refused to involve its criminal agents
. In an e-mail to the New York agent, headquarters staff said: "If al-Midhar is located, the interview must be conducted by an intel[ligence] agent. A criminal agent CAN NOT be present at the interview. This case, in its entirety, is based on intel[ligence]. If at such time as information is developed indicating the existence of a substantial federal crime, that information will be passed over the wall according to the proper procedures and turned over for follow-up criminal investigation."

In a reply message, the New York agent protested the ban on using law enforcement resources for intelligence investigations in eerily prescient terms: "[S]ome day someone will die—and wall or not—the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain 'problems.' Let's hope the [lawyers who gave the advice] will stand behind their decisions then, especially since the biggest threat to us now, UBL [Usama Bin Laden], is getting the most 'protection.' "

It breaks my heart to read this exchange. That "wall"—between intelligence and law enforcement—was put in place to protect against a hypothetical risk to civil liberties that might arise if domestic law enforcement and foreign intelligence missions were allowed to mix. It was a post-Watergate fix meant to protect Americans, not kill them. In fact, in 1994, after I left my job as general counsel to the National Security Agency, I argued that the wall should be left in place because I accepted the broad assumption that foreign intelligence-gathering tolerates a degree of intrusiveness, harshness, and deceit that Americans do not want applied against themselves. I recognized at the time that these privacy risks were just abstract worries, but I accepted the conventional wisdom: "However theoretical the risks to civil liberties may be, they cannot be ignored." I foresaw many practical problems as well if the wall came down, and I argued for an approach that "preserves, perhaps even raises, the wall between the two communities."

I was wrong, but not alone, in assigning a high importance to theoretical privacy risks. In hindsight, that choice seems little short of feckless, for it made the failures of August and September 2001 nearly inevitable. In 2000 and 2001, the FBI office that handled al-Qaida wiretaps in the United States was thrown into turmoil because of the heights to which the wall had been raised. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Court, the body that oversees national security wiretaps, had ordered strict procedures to ensure that such wiretaps were not contaminated by law enforcement purposes. And when those procedures were not followed strictly, the court barred an FBI agent from the court because his affidavits did not fully list all contacts with law enforcement. This mushroomed into a privacy scandal that set the stage for 9/11.

In the spring and summer of 2001, with al-Qaida's preparations growing even more intense, the turmoil grew so bad that national security wiretaps were allowed to lapse—something that had never happened before. It isn't clear what intelligence we missed, but the loss of those wiretaps was treated as less troubling than the privacy scandal that now hung over the antiterrorism effort. The lesson was not lost on the rest of the bureau. According to a declassified Joint Intelligence Committee report on Sept. 11, "FBI personnel involved in FISA matters feared the fate of the agent who had been barred and began to avoid even the most pedestrian contact with personnel in criminal components of the Bureau or DOJ because it could result in intensive scrutiny by the Justice Department office that reviewed national security wiretaps and the FISA Court." [Emphasis added.]
So is Ashcroft a Nazi? Or are you the one who's actually uninformed and should be ashamed of yourself?

And this story isn't all over the front pages exactly why? I'm sure you have a perfectly good explanation that doesn't include the mainstream press being completely uninterested in the truth ...

ANOTHER CLASSIC JUST GOT ADDED OVER TO THE RIGHT. I QUOTED A LARGE PART OF THE ARTICLE BUT THAT DOESN'T EXCUSE YOU FROM READING THE WHOLE THING MULTIPLE TIMES LIKE I HAVE...

UPDATE: I don't think I linked to this -- rather relevant n'set pas? I'll give away the punchline: "You got some of us, but you didn't get all of us."
altermondialistes???
An update on the "so-called free world" and where the truth is...

More on the "if they can bury whole MIG fighters" so we have a hard time finding them problem. If this one pans out, I can predict the reaction now: these were just "lost" from all the stuff he used in the Iranian war and weren't an "imminent threat". Never mind that if you have so many WMD that you misplace them there just might be a problem worth noticing? Duh-oh!
That H.R. 4655 has turned out to be pretty darned inconvenient, hasn't it?
French dhimmi watch update: you know that French jetliner that went down in Egypt?

Everyone will understand ...

but by then it will be too late. UPDATE: You could have clicked thru from Totten below but I wasn't willing to take the risk of having you miss it anymore...

Needless to say, this just got added to the classics page. INCREDIBLY POWERFUL AND AN ABSOLUTE MUST READ. 'NUFF SAID.

Friday, January 09, 2004

Are you sincere?
No problem here -- just move along now, look away, no problem, it's definitely not a war, just a "police action" you see...
Susan Block, foaming rocket scientist.
How Hugh Shelton developed a taste for vodka.
... or excreted by ... and you won't be able to stop laughing.

Hypocrisy? What hypocrisy?

(Hat tip Darren.)
There are no Americans in Baghdad?
My boys are fascinated with dinosaurs. This may have been how they left us -- and how we may leave us. Mine the links -- very thought provoking...

A Kuru-like Plague?

Yeooouch! Check out Austin Bay:
Mad Howard's frantic, peptic rise to top dog in the Democratic pack exhibits similar symptoms, from his "unsteady" (retracted) crack about rebel flags to his hideous conspiratorial "hint" that President Bush knew in advance of 9-11, to his demand we deal with the Soviet Union (it's Russia now, Howard), to his huff that America is no safer with Saddam Hussein incarcerated, followed by his startling revelation that Job is his favorite book in the New Testament.

Imagine the monthlong jihad Maureen Dowd and other smirky national press pooh-bahs would have waged had Bush done a similar job on Job. [Emphasis added.]
Definitely a RTWT! Smiles abound...
WHOOPS? More Clinton lies?

Thursday, January 08, 2004

We must explore the universe in order to reject it!

This is just outstanding -- just as Bush prepares to announce a return to space! Lileks rocks... Read it -- you need a good laugh.
Who are the Slovaks again?

Splitters! (Hat tip Glenn.)

Woe unto those who call evil good and good evil, who turn darkness into light and light into darkness . .

The Wall: Prelude.

It's finally bad enough that even Benny Morris is becoming conflicted.

Wednesday, January 07, 2004

Monday, January 05, 2004

Nuanced Dominoes

A nice job critiquing the Bush administration on Iraq by Ken Pollack. This is what reasoned critique based on historical perspective and unblinkered analysis looks like. I can't resist quoting his swing at the leftist's race-based arguments about democracy being impossible in the MidEast because they're just stupid Arabs:
It's not a matter of dominoes falling, it's something somewhat different. For the first time ever Arabs will be able to look at Iraq and see an Arab democracy. Often when we say democracy, Arabs hear Britney Spears, sex on TV, same-sex marriages and hip-hugger blue jeans. They know they don't want any of that. But once you get that first democracy formed in a region, it has a remarkable transformative effect. This is what the East Asian historians say about Japan. Fifteen, twenty years after the occupation of Japan was over, when there was a functional democracy in Japan, it changed a lot of perceptions throughout East Asia. For the first time East Asians could look at Japan and say "That's the kind of state that I could imagine living in."

Before Japan, East Asians thought about democracy the same way that Arabs do now. They thought of it as being an American or a European thing. Those were the only examples they had, and they knew they didn't want that. But then Japan came along and proved that you could build a democracy that was very different from a Western-style democracy. To me, Japan is more dissimilar from our form of democracy than Hosni Mubarak's Egypt is from our democracy. But it is a functional democracy that is consistent with Japan's values, traditions and history. And if we get it right in Iraq, for the first time there will be a democratic Arab state with a free-market economic system that will be consistent with Arab values, traditions and history.
He also says a number of critical things but does so in a level-headed and insightful way (Pollack served under Clinton BTW.) When I see one of the Dem candidates actually paying attention to someone like Pollack, then we'll have a race for the White House. Right now Lieberman is the only one with a clue. Otherwise the Dems are toast this go-round...
W is the one who's stupid? Uh huh...

Sunday, January 04, 2004

Some entertaining perspective from Australia. (Hat tip Totten.)
Mandatory reading today from Michael Totten on the distinction between liberals and leftists. Well done with the good sense to include a classic Churchill quote.