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Ashcroft efforts on terrorism criticized { April 14 2004 }

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   http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9653-2004Apr13.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A9653-2004Apr13.html

Ashcroft's Efforts on Terrorism Criticized
Ex-FBI Official Doubted Priorities

By Dan Eggen and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, April 14, 2004; Page A01


The former acting director of the FBI testified yesterday that Attorney General John D. Ashcroft rejected any further briefings on terrorist threats in the weeks before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and did not view combating al Qaeda as "a top item on his agenda."

Thomas J. Pickard, who ran the FBI for several months before the attacks, also told the commission investigating the terrorist strikes that Ashcroft rejected a plea that summer for an extra $58 million to combat al Qaeda. Pickard testified that he received the formal denial on Sept. 12, 2001, the day after the attacks.

The allegations came during another day of dramatic and often tense testimony before the panel. They prompted an aggressive defense from Ashcroft, who denied barring Pickard from offering him threat reports and said he was highly focused on the dangers posed by terrorists that summer.

Ashcroft sought to blame the Clinton administration for many of the shortcomings in counterterrorism strategies before the attacks, taking the unusual step of publicly citing the work of a Democratic member of the commission, Jamie S. Gorelick, who served as a deputy attorney general in the Clinton administration. Ashcroft announced the declassification and release of a 1995 memo she wrote that outlined legal rules on sharing intelligence information, characterizing the guidelines as "the single greatest structural cause for the September 11th problem."

"We did not know an attack was coming because for nearly a decade our government had blinded itself to its enemies," Ashcroft said.

Ashcroft's pointed remarks capped a day of finger-pointing by current and former law enforcement and intelligence officials, who defended their own roles in assessing and fighting the al Qaeda threat while generally criticizing the missteps of others.

The staff of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, as the panel is known, also released two new reports that broadly condemned the FBI and the CIA for missing clues that might have revealed the workings of the Sept. 11 plot. The reports repeated a now familiar list of lost opportunities in 2001 to follow leads that might have helped them unravel the impending assault, and disclosed new details about financial and policy failures contributing to the problems.

Commission Chairman Thomas H. Kean called one of the reports "an indictment of the FBI over a long period of time."

In a news conference last night, President Bush defended his administration's counterterrorism efforts before the attacks, saying that there was no evidence that such a plot was in the works and that he was "sick when I think about the death that took place on that day." He also supported Ashcroft's complaints about legal restrictions before the hijackings.

"We weren't on a war footing," Bush said. "The country was not on a war footing, and yet the enemy was at war with us."

Disclosures at yesterday's commission hearing included:

• The panel last week obtained a copy of a previously unknown secret order that may clarify a long-raging debate over whether the CIA had the authority to assassinate Osama bin Laden during the Clinton administration, or whether it was required to attempt to capture him. Commissioners were vague on details, citing secrecy rules, but indicated that the document rebutted assertions by Ashcroft and others that no clear kill order existed.

• One day after telling the Senate that combating terrorist attacks was his highest priority, Ashcroft issued a memo on May 10, 2001, outlining the Justice Department's strategic goals that contained no mention of counterterrorism. Dale Watson, the FBI's terrorism chief at the time, told the commission staff that he "almost fell out of his chair" when he read it.

Ashcroft said he based his memo on a strategic plan issued by former attorney general Janet Reno, although he acknowledged that the original included several goals relating to terrorism.

• The FBI's computers were woefully outdated, its counterterrorism training was abysmal and the bureau had a poor grasp of al Qaeda's presence in the United States, the commission reports said. White House officials, including counterterrorism coordinator Richard A. Clarke, complained about the "FBI's unwillingness or inability to share information," and an internal review found that "66 percent of the bureau's analysts were not qualified to perform analytic duties."

The FBI hopes to hold on to its counterterrorism mandate even as Bush indicated Monday that he is considering a revamping of U.S. intelligence services.

• Ashcroft said he never saw a copy of an Aug. 6, 2001, memo given to Bush that warned, "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US," which was declassified Saturday. He also testified that he did not recall seeing a similar, less restricted summary that was widely distributed the next day with the title: "Terrorism: Bin Laden Determined to Strike In The United States."

• The same Aug. 6 briefing document apparently overstated the FBI's capabilities by citing "70 full field investigations" throughout the United States that the FBI considered related to bin Laden. Pickard said that number was high and would have referred to individuals rather than whole cases; he provided details on only 27.

"I expect information that comes to my desk to be real and valid," Bush said at last night's news conference, reacting to the uncertainty over the number of field investigations contained in the August memo. " . . . I can't make good decisions unless I get valid information."

Commission officials also said yesterday that the CIA had granted them access late Monday to the CIA analyst who wrote the Aug. 6 document. Kean and other members said previously that the administration had refused to allow the commission to question the analyst.

As the hearing began, former FBI director Louis J. Freeh sharply criticized Congress and, less directly, the Clinton administration for not giving the FBI resources it requested for counterterrorism.

"We weren't fighting a real war," Freeh said. "We hadn't declared war on these enemies. . . . We were using grand jury subpoenas and arrest warrants to fight an enemy that was using missiles and suicide boats to attack our warships."

But in the afternoon, J. Cofer Black, former head of the CIA's counterterrorism center, told the commission: "I've heard some people say this country wasn't at war. I want to tell you, Mr. Chairman, the Counterterrorism Center was at war, we conducted ourselves at war." Reno offered complaints about the FBI. "When I came into office, I learned that the FBI didn't know what it had," Reno testified. "We found stuff in files here that the right hand didn't know what the left hand was doing."

But the most heated questioning, and perhaps the most dramatic testimony, centered on separate appearances by Pickard -- a career FBI agent and accountant who joked about his inability to type -- and Ashcroft, the former Republican senator and Missouri governor who has not shied from defending himself from critics.

Pickard said that just hours after the Sept. 11 attacks, he learned about two of the three most important clues ignored by the FBI that year. They were a July 10 memo from a Phoenix FBI agent that warned that al Qaeda followers might be seeking aviation training in the United States, and the Aug. 15 apprehension of Zacarias Moussaoui, a French national who had aroused suspicion while seeking flight training in Minnesota.

A day or two later, Pickard said, he learned that the FBI had been searching since late August for Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, two of the hijackers on the plane that struck the Pentagon.

"It's a frightening thought to think that that could have been on my desk on September 10th, and would I have done something differently or not?" Pickard said. ". . . It keeps me up at night, thinking: If I had that information, would I have had the intuitiveness to recognize, to go to the president, to do something different?"

During his testimony, Pickard confirmed the commission's report that after he briefed Ashcroft twice on terrorist threats during the summer of 2001, "the attorney general told him he did not want to hear this information anymore," according to the findings. Pickard indicated concern about the May 10, 2001, memo that included no counterterrorism strategies, and recounted his plea for more funds that summer after being disappointed by initial 2003 budget proposals.

Pickard said that while counterterrorism was a "top tier" item for the FBI, "I did not see that as a top item on his agenda."

Ashcroft strongly denied Pickard's version of his briefing instructions, and his former deputy and chief of staff have no recollection of that exchange, according to the staff report.

Ashcroft also laid out an aggressive defense of his counterterrorism record before the attacks. He argued that a set of classified 1995 guidelines provided a foundation for the "wall separating the criminal and intelligence investigations" that had "debilitating impacts" on terrorism investigations by restricting the FBI from mixing intelligence and criminal investigations.

Ashcroft said that he had the guidelines declassified and that "full disclosure" required him to indicate they had been drafted by Gorelick. Gorelick did not address the criticism in her questioning and declined to comment afterward.

Commissioner Slade Gorton, a former Republican senator from Washington, asked Ashcroft why he had not changed those guidelines on his own, noting that Ashcroft's deputy wrote in an Aug. 6, 2001, memorandum that "the 1995 procedures remain in effect today." Ashcroft said the 2001 order made some improvements.

Ashcroft also said that one of the first things he did after becoming attorney general was to conduct a "thorough review" of the authorities that the Clinton administration had given the CIA to take covert action against bin Laden. His review showed, he testified, that there was "no covert action program to kill bin Laden."

But several commissioners disagreed. They cited the 1998 "memorandum of notification" signed by Clinton, which was found among the documents that the Bush White House originally refused to turn over to the commission.



© 2004 The Washington Post Company


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