Four months before the 9/11 attacks, newly installed
Attorney General John Ashcroft told FBI officials to stop
briefing him about CIA warnings of an al Qaeda attack because
he already had that information, the FBI's former acting
director told a federal commission Tuesday.
Thomas Pickard, interim director of the FBI after the
departure of Louis Freeh in June 2001, said in sworn testimony
that he briefed Ashcroft at "seven or eight meetings" about
the FBI's counter-intelligence activities, and on two
occasions mentioned mounting evidence of an al Qaeda attack.
Pickard said Ashcroft told him to stop talking about the al
Qaeda threats.
"He did not want to hear about this anymore," Pickard said.
"That is correct."
Ashcroft flatly denied this happened.
"I did never say to him that I did not want to hear about
terrorism," Ashcroft said. Ashcroft said that even before the
9/11 attacks he approved a large funding increase for
counter-terrorism in the Justice Department and had pressed
Pickard on what the terrorists were up to.
"My No. 1 priority was terrorism," he said.
Under questioning by several commissioners, Ashcroft
acknowledged that he signed a May 2001 budget document that
listed gun crimes and drugs as the top Justice Department
priorities, and made no mention of terrorism.
In his testimony before the National Commission on
Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, Ashcroft sought to
blame the Clinton administration for a failure to adequately
fund the anti-terrorism effort or properly target Osama bin
Laden and his al Qaeda cells.
Ashcroft said secret orders that President Bill Clinton
gave the CIA had to be rewritten because they did not permit
the agency to kill the al Qaeda leader, but only to capture
him.
"It was so complex and convoluted that it would be
paralytic," he said of Clinton's directive.
Commissioner Fred Fielding, a Republican lawyer, said the
commission recently found classified instructions to the CIA
that left no question about Clinton's determination on the
fate of bin Laden. Fielding said the instructions are still
classified and the CIA directive was not publicly released.
Earlier, former Attorney General Janet Reno said several
times that President Clinton's orders to the CIA were "to
either capture or kill" bin Laden.
Tuesday's commission meeting concentrated on why the
Justice Department failed to find al Qaeda cells operating in
the United States in 1999 and 2000.
The commission's staff found the FBI was preoccupied with
tracking down high-profile crime that results in prosecutions
and convictions, but unprepared to handle undercover
intelligence investigations tracking terrorists that may not
result in any criminal charges. The staff said the FBI
regarded intelligence as a backwater and concluded two-thirds
of the FBI analysts assigned to intelligence operations lacked
any training in the specialty.
The commission said FBI field offices found out al Qaeda
was operating in the United States in 1999, and by 2001 field
offices launched major intelligence investigations in New
York, Chicago, Detroit, San Diego and Minneapolis into groups
that were raising money for overseas Islamic terror
organizations. Some FBI officials had concluded that some of
these groups were likely connected to Osama bin Laden's
organization.
But the commission's staff said the FBI never reached a
conclusion that these groups might be plotting an attack on
the United States and "lacked a fundamental strategic
understanding of the nature and extent of al Qaeda fundraising
problem within the United States."
Before the 9/11 attacks, FBI field offices had developed 70
investigations into al Qaeda suspects in the United States.
Still, the leader of the counterintelligence squad at the FBI
field office in Washington - located six blocks from FBI
headquarters - told the commission he didn't even know there
were heightened reports of a potential terrorist attack
against the United States that year. The agent in charge of
the Miami office learned of these reports only after 9/11, the
commission staff report said.
In a crescendo of reports in April and May 2001, CIA
intelligence analysts issued warnings: "bin Laden planning
multiple operations," "bin Laden public profile may presage
attack," "bin Laden network's plans advancing" and "bin Laden
threats are real."
Reno said she was frustrated in her years overseeing the
agency that the FBI was stymied by an antiquated computer
system based on outdated 1980's technologies and Washington
headquarters staff often didn't know what the largely
autonomous 56 FBI field offices were doing.
"It was common knowledge the FBI didn't know what it had,"
said Reno, adding that it was not until after the 9/11 attacks
that the FBI rushed into operation a new computer system to
ease information sharing between FBI field offices and other
federal agencies.
Former FBI Director Freeh said the agency like the rest of
the U.S. government was not on a war footing until the 9/11
attacks.
"We weren't fighting a real war," Freeh said.
Freeh denied charges made by former White House
counterintelligence chief Richard Clarke that the FBI and CIA
weren't sharing information. Freeh said he and Reno met every
two weeks with former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger
to discuss terrorism with CIA officials and he was aware of
the dangers. "The notion we weren't sharing is an incorrect
notion," he said.
"We were not at a high state of alert. We were at ease. We
had stacked arms," said commissioner Bob Kerrey, a former
Democratic senator from Nebraska. He noted the government
allowed soldiers from bin Laden's army to walk into the United
States unimpeded.
But Pickard, who served until November 2001 as interim FBI
director after Freeh's departure, protested that the CIA
warnings he saw lacked anything specific to act on. "The
intelligence community never had anything more specific than
the level of chatter had increased and then decreased. There
was no specificity to the chatter as to precisely who, what,
when, where or how," he said.
Pickard said he doesn't understand why local FBI offices
told the commission staff they don't recall being alerted to
any of the heightened intelligence reports.
"I don't know what more could have been done," Pickard
said, explaining he talked to each of the 56 FBI field offices
in July 2001 to tell them of the intelligence.
"We did not have great sources in al Qaeda, and that's
evidenced by 9/11," Pickard said.
(Reach Lance Gay at
gayl(at)shns.com)
