Congressman: Atta Papers Destroyed on Pentagon Orders

MSNBC.com

A Pentagon employee was ordered to destroy documents that identified Mohamed Atta as a terrorist two years before the 2001 attacks, a congressman said Thursday. The employee is prepared to testify next week before the Senate Judiciary Committee and was expected to identify the person who ordered him to destroy the large volume of documents, said Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa.


Weldon declined to identify the employee, citing confidentiality matters. Weldon described the documents as “2.5 terabytes” — as much as one-fourth of all the printed materials in the Library of Congress, he added. A Senate Judiciary Committee aide said the witnesses for Wednesday's hearing had not been finalized and could not confirm Weldon’s comments.


Pentagon: Nothing found


Army Maj. Paul Swiergosz, a Pentagon spokesman, said officials have been “fact-finding in earnest for quite some time. We’ve interviewed 80 people involved with Able Danger, combed through hundreds of thousands of documents and millions of e-mails and have still found no documentation of Mohamed Atta,” Swiergosz said. He added that certain data had to be destroyed in accordance with existing regulations regarding “intelligence data on U.S. persons.”


Did program exist?


Weldon has said that Atta, the mastermind of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and three other hijackers were identified in 1999 by a classified military intelligence unit known as “Able Danger,” which determined they could be members of an al-Qaida cell. On Wednesday, former members of the Sept. 11 commission dismissed the “Able Danger” assertions. One commissioner, ex-Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., said, “Bluntly, it just didn’t happen and that’s the conclusion of all 10 of us.”


Weldon responded angrily to Gorton’s assertions. “It’s absolutely unbelievable that a commission would say this program just didn’t exist,” Weldon said Thursday.


Pentagon officials said this month they had found three more people who recall an intelligence chart identifying Atta as a terrorist prior to the Sept. 11 attacks. Two military officers, Army Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer and Navy Capt. Scott Phillpott, have come forward to support Weldon’s claims.


(c) 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

One has to wonder just what they were hiding. Or was this a result of a little known excess of the Reno Justice Department? There is plenty of blame to go around about 9/11. Here is a skeleton from the Clinton Administration. Consider the source. There is a lot of propaganda interspersed within the document. But I suspect some of the detail is true.
Freerepublic.com

Attorney General Reno’s “Procedures for Contacts Between the FBI and the Criminal Division Concerning Foreign Intelligence and Foreign Counterintelligence Investigations,” issued in July 1995. Immediately dubbed “the Wall,” the 1995 guidelines erected a mind-boggling and ultimately lethal set of impediments to cooperation among all relevant anti-terrorist personnel.

[...]
Analogous to the Wall between FBI agents working in intelligence and those working on criminal cases was another wall, between the FBI and prosecutors, who also are barred from bringing their accumulated knowledge to bear on all intelligence information. According to Kenneth Bass, who helped draft FISA for the Carter administration, none of these Reno-mandated restrictions reflects the law’s original intent. “The Wall is absolutely ludicrous,” he says. “It is not in the national interest.”

[...]
Intelligence agents thought that things could not get much worse. They were wrong. In November 2000, the chief judge of the FISA court, Royce Lamberth, blasted the Bureau and one of its most respected agents for trivial violations of the Wall. The Reno Justice Department, it had turned out, was unable to abide by the Reno Wall. In September 2000, the Clinton administration had notified the FISA court that there had been over 75 breaches of the Wall since its inception. These included such violations as: disseminations of FISA intelligence to terrorist criminal squads in the FBI’s New York field office and to the U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York without court permission; a claim in a wiretap application that the target was not under criminal investigation for terrorism when in fact he was; and misstatements about the existence of a Wall in one particular FBI office between intelligence and criminal squads, when actually all the agents were on the same squad, and a supervisor overseeing both investigations screened the raw intelligence intercepts.

[...]
In recoil, the FBI and Justice Department hunkered down completely. FBI headquarters and the OIPR, already a crippling drag on terrorist investigations, became paralyzing weights. Recalls Mary Jo White: “The walls went higher. Nothing could have been worse.” It was as if the Wall had become covered with concertina wire and broken glass, says Kallstrom. Morale plummeted. Agents in the New York bureau put signs on their desks saying: “You may not talk to me.”


Fast-forward to August 2001. Coleen Rowley and other FBI agents in her Minneapolis office were furiously banging their fists against the Wall. A Minneapolis agent had flagged Zacarias Moussaoui as a possible terrorist threat, after a local flight school disclosed that Moussaoui had been acting strangely and had paid cash (nearly $7,000) for simulator training. The Minneapolis office learned from the French Intelligence Service that Moussaoui, now in custody on an INS violation, had connections to radical Islamic groups. Desperate to search Moussaoui’s computer and possessions, the agents sought permission from FBI central headquarters to ask the OIPR to seek a warrant, as per Wall procedures.


They met only resistance. Finally, on August 28, 2001, the FBI’s National Security Law Unit (NSLU)—incredibly, yet another bureaucratic gatekeeper that stymies counterintelligence operations—pronounced that there was insufficient evidence of Moussaoui’s connection specifically to al-Qaida to justify a FISA search. FISA required no such showing: the French Intelligence Services’ linking of Moussaoui to Islamic radical groups in general was sufficient. The NSLU had imported a new, non-mandated roadblock into the act in the mania of risk-aversion that had gripped the agency after the Lamberth outburst. The investigation was over—until September 11, when FBI headquarters decided that maybe it ought to look into that computer after all.


Astoundingly, on August 29, 2001, the day after the National Security Law Unit killed the Moussaoui investigation that would have led to two 9/11 hijackers and to the Hamburg cell that planned the attack, it cited the Wall to rebuff as well a New York agent’s urgent pleas to let him and his subordinates help track down al-Qaida member Khalid Almihdar. According to the Bureau’s paranoid Wall interpretation, because the New York agent was working criminal cases against terrorists, and Almihdar had not been indicted for a crime, the agent and his men could not cooperate with the intell agents searching for Almihdar.


Immediately after the NSLU’s prohibition, the agent sent an angry e-mail to FBI headquarters: “Someday someone will die—and wall or not—the public will not understand why we were not . . . throwing every resource” at terrorists.


On September 11, when his office received the passenger manifests of the four hijacked flights, the agent shouted: “This is the same Almihdar we’ve been talking about for three months.” In a parody of bureaucratic buck-passing, his supervisor responded: “We did everything by the book.”

Of course, the information about Atta and his apparent association with Al Qaeda was reported to the Defense department under Rumsfeld. But the 9/11 report outlines a very different truth about the "Wall".
ACLU

The “Wall”


The 9/11 Commission is quite clear that the internal and inter-agency obstacles to information sharing, as they developed during the 1980s and 1990s, were, as the ACLU has argued, almost exclusively the result of a misunderstanding and misapplication of both FISA and internal procedures designed to keep criminal prosecutors from exploiting the lower standards for intelligence surveillance – and not a result of FISA itself. Pages 78 through 80 tell this story.
Prior to 1978, the attorney general claimed authority to allow foreign intelligence surveillance without any court review, although this authority was hotly contested. In response to the broad misuse of this power to investigate political dissenters, a reformist Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, which established a secret court to oversee the investigation and surveillance of foreign powers and foreign agents. FISA was then interpreted by the courts to require that an intelligence order have as its “primary purpose” the acquisition of foreign intelligence information. According to sources examined by the commission, the Justice Department interpreted the primary purpose test to mean that federal prosecutors could be briefed on FISA information but could not direct or control its collection.


From 1978 to the mid-1990s, federal prosecutors had “informal” arrangements for accessing information gleaned from FISA tools, under the understanding that they would not exploit this material for their criminal cases. However, after the Aldrich Ames case in 1994, anxiety rose significantly within the Justice Department that the current system could result in the courts excluding evidence obtained through FISA orders. Consequently, the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review in the Justice Department, which presents all FISA applications to the FISA court, decided to regulate the flow of FISA information to prosecutors.


In July 1995, OIPR complaints finally resulted in a working group led by the Justice Department’s Executive Office of National Security, in consultation with FBI, OIPR and the criminal division. The U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York was permitted to comment on the working group’s product. The procedures developed by the working group, led by Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick, mandated the disclosure ofinformation obtained under FISA authority, but regulated the manner in which it was to be shared.


The procedures were, in the words of the commission, “immediately misunderstood and misapplied.” After some time, they became known as what is often referred to as the “wall.” “The term ‘the wall’ is misleading, however,” the report says, “because several factors led to a series of barriers to information sharing that developed.” (pg. 79) The OIPR then became the sole gatekeeper for passing FISA information to the criminal division, arguing that if it were not permitted to play this role, it would no longer present FISA applications to the court.


This bottleneck was then compounded by an institutional aversion to information sharing among agents themselves. The FISA primary purpose proviso was intended to leash criminal prosecutors, not necessarily investigative agents themselves. However, pressure from the OIPR, FBI leadership and the FISA court itself began to build barriers between FBI agents working on criminal matters and those working on intelligence investigations. At one point, the report relates, FBI Deputy Director Robert “Bear” Bryant informed agents that too much sharing could be a “career stopper.”


This overly cautious view leeched into the mindset of agents in the field. As a result, intelligence investigators began to stop sharing any intelligence information, even if it had not been gathered using FISA at all. Reports from the CIA and NSA failed to make their way across the growing divide to criminal investigators. Limited restrictions on the transfer of information disclosed during grand jury proceedings turned into a blanket interpretation barring the sharing of “much of the information” unearthed during investigations. And so on.


The practical consequences of this broad confusion were serious. As related in chapter eight (pgs. 269-276), an intelligence FBI agent assigned to the U.S.S. Cole bombing, confused about the complex rules governing information sharing, mistakenly told a criminal FBI agent assigned to the criminal Cole investigation that the rules barred him from participating in the search for Khalid al Midhar, one of the hijackers who the FBI had discovered was in the U.S. “As a result of this confusion,” the report says, “the criminal agents who were knowledgeable about Al Qaeda and experienced with criminal investigative techniques, including finding suspects and possible criminal charges, were thus excluded from the search.” Furthermore, the report finds that if additional resources had been applied and a significantly different approach taken (presumably one where the limitations of the so-called “wall” were properly interpreted by investigators), Midhar and another hijacker, Nawaf al Hazmi, could have been located, as they had used their real names in the U.S. Authorities also knew that Midhar had met with another terrorist facilitator, known as Khallad, in Kuala Lumpur.


In short, the findings of the 9/11 Commission report highlight the fallacy in the argument, ubiquitous among supporters of the Patriot Act, that the 2001 law was instrumental in breaking down the “wall” between intelligence and law enforcement. The “wall,” the report’s findings make clear, was not a result of FISA, but a result of confusion about FISA.

While full of legalese technicalities, the report makes it's point. The "Wall" was largely the result of a misunderstanding of what appears to have been a very difficult law to understand. Whether it was incredibly complex or vague is probably not important for anyone but a lawyer. "The Wall", regardless if it was based on rule of law or misapplication, helped create a situation where complete information could not be put together to increase the likelihood of someone acting.
However, since several sufficient warnings appeared and reappeared over and over again several times through the Clinton Administration well into the Bush Administration, it seems pretty weak to blame 9/11 on the "Wall".
In a quick perusal of Google's references, this report is turning up all over the internet. It would appear we are beginning to see media campaign trying to deflect attention from the total incompetence of the Bush Administration and blame 9/11 on the Democrats.