No one seems to be writing opinion pieces quite the way I would, so I decided to do it myself.

The name? Taverns are places where one goes to discuss the interesting events and things in the world, so this is my tavern.

I will offer my views on politics, economics, and whatever else strikes my fancy.
I will occasionally publish the entire article from another journal for purposes of causing discussion.

 

The Financial Times is less charitable about what the long-delayed Congressional report on what the US government knew before 9/11 than is the American Media

Financial Times

Investigation undermines Bush's claims

By Edward Alden and Marianne Brun-Rovet
Published: July 24 2003 20:52 | Last Updated: July 24 2003 20:52

For the past 18 months the administration of President George W. Bush has clung firmly to the argument that whatever the failings of intelligence, the September 11 2001 attacks could not have been prevented.

The release�on Thursday�of the declassified final report of the congressional investigation will make that argument much harder to sustain and could ignite fresh controversy for an administration already under scrutiny for manipulating intelligence information before the war on Iraq.

The report does not contain any wholly new revelations about the missed opportunities to unravel the plot of the 19 hijackers. But the detailed narrative of just how much the US knew of their movements before the attacks is more than enough to belie the assertion made to the investigators last year by Robert Mueller, Federal Bureau of Investigation director, that "as far as we know, they contacted no known terrorist sympathisers in the US".

The congressional report makes it clear that was not the case, as Mr Mueller acknowledged a few months later. The report points out that five of the hijackers had met a total of 14 people who had come to the FBI's attention as part of counter-terrorism investigations. Four of those 14 were under FBI investigation when the hijackers were in the US.

The six hijackers who led the attacks were not isolated but maintained a number of contacts in the US.

The report reveals that an informant for the FBI had maintained close contacts with two of the hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, when they were living in San Diego. But the San Diego FBI was unaware that the Central Intelligence Agency had identified the two men as al-Qaeda operatives, so never acted on the information.

The FBI had also opened in 1998 a counter-terrorism investigation of Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi who co-signed the lease on an apartment in San Diego rented by the two hijackers, paid the first month's rent and organised a party to welcome them into the community.

Mr Bayoumi became the subject of attention late last year after it was revealed that the wife of Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the US, had indirectly deposited tens of thousands of dollars to an account held by Mr Bayoumi's wife. The Saudis have said they had no knowledge that the money, which was part of the government's large charitable contributions, had ended up in her accounts.

The report says that although Mr Bayoumi was a student, he "had access to seemingly unlimited funding from Saudi Arabia", and at one time made a $400,000 (?348,000, �249,000) donation to a Kurdish mosque in San Diego. "One of the FBI's best sources in San Diego informed the FBI that he thought that Mr Bayoumi must be an intelligence officer for Saudi Arabia or another foreign power."

The most controversial element of the report will be what it does not contain. At the insistence of the Bush administration, 28 pages discussing evidence of foreign government support for the hijackers was deleted from the declassified version.

"The Bush administration has done everything they can do to make sure that's not the focus," said William Wechsler, a former White House official who co-authored a recent Council on Foreign Relations report critical of the Saudi failure to cut off financing for terrorist groups.

"They want to talk about tactical breakdown but they don't want to talk about the elephant in the room."

US officials note that Saudi co-operation in counter-terrorism investigations has improved markedly, particularly following the al-Qaeda attack in Riyadh in May that left more than 30 people dead.

But the investigation showed that even well after the September 11 attacks, Saudi Arabia continued to block US efforts in such areas as shutting down financing for terrorism. "There is an almost intuitive sense that things are not being volunteered," David Aufhauser, the Treasury Department's general counsel, told the inquiry last July.

While the congressional investigation was a bipartisan undertaking, its conclusions are likely to fuel a partisan battle over whether the Bush administration has responded fully to the lessons of September 11. Democrats have homed in on intelligence failures, both in the war on terrorism and prior to the war on Iraq, as the vulnerable spot for an administration that has been widely trusted by Americans on national security since the attacks.

The report challenges whether the administration has yet made sufficient efforts to improve intelligence-gathering and sharing. It details case after case where the FBI, the CIA and the National Security Agency did not pass to other agencies crucial details of their counter-terrorist investigations.

On foreign support for terrorists, the report says "only recently", and in part due to the pressure from the congressional inquiry, had the agencies tried to determine the extent of the problem.

"This gap in US intelligence coverage is unacceptable, given the magnitude and immediacy of the potential risk to US national security," the report says.

Democratic hopefuls for the next presidential election, including Senator Bob Graham, the former intelligence committee chairman, are already seizing on the problems identified by the inquiry.

A report card released Wednesday by the Democratic Progressive Policy Institute gave the Bush administration a "D" for its efforts to protect the US against further terrorist attacks.

The study charged that, in particular, the administration had failed to implement the core recommendation of the committees' investigation that intelligence-sharing be overhauled.

We really need to get the FBI out of the Intelligence business. They simply can't do the job, and never have been able to.


posted by Richard at 12:50 PM