IP: Weldon: Clinton Official Ignored Program

[David Farber <dfarber () earthlink net>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Einar Stefferud <stef () nma com>
Date: Thu, 23 May 2002 11:35:30 
To: Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>
Subject: Weldon: Clinton Official Ignored Program

  Curt Weldon's comments from the floor Tuesday night.
_  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _  _
Fox News - Thursday, May 23, 2002

Weldon: Clinton Official Ignored Program


WASHINGTON - An experimental computer program designed to analyze
intelligence gave U.S. Special Forces a mission recommendation in 2000 that
some say could have prevented the Sept. 11 attacks.

The U.S. Military Special Forces Command at McDill Airforce Base came up
with a chart of Al Qaeda's entire international network in the period prior
to the November 2000 election, but the recommendation, which reached the
desk of Clinton Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Hugh Shelton was never
implemented, according to eight-term Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., a member of
the House Armed Services Committee.

"One year before 9/11 ... the capability that Special Forces built actually
identified to us the network of Al Qaeda, and they went beyond that and gave
us recommendations where we could take out five cells to eliminate their
capability," Weldon said on the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives
Tuesday night.

Weldon said that he went public with the information to silence Democratic
criticism of the Bush administration, but not to blame former President Bill
Clinton.

The debate over intelligence failures heated up in the last week after it
was revealed that an FBI agent had sent a memo in July 2001 warning that
Middle Eastern men with ties to Usama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network were
training at flight schools.

The memo, it was revealed, was ignored by higher-ups in the bureau, who
claimed that they were too overwhelmed with the U.S.S. Cole bombing and
other investigations to conduct a search of all U.S. flight schools.

The debate, however, took a political turn last week, with some members
calling for the creation of an independent commission to investigate whether
the Bush administration failed to act on warnings. Already, a joint
House-Senate intelligence panel is investigating intelligence failures
within the law enforcement agencies.

Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.,
have said that an independent commission, composed of experts who have an
understanding of intelligence matters, would be able to take a more
objective look at the U.S. intelligence community, and perhaps feel free to
propose more radical changes.

Opponents of the commission say that adding a new bureaucracy will only tie
up intelligence officials who must run the war on terrorism while already
answering to the congressional investigation.

Weldon said that instead of trying to put blame on the administration, more
needs to be done to investigate the failings by the CIA and FBI to share
information and see obvious clues.

The agencies have tried to respond to the criticism. Since the Sept. 11
attacks, the Justice Department has issued new guidelines on handling
investigations, and both the CIA and FBI have redirected their sources to
concentrate on international terrorism.

On Wednesday, the CIA named Winston P. Wiley, the deputy director of
intelligence, as the new associate director for central intelligence for
Homeland Security. He will take up that role, which is designed to
communicate intelligence on terrorist threats to the Office of Homeland
Security, on May 28.

Intelligence experts also shot back Wednesday that Congress is in part to
blame for the intelligence failings because of its hard-hitting insistence
that the FBI investigate the "flavor of the week."

"Ducking child welfare (payments), parental kidnappings, pornography on the
Internet, whatever the flavor of the week was," the FBI was ordered to
investigate, said former agent Clint Van Zandt. "And in the background,
always brewing over the mountain - you could see smoke, no pictures - was
international terrorism."

"It goes back to the very heart of the political leadership, goes back over
the previous administration as well," said John Martin, a former FBI
counterterrorist specialist and retired chief of internal security at the
Justice Department, who added that even after the World Trade Center
terrorist bombing in 1993, some top officials wanted the FBI to focus on
abortion-clinic violence, street crime and the like.

"We were not preparing for this kind of attack," he said.

Weldon said that even if the intelligence community was absorbed with other
issues, it missed at least one public and maddeningly obvious clue that
until now had gone unnoticed.

"In August of 2000, an Al Qaeda member had been interviewed by an Italian
newspaper, and (it was) reported that Al Qaeda was training kamikaze pilots.
The intelligence community and enforcement agencies don't read open-source
information," he said.

In truth, though, the CIA does study foreign press, but before Sept. 11 made
little use of computers to collect and analyze classified and unclassified
information together, which is what Special Forces began doing in 1997,
enabling them to get a read-out on the terror cells.

Congress has passed legislation since the mid-1990s to compel the CIA to
improve its computer gathering and analysis of intelligence, but little has
been done, which adds to Weldon's criticism of the intelligence services.

"We knew what should have been done, we knew what we could have done, and we
didn't do it," Weldon said.

Fox News' Carl Cameron and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

©Associated Press. All rights reserved.
©Fox News Network, LLC 2002. All rights reserved.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,53476,00.html



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