Another Wrong-Headed Plan Under The "War On Terrorism" Umbrella

F.B.I. Struggling to

Reinvent Itself to Fight Terror

The "War On Terrorism" has produced some really horrible legislation, the loss of over 125,000 people (almost 3,000 of those American GIs), over 100,000 injuries and disabilities, contractor corruption, failures of policy and process, violation of international treaty, abrogation of civil liberties and wasted money in the realm of intelligence and national security.

While no one is in favor of not spending money in an appropriate manner for appropriate resources, training and materials, there seems to be a deliberate effort on the part of the Bush administration to undermine all of our existing institutions of intelligence and law enforcement under the notion that everything in the federal government needs to be re-tooled, revamped, reconstituted, refocused or re-assigned. The latest in these efforts is targeting the FBI.

The FBI is supposed to be the "big dog" of law enforcement in our federal government. They are supposed to have the top equipment, the best training, the best personnel and the most resources for enforcing our laws. Lately, however, we have been using our FBI as an extention of the CIA, DHS, State Department Intelligence Agency, DOD Intelligence and other duties that are entirely outside of the rationale for having a top-notch law enforcement agency. The reason for the push to refocus, revamp and re-assign the FBI is that someone in Washington got a bug up their ractal tissues to create an American version of MI5, the British national security force designed to battle Cold War Era espionage and counter-terrorism.

One problem I see with this approach is that both British security and intelligence agencies (MI5 and MI6) have had more security leaks, double-agents and internal turncoats than any American agency. Modeling (or remodeling) our FBI to fit the Birtish system is a ludicrous waste of money, time and effort... not to mention the retraining of FBI agents to be intelligence operatives rather than investigators.

Another problem is that we already have mechanisms, restructuring efforts, a National Counter-Terrorism Information Center, a new Department of Homeland Security, an intelligence czar in the White House, and the CIA working on these same issues. Revamping the FBI is a huge waste of time, effort and money because it is duplication of effort on top of duplication of effort. How many agencies do we need working on these cases and issues? Shouldn't the so-called "increased efforts" toward sharing information and coordinating activities provided for by the USA Patriot Act and modifications to FISA and other laws suffice in bringing the prowess of US intelligence and law enforcement up to speed? (If I failed to mention it, all of these efforts are in utter chaos, are way behind schedule, and are way over budget.)

Yet another problem is the money we have wasted by using the FBI to chase down 5,000 referrals (at last public report) from the CIA, NSA and other intelligence agencies. Having some experience with background and criminal investigation procedures and expenditures, I know that a routine background investigation can cost somewhere between $15,000 and $40,000 per case. (If there are any enquiring minds reading this post, it would be useful to note that not one of the 5,000 reported referrals to the FBI resulted in a single case of legitimate arrest, incarceration or prosecution on the grounds of terrorist activities.

The final problem I see with this approach is that it undermines the FBI from doing a job already assigned to them, including investigation of criminal activities (including terrorist activities) that violate federal law and supporting state and regional law enforcement efforts with technical resources. (It might be useful to note that EVERY arrest/case made against terrorists in the US have occurred from good old-fashioned law enforcement approaches and procedures, not any of the "broadly sweeping wiretapping" approaches advocated by the Bush gang of fascists enemies of the Constitution.

Last February, top F.B.I. officers from across the nation gathered in a high-security auditorium for the latest plan to reinvent the crime-fighting agency to take on terrorism.

I want to know what was NOT happening while these top FBI folks were away from there regularly assigned duties and how many murderers, rapists, bank robbers, kidnappers and terrorists were free to commit crimes while everyone in charge was twiddling their collective thumbs in a huge auditorium?

Philip Mudd, who had just joined the bureau from the rival Central Intelligence Agency, was pitching a program called Domain Management, designed to get agents to move beyond chasing criminal cases and start gathering intelligence.

Drawing on things like commercial marketing software and the National Security Agency’s eavesdropping without warrants, the program is supposed to identify threats. Mr. Mudd displayed a map of the San Francisco area, pocked with data showing where Iranian immigrants were clustered — and where, he said, an F.B.I. squad was “hunting.”

It appears that this is an effort to clarify jurisdictional disputes rather than make the work easier to accomplish. Given that numerous database and data mining experts (i.e. Jim Harper of the CATO Institute, Mary DeRosa of the Center for Strategic and International Studies) and constitutional experts (i.e. Laurence Tribe and Bruce Fein) have identified the NSA-type programs as ineffective, unworkable and unconstitutional, one would think that our government (especially the Bush gang that is taking a beating in the courts on these issues) would take a different approach altogether.

Some F.B.I. officials found Mr. Mudd’s concept vague and the implied ethnic targeting troubling. How were they supposed to go “hunting” without colliding with the Constitution? Would the C.I.A. man, whom some mocked privately as Rasputin, take the bureau back to the domestic spying scandals of the 1960’s? And why neglect promising cases to, in Mr. Mudd’s words, “search for the unknown”?

The skepticism is just one sign of unfinished business at the bureau. Five years after the Sept. 11 attacks spurred a new mission, F.B.I. culture still respects door-kicking investigators more than deskbound analysts sifting through tidbits of data. The uneasy transition into a spy organization has prompted criticism from those who believe that the bureau cannot competently gather domestic intelligence, and others, including some insiders, who fear that it can.

Eight months after his talk, Mr. Mudd admits that some in the bureau do not accept his guiding premise: that arresting bad guys is sometimes less important than collecting intelligence to uncover the next terrorist plot.

“There’s 31,000 employees in this organization and we’re undergoing a sea-change,” he said in an interview. “It’s going to take a while for what is a high-end national security program to sink down to every officer.”

Gee, let us see how many issues are identified here? First is the entire concept of the "no-knock raid" or "no-knock warrant" approach, although preferred by the FBI, has been undergoing scrutiny by federal courts because of lack of probable cause, the number of injuries/deaths being caused by such procedures, the violation of constitutional rights, the overuse of such tactics, and the entire issue of reliability when these procedures are executed on the basis of confidential informant information (and sometimes fraudulently sworn out by law enforcement officers).

Then there is the reluctance of experienced agents to endorse these approaches because of constitutional questions. A vast number of FBI agents possess law degrees. If those officers and agents see constitutional questions before these procedures are fully integrated and adopted, one would imagine that the management of the FBI and the DOJ would take a deeper look and apply more scrutiny to such proposals. Then, too, it has been 8 months since Mudd gave his presentation and the FBI is not only endorsing the idea, but questioning the validity of the entire approach based on the original concept lacking details regarding methodology, change management and implementation.

The top counterterrorism job has turned over repeatedly — seven people in five years — filled mostly by veterans with little expertise on Islamist movements and terrorist networks. Many counterterrorism agents have minimal specialized training. A National Security Agency executive brought in to reshape the bureau’s intelligence capabilities, Maureen Baginski, departed after clashing with F.B.I. old-timers. The intelligence units Ms. Baginski created in the 56 field offices lack clear instructions and some are “struggling,” a recent Congressional study found.

My goodness... this describes a management structure that does not have a grasp on the fundamentals of dealing with terrorists in general, and fundamentalist Islamic terrorists/extremists in specific. My personal experience working for bosses that didn't have a clue suggests that the plan offered by Mudd is not only unworkable, inadequately planned, but entirely unfeasible given the culture of the FBI and DOJ.

And some bureau traditionalists believe that Mr. Mudd, too, will move on from his job as second in command of the bureau’s new National Security Branch. “They’ll just wait him out,” a counterterrorism official said.

The rapid turnover in these positions and roles suggest a dysfunctional organization and inappropriate mission.

After interviewing more than 60 intelligence officials for a new book on counterterrorism, Amy Zegart, of the University of California, Los Angeles, reached a dismal verdict on the F.B.I.

“If you look at, for example, the four key ingredients for counterterrorism success — agents, analysts, managers and computers — the F.B.I. is struggling to get the basics right on all of them,” Ms. Zegart said. “New agents still get more time for vacation than they do for counterterrorism training. Analysts are still treated as glorified secretaries.”

Given that the FBI has spent billions on a computer upgrade that did not work, had to revamp the upgrade twice since then, and still has a dysfunctional computer network, it would be wise for us to really take a hard look at these issues in particular. If, as reported by Zegart, agents of the FBI are likely to have more vaction than counter-terrorism training, one could argue that someone in Washington doesn't understand the task at hand. Then, too, if we consider the problems and obstacles we have been encountering in the basics of securing our borders, tracking foreigners in our nation, and protecting our basic transportation and infrastructure, we could argue that there are more important--and more pressing--tasks for our top law enforcement agents to accomplish.

In interviews by The New York Times and the Public Broadcasting System documentary series “Frontline,” even critics acknowledged the sweeping structural changes at the bureau under Robert S. Mueller III, who took over as director a week before the Sept. 11 attacks.

The number of Joint Terrorism Task Forces, in which F.B.I. agents collaborate with state and local agencies, has ballooned to 101, from 35. The number of intelligence analysts has doubled to 2,161, and the number of linguists has doubled to 1,371. And the F.B.I. points out that there has been no new terrorist attack.

Jesus help us! How many dysfunctional task forces can we have? Is there any way to coordinate the information gathered by these task forces? Given that the National Counter-Terrorism Center is three years behind schedule, dramatically over-budget, and still not able to coordinate information and communication coming from 16 intelligence agencies, 28 different networks that are incompatible with one another, and over 100 different databases that are not intact, one has to conclude that not only does the FBI effort create duplication of effort, but also duplication of the problems and dysfunction.

Mr. Mudd said agents were encouraged to postpone the arrest of a terrorism suspect until his ties to other operatives, financial supporters and foreign networks were fully understood.

“I don’t want to take him down too quickly,” he said. “I want to understand what we know and what we don’t know. If we’re focused solely on cases, I can’t have confidence that we know what’s going on.”

But the drive to bring criminal charges often eclipses the intelligence imperative. In cases from Lodi, Calif., where a 23-year-old man was convicted this year of training in a terrorist camp in Pakistan, to Miami, where seven Haitian men are charged with waging war against the United States government, defendants who seemed nowhere near ready to mount an attack were arrested with a news media splash rather than quietly kept under surveillance.

It could be that I am just a little biased against the Bush gang, but it strikes me that these arrests were more a matter of public relations, ego-boost and poll boost for George W. than a matter of the FBI being overly eager. I know a few FBI agents, most of them retired and working security in the corporate world, who would argue that the greatest talent of the FBI is that of waiting until just the right moment to take down a perpetrator... unless pressured by the DOJ and AG.

Christopher D. Hamilton, who retired last year after 22 years at the F.B.I., half of it working on counterterrorism, said agents still believed that their careers would rise or fall on the cases they brought.

“Supervisors will say, ‘Why don’t you have any cases?’ ” said Mr. Hamilton, now at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. “Cases are good for getting resources, good for publicity and good for morale.”

The FBI is no different than any other federal bureaucracy. Professionals in the federal government are subject to the whims of nut cases like Mueller, Freeh, Gonzalez and other political hacks in the chain of command. The tradition of being fearful of reactions from the top echelon has a long history in the FBI... a tradtion started by J. Edgar Hoover, a paranoid, cross-dressing dictator and micromanager.

Even a Los Angeles case that federal officials describe as the most operationally advanced of post-2001 plots uncovered in the United States appears to show a gap between public relations and reality.

In that case, three men are charged with committing robberies to raise money for jihadist attacks on synagogues and military recruiting stations, in what Director Mueller has described as a bid to create “Al Qaeda in California.” Their actions are said to have been directed by Kevin James, who headed a Muslim group behind bars.

But agents checked on more than 100 prisoners with links to Mr. James and charged none. And though Mr. James has been portrayed as the mastermind, reporters for The New York Times and “Frontline” were repeatedly able to visit him in jail in Santa Ana, Calif. Such access is almost never granted to people accused of terrorism because the authorities fear that they could direct a plot from prison.

Just another example of how wrong-headed this approach would be... and proof that AG Gonzalez and other members of the Bush gang haven't a clue how to conduct counter-terrorist efforts effectively.

But if making arrests is no longer the top priority, many agents fear that an ill-defined quest for domestic intelligence is likely to lead to political trouble, as the hunt for Communists in the 1960’s led to surveillance on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and John Lennon. Michael Rolince, a veteran F.B.I. counterterrorism official who retired last year, said the attorney general’s investigative guidelines, first imposed as a reform in 1976, “are absolutely necessary to keep F.B.I. agents out of trouble.”

According to research conducted by the ACLU, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Thomas Nelson, the Electronic Freedom Foundation, EPIC and a dozen or more reliable sources, these political troubles are already present in our anit-terrorist fanaticism and climate of fear being broadcast by the Bush gang. We are once again so fearful that we have created another form of McCarthyism... Well, actually the Bush gang has created it and we, the people, have allowed it to become dysfunctional, unconstitutional and absurd.

But the guidelines, largely classified, have been loosened repeatedly in the last 30 years, most recently in 2003 to permit “threat assessments” without evidence of a crime. Officials say uncertainty in field offices about how the rules apply today has slowed the move to intelligence. They plan to issue new instructions to top agents from each field office this month.

Because no one in the Bush administration has a handle on the legalities and proper manner on how to conduct counter-terrorism activities devoid of a pre-determined agenda or self-fulfilling prophecy, the guidelines remain vague, improperly defined, and subject to change according to the political and ideological whims of the idiots in congress, the White House and elsewhere in the federal government. Event the courts have failed to take an effective stance on these issues, projecting ideological fixes rather than a constitutional standard in these matters. What it boils down to is that agents in the field must say a prayer that they will not be subject to arbitrary and capricious disciplinary action for failure to follow the ill-winds of the wishy-washy politicians running the show.

Mr. Mudd said he knew that concern about civil liberties was “in the DNA” at the F.B.I., and he recently read a biography of J. Edgar Hoover, whose long tenure as director was marred by abuses, to recall the dangers of uncontrolled domestic spying.

Still, he said, “I do bristle a bit at people saying, ‘You want to just go back to the 60’s and 70’s.’ ”

Indeed, we have gone back to the 50s, 60s and 70s... prior to the Church Committee hearings that exposed 20-30 years of secret warrantless wiretaps, infiltration of civil and church organizations, surveillance of activists (not militants, but activists), as well as secret programs run by the military that sprayed aerosol forms of psychedelic drugs in subways and other public places.

Intelligence on the terrorist threat involves not just spying, Mr. Mudd said, but also building a close relationship with leaders in Muslim communities.

How about we start by understanding the difference between a Muslim following the five pillars of Islam in a rational, reasonable manner according to the Holy Qu'ran and hadith, versus those that have politicized and militarized Islam for extremist power and politics. How about we start with understanding the many cultures where Islam is practiced instead of stereotyping them as "Islmic extremists" or "Jihadists" merely because they are Muslim. Then we might be able to establish a relationship... a pre-requisite for building a close relationship.

To help agents and analysts distinguish genuine threats from routine Islamist rhetoric, the bureau has just doubled its basic training on counterterrorism to about 80 hours. Skeptics note, however, that more time is devoted to firearms training.

I had more training as a member of the ambulance crew in the Navy. Eighty hours is two work weeks. I had 90 hours of training on how to drive an ambulance, a topic/skill that is far less complicated than understanding Islam, terrorists or counter-terrorism.

“The F.B.I. needs to follow the lead of the small group of agents who’ve made themselves experts,” said Evan F. Kohlmann, a consultant to the bureau and Scotland Yard and author of a book and Web site devoted to Al Qaeda.

Mr. Kohlmann said the dozen agents who knew international terror networks best were rarely brought in on local cases.

Talk about the adage "a prophet is not heard in his own land."

Knowledgeable employees say Muslim agents number no more than a dozen of the bureau’s 12,664 agents. (The bureau says it does not track employees by religion.) And an F.B.I. tradition that values leadership and personal connections more than specialized knowledge has resulted in counterterrorism bosses with minimal background.

“You need leadership. You don’t need subject-matter expertise,” said Gary M. Bald, whom Mr. Mueller named last year as the first head of the National Security Branch, admitting in a 2005 deposition that he knew little about Islam. Mr. Bald has since left for a security job with a cruise line.

In my view, that is similar to saying that a doctor needs a good bedside manner, but doesn't need any real expertise in the operating room. Certainly leadership is an essential tool for a boss, but so is knowledge of the subject matter.

The rest of this article continues to woefully describe the dysfunction that is our federal government's effort to deal with terrorism. In the mean time, we are all being subjected to unconstitutional actions and crimes against the people of the United States.

The awkward tension between intelligence and prosecution was on vivid display in the Lodi case. The investigation began in late 2001 as an intelligence operation to size up two imams from Pakistan whom the authorities believed had ties to extremists.

After four years of surveillance, agents had found no evidence of terrorism-related crimes by the imams, who were deported to Pakistan. Instead, the government prosecuted Hamid Hayat, 23, who faces a maximum sentence of 39 years in prison for attending a terrorist training camp in Pakistan. His father, Umer Hayat, 48, is free after a mistrial and a guilty plea to making a false statement.

The Lodi case produced worldwide headlines about an “Al Qaeda cell” in California, and John D. Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, called it the prime example of a “homegrown jihadist cell” in Congressional testimony. But critics of the case, including several former agents, say it has serious and revealing shortcomings.

The informant in the case, a convenience store clerk who was paid more than $200,000 over four years in salary and expenses, could be heard on tape angrily ordering Hamid Hayat to seek terrorist training. His claim that he saw Ayman al-Zawahri, Al Qaeda’s second in command, at the Lodi mosque in 1998 or 1999 was admitted by the government to be inaccurate.

The video of Hamid Hayat’s confession showed agents prompting his answers and sometimes insisting on their own version. And his account of the camp bore no resemblance to that of his father, who said it was an underground facility where would-be terrorists dressed as “Ninja turtles” and practiced pole-vaulting.

The interrogation tapes so outraged James J. Wedick, who retired in 2004 after 35 years as an F.B.I. agent, that he worked for the defense without charge. “It’s shameful, because I’ve never seen the department do this before,” Mr. Wedick said.

The Hayats, he concluded, were saying whatever they thought the agents wanted to hear, and little effort was made to corroborate their confessions.

The case also raised questions about agents’ familiarity with Islam, as some scholars say agents misinterpreted a scrap of paper with a Muslim prayer as a jihadist vow.

Finally, several other Pakistani Americans whom the Hayats said had visited terrorist camps have not been charged, suggesting that the F.B.I. does not believe at least some parts of the Hayats’ confessions. The management of the case appears at odds with the new philosophy of following up all leads before any public charges are brought.

A lingering question in the Lodi case is the effect on Pakistanis in the area. Some mosque leaders who saw the Pakistani imams as militant interlopers are glad they are gone. But few believe that the Hayats ever posed a threat.

Taj Khan, a retired engineer and leader among the Pakistanis in Lodi, said the Hayats’ experience had made residents more reluctant to cooperate with the F.B.I.

“Everybody’s clear that as soon as they talk to the F.B.I.,” Mr. Khan said, “they might be, you know, put in the slammer.”

There is, he added, “not much trust at all.”

Drew S. Parenti, the special agent in charge of the Sacramento office of the F.B.I., defended the case, saying, “Everything we did in this case was lawful, ethical, proper, was reviewed by a judge and was determined by a jury of peers to be sufficient evidence to sustain conviction.”

But Mr. Scott, the United States attorney, now says it was a mistake to label the case as a Qaeda plot.

“We probably, at the end of the day, should not have used that term,” he said. “One of the biggest mistakes that we can make is to overhype these cases on the front end. And if it is a widely held perception out there that we did that in this case, then I regret that, because that was never our intent.”