Did * leave doors unlocked and alarms off for terrorists?

Think back to all the times you have moved into a different house or apartment. Did you always understand all of the previous tenants' security measures, from day one? Did you set the alarm from the very first night? Did you know how to lock all of the doors and all of the windows from the day you moved in? Or was there some period during which you were vulnerable to break-ins due to your own ignorance and negligence?

Do you think Dubya and Condi understood all the security measures the previous administration had put in place against terrorism? Or did they leave some figurative doors and windows unlocked and some metaphoric alarms turned off until 9-11-01?

I got to thinking about this because the just-declassified August 6 2001 PDB refers to SEVENTY FBI INVESTIGATIONS into terrorism ongoing a month before 9-11. A poster on another thread wondered, how many of these 70 investigations do you think got started on Bill Clinton's watch? I would suspect that VIRTUALLY ALL of them did. But there exist hard statistics to answer this question decisively. The 9-11 Commission could publicize these statistics, and Benveniste, Gorelick, or Roemer could ask DOJ witnesses about these statistics on Tuesday and Wednesday. But such actions seem unlikely. A unique opportunity most likely will be lost this week, when the 9-11 Commission holds hearings on "Law Enforcement and the Intelligence Community".

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The number of "FISA Warrant applications" measures quantitatively the extent to which the Department of Justice is pursuing counterterrorism. Under Bill Clinton's and Janet Reno's watch, 796 of these applications were made in 1998. 886 in 1999, and 1005 in 2000. According to the FISA Annual Report to Congress (see http://www.usdoj.gov/04foia/readingrooms/oipr_records.htm ), there were 932 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant requests in 2001. What were the monthly, weekly, and daily distributions of such requests? How many came during Bill Clinton's last three weeks, how many between Inauguration Day and 9/10/01, and how many on or after 9/11/01?

Between Inauguration Day and 9/10/01, how many FISA warrant requests from the field never made it out of the OIPR? What happened to these requests? Who in OIPR worked on them? In particular, what happened to Colleen Rowley's request for a FISA warrant to search Zacharias Moussaoui's computer?

Answers to these questions would show in a quantitative way how Dubya seized conterterrorism responsibilities from Bill Clinton on Inauguration Day, and then proceeded to leave doors unlocked for terrorists, and to turn off alarm systems. Despite his fantasies to the contrary, Dubya is no Winston Churchill, and these statistics could help prove this to millions of voters.

A few of us DUers have been researching and thinking about this since 2001. See especially the August 2002 thread archived at http://www.democraticunderground.com/cgi-bin/duforum/duboard.cgi?az=sh ... This post is paraphrased from post #13 in that archived thread.

I don't at all think it rules out the possibility of LIHOP, but it seems like a much simpler way to explain what must have happened. And there are quantitative statistics at DOJ that can disprove or verify the "alarms turned off" explanation.

Isn't that what's so insidious about LIHOP to begin with? It's all about not taking action. Always a million more reasons for not acting than for acting, thus a million more excuses to hide behind, even if your failure to act was motivated by a will to do harm rather than a lack of will to do good. If they did LIHOP, how would you ever prove it? How would the evidence look any different from what we've already seen?

To verify the "Letting It Happen" part, it would be sufficient to use quantitative measures of Dubya's and Condi's counterterrorism efforts, compared to those of the Clinton administration. These indicators would show whether Dubya and Condi had "left the door open" for terrorists, compared to the countermeasures previous WH occupants took.

To verify the "On Purpose" part of LIHOP would take an incriminating tape. Such tapes could in fact exist. For example, a poster in another thread said that some attended the 8/6/01 Presidential Daily Briefing meeting by video. But tapes would be harder to come by than statistics gathered routinely for years at the DOJ.

LIH could be 'LIH on purpose' or LIH out of unforgiveable negligence and ignorance, IMO.

Let it Happen Through Sheer Stupidity

These people had no idea how to run the country. They had no idea how the executive branch worked. They were a bunch of dilletentes with huge egos who, like a bunch of college kid, were know-it-alls who actually had absolutely NO real-world experience at their new jobs.

Everybody thought somebody else was covering their ass. Condi thought the FBI and the CIA would tell her if she needed to do anything.

Bush thought Uncle Dick would tell him what to do.

These are nefarious people who should be Impeached,

... talk about LIHOP without dealing with the possibility of LIHTSS. Many more people would "connect the dots" to conclude LIHTSS than would go all the way to LIHOP. And the facts that would be consistent with LIHTSS would also be consistent with LIHOP.

What the hell else could that mean other than a "give them enough rope and they'll hang themselves" type of strategy?

... thread, at http://www.democraticunderground.com/cgi-bin/duforum/duboard.cgi?az=show_thread&om=1922&forum=DCForumID60 ?

I found it again by googling "FISA warrant applications".

You were the first replyer to SkipFox on that thread. Glad you're still here.

about "Tired of Swatting Flies", etc. I could have sworn he was thinking "Oh my god, those 9/11 widows were right, these morons did let it happen on purpose"...

He was preaching and giving her stuff to rebut.

If he had just said "The President was tired of swatting at flies - What flies had he already swatted?" - maybe - he would have gotten a short answer.

I don't think you will find it more fine-grained than by the Calendar year, It's reported yearly to congress.

I also don't think you will be able to match it too well to the 70 FBI cases because each warrant is rather specific and time limited, so there could be many of them for each case, or none for a case.

Some information below you may have already seen from the congressional joint intelligence investigation into 9/11. I had seen another quote implying that Ashcroft was cutting the FBI off from getting FISA warrants - Couldn't find it but I think it's in this same report somewhere.



From http://www.gpoaccess.gov/serialset/creports/911.html

"FBI Headquarters attorneys determined that there was not probable cause
to obtain a court order to search Moussaoui痴 belongings under the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). However, personnel at
FBI Headquarters, including the Radical Fundamentalist Unit and
the National Security Law Unit, as well as agents in the Minneapolis
field office, misunderstood the legal standard for obtaining an order
under FISA."

"12. Finding: During the summer of 2001, when the Intelligence Community was bracing for an imminent al-Qa段da attack, difficulties with FBI applications for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) surveillance and the FISA process led to a diminished level of coverage of suspected al-Qa段da operatives in the United States. The effect of these difficulties was compounded by the perception that
spread among FBI personnel at Headquarters and the field offices that the FISA process was lengthy and fraught with peril.

Discussion: In the summer of 2000, during preparation for the trial in New York of those involved in the bombing of the U.S. embassies in East Africa, prosecutors discovered factual errors in applications for FISA orders sanctioning electronic surveillance. The FISA Court found that these errors included an erroneous statement that a FISA target was not under criminal investigation, erroneous statements concerning overlapping intelligence and criminal investigations, and unauthorized sharing of FISA information with criminal investigators and prosecutors.

The FISA Court also determined that these errors called into question the certifications that had been made by senior officials that the FISA surveillances requested by the applications had as their purpose the gathering of foreign intelligence, rather than criminal-related information, as required by FISA. After being informed of additional
errors in subsequent months, the FISA Court barred an FBI agent who had prepared one of the erroneous applications from appearing before the Court again.

The FBI and the Department of Justice痴 Office of Intelligence Policy and Review (OIPR) began a systematic review of the FISA application process in September 2000 to ensure the accuracy of FISA Court filings. Some FISA surveillances targeting al-Qa段da agents were allowed to expire while OIPR and the FBI investigated how the
errors had occurred. These orders were not renewed until after the attack on USS Cole in October 2000. In April 2001, the Bureau promulgated procedures for the review of draft FISA declarations and the submission of FISA applications to the Court. OIPR also
revised the standard al-Qa段da FISA application to reduce the amount of extraneous information that was required and that increased the likelihood of factual errors.

During this process, many FISA surveillances of suspected al-Qa段da agents expired because the FBI and OIPR were not willing to apply for application renewals when they were not completely confident of their accuracy. Most of the FISA orders targeting al-Qa段da that expired after March 2001 were not renewed before September 11.

The Joint Inquiry received inconsistent figures regarding the specific number of FISA orders that were allowed to expire during the summer of 2001. One FBI manager stated that no FISA orders targeted against al-Qa段da existed in 2001, others interviewed said there were up to <--> al-Qa段da orders at that time, and an OIPR official explained that approximately two-thirds of the number of FISA orders targeted against al-Qa段da had expired in 2001.

Several organizations played a role in the breakdown of the FISA process in the year before the September 11 attacks. According to FBI personnel, OIPR and the FISA Court erred by requiring much extraneous information in FISA applications, thus increasing the likelihood of mistakes. Bureau agents frequently could not or did not verify the accuracy of information in the FISA applications. The FISA Court痴 order prohibiting an FBI agent from appearing before the Court also apparently had a chilling effect on FBI agents, and they became increasingly unwilling to confirm the veracity of FISA applications.
"

I had seen the Joint Inquiry Report on the Findlaw website, but this GPO link will be much more useful for finding other reports from Congress. In 800 pages, I guess just about any terrorist-related topic you can think of might be broached, including the obscure Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

I agree that published data on FISA warrant applications aren't finer-grained than annual. But don't you think the 9-11 Commission could request and get day-by-day logs of warrant applications received? That's all that would be required for disaggregating the 932 applications for 2001 into Clinton, Bush pre 9-11, and Bush post 9-11 pieces. These three numbers would provide decisive evidence about the extent to which the Bush administration "left doors and windows unlocked and turned off alarms" to make us more vulnerable to terrorist attacks. I agree it would be hard to use FISA warrant statistics to answer a question of secondary importance about when the 70 investigations mentioned in the PDB were started.

Since nobody on the Commission is known to have thought of asking for the logs, we're unlikely ever to see these three numbers. My original post was meant to highlight the opportunity that's likely being lost this week, with hearings being held Tuesday and Wednesday where questions about FISA use would be quite germane.

... had a page on the FISA law.

Is this the info you said (in #9) you'd seen on Ashcroft's mishandling of FISA warrant requests summarized in this 2002 NY Times article, archived at http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/08.29E.sena.rprt.911.htm ? I'm sure Ashcroft will be asked about this if he testifies Tuesday or Wednesday:

"In the Moussaoui case, the report found, F.B.I. counterterrorism specialists and the bureau's lawyers were so ignorant of federal surveillance laws that they did not understand that they had ample evidence to press for a warrant to search the belongings of Mr. Moussaoui, a French national who was arrested weeks before the attacks after arousing the suspicion of instructors at a Minnesota flight school.

Instead, the report found, the F.B.I. supervisors and lawyers aggressively blocked the search warrant sought by desperate field agents in Minnesota who believed last August that they might have a terrorist on their hands who might use a commercial airplane as a weapon. The Minnesota agents had sought the warrant under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which sets a relatively low standard for the evidence required for searches of suspected spies or terrorists; standard criminal warrants require a much higher standard of evidence.

Officials said a search of Mr. Moussaoui's computer and other belongings after Sept. 11 turned up information on commercial airplanes, crop-dusting and a telephone number in Germany for a suspected member of the Qaeda terrorist network. That evidence, coupled with other information in the hands of the same F.B.I. counterterrorism supervisors last summer, would have provided a "veritable blueprint for 9/11," said Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, who is a member of the Judiciary Committee and an author of the report."

Did Nothing On Purpose.

I think at this point we have proved Did Nothing.

Now we we need to explain On Purpose.

We have the evidence, but people don't know it yet.

... the meetings they held, all involving the same seven people.

The current (April 19th) Newsweek has an article that says AG John Ashcroft did not make the cut to get the 8/6/01 PDB and other counterterrorism material.