Consequences

I just finished Philip Shenon’s The Commission. I found it, overall, a worthwhile book. All other debates about the book notwithstanding (for example, I actually think it’s reasonably fair to Philip Zelikow, balancing his tremendous writing talents against the detrimental effect of his asshole personality), I kept thinking about the consequences of two decisions made over the course of the report–made primarily by Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton. The Commission decided to avoid laying blame–on many people, including Bush, Clinton, and Tenet, but most of all on Condi Rice. And, after a great deal of lobbying from Robert Mueller, the Commission did not call for the break up of the FBI.

What if the 9/11 Commission had made it clear that Condi, above all other people, failed to do the things that might have stopped 9/11? What if the 9/11 Commission had called for drastic changes in the FBI?

Condi

To be fair, if Condi had received the blame she deserved, the some of her salutary influences on Bush would have been absent. For example, at several times in the last four years, Condi was probably the biggest thing standing between Dick Cheney and the war he wanted in Iran. Condi is incompetent, but incompetence notwithstanding, she may have saved us from World War III.

That said, I kept thinking of Condi’s ham-handed attempts to secure a legacy in the Middle East. In particular, I think of David Rose’s recent Vanity Fair article detailing how Condi’s inept attempts to install a strong-man in Palestine led to the Gaza coup and the strengthening of Hamas.

In essence, the program was simple. According to State Department officials, beginning in the latter part of 2006, Rice initiated several rounds of phone calls and personal meetings with leaders of four Arab nations—Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. She asked them to bolster Fatah by providing military training and by pledging funds to buy its forces lethal weapons. The money was to be paid directly into accounts controlled by President Abbas.

Not just in Palestine, Condi has a habit of taking bad situations and making them worse, with tremendous costs in terms of lives and American stature. The question is, if she had received the blame she should have for 9/11, would we have avoided those mistakes? And if we did, how much more would that have empowered Cheney?

Update: MadDog reminds me I intended to link to this, from Laura Rozen.

So why did Rice meet this week, asks a former US government official, with the former Lebanese militia leader Samir Geagea, recently released from prison for murdering Dany Chamoun and his family, and perpetrator of numerous other atrocities? This source, no shrinking violet, described Geagea as truly a war criminal. “This guy is a psychopath.” How can you tell Hezbollah to disarm if you are working with this militia leader, he further asks. For the Bush administration, Geagea has one important credential, apparently: he’s anti Syrian. “As they say, the enemy of my enemy gets my visa,” Al Kamen writes. And a meeting with the White House’s Stephen Hadley.

FBI

The Commission had more pragmatic reasons, I think, for backing off calls to revamp the FBI (even if it came to those pragmatic conclusions as a result of some heavy lobbying). An MI5 organization would present all sorts of civil liberties problems. It would be difficult to call for major changes to both the CIA and the FBI at one time.

But then I think about two things that–arguably–might have been different had the 9/11 Commission called for such drastic changes. The first is the FBI’s computer systems. Shenon describes the sheepishness with which the FBI agents interviewed by the Commission directed staffers to send them stuff via snail mail–they simply had no workable email. That lack of automation has long prevented the agency from automating investigative files. Partly as a result of the Commission’s reluctance wrt the FBI, two years after the 9/11 report recommended that,

The president should lead the government-wide effort to bring the national security institutions into the information revolution…

…the FBI and DOJ were still struggling to establish a standard computer system (and that struggle was used to justify John McKay’s firing). Significantly, it was a failure of leadership that led to such struggle. As McKay explained in an email:

…mid level bureaucrat nay-sayers at FBI, DEA, ATF, Main Justice and an array of consultants who sniff lucrative contracts are picking us apart.

And it has taken until this month to make real progress on an integrated investigative database.

As federal authorities struggled to meet information-sharing mandates after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, police agencies from Alaska and California to the Washington region poured millions of criminal and investigative records into shared digital repositories called data warehouses, giving investigators and analysts new power to discern links among people, patterns of behavior and other hidden clues.

Those network efforts will begin expanding further this month, as some local and state agencies connect to a fledgling Justice Department system called the National Data Exchange, or N-DEx. Federal authorities hope N-DEx will become what one called a "one-stop shop" enabling federal law enforcement, counterterrorism and intelligence analysts to automatically examine the enormous caches of local and state records for the first time.

And even so, multiple incompatible systems remain.

At least 1,550 jurisdictions across the country use Coplink systems, through some three dozen nodes. That’s a huge increase from 2002, when Coplink was first available commercially.

At least 400 other agencies are sharing information and doing link analysis through the Law Enforcement Information Exchange, or Linx, a Navy Criminal Investigative Service project built by Northrop Grumman using commercial technology. Linx users include more than 100 police forces in the District, Virginia and Maryland.

Hundreds of other police agencies across the country are using different information-sharing systems with varying capabilities. Officials in Ohio have created a data warehouse containing the police records of nearly 800 jurisdictions, while leaving it to local departments to provide analytical tools.

If the 9/11 Commission had made improvements at FBI a greater priority, would DOJ have been able to hold off on such databases two years ago because a USA challenged Paul McNulty?

More importantly, I can help but wonder whether the FBI had been reorganized as a result of the 9/11 Commission, whether we’d still be seeing frequent headlines about the FBI’s abuse of powers it received under the PATRIOT Act. As Shenon portrays it, one of the most compelling cases not to reorganize the FBI was made by Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the Director General of Britain’s MI5. She argued that the US couldn’t tolerate an MI5 because of our greater protection for civil liberties.

She remined the commissioners that there were also important civil liberrties differences between Britain and the United States.

[snip]

The level of electronic surveillance carried out by MI5 would raise severe constitutional issues if the United States government tried to carry out something similar.

Admittedly, even with the warrantless wiretap dragnet, we ostensibly still have greater privacy protections than the UK. Even legally, though, that’s increasingly a fiction hiding behind the fig leaf of bad legislation. More importantly, the NSLs debacle shows that one of the biggest threats to our privacy comes from the continued incompetence of the FBI.

In total, Fine said, the FBI issued almost 200,000 national security letters from 2003 through 2006, and they were used in a third of all FBI national security and computer probes during that time. Fine said his investigators have identified hundreds of possible violations of laws or internal guidelines in the use of the letters, including cases in which FBI agents made improper requests, collected more data than they were allowed to, or did not have proper authorization to proceed with the case.

And, once again, a critical issue is the automation of the FBI.

FBI Assistant Director John Miller said a new automated system will keep better tabs on the letters, and they are now reviewed by a lawyer before they are sent to a telephone company, Internet service provider or other target.

In other words, the areas of incompetence FBI identified by the 9/11 Commission have only begun to be addressed–and that incompetence has led to the erosion of privacy that suggested against a larger overhaul.

If the 9/11 Commission hadn’t been seduced by Mueller’s lobbying, would we have fixed these problems?

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28 replies
  1. MadDog says:

    I’m arguing with myself whether the FBI would be “better” or “worse” with more effective automation. The argument is not over. *g*

    With more effective computerization, perhaps they wouldn’t have made so many screw-ups with things like “Flight Schools” or “misinterpreted fingerprints in Washington state”.

    On the other hand, they’d likely be far more dangerous to our civil liberties if they really got computerized.

    Sometimes a license to only drive a horse and buggy is for the best. *g*

  2. MarieRoget says:

    Nice meaty post to start my reading this a.m. Thanx, ew. LinX could have been the real deal for interagency communication- what a half-assed excuse(among so many duplicitous excuses) to use for John McKay’s firing, particularly since Comey was also for it, & said so repeatedly. Dittto the DoJ firing excuse that Paul Charlton pushed too hard for the FBI to tape interviews/confessions, instead of continuing the pen&pencil style of recording that caused cases in AZ to incure greater likelihood of being pled down or lost, according to Charlton.

  3. Bushie says:

    Please don’t give the FBI the label of incompetence, that’s an easy out. The FBI still carries the Hover mind set of being above the law. Add this and the Bush regime attitude on the rule of law exacerbates the problem that is the FBI. The institutional mind set is ingrained at every level of the FBI. This is very different from incompetence.

    • emptywheel says:

      There’s a quote in the book that addresses this–kind of explains why Mueller’s lobbying was so successful:

      Mueller did not talk about it openly, but his deputies say he was also aware of how much fear the FBI continued to inspire among Washington’s powerful and how, even after 9/11, that fear dampened public criticism. Members of Congress who might otherwise describe themselves as champions of civil liberties shrank at the thought of attacking the FBI. Why make an enemy of an agency that has the power to tap your phones and harass your friends and neighbors? For many on Capitol Hill, there was always the assumption that there was an embarrassing FBI file somewhere with your name on it, ready to be leaked at just the right moment. More than one member of the 9/11 commission had joked–and worried–among themselves about the danger of being a little too publicly critical of the bureau.

      • Bushie says:

        Thanks for the bit on politicians fearing the FBI. That too is a holdover from the Hoover years. So what do politicians do: authorize deeper and wider intrusions into their privacy through Protect America act and FISA expansion. Good job boys and girls!

  4. rdwdkw says:

    Marci, do you think Bush can or will issue a blanket pardon of sorts to protect Condi from the future?

    • emptywheel says:

      You know, I’ve been meaning to put up a pardon predictions thread for a while, thanks for reminding me.

      I don’t think Condi has done anything as blatantly illegal as Cheney and Rove and Libby and Addington and Tenet. But she might be included, sure.

      • NCDem says:

        don’t think Condi has done anything as blatantly illegal as Cheney and Rove and Libby and Addington and Tenet. But she might be included, sure.

        When she is judged in history, I see a special place for her support for Israel in the Lebanon War and the carpet bombing that was going on. Hell, we even replaced the carpet bombs even though we know/knew that it was a war crime.

        Marci, I’ve also read Shenon’s book which I thought was excellent. The insight he gave on the staffers and their interests was fascinating. In addition to the list of those culprits of incompetence, I would add John Ashcroft who I thought placed second on the “hold responsible list”. With a temporary replacement Thomas J Pickard in lieu of Louis Freeh, John Ashcroft should have been more interested in out nation. For the attorney general to refuse to fly on commercial planes after late July, 2001 because of the threat, you would at least think he could talk about something other than church, abortions, and NRA.

  5. masaccio says:

    This computer problem has been around forever. Around 1986, my firm was the trustee for a title company that was kiting checks. The FBI was interested because there was a huge loss. We picked up the checks, which had been organized into a notebook by an agent, who told me that this would be a form of proof. I took the entire group of checks, and working with an accounting firm, we set up a computer program which demonstrated the kite quite clearly. We offered the program and the data to the FBI, but they didn’t have computers and couldn’t accept. The FBI eventually took our work, thousands of checks and the proof of kite, on paper! At least they got the conviction.

    By the way, we used the data to prove a preference action that netted the estate over $2 million.

  6. MadDog says:

    That said, I kept thinking of Condi’s ham-handed attempts to secure a legacy in the Middle East. In particular, I think of David Rose’s recent Vanity Fair article detailing how Condi’s inept attempts to install a strong-man in Palestine led to the Gaza coup and the strengthening of Hamas.

    And she’s at it again. Per Laura Rozen over at War and Piece:

    So why did Rice meet this week, asks a former US government official, with the former Lebanese militia leader Samir Geagea, recently released from prison for murdering Dany Chamoun and his family, and perpetrator of numerous other atrocities? This source, no shrinking violet, described Geagea as truly a war criminal. “This guy is a psychopath.” How can you tell Hezbollah to disarm if you are working with this militia leader, he further asks. For the Bush administration, Geagea has one important credential, apparently: he’s anti Syrian. “As they say, the enemy of my enemy gets my visa,” Al Kamen writes. And a meeting with the White House’s Stephen Hadley.

    Shorter Condi: “Never let incompetence get in the way of stupidity.”

    • MarieRoget says:

      In her own mind, I’m sure, Rice is always the smartest person in the room. That never seems to vary. Great combo w/GWB, since he thinks Rice is so intelligent she can’t make a mistake, no matter what evidence to the contrary.

      Hence all her meddling & bumbling in the ME that passes for foreign policy these days. Who needs to consult w/pesky ME experts as others in say, previous administrations have, when you are so incredibly smart all on your own?

      • Ishmael says:

        Condi, Soviet scholar that she is, thinks that proxy wars with local bastards was how the US “won” the Cold War – same old same old.

  7. Ishmael says:

    The FBI’s technical problems are not confined to information technology – the crime lab has been accused of incompetence and falsifying of test results. It would seem to me that this stubborn clinging to paper files and the resistance to linkage to other databases reflects an organizational value of secrecy and control over information and “evidence”, and not simply a phobia towards change.

  8. Ishmael says:

    …and further, a “hivemind” approach to law enforcement, where everyone shares information and cooperates can of course have excellent results where there is proper scrutiny – Wikipedia and the blogosphere itself are proof of this. The problems arise when this critical mass of information is collected, maintained and accessed by those who have the power of the state behind them, or alternatively of large corporatist interests – or when the mission is viewed as analagous to a “war”, whether on crime, or drugs, or terror. And when you are involved in a “war”, you inevitably have atrocities.

  9. bmaz says:

    Don’t forget this update on piglink and n-dex from Nakashima and the WaPo just one week ago. Here is the problem, as Ishmael and MadDog have already pointed out, and that is how much total information awareness do you want every cop on the street having? Because, and i positively guarantee this, despite their assurances that only certain gatekeepers will have access and that everything will be logged and regulated etc., that just will not be the case in practice. That was supposed to be the case on having arrest records and MVD records when the centralization of that started long ago. But, the second that technology allowed it, the power was in every police cruiser with a computer terminal. The same will hold true here. In fact, probably under the scare of terrorism protecting children or some other trojan horse, the second the system really has all the facts and info on every citizen’s entire life (which won’t take long the way they have been hoovering up information) there will be a push for funding to give every cop on the street everywhere a hand held data device similar to an iPhone to access all this crap. I don’t know if this progression can be stopped quite frankly, but it is coming. soon….

    • Ishmael says:

      Exactly. The IRA terrorism in Britain led to the presence of CCTV cameras on every streetcorner, in a country without written constitutional protections on civil liberties – and those same CCTV cameras, now in place and which were originally only supposed to be used to investigate crimes after the fact, are now capable of feeding constant images and facial recognition software to track people everywhere, all the time. Once the police state infrastructure is in place, the technology will improve to allow for greater use, storage and applications of the data obtained far beyond what was ever intended.

      My personal theory is that the critical masses of information that are now in existence should be regulated like a public utility, every “bit” as important as electricity or water or traintracks, and that scattered privacy statutes and reliance on judicial supervision of isolated abuses that make it to the courts is simply no longer sufficient.

      • sailmaker says:

        Note that the CCDs were in place for 7/7, and did not prevent it. Instead of attempting to watch everyone, maybe they should investigate people who make actual threats like this:

        Saudi Arabia’s rulers threatened to make it easier for terrorists to attack London unless corruption investigations into their arms deals were halted, according to court documents revealed yesterday.
        ——-
        Previously secret files describe how investigators were told they faced “another 7/7″ and the loss of “British lives on British streets” if they pressed on with their inquiries and the Saudis carried out their threat to cut off intelligence.
        ——–
        Prince Bandar, the head of the Saudi national security council, and son of the crown prince, was alleged in court to be the man behind the threats to hold back information about suicide bombers and terrorists. He faces accusations that he himself took more than £1bn in secret payments from the arms company BAE.
        ——–
        He was accused in yesterday’s high court hearings of flying to London in December 2006 and uttering threats which made the prime minister, Tony Blair, force an end to the Serious Fraud Office investigation into bribery allegations involving Bandar and his family.
        ———
        The threats halted the fraud inquiry, but triggered an international outcry, with allegations that Britain had broken international anti-bribery treaties.

    • PJEvans says:

      bmaz, you might want to read Halting State by Charles Stross. It’s set in the late teens (or maybe in the 20s) where that’s more or less what’s happened. (Virtual reality run wild, mostly.) It starts with a bank robbery in an online game and goes from there ….

  10. JohnLopresti says:

    Some of the material above reminds me of the wiretap elucidations in Opsahl’s review linked in a thread yesterday, which I understood as highlighting the fbiNsa symbiosis in IT; Opsahl partly debunks some pretty thorough Gorman wsj writing on the topic; Opsahl’s article’s link to Gorman’s article works. Since the US atty scandal and McKay’s IT policies are possibly relevant, perhaps it is worth mentioning that there is a newly available IG study of the EAC dynamic in preelection 2006 which resulted in suppression of the Wang ‘voter fraud’ report and near complete gagging of Wang for a long time thereafter; and, although this meanders OT slightly, that CLC linked article, a current commentary, also has recalled, for me, that vonSpakovsky’s nomination at FEC remains unreported, despite Reid’s recent barter list’s promulgation two days ago h/t cboldt in thread yesterday. And wayOT here is a link to reporting on an ostensibly semi-extinct ACVR expert proxy’s testimony recently in congress re: voter fraud.

  11. earlofhuntingdon says:

    Admittedly, even with the warrantless wiretap dragnet, we ostensibly still have greater privacy protections than the UK.

    True, but for how much longer? A good example of where the Mother of Parliaments has gone, and where we may soon not fear to tread:

    A young adult man in London, with a complexion and hair slightly darker than his neighbors, was recently queuing at a bus stop “on a dark and stormy” afternoon. He made the mistake of using his cell phone. Someone in line saw its blurred shape and confused it with a concealed firearm. The “neighbor” alerted the police, who quickly arrested the “suspect”.

    The mistake was soon made clear, but here’s the catch: his arrest on suspicion of a firearm’s violation is now on his permanent record. So are his fingerprints, blood type and DNA. [The UK leads the EU in developing a national DNA database – purportedly for law enforcement purposes – to which the USA has demanded (and received?) real time access.] There is as yet no provision for deleting these records, which in the case of legitimate mistakes, itself seems a gross miscarriage of justice. As a result, his travel, job applications, traffic stops or applications to open a bank account may never be routine again.

    It’s easy to imagine Bush’s FBI/DOJ responding similarly, but without ever admitting its mistake, perhaps never admitting the arrest and allowing “the suspect” to remain incarcerated in a secret prison.

    Our individual privacy rights – commercial and governmental – are inescapable parts of wider debate we desperately need about the limits of law enforcement. A debate this administration has resisted as resolutely as the telling the truth about Iraq’s WMD, its lies about Libby and Plame, and the purported truthtelling Karl Rove learned in the lap of the family Bush.

  12. sailmaker says:

    “The first is the FBI’s computer systems. Shenon describes the sheepishness with which the FBI agents interviewed by the Commission directed staffers to send them stuff via snail mail–they simply had no workable email. That lack of automation has long prevented the agency from automating investigative files.”

    How on earth does the Total Information Awareness ever work, if the FBI doesn’t even have reliable email? Interestingly consistent with the White House stories of missing emails and logs, but doesn’t explain the Quantico backdoor tap/trap ‘the client doesn’t want logs.’

    “C1 said that this circuit should not have any access control. He actually said it should not be firewallled.

    I suggested to migrate it and implement an “Any-Any” rule. (”Any-Any” is a nickname for a completely open policy that does not enforce any restrictions.) That meant we could log any activity making a record of the source, destination and type of communication. It would have also allowed easy implementation of access controls at a future date. “Everything at least SHOULD be logged,” I emphasized.

    C1 said, “I don’t think that is what they want.”"

    So who decides which branch of what offices don’t have working email (I am assuming that it is willful at this late date)?

  13. JohnJ says:

    In one of my Florida “any job” times, I worked assembling those FBI computers. They would only buy from this one(DC based, here for the cheap labor) company and would ONLY take IBM made PCs. This was at a time when IBM had basically lost control of the PC platform and was trying to re-invent the PC as the PS2 (Personal System 2). The FBI therefore got lagging incompatible technology. Also the PC were being sold as TEMPEST units that had 10x price tag due to the nature of the modifications. (TEMPEST units are protected from radiating data, readable from a distance, to simplify).

    One small problem; they never got the design to pass the TEMPEST test and were shipping unmodified units for the TEMPEST price. They claimed that they would modify them in the field after they got the design finished. (As someone who started my career in TEMPEST I can say “bullshit”. They need to be completely reboxed and the circuits modified.) When they finally gave up on the design (of course the PCs were obsolete as well), the FBI said, “oh well, no harm” and ORDERED MORE FROM THE SAME PLACE!

    This location was also set up to obscure theft. They had no real inventory matching system and used mostly temps (like me) and changed them all out every 6 months. Now, when the inventory was done once a year, any shortages (huge!) could be blamed on 2 sets of temporary employees. I discovered that the warehouse next door that was full of PS2s was mostly empty boxes counted as…you can guess. I knew 2 guys there that were building PCs to order for their own businesses right out of the companies stock!

    As an epilogue, the manager of that place got busted when his soon to be ex-wife turned him in; his garage was filled to the ceiling with stolen PC stuff.

    You know I have to say it again…..my mother was terrified of what Hoover had on her in her “jacket” for 5 years after he died. He was the archetype for todays Big Dick. That was what he considered the FBI main purpose; to collect information on everyone.

  14. JohnJ says:

    Too many distractions around here….
    I should have separated that last paragraph out as unrelated to the rest of the post. Sorry, I blame it on the kids.

  15. al75 says:

    This post touches on something that bothers me every day: the collective indifference to Richard Clark’s account of begging Condi to take terrorism seriously prior to 9/11.

    Clark’s book came out in the 2004 election season, which may have made it easier for the Bushies to dismiss his testimony as partisan.

    In hindsight, of course, it’s clear that everything he said was true: there was massive evidence of a looming attack, and the Bush administration did nothing. There was no effort on the part of the Bush admin to raise the level of vigilance, similar to the watchfullness around the Millenium (I remember the 4-5 stationary helicopters hovering around Manhattan on 12/31/99).

    This was a blunder that made 9/11 possible – we all know the tragic missed opportunities – from Tenet refusing to tell the FBI that the AQ agents they were asking about in reference to the Cole bombiing were INSIDE the US; to the blind eye turned to reports of Mohammed Atta’s homicidal boasting to an FAA agent, the flight school warnings, the rest of it.

    Incompetence and indifference paved the way to 9/11.

    And still, somehow, the Repubs hold the title of the “national security” party – this seems to me the real reason for the push for torture and domestic spying – it allows the Repubs to seize the Jack Bauer mantle, when the truth is in fact so utterly different.

    • IntelVet says:

      Look, I know this can be considered “tin-foil hat” stuff, but an in-depth reading of the 9-11 Commission Report should lead to the following:

      Incompetence and indifference paved the way to 9/11.

      Incompetence and indifference were the excuses used to allow inaction to the known hijackings. They are excuses used to firewall criminal negligence, at a minimum; more likely abetting a crime. Just based on the head of NSA’s weird statement “… but we did not know they would fly those planes into buildings”, as well as other “interesting comments” should raise all sorts of red flags.

      The Cheney Administration should be decapitated, figuratively, of course.

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