FBI SUPERVISORY AGENT DAVE FRASCA EXPOSED AS ROWLEY'S "BRAKEMAN"
msnbc.com
TigerPaw,
About halfway through this article, the supervisor who the FBI's Coleen Rowley said stifled her investigation is mentioned. Mr. Frasca, he's got some 'splainin' to do!
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Who’s to blame? Ask Dilbert
The greatest crime in our history is also the story of a bureaucratic snafu
FBI Director Robert Mueller (second right in red tie) walks into a Senate intelligence briefing May 22 on Capitol Hill.
By Jonathan Alter
SPECIAL TO MSNBC.COM
May 28 — Who was asleep at the switch before September 11th? We now have the answer. It was not just the FBI or the CIA or the INS, though those agencies and several others must be remade if we’re to have real security. It was not just senior administration officials, though I wish they’d quit dodging the much-needed and highly patriotic accountability that the nation deserves. The main culprit was someone else, someone much more familiar.
IT WAS that guy on the 17th floor, or downtown, or back in the home office — you know, one of the “suits.” It was every foot-dragging, fanny-covering bureaucrat in every company or government home office, each just “doing my job” by-the-book. It was Mr. Mooney from “I Love Lucy,” or the Dabney Coleman character in “Nine to Five.” Who let the terrorists get away with it? Ask Dilbert.
Better yet, subpoena him. The greatest crime in our history is also the story of a bureaucratic SNAFU (“Situation Normal, All F—-ed Up,”), a word — and experience — that dates at least to World War II. The SNAFU must be unraveled and inspected. Careers will be ruined. Some people will be unfairly scapegoated. But it must be done, no matter what Dick Cheney says in that sonorous they-know-best tone. The fact is, “they” (the authorities) didn’t know best. If they did, we wouldn’t be in this pickle.
POINTING FINGERS
At least that’s what I took from the now-famous memo Minneapolis agent Coleen Rowley recently sent to Robert Mueller, director of the FBI, now widely known as the Federal Bureau of Incompetence. The May 21 memo, obtained by Time Magazine, is one scary document. It suggests that we have a bunch of time-servers protecting our security, that no one is in charge of anything. If any of this changed after September 11, Rowley, a highly regarded veteran of the bureau, does not say so.
Without mentioning names, Rowley basically fingers a mid-level FBI supervisory agent in the Hoover Building (in Washington) named Dave Frasca, head of the task force on religious fanatics. After the Minneapolis office took flight student and hijacker-wannabe Zacarias Moussaoui into custody and obtained intelligence from the French indicating that he had terrorist ties, alert Minnesota agents didn’t just passively push the case up the chain of command. They became, in Rowley’s words, “desperate to search his computer laptop.” So desperate that they risked the wrath of higher-ups by committing a real pre-9/11 no-no — contacting the CIA.
FBI headquarters personnel didn’t just deny the request to probe Moussaoui further. Even though they were “privy to many more sources of intelligence information than field agents,” as Rowley plaintively put it, they “continued to, almost inexplicably, throw up roadblocks and undermine Minneapolis’ by-now desperate attempts to obtain a search warrant.”
Because Frasca’s not commenting publicly, we haven’t heard the other side of the story
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