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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JohnM who wrote (28343)	9/9/2006 1:47:57 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541219

I remember you mentioning The Informant. I will pick that up if I see it. I just can't resist buying a great book for a buck, which is why my house is just a tad too full of books.

To: JohnM who wrote (28343)	10/2/2006 12:23:09 PM
From: Win Smith	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541219

Ok, another followup. The Lawrence Wright piece from the New Yorker is available at newyorker.com . There's also some new stuff by George Packer and other things that look interesting at newyorker.com and newyorker.com , but I haven't looked at those. Meanwhile, at nyrb, there's a big review of Wright's book up at nybooks.com . Another long piece which I assume will remaing available, so I won't post the body here. As a followup to myself in Message 22852393 , though, I'll post this little bit on the CIA/FBI intelligence conflict. O'Neill's lead investigator, a young Arabic-speaking agent named Ali Soufan, persuaded the Sudanese authorities to let him speak to an arrested al-Qaeda member, Fahd al-Quso, who had been given the mission of filming the Cole bombing for propaganda purposes, but had overslept. He told Soufan that just before the bombing, he had flown to Bangkok with one of the Cole bombers to deliver $36,000 to an al-Qaeda operative named Khallad, who had taken part in the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Checking phone records, Soufan found calls to a telephone number in Malaysia. He then asked CIA officials if they knew anything about Khallad or the Malaysia connection. It seemed odd, after all, that money would be flowing away from Yemen just before the bombing there. Was another operation underway? The CIA, as it happened, knew all about Khallad. He had met in Malaysia in late 1999 with Khaled al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, two men known at that time to be al-Qaeda members who would later be part of the hijacking team on September 11. More than that, the CIA knew that Hazmi had entered the United States with a valid visa on January 15, 2000. (Mihdhar was traveling with him.) Had the CIA passed this information on to the FBI, an investigation would have begun immediately, and the September 11 attacks might have been averted. Instead, the CIA told Soufan nothing. Why? The official answer is that the Justice Department had in 1995 instituted a policy known as "the Wall," which was intended to regulate the exchange of foreign intelligence information between CIA agents and the department's criminal investigators. That policy, apparently aimed at preventing disclosure of CIA secrets during trials, was quickly misinterpreted as calling for a near-total ban on sharing information. Summarizing the failure to catch Hazmi and Mihdhar, the 9/11 Commission failed to assign clear responsibility: "It is now clear that everyone involved was confused about the rules governing the sharing and use of information gathered in intelligence channels." If the information had been shared, "a combination of the CIA's zone defense and the FBI's man-to-man approach might have been productive." In other words, both teams dropped the ball. Wright disagrees. He suggests instead that the failure may derive from an intensely personal struggle between the two agencies over who would lead the fight against al-Qaeda. On one side was John O'Neill, and on the other, the CIA agents loyal to Michael Scheuer, an equally driven man who had helped found Alec Station but had been assigned to other work in 1999 after he proposed a cruise missile strike at bin Laden in Afghanistan and was turned down. "There were many in the agency—not just the sidelined Scheuer—who hated O'Neill and feared that the FBI was too blundering and indiscriminate to be trusted with sensitive intelligence," Wright comments. "And so the CIA may have decided to hide the information in order to keep O'Neill off the case." This interpretation recalls Wright's approach to al-Qaeda itself. For him, power struggles at the top— not just ideology or bureaucratic failures—are often the deciding factor, whether among the jihadis or in the US government.