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From
1998 to 2001, the Army Intelligence and Special Operations Command
(AISOC) conducted a highly classified intelligence-gathering endeavor known as
Able Danger. Its mission was to investigate the terrorist threat posed by al
Qaeda, both inside the United States and abroad. By 1999, Able
Danger had identified, by name, four of the future 9/11 hijackers --
including the ringleader, Mohammed Atta – as members of an al Qaeda cell
based in Brooklyn, New York. But the AISOC never informed the FBI about the
activities of these suspects, thus leaving them free to continue plotting and
preparing for the 9/11
attacks with impunity.
On August
15, 2005, Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, the first member of Able Danger
to speak publicly about his role
in the operation, told the press about Able Danger’s findings and
detailed the policies that had caused the crucial intelligence to go
unheeded. Shaffer explained
that when Able Danger had tried to
arrange a series of meetings in 2000 with the Washington field office
of the FBI to share its information about Atta, military lawyers
intervened and canceled the meetings, citing fear of controversy “if
Able Danger was portrayed as a military operation that had violated
the privacy of civilians who were legally in the United States." At
the root of this fear was a clearly defined prohibition against
inter-agency intelligence-sharing in terror investigations. This
prohibition, commonly referred to as the “wall” blocking such
communications, dated back to the Carter administration's
1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which was enacted
to defuse allegations of FBI espionage abuses.
In
1995, while America’s intelligence agencies were still
investigating al Qaeda's 1993 terrorist bombing of the World Trade
Center, the Clinton administration strengthened FISA to a degree that
was unprecedented. Specifically, Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick called for
increased restrictions on information-sharing between intelligence
(CIA) and law-enforcement (FBI) agencies. In a 1995 memo to then-FBI
Director Louis Freeh and U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White, titled
“Instructions on Separation of Certain Foreign Counterintelligence
and Criminal Investigations,” Gorelick wrote the following:

“We
believe that it is prudent to establish a set of instructions that
will more clearly separate the counterintelligence investigation from
the more limited, but continued, criminal investigations. These
procedures, which go beyond what is legally required, will prevent
any risk of creating an unwarranted appearance that FISA is being
used to avoid procedural safeguards which would apply in a criminal
investigation.”
It
should be noted that when Gorelick penned the
aforementioned memo, President Clinton was extremely
worried about ongoing FBI and CIA investigations into illegal Chinese
contributions that had been made to his presidential
campaign. Both the FBI and the CIA were churning up evidence damaging
to the Democratic Party, its fundraisers, the Chinese, and ultimately
the Clinton administration itself. It was also a period when the
FBI had begun to systematically investigate weapons-technology theft by
foreign powers, most notably Russia and China. Had FBI agents been able to confirm China's theft of such technology -- or its transfer of that technology to
nations like Pakistan, Iran and Syria -- Clinton would have been
forced by law and international treaty to react (and to thereby
jeopardize the future flow of Chinese money into his political
coffers).
Gorelick's 1995 memo emphasized Presidential Decision Directive 24 (PDD 24), which Clinton had signed the
previous year. PDD 24 placed intelligence-gathering under
the direct control of the President’s National Security Council,
and ultimately the White House, through a four-level, top-down chain
of command set up to stifle information-sharing
and cooperation between intelligence and law-enforcement agencies. From the moment the
directive was implemented, such information-sharing
became a bureaucratic nightmare over
which the President himself had final authority. Consequently,
information lethal to Clinton and the Democratic Party languished
inside the Justice Department, trapped behind PDD 24 and Gorelick’s
“wall.”
The implications of this policy were enormous. Mary
Jo White, a New York attorney and an experienced al Qaeda prosecutor,
vehemently objected to the barrier Gorelick had erected between
agencies. In a letter to Gorelick and Attorney General Janet Reno,
White noted:
“The most effective way to combat terrorism is with as few labels
and walls as possible so that wherever permissible, the right and
left hands are communicating.” White also wrote a second letter in which she warned that
Gorelick's policy “could
cost lives.”
Testifying
before the 9/11 Commission in April of 2004, then-Attorney General
John Ashcroft made his own observations about how the “wall” had greatly hindered terrorism investigations:
“In
the days before September 11, the wall specifically impeded the
investigation into Zacarias
Moussaoui,
Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. After the FBI arrested
Moussaoui, agents became suspicious of his interest in commercial
aircraft and sought approval for a criminal warrant to search his
computer. The warrant was rejected because FBI officials feared
breaching the wall. When the CIA finally told the FBI that al-Midhar
and al-Hazmi were in the country in late August, agents in New York
searched for the suspects. But because of the wall, FBI headquarters
refused to allow criminal investigators who knew the most about the
most recent al Qaeda attack to join the hunt for the suspected
terrorists. At that time, a frustrated FBI investigator wrote
headquarters, quote, 'Whatever has happened to this – someday
someone will die – and wall or not – the public will not
understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource
we had at certain problems.'’’
In
the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. House of Representatives and the
Senate set about to craft legislation that would provide the government
with new tools for combating
terrorist threats facing America. As a result of these efforts, on October 26, 2001 the USA
Patriot Act
was passed, finally authorizing criminal investigators and intelligence
agencies to cooperate on international terrorism cases.
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