Washington Post flies kites for the FBI
MichaelP
like inspirational material leaked to uncritical, friendly journalists.
You can at least be certain that I couldn't phone the FBI personally
to have a converstaion with someone who will tell me that "We are
known for humanitarian treatment,..."
====================== Washington Post Monday, October 21, 2001;
Page A06 By Walter Pincus
FBI and Justice Department investigators are increasingly frustrated
by the silence of jailed suspected associates of Osama bin Laden's
al Qaeda network, and some are beginning to that say that traditional
civil liberties may have to be cast aside if they are to extract
information about the Sept. 11 attacks and terrorist plans.
More than 150 people rounded up by law enforcement officials in
the aftermath of the attacks remain in custody, but attention has
focused on four suspects held in New York who the FBI believes are
withholding valuable information.
FBI agents have offered the suspects the prospect of lighter
sentences, money, jobs, and a new identity and life in the United
States for them and their family members, but they have not succeeded
in getting information from them, according to law enforcement
sources.
"We're into this thing for 35 days and nobody is talking," a senior
FBI official said, adding that "frustration has begun to appear."
Said one experienced FBI agent involved in the investigation: "We
are known for humanitarian treatment, so basically we are stuck.
. . . Usually there is some incentive, some angle to play, what
you can do for them. But it could get to that spot where we could
go to pressure . . . where we won't have a choice, and we are
probably getting there."
Among the alternative strategies under discussion are using drugs
or pressure tactics, such as those employed occasionally by Israeli
interrogators, to extract information. Another idea is extraditing
the suspects to allied countries where security services sometimes
employ threats to family members or resort to torture.
Under U.S. law, interrogators in criminal cases can lie to suspects,
but information obtained by physical pressure, inhumane treatment
or torture cannot be used in a trial. In addition, the government
interrogators who used such tactics could be sued by the victim or
charged with battery by the government.
The four key suspects, held in New York's Metropolitan Correctional
Center, are Zacarias Moussaoui, a French Moroccan detained in August
initially in Minnesota after he sought lessons on how to fly
commercial jetliners but not how to take off or land them; Mohammed
Jaweed Azmath and Ayub Ali Khan, Indians traveling with false
passports who were detained the day after the World Trade Center
and Pentagon attacks with box cutters, hair dye and $5,000 in cash;
and Nabil Almarabh, a former Boston cabdriver with alleged links
to al Qaeda.
Questioning of "the two with the box cutters and others have left
us wondering what's the next phase," the FBI official said.
One former senior FBI official with a background in counterterrorism
said recently, "You can't torture, you can't give drugs now, and
there is logic, reason and humanity to back that." But, he added,
"you could reach a point where they allow us to apply drugs to a
guy. . . . But I don't think this country would ever permit torture,
or beatings."
He said there was a difference in employing a "truth serum," such
as sodium pentothal, "to try to get critical information when facing
disaster, and beating a guy till he is senseless."
"If there is another major attack on U.S. soil, the American public
could let it happen," he said. "Drugs might taint a prosecution,
but it might be worth it."
Even some people who are firm supporters of civil liberties understand
the pressures that are developing.
David Cole, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center who
obtained the release of Middle Eastern clients after they had been
detained for years based on secret information, said that in the
current crisis, "the use of force to extract information could
happen" in cases where investigators believe suspects have information
on an upcoming attack.
"If there is a ticking bomb, it is not an easy issue, it's tough,"
he said.
Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel during the Clinton
administration, wrote recently that the Supreme Court distinguished
terrorism cases from cases where lesser threats are involved. He
noted that five justices in a recent deportation case recognized
that the "genuine danger" represented by terrorism requires
"heightened deference to the judgments of the political branches
with respect to matters of national security."
Former attorney general Richard L. Thornburgh said, "We put emphasis
on due process and sometimes it strangles us."
In the aftermath of Sept. 11, he said, "legally admissible evidence
in court may not be the be-all and end-all." The country may compare
the current search for information to brutal tactics in wartime
used to gather intelligence overseas and even by U.S. troops from
prisoners during military actions.
Extradition of Moussaoui to France or Morocco is a possibility,
one law enforcement official said. The French security services
were quick to leak to journalists in Paris that they had warned
the CIA and FBI in early September, before the attacks, that
Moussaoui was associated with al Qaeda and had pilot training.
The leak has irritated U.S. investigators in part because "it was
so limited," one FBI official said. "Maybe we should give him
[Moussaoui] to them," he said, noting that French security has a
reputation for rough interrogations.
The threat of extradition to a country with harsh practices does
not always work.
In 1997, Hani Abdel Rahim al-Sayegh, a Saudi citizen arrested in
Canada and transferred to the United States under the promise that
he would tell about the bombing of the Khobar Towers military
barracks in Saudi Arabia, refused to cooperate in the investigation
when he got here.
The FBI threatened to have al-Sayegh sent back to Saudi Arabia,
where he could have faced beheading, thinking it would get him to
talk. "He called their bluff and went back, was not executed and
is in jail," a government official said.
Robert M. Blitzer, former chief of the FBI counterterrorism section,
said offers of reduced sentences worked to get testimony in the
cases of Ahmed Ressam, caught bringing explosives into the country
for millennium attacks that never took place, and Ali Mohammed,
the former U.S. Army Green Beret who pleaded guilty in the 1998
embassy bombings and provided valuable information about al Qaeda.
The two former al Qaeda members who testified publicly in the 1998
bombing trials were resettled with their families in the United
States under the witness protection program and given either money
or loans to restart their lives.
Torture "goes against every grain in my body," Blitzer said. "Chances
are you are going to get the wrong person and risk damage or killing
them." In the end, he said, there has to be another way.
2001 The Washington Post Company
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Washington Post Monday, October 15, 2001; Page A06 By Walter Pincus
Last summer, after the CIA received credible specific warnings that
Osama bin Laden was planning a major attack against U.S. targets,
the agency clandestinely worked with police and security services
in 20 foreign countries to arrange the arrest and interrogation of
12 al Qaeda operatives.
This kind of dragnet, known in intelligence terms as "disruption,"
is the prime technique employed by U.S. intelligence and law
enforcement agencies to handle terrorist threats when the time,
place and target remain unknown.
"Disruption," a senior intelligence official said recently, "is
doing something that throws the terrorists off their game plan."
"It takes possible participants off the streets . . . and word goes
through their network someone is not going to be there," he said.
They pull back, he added, "but they often come back later to try
again."
In the case of last summer's warnings, the CIA believes, the
disruption approach may have thwarted some plots. But it also failed
to halt the most horrendous terrorist attacks in history, the
hijackings that caused nearly 5,000 deaths at the World Trade Center
and Pentagon.
The mixed success of disruption is what has intelligence officials
nervous as they try to respond to new intelligence suggesting that
additional terrorist attacks are imminent. Since Sept. 11, the CIA
has arranged for 230 people in more than 40 countries who are
suspected of being part of al Qaeda or associated terrorist networks
to be jailed and questioned, according to intelligence sources.
In this country, the FBI has detained about 700 individuals as part
of what Justice Department officials have described as an effort
to disrupt al Qaeda networks operating across the country. But
current and former intelligence officials warn that even such
zealous efforts are not 100 percent fail-safe.
"A dozen victories in the dark make one loss in daylight look like
we are losing badly," said a former White House terrorism specialist.
The terrorist attacks have brought calls from Capitol Hill and
elsewhere for the removal of CIA Director George J. Tenet. But his
defenders at the agency said Tenet warned repeatedly about bin
Laden and his network over the past four years, making it difficult
to conclude there was clearly an intelligence failure.
"Failure is not paying attention," the senior intelligence official
said.
"We made a supreme effort. . . . No one in the world knows more
than we about bin Laden." With regard to Sept. 11, he said, the
agency believes terrorist planning began more than two years ago
and that in trying to uncover it, "We just ran out of time."
"It has to be seen in the context of all the work we are doing,"
this source added. "It must be seen as a war against a worldwide
army. . . . In war you win some battles and lose some, and although
we lost this battle, we are going to win the war."
The former head of Navy intelligence recently criticized the
intelligence community for being "mired in conventional thinking"
and "taken by surprise by the imagination and sophistication" of
the Sept. 11 attacks.
According to retired Rear Adm. Thomas A. Brooks, director of naval
intelligence from 1988 to 1991, the intelligence failure was in
the "inability to think the unthinkable, and to understand the
mind-set of the enemy and extrapolate that into a warning of what
could happen."
Disruption remains the main intelligence weapon in this war. But
as a senior counterterrorist specialist said, the approach "only
buys you time to look for more leads." For example, it worked that
way in 1997 when an attempt to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi
was disrupted after Kenyan police collected documents that led to
the temporary break up of an al Qaeda cell. However, a year later,
the bombing occurred.
Disruption worked in late 1999, when intelligence gathered by the
CIA forecast multiple attacks at the time of the millennium
celebrations.
President Bill Clinton was told that five to 15 attacks against
U.S.
targets at home or abroad could be expected, former White House
and intelligence sources said.
The CIA worked with Jordanian, Egyptian, Canadian and Pakistani
services, picking up terrorists, some associated with al Qaeda,
and moving them to either Jordan or Egypt. Those services then
received information that in December 1999 led to disruption of
millennium bombing plots aimed at a hotel in Amman, Jordan, and a
religious site on Jordan's Mount Ebo. A Canadian border arrest in
mid-December followed by widespread detentions among the Algerian
Muslim community in the United States and Canada led to disruption
of a plot to attack Los Angeles International Airport and tourist
targets in Washington state, according to intelligence officials.
"In successful cases, we can apprehend someone and move that person
to another country where he can be arrested and interrogated," an
official said.
One major benefit of putting possible terrorists in the hands of
foreign services, according to intelligence sources, is that most
countries do not have the same legal rights and procedures as are
practiced in the United States. Many foreign countries fighting
terrorism use interrogation methods that include torture and threats
to family members.
In the United States, by contrast, potential terrorists and their
accomplices, such as those who carried out the 1998 U.S. Embassy
bombings in East Africa and the Sept. 11 attacks, lived in the
United States "under the protection of our legal system, which
prevents intrusive investigative techniques," an intelligence
official said.
One result is that in the war against international terrorism, "the
front line is what we do with liaison partners abroad," said a
former terrorist specialist who worked in the Clinton White House.
Over the past five years, CIA and FBI personnel have worked closely
with foreign police and security services in more than 40 countries,
the specialist said.
"In some countries, we work with services where our diplomatic
relations hardly exist," a former intelligence officer said. "They
recognize we all have the same interests when it comes to terrorists."
Bin Laden's network has targeted many nations besides the United
States, he said, "and does its basic planning, recruiting, training
and fundraising abroad."
Another need met by working with foreign police and security services
is the potential for early warning. Those services have informants
in places where the CIA and the FBI have had almost no success
penetrating terrorist networks -- particularly al Qaeda. "They have
the assets in their own countries for their own self-protection,"
a retired intelligence officer said. "It would take years for us
to penetrate or buy our way into those groups. Sometimes we have
had to buy security service informants when host governments in
the Arab world won't come clean with us on what they know."
Although the CIA will not discuss the 1999 millennium disruption
operations, King Abdullah of Jordan said during a CNN interview
last month that the cell uncovered in 1999 in his country "allowed
us the ability to uncover a series of operations in Europe and in
the United States, and in Canada."
Since Sept. 11, CIA officials have reviewed information gathered
to date about the 19 terrorists, looking for what they may have
missed.
One finding is that the terrorists "have tightened their security
overseas," a senior intelligence official said. "When we take one
[plot] down, they go to school and now we are looking at tighter
communications overseas."
When it comes to "time, location and target, communication is now
in very elaborate code and closely held," he said.
The official also noted that although "some [foreign country]
services worked carefully [on CIA requests] last summer, others
did not." At least two countries, he said, "did not focus [their]
people on the threat. There was a climate of disbelief before"
Sept. 11.
While refusing to name the countries, the official said, "Since
September 11 those countries and every foreign service take every
lead seriously."
In addition, he said, "our information then was good, now it is
very good since we are getting better."
2001 The Washington Post Company
======================
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