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Title: The FBI Allowed the 1993 WTC Bombing to Happen
Source: THE NEW YORK TIMES
URL Source: http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/wtcbomb.html
Published: Oct 28, 1993
Author: By Ralph Blumenthal
Post Date: 2017-06-16 01:49:04 by Uncle Bill
Keywords: FEDERAL, BOMBING, INSTIGATORS
Views: 88
Comments: 1

"We are potentially the most dangerous agency in the country,"
FBI Director Louis Freeh - testimony before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime on June 5, 1997

An active agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation has filed a complaint with a public-interest law firm alleging that Justice Department and FBI supervisory personnel have either mishandled or interfered with anti-terrorism investigations in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.

"No FBI director has ever broken bread with apologists for the murderers of Americans. J. Edgar Hoover, for all his faults, never addressed the German-American Bund or the American Communist Party. But Robert Mueller III, unembarrassed by his bureau's string of intelligence failures, intends to deliver a lunch talk today to the American Muslim Council - a group with well-established links to supporters of anti-American terrorism."

IN PHOENIX WE'RE TERRORISTS

THE NEW YORK TIMES

* * * * *

Thursday October 28, 1993 Page A1

"Tapes Depict Proposal to Thwart
Bomb Used in Trade Center Blast"

By Ralph Blumenthal

Law-enforcement officials were told that terrorists were building a bomb that was eventually used to blow up the World Trade Center, and they planned to thwart the plotters by secretly substituting harmless powder for the explosives, an informer said after the blast.

The informer was to have helped the plotters build the bomb and supply the fake powder, but the plan was called off by an F.B.I. supervisor who had other ideas about how the informer, Emad Salem, should be used, the informer said.

The account, which is given in the transcript of hundreds of hours of tape recordings that Mr. Salem secretly made of his talks with law-enforcement agents, portrays the authorities as being in a far better position than previously known to foil the February 26th bombing of New York City's tallest towers.

The explosion left six people dead, more than a thousand people injured, and damages in excess of half-a-billion dollars. Four men are now on trial in Manhattan Federal Court [on charges of involvement] in that attack.

Mr. Salem, a 43-year-old former Egyptian Army officer, was used by the Government [of the United States] to penetrate a circle of Muslim extremists who are now charged in two bombing cases: the World Trade Center attack, and a foiled plot to destroy the United Nations, the Hudson River tunnels, and other New York City landmarks. He is the crucial witness in the second bombing case, but his work for the Government was erratic, and for months before the World Trade Center blast, he was feuding with the F.B.I.

Supervisor `Messed It Up'

After the bombing, he resumed his undercover work. In an undated transcript of a conversation from that period, Mr. Salem recounts a talk he had had earlier with an agent about an unnamed F.B.I. supervisor who, he said, "came and messed it up."

"He requested to meet me in the hotel," Mr. Salem says of the supervisor.

"He requested to make me to testify, and if he didn't push for that, we'll be going building the bomb with a phony powder, and grabbing the people who was involved in it. But since you, we didn't do that."

The transcript quotes Mr. Salem as saying that he wanted to complain to F.B.I. Headquarters in Washington about the Bureau's failure to stop the bombing, but was dissuaded by an agent identified as John Anticev.

Mr. Salem said Mr. Anticev had told him,

"He said, I don't think that the New York people would like the things out of the New York Office to go to Washington, D.C."

Another agent, identified as Nancy Floyd, does not dispute Mr. Salem's account, but rather, appears to agree with it, saying of the `New York people':

"Well, of course not, because they don't want to get their butts chewed."

From OKCSUBMARINER (Patrick B. Briley):

I have been around the FBI all my life and my boss Rickover knew J.Edgar Hoover very well. My parents worked for the FBI once as well as Army intelligence.

The FBI wrote the book on spin, deception, manipulation and just plain fabrication, falsification and lying. It is okay when they use it to catch crooks but the FBI is evil when it lies to Congress , lies to the courts and falsifies evidence presented in court and also deliberately destroys the lives of its critics and threatens key witnesses. The FBI plays the Congressional oversight committees and the Federal courts like a harp.

The FBI and Louis Free had advanced warning for over six months of the World Trade Center, Kenyan and Tanzanian bombings and failed to stop the bombings. The FBI handling of these bombings was a total and unmitigated failure and disaster, it was not a success as the self serving propaganda you have posted would lead one to wrongly believe. A lady FBI agent wrote a detailed book on the WTC bombing case vindicating Salem's claims of FBI bungling and foreknowledge. The FBI's main informants in these bombings even have testified in court that the FBI had detailed advanced warnings.

The FBI had advanced warning of the OKC bombing as well because it was their own failed sting operation. The FBI lied to the courts , falsified their own 302 interviews and threatened many witnesses including law enforcement personnel, Army recruiters, and injured victims and tried repeatedly to keep them from testifying in court or speaking to the press. I and my friends, even those in the military, have interviewed the witnesses that the FBI threatened to obstruct justice. I can and already have named many of the FBI agents and the witnesses.

The FBI handling of the Ames case was found to be a disaster by Congress, and the official Congressional report concludes that the FBI and not the CIA shouldered most of the blame for the Ames case because the FBI repeatedly did not inform the CIA and Congress of important intelligence involving Ames the FBI had in the case for many years.

Freeh has aggressively promoted gays in the FBI thereby undermining and compromising many FBI operations since the gay FBI agents are subject to blackmail.

The VANPAC mail bomb case was shown to have used fraudulent evidence the FBI crime lab, Howard Shapiro and Freeh concocted to catapult their careers. Under Freeh over forty Federal case were found to have been based on false evidence manufactured by the crime lab and Freeh just like in the VANPAC cases. Weldon Kennedy, who Freeh brought into cover-up the crime lab mess, was called a liar by Senator Grassley, and encouraged to take early retirement for his role in covering up the FBI crime lab false evidence.

Freeh bragged to Congress in May 1995 that the FBI had set up three Abu Nidal terrorists cells in the US and had helped populate the cells with known middle eastern terrorists. Bad policy, very corrupt policy.

And yes, Freeh along with Senator Orin Hatch set up the FBI global school in Budapest Hungary and has taught many KGB agents in the techniques of the FBI which includes lying, corruption, murder, manipulation of the press and planting stories, and driving people to suicide(COINTELPRO which Congress censored the FBI for before Freeh, but Freeh is back at using COINTEL practices once again).

Freeh has led the FBI into becoming a global political police force. He has laid the groundwork for the FBI to become the gestapo for the Anti-Christ to enforce world government. Freeh has prostituted and squandered the moral and legal and political values of our country so that today the FBI has become a great economic(subject of a new article I am writing) and political global whore.

Our country will reap the whirlwind for allowing the FBI to have waxed so evil. Those who could have stopped the FBI but did not because they thought the FBI would only come for others will be in shock the day the FBI comes for them. The FBI has become absolutely ruthless in their tactics.

The FBI has raped the American people of their civil liberties and privacy. Freeh presided over the creating of FBI spying on all Americans on the internet by the FBI Carnivore systems and the legalization of automated FBI listening to phone calls and fax and satellite transmissions without a court order-the law for this was passed in 1994 and we are paying our telecommunications companies $16 billion to implement the FBI electronic spying system.

Freeh masterminded the FBI cover-up of the Waco and Oklahoma city bombings. His buddies Coulson, Shapiro and Potts helped him do it.

God Himself will deal with Louis Freeh for the destruction of our country and of Christian lives and souls.

Pass this along to your FBI friends. Many in the FBI will not have a clue of what I have said. Others who once were in the FBI have told me what I have written is true. Read this and weep for the doom of the FBI is at hand, God will not tarry.

Write this down, for when it is shown to all to be true, I want you and your FBI friends to remember it and then weep and howl and bow your knees before Jesus Christ. Maybe He will have mercy on some of the FBI's lost souls if it is not too late and the FBI agents repent and come out of the FBI.

81 Posted on 03/09/2001 00:00:03 PST by OKCSubmariner

THE RISE OF THE FBI

Washington Post
Sunday, July 20, 1997; Page W10 By Jim McGee

Congress is handing the bureau new powers and funds, creating a national police system that draws on military and intelligence resources. Louis Freeh says the FBI can protect both the public and the Bill of Rights. Civil libertarians worry about the repetition of past abuses

On May 9, 1995, FBI Director Louis J. Freeh finished a letter that set down his vision of the bureau's future. It was just three weeks after the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, the worst act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history. Hundreds of FBI agents were already swarming over that case. The bombing had struck Washington like a new Pearl Harbor, and the FBI had the undivided attention of the Clinton administration and Congress. Indeed, politicians had already started shoveling money at the FBI, attempting to reassure the public about their fortitude in the face of terrorism. Within days of the bombing, the Clinton team had cobbled together a $71 million special appropriation for the Justice Department and promised another $400 million in the 1996 budget. Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) had offered an equally expansive package. Freeh needed to influence this effusive budgeting, or it would shape the FBI's growth without him.

He decided to lay out his priorities in a 22-paragraph letter to a friend of the FBI, Sen. Phil Gramm (R-Tex.), who had first asked Freeh for his ideas in late March. Freeh outlined "a multiyear plan for infrastructure restoration and expansion," as he wrote, a bricks-and-mortar vision of how the FBI would ideally look at the beginning of the 21st century.

After being appointed FBI director by Clinton in 1993, Freeh had been lionized by the media and by politicians from both major parties for his character, vigor and intelligence. Less remarked upon were Freeh's formidable skills as a lobbyist and salesman; he would become an active, savvy architect of an increasingly ambitious FBI future. He was leery of politics, but as director he had learned the virtues of persistence, especially on Capitol Hill. Easy to like on a personal level, he had developed friendships with key senators such as Hatch, Joseph Biden (D-Del.), Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), sometimes socializing with them to discuss FBI issues. Freeh managed and responded to these politicians as if they were the FBI's board of directors, which in a sense they were. In addition, at the workaday level, the FBI's Office of Public and Congressional Affairs, with 85 full-time positions, had become one of the most effective lobbying operations in Washington, public or private.

Now, amid the Oklahoma City shock waves, Freeh presented Gramm a remarkable wish list. For design and construction of a new FBI laboratory: $150 million. For support of forensic work: $70 million. For renovations and program expansions at the FBI Academy: $248 million. For support of cellular and digital telephone wiretapping: $328 million. For 10 new overseas offices and other international expansion: $32 million. And so on.

All told, Freeh's vision would cost more than $1 billion by the year 2000.

To other federal department heads tightening their agencies' belts amid bipartisan plans for a balanced budget, the scale of Freeh's requests might have seemed audacious. Yet Freeh understood that, like the Pentagon had been during the Cold War, the FBI in the 1990s was increasingly seen by Congress and the administration as the agency that could best defend America against its most serious perceived threats -- in this case, violent crime and terrorism.

As Freeh put it to Gramm, "I seek to provide the types of forensic, training and investigative support services needed by the FBI and other federal, state and local law enforcement involved in the effort to reduce the fear and the fact of violent crime that pervades the lives of citizens in so many of our communities."

And who, after all, could be opposed to that?

Louis Freeh has obtained most of what he sought in that 1995 letter -- and more. The bureau's budget has soared, increasing 47 percent from $2.1 billion when Freeh took over to $3 billion in the current fiscal year. Jurisdiction over new areas of federal law enforcement has been assigned to the FBI. The CIA has been integrated into the FBI's operating system, the FBI is opening new foreign offices, and Congress has directed that the CIA cooperate with the Justice Department's law enforcement missions -- which the CIA has done, as in the recent joint tracking and arrest of Mir Aimal Kansi, the Pakistani national accused of killing two CIA employees in Langley in 1993. The FBI has negotiated a de facto merger with the Drug Enforcement Administration and has its agents working side by side with DEA agents in most American cities and many foreign capitals. Virtually every major U.S. police department participates in permanent FBI task forces aimed at combating street gangs and drug dealers, and tracking down fugitives. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been plowed into new FBI computer centers and operational facilities. Hundreds of new agents have been hired, swelling the number of agents to 11,127 (out of a total work force of 26,817). In the world of federal budget politics, all this growth represents the triumph of Freeh's skills on Capitol Hill and his articulate planning. But it also signals something larger: Piece by piece, the Clinton administration and Congress are completing the full federalization of the nation's criminal justice system.

They are building something America has never really had before: a robust national police system. The FBI stands at the center. For many years, federal law enforcement police power was spread among several competing agencies. Now, important assets of the nation's local, state and federal law enforcement agencies are being combined with those of the intelligence community and parts of the military -- creating an integrated system whose powers of investigation, intelligence collection and electronic surveillance will be unprecedented. In the future, few crime-fighting tasks will be too small for some FBI involvement and none will be too large. With its own burgeoning resources and through an expanding network of collaborations, the new FBI is working with police detectives in Boston, CIA officers in Pakistan, Mounties in Canada, Border Patrol agents in Texas and National Guard soldiers in Puerto Rico.

Attorney General Janet Reno uses the words "partnership" and "coordination" in describing these changes. Rep. Harold Rogers (R-Ky.), chairman of the House Appropriations subcommittee that controls the Justice Department budget, prefers the concept of "seamlessness"; a pragmatic man, Rogers has insisted that the FBI and other Justice Department police agencies appear before him as a single group rather than present their budgets separately. Former attorney general Richard Thornburgh uses the phrase "federal law enforcement establishment" to describe where he sees the system going. In 1993, Vice President Gore went so far as to propose a merger of federal drug and firearms agents into the FBI, overseen by a new Cabinet post of director of law enforcement, a position that would be equivalent to the interior minister of many foreign governments. For his part, Freeh said in an interview late last month that he doubts the system "will ever be completely seamless or unified." Yet while some differences are sure to remain among the various agencies because of "very, very distinct missions," Freeh said, he also emphasized that greater cooperation is essential to combat new forms of crime.

Whatever the new system ends up being called, the trend toward consolidation is unmistakable. The argument in favor is that it will make federal law enforcement more efficient and effective, especially against diffuse post-Cold War threats such as terrorism and drug trafficking. Indeed, proponents of consolidation worry that it has not advanced far enough. Sen. Judd Gregg (R-N.H.), chairman of the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that approves the FBI's budget, says that consolidation "is the most significant management issue that we have in federal law enforcement today," and that he wants to see more of it. He is supported by colleagues such as Specter, who said recently he thinks "that we are not doing nearly enough against terrorism and that we are really winking at it." Specter does worry, however, about whether "we [are] really able to handle all that's been given to the FBI."

The argument against consolidation is that it may create a concentration of federal police power at odds with American traditions -- power that, history suggests, might eventually be abused by an unscrupulous FBI director or elected president. The FBI "is a professional culture and a bureaucracy that has simply become too powerful," says Rep. Robert Barr Jr. (R-Ga.), who served as U.S. attorney in Atlanta from 1986 to 1990. "Federal law enforcement power far outweighs accountability." Freeh, too, has warned that "the FBI potentially could be the most dangerous institution in the United States" if its "awesome powers" are not held in check.

Freeh describes himself as striking a carefully considered balance as he shapes the FBI's future. America must improve and update its law enforcement capabilities while preserving constitutional liberties, he says. "The message I have gotten across -- I think I've gotten it across internally and externally -- is that we are not in the business of locking people up," Freeh said in the interview last month. "Our job just as importantly has to do with the protection of rights and liberties, with the exculpation of people who are innocent, with the protection of the confidentiality of our investigations so peoples' lives and reputations aren't ruined unfairly and unlawfully. And if we do that job well, the FBI's mission is a success. There's nothing about me or my directorship, if that's the right word, that in any way, shape or form advocates changing the Constitution, going to war against the Constitution, or anything like that."

Hardly anyone in Congress is worried that Freeh is going to abuse the power being handed him these days; if they worry at all, they tend to worry about who may come after Freeh, or what may occur in spite of him.

Notably, this change is occurring without much public debate, a fact that civil liberties groups attribute to the FBI's ability to drown out other voices, as well as the unwillingness of Congress to challenge the direction of the bureau's rapid growth. "Nobody has stepped forward with a principled, alternative vision to compete with the vision of the FBI," says James X. Dempsey, a former House Judiciary subcommittee staff lawyer who specializes in FBI issues.

The FBI's recent growth is a product of bipartisan political consensus, backed up at least implicitly by public opinion. The FBI remains an unusually popular police institution -- it can be harder to get a ticket to tour its Washington headquarters than to tour the White House. For their part, when politicians and the media evaluate the FBI these days, they tend not to refer to the buildup of its institutional role, but to normal Washington politics: Louis Freeh, in or out? Is the FBI "troubled" by scandal and poor management, or will it "rebound"?

In fact, recent FBI-related headlines chronicle real and serious matters: the Ruby Ridge affair, the chaos inside the bureau's forensic laboratory, and other important cases. Yet it could be argued that even the most significant of these pales in comparison with the structural decisions that Congress and the administration are making one dull, boring appropriations bill at a time.

Where, then, did this change come from? What is its structure? As the FBI grows and the United States develops a more integrated national police system, will its operations and culture adequately reflect the values of the Bill of Rights? When Louis Freeh completes his 10-year term in 2003, assuming he does, what will be the FBI's role in American society?

Some of the answers to those questions flow from three aspects of the FBI's ongoing expansion: the widening scope of its legal jurisdiction, the changing rules governing its investigations, and its growing relationship with the rest of the national security establishment.

The first large blessing of Freeh's career with the FBI was that, as a rookie agent in 1975, he was assigned to an organized-crime squad in New York. The FBI field office in Manhattan was then the true center of the FBI's operational universe, a place where agents went up against the major La Cosa Nostra crime families and the KGB. Agents had to push the limits of investigative technique just to stay even with their opponents. And it was that nexus that gave birth to key elements of Freeh's vision today.

Freeh was assigned to a squad supervised by Jim Kallstrom, an ex-Marine who liked to launch ambitious investigations and make creative use of electronic surveillance tools -- not only telephone taps, but room bugs, car bugs, even bugs hidden behind pictures in mob-run bars. Freeh worked undercover on a case code-named UNIRAC, for "union racketeering." It led eventually to the arrest of more than 100 corrupt union bosses, leg-breaking Mafiosi and bribe-paying shipping executives. Freeh's job was to pose as a crooked lawyer at the Shelton Health Club in Brooklyn, where he watched cash payoffs being exchanged amid the clanking of weight machines and the hiss of the steam room. The lessons of UNIRAC would define the next decade of FBI investigations: extensive intelligence-gathering, aggressive use of electronic surveillance, creative undercover ploys and the deployment of massive resources.

After becoming a federal prosecutor in 1981, Freeh directed large, sophisticated investigations, including the biggest Mafia drug case of its time, nicknamed the Pizza Connection, in which he coordinated the work of numerous law enforcement agencies and made extensive use of court-authorized wiretaps.

The investigative experiments in New York represented a major leap from the FBI of J. Edgar Hoover, which got a lot of press and managed its image deftly in Hollywood and on television, but did not have a lot of resources, in terms of either legal jurisdiction or investigative tools. Reorganized and renamed in 1935, Hoover's FBI struggled for years to define its place in an American justice system that emphasized state and local control over nearly all crime, from burglary to murder. Only gradually did the bureau, the Justice Department and the courts develop the idea of federal law enforcement jurisdiction over interstate crime, such as a stolen car driven across a state border -- "interstate transportation of stolen property," as the old FBI television show put it so grandly. Nowadays, the image of dark-suited FBI agents turning up only when some thief has been foolish enough to flee across a state border is outmoded.

In many ways, the modern expansion of FBI jurisdiction dates to the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968 -- it was the law that gave rise to Freeh's UNIRAC case, among many others. Congress hoped it would help win the then-raging battle against organized-crime families. The law made wiretaps legal and bolstered the powers of federal grand juries. By the 1970s, it and similar laws had fostered the rise of large federal organized crime strike forces in New York and elsewhere. Along with innovative "sting" investigations such as ABSCAM, the famous 1980 political corruption case, and complex FBI investigations of civil rights abuses in the South, these changes signaled new thinking about the scale and character of American federal policing.

After UNIRAC, Freeh spent several months in 1981 helping then-Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) run a series of high-profile Senate hearings, titled "Waterfront Corruption," that highlighted the investigative techniques used in New York. Then-FBI Director William Webster cited "gaps" in the federal laws and said that the public's rising fear of crime "means to me the American people are ready to support congressional efforts to create a more effective criminal justice system."

"I think the climate is right," Nunn agreed, and helped ensure it was. In the months and years that followed, he used the Waterfront testimony to win approval for anti-crime legislation that lavished new powers on federal law enforcement. "It was sort of impossible for a legislator to vote against those things in the wake of the hearings," recalls Marty Steinberg, a former Organized Crime Strike Force chief who was then chief counsel to the Senate permanent subcommittee on investigations, on which Nunn was ranking Democrat. Freeh, Steinberg says, "became a role model for the swing of the pendulum, basically in creating a more sophisticated law enforcement approach."

Dozens of other hearings were organized in Congress on emerging national crime problems. First the Reagan administration and then the Bush and Clinton administrations produced packages of comprehensive crime bills. In 1984, 1986, 1988, 1990 and 1994 Congress passed thick tomes that carpeted nearly all of criminal law with federal jurisdiction.

Freeh's own first big legislative victory as director was the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which will eventually facilitate the use of court-authorized wiretaps on new digital phone systems. In the years since, Congress has passed other important laws on the bureau's agenda. The Economic Espionage Act opened a new FBI avenue for trade-related investigations overseas. The Aviation Security and Antiterrorism Act gave the FBI new jurisdiction over airport security. The Combating Proliferation of Weapons of Mass Destruction Act created a new FBI role in dealing with chemical and biological attacks. The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act established the FBI's worldwide investigative jurisdiction over the federal crime of terrorism.

Besides all this, the FBI was taking on a larger role in such matters as environmental crime, health care fraud, telemarketing fraud, chasing down deadbeat fathers, even carjacking. Its role in drug enforcement has expanded to the point that the FBI now has more personnel devoted to drug enforcement than the DEA's entire work force.

As Webster had done at the Waterfront hearings, Freeh has continually emphasized that the growth he seeks will make the nation stronger -- and the public more secure. "I am an advocate for the public safety of the American people," he declared at a 1994 congressional hearing.

Of course, implicit in the support Freeh has won is a viewpoint that many Americans find acceptable today, but which would have been highly contentious only 20 years ago: The FBI can be trusted.

On November 1, 1995, FBI headquarters sent to its field offices a teletype that described a new Justice Department memorandum about what are known to the initiated as the Attorney General's Guidelines on General Crimes, Racketeering Enterprise and Domestic Security/Terrorism Investigations.

According to a copy obtained by The Washington Post, the teletype declared: "The guidelines provide that any lawful investigative technique may be used in a preliminary inquiry with only three narrow exceptions: mail covers [monitoring personal mail], mail openings and non-consensual electronic surveillance . . . Indeed, with appropriate approval, a preliminary inquiry may include the development and operation of new sources or informants, or even `the planting of undercover agents in the [suspected] organization.' "

Behind those bureaucratic sentences lies another recent and remarkable chapter in the FBI's expansion. It involves a decades-old struggle over the rules that regulate the scope of FBI counterterrorism investigations.

In 1975, a congressional committee led by Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) investigated the conduct of the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Army's Domestic Surveillance Program and J. Edgar Hoover's FBI and found that all of them had engaged, during the 1960s and earlier, in unconstitutional spying on political dissidents in the United States -- operations that included illegal wiretapping of telephones, burglary of homes and undercover efforts to disrupt political activity. The Church committee exposed the FBI's darkest domestic spying secrets. Most notably, under an FBI program code-named COINTELPRO, the bureau had sought to disrupt the civil rights movement, the antiwar movement and the women's liberation movement under the theory that all three posed grave threats to American national security.

The Church committee proposed reforms designed to ensure that these abuses would never be repeated. Congress enacted a new law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, to govern spying on foreign agents or international terrorists. It also proposed a charter for the FBI, essentially a formal, congressionally enacted rule book for the bureau. Clarence Kelley, FBI director at the time, supported the idea, as did his successor, William Webster.

But Congress failed to pass the FBI charter, adjourning amid political disagreements over its details. Instead, the Justice Department produced on its own the Attorney General's Guidelines. The guidelines came in two parts. A classified set covered foreign counterintelligence and international terrorism cases and gave the FBI wide berth, under the supervision of a secret court, to use aggressive measures. An unclassified set governed domestic security investigations, that is, probes of groups that might resort to violence for political or social reasons. These unclassified guidelines were more restrictive, and generally required the FBI to focus on developing criminal cases, instead of broadly monitoring political groups that raised the FBI's suspicions. Initially, the FBI interpreted the guidelines as even banning the collection of public statements by political activists. Cautious in the immediate aftermath of the Church hearings, the FBI at this stage interpreted First Amendment protections very broadly and was reluctant to open investigations based on comments by political activists unless the comments threatened very specific acts of violence.

In 1983, the Reagan administration's first attorney general, William French Smith, facing a rise in terrorism incidents, revised the domestic guidelines to allow the FBI broader intelligence-gathering discretion regarding suspected terrorist groups. He also simplified the system by declaring that domestic terrorism investigations could be handled just like any criminal or racketeering case. Smith's rules made it clear that the FBI could readily gather intelligence and monitor the statements of a group whose activities raised "reasonable indications" of criminal wrongdoing. The goal of these investigations was to get a fix on a group's size, its membership and its propensity for violence.

Under the looser Smith guidelines in the '80s, the FBI had great success against terrorists. The bureau hammered down the rate of domestic political violence to virtually nil and estimates that it prevented more than 50 planned terrorism attacks. Yet Freeh and others felt that the terrorism threats that emerged in that decade had not been completely eliminated -- and that in any event, the guidelines, even as implemented under Smith, unnecessarily hindered FBI investigations.

In the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing, Freeh publicly declared himself a critic:

"For two decades, the FBI has been at an extreme disadvantage with regard to domestic groups which advocate violence," he said in a written statement submitted to Congress on April 27, 1995. "We have no intelligence or background information on them until their violent talk becomes deadly action. I do not support broad and undefined intelligence-collection efforts -- but law enforcement has to know something about those individuals and groups advocating deadly violence in the furtherance of their causes."

That November, after months of behind-the-scenes work within the Justice Department, the FBI was able to send its teletype to its field offices describing the newest Justice Department interpretation of the domestic security guidelines.

The teletype affirmed that FBI agents should now feel comfortable in being more aggressive in their preliminary domestic investigations -- and not just of groups. "Now we can take a look at individuals," is how Robert M. Blitzer, head of the FBI's domestic counterterrorism section, described this change in an interview. Freeh's summation: "We just said that the guidelines allow you to open more cases -- but they are all cases that are predicated by somebody willing and about to violate one of our criminal statutes." The FBI's internal system for overseeing investigations to ensure their constitutionality would remain unchanged. But the result of the teletype was that, within the existing oversight system, agents could now use virtually all methods available -- including planting informants and using undercover agents. The only exceptions were opening mail and conducting electronic surveillance, which required court approval. This green light has since been backed up by $369 million in counterterrorism funding that will pay for 1,913 new positions, including 775 new FBI agents and hundreds of intelligence analysts, surveillance specialists, technicians and linguists.

As a result, the number of open domestic security investigations has risen from approximately 100 in 1995 to more than 800. The basic change, FBI officials say, reflects a greater number of investigations of suspect individuals, as opposed to groups.

There have been other recent changes affecting FBI investigative rules. In 1995, Congress agreed to a long-standing FBI request that it be allowed to install intelligence databases in the National Crime Information Center, the system police officers query from their patrol cars to check for arrest warrants. For more than two decades, the NCIC had been limited to official criminal records, on the theory that including less formal investigative data about alleged terrorists or gang members would lead to mistaken arrests. Last year, in authorizing investigations of U.S. citizens who support foreign groups deemed by the secretary of state to be involved in terrorism, Congress revoked an earlier law that prohibited such probes if they were triggered by lawful First Amendment conduct.

Civil libertarians see these sorts of changes as Freeh's largest blind spot. "The last time we saw national security being used as the rationale for FBI law enforcement investigation in this country was in the '50s and '60s when the FBI spied on and harassed millions of Americans because of their politics," says Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies. "There were a whole set of rules adopted in response to those abuses, and now the FBI is trying to weaken those rules, again in the name of national security, this time combating terrorism instead of communism."

Freeh said in the interview last month that the recent rise in terrorism "is not consistent with us applying a conservative approach" to fighting it. Nonetheless, he said, he takes offense at any suggestion "that this director or any director of the FBI is looking to amend the Constitution, abridge civil rights, abridge civil liberties or somehow use new technologies or new law enforcement partnerships to overrun the Bill of Rights."

Senior Justice Department officials argue that a critical difference between today and the earlier period of FBI abuses is the more formal oversight of FBI domestic security operations by Justice lawyers. "I consider it my job" to ensure that civil liberties are not violated, Attorney General Reno said in an interview, "and so far nobody's pointed out to me where we have failed."

The changes at the FBI do not only involve amending old rules and widening jurisdiction. The agency is also interweaving itself with the rest of the national security establishment.

One example can be found each weekday morning at FBI headquarters, where Army Col. John J. Ellis reports for duty in plainclothes. In his back pocket are FBI credentials, which get him through security and then down the long, antiseptic corridors to the FBI's new counterterrorism center, where Ellis serves as a deputy section chief.

Ellis had served most recently as the Pentagon's director of counterterrorism in the Office of Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict. Pressing for his appointment, Freeh said in a letter to then-Secretary of Defense William Perry that he wanted to include "personnel from the DOD and other key agencies in operational and analytical components" at the FBI.

That dry phrase signals another profound change underway at the FBI: the creation, with strong support from Congress and the Clinton administration, of a unified system of intelligence-gathering that blends top-of-the-line federal law enforcement, military, civilian intelligence and local police resources.

The FBI's counterterrorism center, which became fully operational last July, is the physical expression of this change -- a kind of Grand Central Station for domestic and international intelligence-gathering. "I think this is the wave of the future," Ellis says of his particular mission, which involves a partnership between the Defense Department and the FBI. Acknowledging the FBI's preeminent role in such partnerships, he adds, "The one federal agency I guarantee has one person in every community is, in almost every case, the bureau." Preeminent, yes, but far from alone: Analysts from no fewer than 16 agencies -- including the CIA and the National Security Agency, which conducts global electronic eavesdropping -- also work at the counterterrorism center. These analysts, including one with access to the CIA's vast foreign networks, man special computers that can reach back into their home agencies' intelligence databases and pull up information for the FBI.

With more than 100 staff members, the center is the hub for a much larger FBI-led counterterrorism bureaucracy that reaches major U.S. cities through a network of 13 Joint Terrorism Task Forces, where agents and local police detectives gather intelligence on political activists of all kinds who might be inclined toward violence.

During the first Reagan administration, Congress enacted legislation allowing the Pentagon to provide assistance to domestic drug enforcement agencies, and the CIA was directed by executive order to collect foreign intelligence on international terrorists and drug traffickers. In recent years, the Pentagon's counter-drug operations acquired a permanent infrastructure, and military intelligence analysts became a significant force within federal law enforcement.

Running parallel to this was Freeh's bid, begun soon after he took office, to expand the FBI's presence overseas. In May 1994 -- during a hearing before the Senate Governmental Affairs permanent subcommittee on investigations, where Nunn was then chairman -- Freeh argued that Russian organized crime was a threat to national security. That testimony provided an impetus for Freeh's successful campaign to win new FBI jurisdiction over transnational crimes and to establish 23 new FBI offices around the world.

Along with these and other legislative developments, Freeh advocated using White House executive authority to draw the CIA more fully into the FBI's institutional framework. In 1994, after the Aldrich Ames spy case, the FBI won from Clinton language in Presidential Decision Directive 24 that puts the FBI in charge of the CIA's National Counter-Intelligence Center and orders that an FBI executive manage the counterespionage group at CIA headquarters. Subsequently, Presidential Decision Directive 39 ordered the Clinton Cabinet to "integrate the roles of all pertinent federal agencies in a comprehensive, pro-active" counterterrorism program and named the FBI as the "lead" investigative agency.

What does all this blending of military, intelligence and federal law enforcement resources portend?

Civil libertarians argue that Freeh is taking the FBI into the future by reaching back to a model that is 30 years old. In 1967, rattled by social eruptions ranging from the marches led by Martin Luther King Jr. to the public demonstrations of the antiwar movement, J. Edgar Hoover created at FBI headquarters a special unit that was the predecessor of the counterterrorism center. It was called the Inter-division Information Unit or IDIU. Using a big new computer, the unit took in all domestic intelligence gathered by such federal entities as the National Security Agency, as well as by dozens of local police intelligence units.

The Church committee summarized the result in its final report: "Beginning in 1967-1968, the IDIU was the focal point of a massive domestic intelligence apparatus established in response to ghetto riots, militant black rhetoric, antiwar protests and campus disruptions. Through IDIU, the attorney general received the benefit of information gathered by numerous agencies, without setting limits to intelligence reporting or providing clear policy guidance . . . resulting in excessive collection of information about law-abiding citizens." A key reform of the Church committee era was to reject the IDIU and to resurrect the legal wall that separated the FBI's domestic law enforcement work from the military and the intelligence community.

"Historically in America, there has been a general principle that the military should not be involved in civilian law enforcement," noted a 1995 report by a House Judiciary subcommittee. Moreover, the National Security Act of 1947 prohibited the CIA from having any police or internal security function. "There was a concern about creating a monolithic central security service," a House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence report said last year. For better or for worse, both of these institutional fire walls have now been significantly eroded.

Freeh sees all these changes as a natural and necessary evolution of federal policing in response to serious threats. As he said in a speech delivered not long after the Oklahoma City bombing, "We do not have a civil liberties crisis in America. Nor are we under siege by enemies, domestic or foreign. Americans do not have to make a choice now between safety or freedom . . .

"But at the same time," he continued, "we have not spent over 200 years carrying out history's most successful experiment in liberty to have it destroyed by crime, fear and terrorists."

Such are Louis Freeh's good intentions, that much seems clear. Where the road they pave will lead is a murkier question.

Jim McGee is a reporter on The Post's Investigative staff and the coauthor, with Brian Duffy, of the 1996 book Main Justice: The Men and Women Who Enforce Our Nation's Criminal Laws and Guard Its Liberties.

@CAPTION: Sen. Frank Church in 1975, when his committee exposed FBI and other government abuses and proposed reforms to ensure that they would never be repeated.

@CAPTION: In the '60s, the FBI sought to disrupt peaceful marchers and violent radical leftists alike, on the theory that they posed threats to national security. Above, Martin Luther King Jr. leads a 1965 civil rights rally. Right, a Black Panther protest in 1968.

@CAPTION: The FBI Academy is one of the law enforcement institutions being endowed with new funding under Director Louis Freeh's administration. In these photographs, prospective field agents undergo training at the academy in Quantico.

@CAPTION: Freeh's vision at work: The FBI's counterterrorism center, far left photos, is a kind of Grand Central Station for domestic and international intelligence-gathering. It became fully operational last July. The bureau's fingerprint lab, near left photos, and DNA lab, below and right, at the Washington headquarters are being upgraded.

@CAPTION: In the lobby of the FBI building on Pennsylvania Avenue hangs a portrait of J. Edgar Hoover, the bureau's director for almost 50 years.

© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company

FBI chief Mueller lied to Senate about key-logging

Crime/Corruption Breaking News News
Source: The Register
Published: 08/08/2001 at 18:59 GMT Author: Thomas C Greene in Washington
Posted on 08/08/2001 16:53:39 PDT by Criminal Number 18F

FBI chief Mueller lied to Senate about key-logging

Thomas C Greene in Washington

New FBI chief Robert Mueller's testimony before the US Senate during his confirmation hearing last week, to the effect that he had no understanding of key-logging technology, sounded very wrong to us.

We were hoping that he was just exhibiting naiveté when, under questioning from US Senator Maria Cantwell (Democrat, Washington State) about the FBI's prosecution of mobster Nicodemo Scarfo, Jr. by means of a black-bag job involving a key logger, Mueller claimed that he's "not familiar with that new technology, and [had] not had occasion to use it in [his] district."

We figured that little gem had to be either a bald-faced lie, or evidence of his technical incompetence and consequent unfitness to lead the FBI in the 21st Century.

Naturally, we all prefer honest incompetence to active deceit, and we were hoping that the second explanation would prove right; but we're sorry to report that we've got evidence that Mueller actually knows a great deal about key-logging technology.

If we consult the following advisory from the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) Coordination Center at Carnegie Mellon University, we find that Mueller contributed to a report on the legalities of installing key-logging technology on a network.

The bulletin advises systems administrators that because key logging could be controversial (as the courts had yet to rule on its legality), it would be best to put a prominent banner warning users and intruders alike that their comings and goings will be monitored.

The bulletin is dated December 1992, revised September 1997. Clearly, Mueller has been well acquainted with the technology he told Congress he knows nothing about.

Obviously, in order to offer legal advice about key logging he would have to understand the technology quite well.

And even if he was splitting hairs during his confirmation, i.e., speaking of a very specific implementation of key-logging technology which he himself hasn't yet played with, he's still deceitful.

He might have been a man about it, and declined to answer on grounds that the technology in question is currently being tested in the courts -- that is, in the Scarfo case. At least he would have shown some spine. But by fobbing off the question with a lie, or with a split-hair statement calculated to mislead the Senate, he demonstrated that he's afraid of tough questions, and eager to take the coward's path out.

It's a sad symbol of his brand-new tenure, and a most horrible way to start it. ®

POST #108

"At no time, to my knowledge, has anyone from the CIA, or any agency, attempted to obstruct or interfere with the Department of Justice's investigation and prosecution of BCCI."
Assistant Attorney General Robert Mueller - S. Hrg. 102-350 Pt. 3, p. 789.

"We're not looking for individuals of any particular religion or from any particular country."
FBI Director Robert Mueller - SOURCE

GOVERNMENT TERRORISM - From Ruby Ridge To Waco And Beyond

Waco Fire Expert - The Government Burned Them To Death

THE SENATE - "I don’t care if you have proof that he raped a woman, stood up and shot her dead, you’re still not going to get 67 votes."

The Justice Department - Attorney General John Ashcroft Picks Arthur Andersen For FBI Review
Note: Arthur Andersen’s Contract to Audit FBI Unaffected by Mounting Evidence of Criminal Activity

George W. Bush To Name Justice Department Building After Kennedy

A Better Understanding of the FBI

George W. Bush policy could foil suits on FBI dealings - Executive Privilege block getting information on Murders

George W. Bush White House Pushes for FOIA Carve-Outs

Defend The Constitution? - Sorry, You're A Terrorist To The FBI

Hello, My Name Is Asa Hutchinson, I'm in Charge of the DEA, and I Shut Down The Largest Drug Trafficking Investigation In The History Of The Republic

Iran-Contra Figure Poindexter Now Heading New Pentagon Office

The Oklahoma City Bombing - The Government Coverup

Oklahoma City Bombing - 36,000 Pages of Undisclosed Evidence - Sorry About That

TWA Flight 800 - Downed By A Missile and the Government Coverup

Say it ain't so, Jim - The James Kallstrom Lies and Coverup

O'Reilly - Bush Justice Dept. Hamstringing Pardongate Probers

Trulock Case Against Wen Ho Lee Dismissed At Request of President Bush

Bush Administration Lawyers Defending Hillary

Bush Administration Lawyers Defending Hillary - Gratis

U.S.Securities and Exchange Records - George W. Bush Disregarded Federal Statutes

Did We Know What Was Coming? Yes, and the Government Did Nothing

Here We Go Again - The government agency claims American Airlines Flight 587 just fell apart in the sky inexplicably Nov. 12, over Belle Harbor, New York. No explosions. No evidence of sabotage

Bush asks Daschle to limit Sept. 11 probes

Dick Cheney asks Daschle to Limit Sept. 11 probes

US agents told to back off bin Ladens after George W. Bush Became President

The White House connection: Saudi `agents' close Bush friends

Ex-CIA Official to Head Sept. 11 Probe in Congress(What else did you expect?)

Cover Up:Senate-House Investigation of Intelligence Failure led by Tenet's Long-time Subordinate

Tenet Must Go

Ridge: Gov't might need reorganizing

Why are U. S. Government Agencies Importing and Protecting Suspected Middle Eastern Terrorists?

Obstruction in 9-11 Terror Investigation

David Schippers represents several FBI agents who state that they are not being permitted to arrest certain terrorists. The agents and Jayna Davis had knowledge of the 9/11 attacks on Manhattan, prior to the attack, and attempted to provide that information to Attorney General John Ashcroft, but were unable to get past staffers and Ashcroft did not return calls to Schippers

Obstruction in terror investigations - FBI agent alleges feds stopped probes that may have prevented 9-11

Congressman: FBI Ignored Repeated Warnings

Al Qaeda terrorist worked with FBI - Ex-Silicon Valley resident plotted embassy attacks

The Justice Department Facilitates The Deaths Of Thousands Of Americans

Mueller ran Justice's criminal division under the last Bush administration and drew fire for being too lax in probing the BCCI banking scandal. It was under Mueller that Radek, then deputy chief of the unit, became a section chief for the first time.

Bush To Name Mueller As FBI Head

FBI should be polygraph-tested

John Magaw - George W. Bush Appoints Magaw as Under Secretary of Transportation Security at the Department of Transportation created in the wake of 9-11

Webster pulled plug on polygraph tests? Ex-agent: Former FBI chief heading up post-spy review killed security program
Obstruction in terror investigations? - FBI agent alleges feds stopped probes that may have prevented 9-11
Congressman: FBI Ignored Repeated Warnings
FBI FOREKNOWLEDGE: Laden Suspect (Moussauoi) in OKC Bombings and WTC Attacks Identified &Jailed
FBI COVER-UP OF CHINESE INFILTRATION OF WHITE HOUSE
The Government Mafia
Criminal Laws Implicated by the Clinton Scandals
OVER 2,000 PEOPLE, ORGANIZATIONS, AND CRIMES CONNECTED TO THE CLINTONS
Bush Justice Department Seeks to Halt Wen Ho Lee Testimony
Bush vows to review Clinton's actions, But Can't Find A Thing
BUSH JUSTICE DEPARTMENT BLOCKS RENO DEPOSITION
Bush Limits Access to Reagan Papers, Draws Criticism
Does Ashcroft Know About Miquel Rodriguez and Vincent Foster?
Ashcroft Orders Full FBI Review And Then The FBI Terrorists Can Proceed As Normal
Ashcroft Winding Down Justice Department Chinagate Probe
Breaking: US Congress Subpoena Orders Ashcroft To Release Clinton Evidence on Sept. 11, 2001
Bush action gives safe harbor to FBI 'terrorists'
DOJ Under Janet Ashcroft - Has Anything Changed?
Eyeing What You Read: FBI in Libraries and Bookstores
Operation Magic Lantern
Spy Network #188 #189
The Bush administration is pushing Congress to act on the president's plan for granting amnesty to millions of Mexican workers living and working illegally in the United States - February 15, 2002

Democrats hail Bush's immigrant-amnesty plan

The Bush administration proposed today to restore food stamps to legal immigrants, whose eligibility for benefits was severely restricted by the 1996 welfare law
Food stamps for immigrants is 'troubling'
Bush's food stamp plan called ethnic pandering
President Bush urged Congress to extend a deadline for illegal immigrants to remain in the United States while they pursue legal residency.
Bush blasts anti-immigrant forces .....wants more immigration
WAS RON BROWN ASSASSINATED? Yes.
THE CRIMINAL RON BROWN INVESTIGATION AND COVERUP - Kathleen Janoski
THE ASSASSINATION OF VINCENT FOSTER

FEDERAL GOVERNMENT CONSPIRACY - Remarks By U.S. Rep. Bob Barr

POLICE STATE

The Fall of the Republic


"When people kill us, they should be killed in greater numbers. I believe in killing people who try to hurt you."
BILL CLINTON - George Stephanopoulos book All Too Human.

"I’d like to kill all of these sons of bitches and just be done with it!"
BILL CLINTON - White House staff meeting during impeachment.

"Write down the name of that motherfuc*er. When I’m back in office, he’s a dead man."
BILL CLINTON - Arkansas second campaign for governor to a campaign aide.

"I can do any Godda*ned thing I want. I’m President of the United States. I take care of my friends and I fu*k with my enemies. That’s the way it is. Anybody who doesn’t like it can take a hike."
BILL CLINTON - White House staff meeting regarding the IRS going after Kenneth Starr.

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Press 1 for English, Press 2 for English, Press 3 for deportation

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