Caution:
If you believe in
government’s ability to protect the people, or that
that is even their first priority,
don’t read this message.




A Slide into Irrelevance

I can’t be sure when it first happened, but I suspect it was when I was seeing strange things happening in the Islamic Section of Brooklyn and over dinner at Middle Eastern restaurants, but I knew something was cooking…and it wasn’t my kabobs….

It began with payback for Rabbi Kahane’s death at the hands of an assassin that resulted in one of my favorite restaurants, a Tunisian place on Atlantic avenue, being blown up in daylight that kind of led me to believe that the FBI wasn’t paying attention.

Subsequently, it was the follow up to the 1993 explosion at the WTC that convinced me that the FBI didn’t get it.

This was confirmed later when we learned that none of the pages of text in the file drawers acquired by the FBI on their raid of the Muslim terrorists who set off the first explosion were ever read.

And if that wasn’t beyond plausibility and immediate grounds for dismissal what was?

The reason given: no one spoke the dialects of the Middle East….Farsi and the like.

Let me play that back one more time.

In a world where the Middle East have repeatedly threatened the West and attacked some of our fortresses including the Marines barracks in Lebannon, the FBI, our principal anti-terrorist group, cannot read Farsi or Pashtun.

Therefore, for years, the FBI kept tons of files that had not read.

Now, let me say that we spend billions of dollars of regular and black budgets to keep these organizations going.

Why didn’t they address the need to have people who spoke the language on staff?

It’s way too late for post mortems but I thought that these actions, or lack of them, was symptomatic of the way they did business; not the exception; much the same way that Katrina exemplified the way Washington took care of business, not the exception.

Unfortunately, we learned that those files contained the blueprints for future actions on the WTC.

Later on, John ONeill’s own experience with his overlords at the FBI further reconfirmed to me the Ole’ Boy nature of our premier investigative unit.

In case, you don’t know the background.

When the Cole was hit and it was clear that the followers of bin Laden were involved, ONeill volunteered to return to the Middle East.

You see, he had lead the investigation of the attack on the Embassies and he knew where the bodies were buried.

However, the US Ambassador and then Louie Freeh, the FBI Director conspired to keep ONeill out of Yemen and the rest was history. He was deemed a “show boat” and not a “team player” that ruled him out.

In one thing or another it was clear that the FBI’s incompetence was overpowering.

They installed a hundred million dollar computer system. It didn’t work.

Their agents were connected with organized crime in Boston and on and on.

The final blow was that they did not act on the fact that the known terrorists were living in LA and that Saudis were training at various airports to learn how to fly; not to land.

John ONeill warned everyone and nobody listened.

Why?

At the time, Aaron Berg had asked me to become his Vice President. He was starting up a new publication on politics called “The Democracy Chronicle.”

What we learned from a high placed source at the CIA was that Louie Freeh’s agents were preoccupied with other things.

What things?

Clinton. They were trying to get the goods on Clinton and assigned more than 200 of their best agents on that task while, at the same time, Philippine Security tried to tell us that there were plans in the computer of the first bomber at the WTC stating that they were planning to take down the WTC by flying passenger planes into it.

We were too busy to listen.

And on and on.

The joint committee then formed to follow up after 911 comprised of the former Governor of New Jersey and a former democratic senator seemed to get very little cooperation from the White House.

And some subjects were treated as virtually taboo.

Why did it take so long to convene a panel that would help to pinpoint blame for the worst attack on America in history?

The Pearl Harbor investigation started immediately and was over before we could agree to convene the first investigation.

And why did Bush try to get Henry Kissinger to head it up?

That was too much of an outrage.

So, today, we limp forward trusting none of the answers that came our way as a result of a crippled panel, a panel thwarted in its attempts to get testimony from the White House.

The idea of putting the various data intelligence agencies together is like trying to suggest that if you put a bunch of bad apples together, you will get something better out of it.

You are lucky to get applesauce.

And I think this has already been proven.

The point is that the FBI’s rationale for its own existence is that it has saved America from terrorist attacks that we don’t know about.

Really?

If that were the case, don’t you think that Bush would be touting them? Let’s get serious. Has Bush ever passed up a photo op?

The truth is that nobody knows nothing about anti-terrorism in these organizations and they should be held accountable for all of their past failures…not to mention the deaths of all the innocents at the WTC.

The other day, in the Washington Post, there was an article about the failures of intelligence and this chronology came to mind as I read the article.

I don’t know what the answer is but I do know that a group that was formed to get rid of booze smugglers in the thirties and run with an iron hand by J. Edgar Hoover is probably not what we want to deal with the challenges of today.

And that’s the point.

If we were attacked today, we would be any better at averting the challenge than we were seven years ago?


The Armchair Curmudgeon
Les Aaron