[Mb-civic] Freeh's Self-Whitewash - John Podesta - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Freeh's Self-Whitewash

By John Podesta
Sunday, October 16, 2005; Page B07

During his tenure as director of the FBI, Louis Freeh presided over a 
series of blunders and failures that brought the bureau to a low point 
in its history. From the embarrassment of the Russian mole Robert 
Hanssen to the bungling of the Wen Ho Lee investigation to the wasting 
of hundreds of millions of dollars in a failed attempt to build a 
modern, computerized case management system, the bureau under Freeh's 
leadership stumbled from one blunder to the next, with little or no 
accountability. The nadir, as the nation knows too well, was reached in 
the astonishing string of failures that helped leave America vulnerable 
to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

In the face of this record, Freeh has now published "My FBI," a book 
distinguished by its shameless buck-passing. Nothing, it seems, was ever 
Louis Freeh's fault.

Who was to blame for the fact that there weren't enough FBI agents 
working on counterterrorism? According to Freeh, it was Congress. But in 
testimony three years ago, Freeh declared that "Congress has shown great 
foresight in strengthening" counterterrorism efforts, tripling the FBI's 
counterterrorism budget from $97 million in 1996 to more than $300 
million in 1999. Whose fault was it that the FBI remained incapable of 
basic file management? Congress's, Freeh contends -- it underfunded the 
bureau's technology program. But as the report of the Sept. 11 
commission points out, Congress did not meet FBI requests in the late 
1990s because the bureau had squandered so much money already. Equally 
appalling is Freeh's recent claim on "60 Minutes" that the bureau was 
too distracted by the many "scandals" in the Clinton White House to 
attend to the terrorist threat. Of course, none of those politically 
motivated witch hunts, in which Freeh did the bidding of his 
congressional patrons on the partisan right, resulted in a conviction. 
And never mind that Freeh's FBI ought to have been able to protect the 
American people while pursuing other investigations at the same time.

Freeh's claim, moreover, that no one, including White House 
counterterrorism official Richard Clarke, told him that radical Islamist 
terrorism was a major threat, is totally disingenuous. As the Sept. 11 
report, the congressional joint inquiry and a book by former National 
Security Council officials Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon show, there 
were countless memos circulating in the bureaucracy and numerous 
meetings that Freeh refused to attend. As Benjamin and Simon aptly wrote 
in "The Age of Sacred Terror," the FBI under Freeh was "a surly 
colossus" that listened to no one, provided intelligence to no one and 
took direction from no one.

Perhaps no part of Freeh's auto-whitewash is more self-aggrandizing and 
inaccurate than his rewrite of the history of the investigation into 
Khobar Towers. Freeh claims the White House did not support his attempts 
to probe the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia and was unable or 
unwilling to help the FBI gain access to witnesses.

In fact, on numerous occasions senior Clinton administration officials 
reiterated requests for full cooperation on Khobar Towers, including 
access to key witnesses, with interlocutors at the highest levels of the 
Saudi government. This culminated in a face-to-face demand by President 
Bill Clinton to Crown Prince Abdullah in Washington in the fall of 1998. 
Freeh, who was not in that meeting and cites only unnamed sources, 
claims that Clinton never pushed seriously for cooperation, instead 
asking Abdullah for a contribution to his planned presidential library.

This account does not pass the straight-face test. Those who were in the 
room, including several still in government service who cannot speak 
publicly, all concur that Clinton pushed Abdullah hard for cooperation, 
telling him that the future of the American-Saudi relationship depended 
on the kingdom's cooperation. In short order, that cooperation was 
forthcoming and produced the information that led to the eventual 
indictments. Freeh alleges that the real reason for the Saudi turnaround 
was the intervention, at his request, of former president George H.W. 
Bush. That Bush added his voice to the chorus of administration demands 
reflects well on our former president, but the argument that the Saudis 
would deliver on the basis of an appeal from someone who was out of 
office as opposed to someone whose actions would determine the course of 
U.S.-Saudi relations is completely implausible.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/14/AR2005101401784.html
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20051017/fdc9d038/attachment.htm