Musical Chairs: FBI's Just the Fall Guy this Time Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit Musical Chairs: FBI's Just the Most Convenient Fall Guy This Time Reuters is reporting that apparently they had a big FBI report months before Mueller took over saying they needed to get their shit together, and specifically that the middle east was something the FBI in particular needed to be alert to. Then it hit me: this is just rigging the musical chairs game. These leaks aren't coming from FBI or Congress but from NSA or CIA. Mueller was only at his job for a few days before Osama's bin BadBoy's Big Adventure so (all together now) "how can we blame him?" No one will if he puts on his game face and lets the agency take one for the team and promises to overhaul it in a way that'd make Hoover and Beria proud. And until something *else* happens, everyone will be just fine -- and when something else *does* happen, it'll be time for another big helping of Budget all around. Why should the *defense establishment* have been expected to *defend* the country against the irregulars that they built up in Afghanistan directly in the late 70s, and then via Saudi and Pakistani proxies in the intervening years? I mean, why would we expect the CIA to pay attention to its alumni? It's not like they have a *history* of coming back to bite us in the ass or anything, right? I mean, isn't "blowback" a term of art that got coined directly in response to 911 by that Wizard of Intel Analysis, Katie Couric on the Today Show? Gosh, no, we normally expect the FBI to handle military and paramilitary engagements, don't we? What, they're supposed to catch crooks, not trained guys trying hard to hide? And you say they needed the family to help bring in a retired math professor who'd been making bombs for 17 years? Well, blow me down. Maybe they *shouldn't* be the lead agency for national defense. Damn, maybe we outta have, like, a department, yeah, that's it, a cabinet-level department whose mission is national defense. Hey, we could call it the Department of Defense... --PB (Musical Media, too. This one is Reuters reporting on a NY Times story, republished by... The New York Times!) Reuters via The New York Times - May 31, 2002 http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/news/news-attack-fbi-report.html Paper: FBI Was Told It Was Not Meeting Terror Threat NEW YORK (Reuters) - A secret FBI report warned the agency director in the months before Sept. 11 of a significant terror threat from the Middle East and said the bureau did not have the resources to combat it, the New York Times reported on Saturday. Quoting senior government officials, the Times said that an secret internal assessment, ``the Director's Report on Terrorism'', found that nearly every major FBI field office lacked the staff needed to evaluate and deal with the threat posed by al Qaeda, which Washington now blames for the hijacking attacks that killed more than 3,000 people last year. But spending increases called for in the document were rejected by the Justice Department. On Sept. 10, Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was not given a copy of the classified report, rejected an FBI request for an additional $58 million for counter-terrorism. The report did not specifically assess the FBI's ability to infiltrate al Qaeda in the United States but did rate FBI field offices in terms of how well they could counter a terrorist threat in their regions, the paper said. Those which fell short were coded red, and most major FBI field offices were listed as red, the newspaper said. The U.S. government had information that al Qaeda was dangerous, but it came from intercepted phone calls and other communications between Islamist militants in the United States, and those overseas. Investigations in the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa also gave some insights into the organization. COULDN'T FOLLOW UP But the FBI was able to do little to follow up on that information, the Times reported. With little insight into al Qaeda, the FBI did not know how to assess a request by the Phoenix field office to look into a large number of Middle Eastern students taking classes at flight schools. And the FBI headquarters in Washington rejected a request from a Minneapolis office to seek a warrant to search the computer and other belongings of Zacarias Moussaoui, who was arrested before the attacks and is being prosecuted in connection with them. The top secret report was written by Dale Watson, now the FBI's top counterterrorism official, the Times said. He was building on work done in 1998 by Robert Bryant, then the deputy director, who wanted to reorient the bureau to put more emphasis on counterintelligence, the newspaper said. ``In the late 1990s, the world had changed, and Bryant was trying to change the direction of the FBI,'' an official familiar with the plan told the Times. ``So they began to look at their vulnerabilities. They had the capacity to go after a bank robber, but in the late 1990s, they needed the capacity to get better information collection in order to deal with problems like counterintelligence and terrorism, and Bryant saw that we don't have that capacity,'' the official said. ``Watson was trying to apply that standard to counterterrorism. They were trying to get this issue right.'' ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytact-06.01.02-07:16:45-2147