Looking elsewhere for truth Part 3 -- Lafcadio T. Lion and Strawberry Sage and Friends Fun Forum

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Date Posted: 16:24:00 06/21/03 Sat
Author: Sage
Author Host/IP: qam1c-sif-39.monroeaccess.net / 12.27.215.40
Subject: Looking elsewhere for truth Part 3
In reply to: Sage 's message, "Looking elsewhere for truth Part 2" on 16:19:46 06/21/03 Sat

The Crackdown That Didn't Happen-Clinton Refuses to Act to Deport Illegal Immigrants

"Make states issue driver's licenses [to immigrants] which expire when [their] visas do," I suggested to President Clinton on March 16, 1995, during a strategy meeting in the White House's East Wing. Noting that half of the nation's illegal aliens had evaded the system by overstaying their visas, I proposed a system providing for "automatic referral from motor-vehicles agencies to the INS" for deportation when routine traffic stops revealed drivers without licenses who were here illegally.

Raising these two issues-immigration and terrorism-with the president for the first time, I commented that, after all, it is through motor-vehicle law enforcement that most people come into contact with the police. If we could use that interface to catch illegal aliens, we could add mightily to the deportation lists. By interfacing the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and motor-vehicle computers, we could determine, immediately, if an unlicensed driver was just a minor scofflaw or in active violation of immigration laws.

The INS had no organized way of identifying and deporting the 150,000 foreigners who overstay their legal visas each year. Of the thirty-nine thousand deported each year during the mid-1990s, only six hundred were ordered to leave for having overstayed their visas. It seemed like an excellent idea to use motor-vehicle enforcement to identify and arrest those who were here illegally. But Clinton refused to pursue the idea. The idea ran into a solid wall of resistance led by White House adviser George Stephanopoulos. I pushed the proposal again at a meeting with Clinton on April 5, 1995, calling once more for "driver's licenses [to] expire when visas do." But no action was ever taken.

Stephanopoulos explained why in his 1999 memoir All Too Human:

Next on his [Morris's] list of potential presidential targets was immigrants. Basically, he wanted to create a background-check system that would turn your average traffic cop into a member of the U.S. Border Patrol. If, say, a police office spotted a suspiciously brown-skinned person driving a car with a busted tail-light, Dick's scheme would give him the ability to dial into a computer and order immediate deportation if the driver's papers weren't in order. Though he brushed off my fears of potential abuse and political harm to our Hispanic base, I persuaded him to hold off on the practical grounds of prohibitive cost.

The real story is a bit more complicated. White House deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes was charged with "vetting" the proposal through INS and the Justice Department. His answer was both decisive and shocking. "We can't deport the people we are already finding," he said. "If we expand the list of deportees without being able to act against them, the result would be a major scandal."

Even though I renewed the proposal at four subsequent meetings with the president, it was never adopted.

What a shame!

Three of the 9/11 hijackers had been pulled over by traffic cops in the months before 9/11. Had the drivers' license proposal been accepted, we might have sent them packing to the Middle East before they had their chance to fly airplanes into our buildings. In April 2001-five months before 9/11-Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the hijackers, was stopped by police near Miami for driving without a license. He was summoned to appear in court, never showed up, a bench warrant was issued, and the matter ended. Had the motor vehicle/ INS/FBI interface been functioning at that time, the traffic cop would have discovered that Atta was in the country illegally, his visa having expired in January 2001. Atta would have been arrested on the spot and bound over to the INS for deportation. He might not have been in the United States to lead the 9/11 hijackers on their grisly mission.

That same month, Nawaf Alhazmi, one of the hijackers who later seized control of American Airlines Flight 77 and crashed it into the Pentagon, got a ticket (in Oklahoma City, of all places) for speeding.

And Ziad Samir Jarrah, one of the four hijackers of United Airlines 93, the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania, was pulled over on September 9, just two days before the attacks, for driving between ninety and ninety-five miles per hour on Interstate 95. As CNN correspondent Jonathan Aiken observed, "Before 9/11 there really was no terrorist wanted list that a state trooper or anyone in the state agency could turn to indicate that there was any federal interest in this individual. As far as the state police in Maryland knew, Jarrah was a law-abiding citizen. . . ."

Had such a list existed, or had the INS and FBI been interfaced with the motor-vehicle computers, things might have been different.

Something always came before fighting terrorism. Some other policy or political consideration always had priority. In this case, Stephanopoulos was likely close to the mark when he warned of the harm to Clinton's "Hispanic base." Since the vast majority of illegal immigrants-although not terrorists-came from Mexico and other Hispanic countries, any program of this sort might be stereotyped as encouraging racial profiling by traffic cops.

To the Clinton White House, it was just more important to be friendly to Hispanic voters in the short term than to hasten deportations, and thus protect Americans of all races, in the longer term.

Terrorism Strikes: Oklahoma City Bombing

My first word of the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City came when Clinton called me while I was on vacation (in Paris again, as it happened). He was distraught, almost in shock: "Haven't you heard? Dozens, maybe even hundreds, of people were killed." At first Clinton thought the terrorists were from the Middle East, but it shortly became clear that the culprits were domestic fanatics.

In the face of such an assault, I urged Clinton to use an address to the nation to propose bold steps to counter terrorism. He demurred. There was always a reason. "If I do that the FBI says that I might bring on a second attack. I've got to move carefully here. This is a dangerous situation."

As Clinton confronted the Oklahoma City bombing, with its 168 deaths, it became increasingly clear that he was more comfortable offering America spiritual leadership in the struggle to find meaning in the piles of rubble than he was in taking practical steps to thwart future attacks.

Abandoning the role of commander in chief in favor of the soothing tones of a mourner in chief, he told the grieving relatives of the Oklahoma City dead: "Today our nation joins with you in grief." He urged Americans "to purge [themselves] of the dark forces that led to this evil." In a reprise of John F. Kennedy's cold war injunction that those who thought freedom was in retreat should "come to Berlin," he said: "If anybody thinks Americans are mostly mean and selfish, they ought to come to Oklahoma. If anybody thinks Americans lost their capacity for love and courage, they ought to come to Oklahoma." The New York Daily News reported that "the President told the victims' families, many weeping, that wounds take a long time to heal. 'But,' he added, the healing 'must begin.' " Appearing on 60 Minutes, Clinton stressed the emotional and spiritual implications of the Oklahoma City bombing, using his enormous capacity for empathy to ease the suffering of those who had lost loved ones and of a nation in shock. Reaching eloquently into the nation's soul, Clinton drew spiritual conclusions from the bombing and gave advice on how to handle the aftermath. "The anger you feel is valid but you must not allow yourselves to be consumed by it. The hurt you feel must not be allowed to turn into hate, but instead into the search for justice. The loss you feel must not paralyze your own lives. Instead, you must try to pay tribute to your loved ones by continuing to do all the things they left undone."

As I watched the coverage, I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop-for the president to make specific proposals to stop terrorism before it spread further. It seemed obvious that a climactic opportunity was being wasted. But each time we spoke, the president said he felt handicapped by the FBI and by the needs of the investigation.

He did say, as The New York Times put it, that he would "seek new authority for federal agents to monitor the telephone calls and check the credit, hotel, and travel records of suspected terrorists." Later, he supplemented this proposal with one to require that "taggants" be added to explosive materials to make them easier to track should they be used in terrorist attacks.

On the key issue, though, Clinton demurred. In the wake of Oklahoma City, the FBI asked for broader powers to investigate terrorist groups. As the Times explained on April 25, 1995:

Under current guidelines, the FBI is forbidden from investigating [terrorist or extremist] groups unless there is a "reasonable indication" that they are trying to achieve their goals through violence and explicit violations of the criminal laws. Following the Oklahoma City bombing, law-enforcement officials have complained privately that those guidelines hamper them from gathering the kind of information needed to prevent such tragedies. Under the proposal being considered, the FBI could infiltrate such organizations or use informers to keep track of their activities.

But the proposal to expand FBI powers ran into opposition from the Treasury Department in general and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) in particular. Faced with a split in his own ranks, Clinton flinched; in the end, he never proposed altering the ground rules for surveillance that had been tying up the FBI.

In his antiterrorist package, The Washington Post noted, Clinton had refused to abandon "the requirement that law enforcement officials prove there is 'probable cause' of criminal activity before a judge approves surveillance against a suspect." The FBI had sought such powers "to compile information on potentially menacing organizations . . . even when there is no evidence they are involved in criminal activity."

Part of the problem in battling terror during the Clinton administration was the attorney general, Janet Reno. When President Clinton told me, in the summer of 1995, that her appointment was "his worst mistake," he was alluding to a long series of anticrime measures torpedoed by Reno, on grounds ranging from civil rights to civil liberties to budgetary constraints to pride of authorship.

Bill Gertz catalogs just one of the ways in which Reno undermined America's ability to prepare for 9/11. When the Minneapolis office of the FBI was alerted to the flight lessons being taken by Zacarias Moussaoui, alleged to be al Qaeda's twentieth hijacker, agents sought access to his laptop computer. But FBI headquarters denied the request, citing the lack of probable cause that a crime had been or was about to be committed. Commenting on the decision after 9/11, John L. Martin, a former Justice Department official, told Gertz he believed "that if the FBI had gone to the career lawyers in the . . . Internal Security Section of the Criminal Division in the Justice Department, they would have been advised to go after the laptop on any number of legal grounds."

Why didn't they?

Because in 1994, Reno's Justice Department adopted new rules that barred the FBI from contacting the Internal Security Section of the Justice Department, as Gertz explains, "as part of an effort to control FBI activities in the intelligence arena."

Whether the focus was deportation of illegal immigrants or expanding FBI investigative powers, the harm Reno did to American national security in the fight against terror was incalculable.

As Clinton's adviser, I chafed at the administration's lack of substantive measures in the wake of Oklahoma City, urging, in vain, stronger steps to counter and prevent terrorism. While many of these ideas were tailored to combat the domestic terrorists who had killed so wantonly in Oklahoma City, they would have done much to move America's war against terror, both foreign and domestic, into high gear.

In a White House meeting on April 27, 1995, two weeks after the attack, I called on Clinton to reject "the tombstone approach which only acts after terrorism has happened." I suggested "preventative surveillance and public disclosure of terrorist group activities to save lives before criminal actions are committed."

Specifically, I suggested that Clinton move to curtail charitable donations to groups funneling funds to terrorists. I suggested that he create a " 'President's List' of extremist/terrorist organizations to warn the public against well-intentioned donations which might foster terror-ism." I urged "public disclosure of membership lists and donor lists by such organizations to aid in the investigative process."

The civil liberties crowd reacted with horror and rallied to persuade the president to kill the idea. Stephanopoulos recalls the play-by-play:

Dick wanted a "national crusade" against domestic terrorism. In the wake of the Oklahoma City bombings, Morris didn't think that you could be too tough on the militias. While Dick's read of public sentiment was unassailable, his proposals reminded me the advice his late cousin Roy Cohn used to give Joe McCarthy.

Morris wanted to require militia groups to register their guns and their membership with the FBI and he wanted the Justice Department to publish the names of suspected terrorists in the newspapers. I raised a civil liberties argument. "Oh, people don't care about that," he said. Then I countered with process, saying that if the attorney general wasn't on board (which she'd never be), Dick couldn't achieve his goal. Leaks from the Justice Department would only make Clinton look weak, and the paperwork would never emerge from the bowels of the bureaucracy unless the president typed it himself.

Stephanopoulos's comment is typical of how the White House staff sought to disempower the president. By threatening leaks and administrative noncooperation ("the paperwork would never emerge . . . unless the president typed it himself"!!!), they gleefully controlled this oft-weak chief executive. Can you imagine a White House staff member having the temerity to pull this kind of stuff on George W. Bush?

Clinton did issue an executive order in 1995 freezing the assets of twelve "foreign terrorist" organizations, mostly connected with the Palestinians. But it was only after al Qaeda's bombings of embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 that "the Clinton administration began the first major effort to disrupt the network's financing," as The New York Times reported, by freezing the assets of al Qaeda. But, since the terrorist group wasn't so obliging as to hold a bank account in its own name, the order netted nothing.

Little was done to enforce even the limited executive orders on terrorist fund-raising President Clinton had issued. Before 9/11, according to The Washington Post, "the number of cases brought under those orders can be counted on little more than one hand. Nearly all have involved individuals and organizations whose money was allegedly being funneled to the Palestinian groups Hezbollah and Hamas. None of it has related directly to bin Laden or al Qaeda."

The New York Times reported that "beginning in 1999, midlevel Clinton administration officials traveled to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates [U.A.E.] seeking information about charities aiding al Qaeda. But Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E. provided no assistance . . . with the embassy bombings receding into mem-ory, the administration largely moved on."

Former Carter domestic adviser Stuart Eizenstat, a key figure in U.S.-European relations, noted that "these visits were not followed up by senior-level intervention by the State Department, or for that matter by Treasury, to those governments. I think that was interpreted by those governments as meaning this was not the highest priority." To put it mildly.

Clinton's diplomats might have done more than just ask the Saudis about charities that aided al Qaeda. According to a report by Jean-Charles Brisard, an investigator hired by the United Nations to report on al Qaeda funding sources, Saudi Arabia transferred $500 million during the 1990s to the terrorist gang. As Brisard puts it: "One must question the real ability and willingness of the kingdom to exercise any control over the use of religious money in and outside of the country."

It wasn't until after 9/11 that the U.S. government, under President Bush, finally closed down charities that funneled money to terrorist groups. When Bush did move against al Qaeda's terror-funding sources, he found an extensive network of back-channel funding and moved aggressively-as Clinton could and should have done-to disrupt it.

The New York Times reported that a key element in al Qaeda's cash flow came from "a financial network called Al Barakaat, which owns an . . . informal remittance system that moves millions of dollars around the world with virtually no paper trail." Immigrants use Al Barakaat "to send money back home . . . where terrorist operatives siphon off a portion of it for al Qaeda." The terrorists charge a 5 per-cent fee on each transfer, a kind of terror surcharge.

Bush froze Al Barakaat's operations and, through an executive order, expanded the president's authority to block assets of foreign entities that aid terrorism. Why didn't Clinton do that? He had the power, just as Bush did. He had the intelligence information. It was already clear how dangerous al Qaeda was. Why did he leave the time bomb ticking?

Only rarely did Clinton actually oppose any recommendations to fight terror or even make an affirmative decision to put other priorities first. There was never a meeting where Clinton listened to the ideas, cleared his throat, and announced his decision. That wasn't how the White House worked in the 1990s.

Instead, the president would hear ideas proposed in staff meetings or at our weekly political strategy sessions on Tuesday or Wednesday nights in the East Wing residence. He usually remained silent, declining to comment on the proposals under discussion. Burned by leaks early in his term, when he was more forthcoming with his reactions, Clinton told me, "I have learned not to say anything in front of more than one other person."

His silence nevertheless sent a clear message to me and the others involved with his policies and message-"check it out." Run the idea by the various cabinet departments and agency heads and see what they think about it. Vet it by the National Security Council or the economic team and get their reactions.

It was at this stage that the proposals to battle terrorism usually ran into trouble. Without a clear mandate to put terrorism at the top of the national agenda, every idea ran into opposition at some point in the bureaucratic food chain. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms killed the FBI's proposals to expand its powers of surveillance over possible terrorists. Clinton wouldn't move against fund-raising fronts for terrorist groups, because Attorney General Janet Reno refused to agree. The administration decided not to stop illegal aliens from getting drivers' licenses, because the Immigration and Naturalization Service had too big a backlog of deportation cases already. Something was always more important than fighting terrorism.

And when one of these proposals ran into bureaucratic opposition, Clinton just let it die. The slightest hint of disagreement from a law enforcement, civil rights, or military perspective was enough to send him scurrying for cover.

Clinton wasn't this way on every issue-not on the domestic front, for instance. Clinton ran roughshod over his own liberal staff at the White House and at the Department of Health and Human Services to sign the welfare reform bill. When his Department of Education and Office of Management and Budget people objected to his proposal to offer tax credits to offset tuition for the first two years of college, he demanded that the initiative proceed on schedule. His Budget Office objected to his decision to propose a balanced-budget plan, but Clinton did it anyway.

But on issues of terrorism, defense, and foreign affairs, generally, he was always too wary of criticism to act decisively. He was never strong enough to take the kinds of stands necessary to override the stand-pat instincts of his bureaucracy.

Even those initiatives the president did take after Oklahoma City ran into opposition from the Republican-controlled Congress. Some-times their dissent was politically motivated-the GOP was always eager to deny the president an achievement on which he could run for a second term-but often it was based on their desire to protect the right wing, the GOP political base.

After Oklahoma City, terrorism was seen primarily as a threat from the extreme right wing. The skinheads, militiamen, gun nuts, white supremacists, and anarchist-libertarians of the radical right were portrayed as a subculture that gave rise to the Oklahoma City bombing, and it was against them that most national angst about terror was directed.

Immediately after the bombing in April 1995, congressional Republicans, who controlled both Houses, vowed to pass antiterror legislation within six weeks. Congress did, indeed, pass antiterror legislation in April-but not until April 1996, a full year after the bombing. Fearful of being lynched in public for failing to pass antiterror laws while America mourned the first anniversary of the bombing, Congress sent the president a watered-down bill that deleted his two most important proposals: expanded wiretap authority and the use of taggants to identify bombs.

His request for more wiretaps was omitted from the bill entirely. Clinton had proposed that federal wiretap procedures be revised so law-enforcement officials could "follow terrorists as they move from phone to phone." Under this measure, a warrant would allow agents to tap all phones the suspect used-cellular, wireless, in-home, or pay phones-rather than just one specific instrument. As Clinton noted, "This authority has already been granted to our law-enforcement officials when they're dealing with organized criminals," but Congress refused to allow its use in the fight against terror.

Clinton proposed that taggants ("trace chemical or . . . microplastic chips") be added to all possible sources of explosives (such as fertilizer), scattered throughout to permit, as he explained, "sophisticated machines [to] find bombs before they explode, and when they do explode, [to allow] police scientists [to] trace a bomb back to the people who actually sold the explosive materials that led to the bomb." As Clinton noted, taggants had been used in "Switzerland over the past decade [and have] helped to identify who made bombs and explosives in over 500 cases. When it was being tested in our country several years ago, it helped police to find a murderer in Maryland." Yet pressure from the National Rifle Association (NRA) eventually overcame the proposal; taggants did not make it into the final terrorism bill. The strange-bedfellows alliance of civil liberties groups and Republicans sympathetic to right-wing groups had killed both the wiretap authority and the taggants proposal.

The price America was to pay for kowtowing to the NRA became fully apparent when a pipe bomb ripped through the Atlanta Olympic Centennial Park in the summer of 1996. To date, authorities have not solved this crime. But, as Clinton pointed out in a radio address after the explosion, taggant technology well might have helped law-enforcement officials to trace the bomb.

Even after the bombing, all Clinton dared to ask of the Republican Congress was to conduct the study of taggants they had authorized, but not funded, in the previous round of antiterror legislation, and to ask that it be extended to study the safety of taggants in black or smokeless gunpowder. The Republicans wouldn't consider even this; two months after the Atlanta bombing, they tabled a Democratic amendment to fund the study, by a vote of 57-42.

The strange story of how the Clinton antiterror bill was gutted in Congress was laid out fully in a Washington Post article by Lally Wey-mouth on August 14, 1996. Noting that the legislation was emasculated by "a bizarre coalition dominated by the far left and the extreme right," she explained how the bill was "watered down [to deny] law-enforcement authorities tools needed effectively to combat the growing terrorism menace."

At the core of this "profoundly strange alliance" was a coalition between "the GOP's far right-led by Representative Bob Barr of Georgia- and the Democratic far left-mobilized by Representative John Conyers of Michigan."

Would the provisions for taggants and wiretaps have prevented the Atlanta bombing? Would they have led law-enforcement agents to the front door of those responsible? We will never know.

But we do know that President George W. Bush felt that the wiretap provisions in the Clinton bill were so important that they formed a key part of the post-9/11 antiterror bill he pushed through Congress. One cannot help but wonder: If the Republicans had been less blind and the Democratic left less self-destructive, would federal law enforcement have been more effective in preventing 9/11?

Nevertheless, the antiterrorism bill made a great photo opportunity for politicians of both parties. Twenty-two members of Congress gathered on the South Lawn of the White House for the bill signing, including Clinton's future opponent in the 1996 election, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole.

Unfortunately, the substance of the bill was totally inadequate, especially in light of the 9/11 experience. Here's what it provided:

� Authorized $1 billion over four years to help federal officials, especially the FBI, monitor and catch terrorists. (Big deal: In the rush to catch up after 9/11, Bush had to increase antiterror spending by tens of billions in one year to make a difference after the true dimensions of the challenge became clear.)

� Restricted habeas corpus petitions by state and federal inmates and curtailed the power of U.S. judges to overturn convictions in state courts. (This was a rider attached to the bill by the Republicans; it was the only way they could get Clinton to sign it into law. It had nothing to do with terrorism.)

� Made foreign airlines using U.S. airports adopt, as the Cleveland Plain Dealer reported, "the same stringent security measures as U.S. carriers." (These measures were not so "stringent" as to stop the 9/11 hijackings.)

� Tagged plastic explosives to make it easier to track bombs. (This watered-down version of Clinton's taggants proposal turned out to be useless in tracing the Atlanta Olympic bomber.)

� Banned fund-raising in the United States by foreign terrorist groups, as designated by the secretary of state. (Which Clinton had already done by executive order.)

� Banned financial transactions between Americans and terrorist states like Libya, Syria, and Iran. (This provision was, of course, of 100 no use in fighting terrorist groups that were not nations, such as al Qaeda.)

� Allowed Washington to deny visas for foreigners suspected of belonging to terrorist groups. (This provision sounds very good in the wake of 9/11, but it really amounts to very little. U.S. intelligence in terror-sponsoring nations is too limited-and diplomatic presence there is usually nonexistent-to permit us to identify who is dangerous and who is not.)

� Permitted faster deportation of foreigners convicted of crimes while in the United States. (While this measure makes sense, it has nothing to do with fighting terror. Robert Mueller, director of the FBI, said of the 9/11 hijackers: "While here [in the United States], the hijackers effectively operated without suspicion, triggering nothing that alerted law enforcement and doing nothing that exposed them to domestic coverage. ...They committed no crimes, with the exception of minor traffic violations. They dressed and acted like Americans, shopping and eating at places like Wal-Mart and Pizza Hut.")

� Made it a crime to use chemical weapons in the United States or against our citizens abroad. (Sure to send terrorists into a panic!) Congress had labored for a year on its antiterror package, but all it produced was this paltry list of half measures. The very limited nature of its scope and reach reflects, eloquently, the low priority terrorism received in official Washington in the middle of 1996.

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Replies:

Looking elsewhere for truth Part 4 -- Sage, 16:27:24 06/21/03 Sat
- Looking elsewhere for truth Part 5 -- Sage, 16:29:24 06/21/03 Sat