John Ashcroft was appointed by President Bush as Attorney General in December 2000, following his defeat for re-election in the Senate a month earlier in Missouri, to a dead man. Yes, the deceased Mel Carnahan beat a sitting Senator by a narrow margin (his widow ended up taking over his office) and that sitting Senator was rewarded by the incoming Bush administration by being appointed the chief law enforcement officer in the United States. Missouri voters picked a dead guy over Ashcroft in a Republican-winning year and Bush rewarded him for his loss. If only Missouri had actually voted for the man the author quotes as "among Senate Republicans, Ashcroft was considered an intellectual lightweight," then we might have had an Attorney General who was interested in stopping al Qaeda before 9/11. Instead, we were left with a guy that actually covered up the nude statue of the Spirit of Justice with blue curtains, because his church was against pornography. Yes, that really happened. Alberto Gonzales, for all his faults, had the curtains removed when he took over the office in 2005.
Former Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton commented on Ashcroft's nomination: "John Danforth would have been my first choice. John Ashcroft would have been my last choice."
Oh, and also there was this:
Ashcroft, a fervent lifelong member of the Assemblies of God church, helped bring the denomination more mainstream recognition in his book Lessons From a Father to His Son (1998). In the book Ashcroft writes of his anointing himself in the manner of Biblical kings, before both terms as Missouri Governor, using Crisco cooking oil when no holy oil was available.
Yes, he was the guy in charge of the FBI, the INS, the US Marshals, and The Border Patrol. I'm glad these law enforcement agencies were in such good hands.
Ashcroft was a hero in the most conservative circles of the Republican Party for his absolutist views on abortion and gun control -- he was fiercely opposed to both. His appointment to Bush's cabinet was seen as an effort to placate the religious conservatives who helped Bush win election. His nomination was very contentious, and he was approved by a 58-42 margin, with most Democrats voting against. If only they had filibustered...
To senior officials at the FBI, Ashcroft made it clear he had two priorities as attorney general: (1) supporting the agenda of the National Rifle Association (NRA), and (2) ending the court disputes that had delayed the execution of Timothy McVeigh. In addition, he was bringing Jesus into government, starting meetings with prayers.
"I found it astonishing," [FBI director Thomas] Pickard said, "to find him standing there by himself, his arms outstretched to his sides, praying. So Ruben [Garcia, another FBI official] and I just bowed our heads until he finished."
At the same time, Pickard could see Ashcroft had no interest in many of the other issues before the Justice Department, including dealing with the terrorist threats.
In May 2001, Ashcroft released an agencywide statement listing his ten priorities for the Justic Department. Terrorism was not on the list.
Thomas Pickard took over the FBI when Louis Freeh (a holdover from the Clinton adminstration) resigned in June 2001. He had the job on an interim basis (he was past retirement age) until a new director could be found. He started giving Ashcroft weekly briefings in June.
Before his first meeting, Pickard sent an agenda to Ashcroft's office of the issues to be discussed. Terrorism was the number one item on the list. The CIA's warnings about an al Qaeda attack [at that time] were dire; they were reported to be the most serious and most convincing warnings of a terrorist strike since the millenium.
During the briefing, Ashcroft suggested he knew little about al Qaeda (ed. note: this is June 2001 and this is the Attorney fucking General of the United States -- I guess since bin Laden isn't in the Bible, Ashcroft didn't need to know him). Pickard offered a primer on the terrorist network and its murderous history: the World Trade Center and East Africa in particular, as well as the links to the bombing of the USS Cole, which happened less than a year earlier.
Ashcroft listened, but seemed far more intrigued by other items on the agenda, especially the latest on the FBI's efforts to end delays on background checks for gun buyers. Pickard said that over the course of the summer, most of his contacts from Ashcroft involved problems with the background check system, which was administered by the FBI.
And then here comes the smoking gun... I probably should have put this in the lead.
Pickard opened his briefing on July 12, 2001, with the latest CIA warnings about an al Qaeda attack: "We're at a very high level of chatter that something big is about to happen. The CIA is very alarmed --"
Ashcroft responded: "I don't want to hear about that anymore. There's nothing I can do about it."
Pickard countered: "Mr. Attorney General, I think you should sit down with George Tenet [head of the CIA] and hear right from him as to what's happening."
Ashcroft: "I don't want you to ever talk to me about al-Qaeda, about these threats. I don't want to hear about al-Qaeda anymore."
Wow. Just wow. In its annual budget request that July, the FBI asked for a sizable increase for only one of its divisions - counterterrorism. But on July 18, Ashcroft sent a letter to Pickard saying the request had been turned down and that the counterrorism division would actually be facing a budget cut. Pickard appealed the cut, in writing, but didn't hear back from Ashcroft for weeks. He finally heard back, via official letter, on the night of 9/11. It was a denial of his request for more money for the counterterrorism division. The letter was dated September 10, 2001.
How important was Ashcroft's incompetence in the summer of 2001? Well, look at my Part 3 report on the absolute flood of warnings of impending terrorist threats during the spring and summer of 2001, coming from FBI field offices, the CIA, and counterterrorism experts. These were ignored by the White House (mostly in the form of Condoleezza Rice) and since there was no central agency to deal with terrorist threats at the time (and questionably now), it was up to the Department of Justice to take the threats that the CIA is reporting and apply law enforcement techniques inside the U.S. to attempt to stop the threats. This wasn't done. At all.
The CIA was the one organization most blamed for 9/11, more than Rice and Ashcroft, more than Bush and Cheney. In fact, there was a concerted effort by the White House, and by Zelikow from the very start of the 9/11 investigation, to cast blame on the spy agency, even though their warnings of terrorist threats were all over the PDBs sent right to the president every single day. Now of course, they do bear some responsibility. BUT, the CIA's responsibility was to look mostly at threats overseas. CIA director George Tenet would not have had daily contact with the FBI or the other domestic agencies. His contacts regarding al Qaeda were mainly with the Pentagon and the State Department. As Tenet said, about the summer of 2001,
"Ships were being put out to sea, embassies were being put on heightened alert. I could see what I could see."
He could only assume the FBI and the other domestic agencies were being mobilized for a possible al-Qaeda strike as they had been in the past through Rice's National Security Council. During the millennium threats, there were daily meetings at the White House between Tenet, Janet Reno (Ashcroft's successor) and Louis Freeh.
Tenet assumed -- he certainly hoped -- that the same thing was happening in the summer of 2001, when the threat from Osama bin Laden was far more severe.
"I had no reason to believe the domestic side was not fully engaged," he later told colleagues. "I thought Condi was fully engaged."
As it turned out Condi was far from fully engaged. Ashcroft was not remotely engaged -- well, in anything other than making sure NRA complaints about gun background checks were being addressed. In the congressional committee report on 9/11, the recommendation was to breakup the FBI due to its failures to prevent 9/11... including not using the evidence on Moussaoui's laptop that detailed the hijacking plot, ignoring the pleas from the Minneapolis field office about flight training for Muslims, and somehow missing the two hijackers from San Diego who were living with an FBI informant.
The attorney general's indifference to terrorist warnings helped explain why the nation's law enforcement agencies were unprepared for what came on 9/11.
The 9/11 Commission Report did not recommend any significant changes to the FBI. An extensive update of the computer system (at the time of 9/11, no one in the FBI headquarters could even receive e-mail on the computers at their desk) was canceled after 18 months of planning.
Comments