[Kabar-indonesia] 2 of 2: New Yorker/Seymour Hersh: The War Over Iran

[Joyo at aol.com]

-2 of 2-

[Includes: The story of the F.B.I. agent who had
the best chance of foiling the 9/11 plot]

The New Yorker/Seymour Hersh: The War Over Iran 
continues...

Iran has not, so far, officially answered President
Bush's proposal. But its initial response has been
dismissive. In a June 22nd interview with the
Guardian, Ali Larijani, Iran's chief nuclear
negotiator, rejected Washington's demand that Iran
suspend all uranium enrichment before talks could
begin. "If they want to put this prerequisite, why are
we negotiating at all?" Larijani said. "We should put
aside the sanctions and give up all this talk about
regime change." He characterized the American offer as
a "sermon," and insisted that Iran was not building a
bomb. "We don't want the bomb," he said. Ahmadinejad
has said that Iran would make a formal counterproposal
by August 22nd, but last week Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
Iran's supreme religious leader, declared, on state
radio, "Negotiation with the United States has no
benefits for us."

Despite the tough rhetoric, Iran would be reluctant to
reject a dialogue with the United States, according to
Giandomenico Picco, who, as a representative of the
United Nations, helped to negotiate the ceasefire that
ended the Iran-Iraq War, in 1988. "If you engage a
superpower, you feel you are a superpower," Picco told
me. "And now the haggling in the Persian bazaar
begins. We are negotiating over a carpet"—the
suspected weapons program—"that we're not sure exists,
and that we don't want to exist. And if at the end
there never was a carpet it'll be the negotiation of
the century."

If the talks do break down, and the Administration
decides on military action, the generals will, of
course, follow their orders; the American military
remains loyal to the concept of civilian control. But
some officers have been pushing for what they call the
"middle way," which the Pentagon consultant described
as "a mix of options that require a number of Special
Forces teams and air cover to protect them to send
into Iran to grab the evidence so the world will know
what Iran is doing." He added that, unlike Rumsfeld,
he and others who support this approach were under no
illusion that it could bring about regime change. The
goal, he said, was to resolve the Iranian nuclear
crisis.

Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the
I.A.E.A., said in a speech this spring that his agency
believed there was still time for diplomacy to achieve
that goal. "We should have learned some lessons from
Iraq," ElBaradei, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last
year, said. "We should have learned that we should be
very careful about assessing our intelligence. . . .
We should have learned that we should try to exhaust
every possible diplomatic means to solve the problem
before thinking of any other enforcement measures."

He went on, "When you push a country into a corner,
you are always giving the driver's seat to the
hard-liners. . . . If Iran were to move out of the
nonproliferation regime altogether, if Iran were to
develop a nuclear weapon program, we clearly will have
a much, much more serious problem." 

--------------------------------------------------------------------

The New Yorker Magazine  
Issue dated July 10, 2006 

Missed Opportunities

This week in the magazine, Lawrence Wright tells, for
the first time, the story of the F.B.I. agent who had
the best chance of foiling the 9/11 plot. Here, with
Amy Davidson, Wright talks about how turf wars with
the C.I.A. got in the way. Wright's book "The Looming
Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11" will be
published by Knopf in August.

AMY DAVIDSON: The question your article asks is
whether the C.I.A. stopped an F.B.I. agent from
preventing 9/11. Let's start with the F.B.I. agent.
Who was he, and why was he remarkable?

LAWRENCE WRIGHT: On 9/11, Ali Soufan, an Arab-American
F.B.I. agent, was one of only eight agents in the
F.B.I. who spoke Arabic, and the only one in New York
City. He was absolutely invaluable to the bureau
because of his skills, his innate talent, and his
relentless nature. At the age of twenty-nine, he was
appointed the chief agent in charge of investigating
the attack on the U.S.S. Cole, in the harbor of Aden,
Yemen, which killed seventeen American soldiers in
October of 2000.

That was an Al Qaeda attack as well?

As it turned out—Soufan's investigation proved that it
was.

What could he have done to stop Osama bin Laden from
attacking the World Trade Center?

People who were involved in the planning of the Cole
bombing were connected to the people who planned 9/11.
There was a meeting in Malaysia in January, 2000,
where at least two of the 9/11 hijackers and the
mastermind behind the Cole bombing, a man named
Khallad, met with other Al Qaeda operatives. After
that meeting, two of the hijackers flew to the United
States and settled in San Diego. The C.I.A. knew about
the meeting; the agency had had it monitored by
Malaysia's secret service, Special Branch, which took
surveillance photos and sent them to the C.I.A. So the
agency had in its file pictures of Khallad and of
people who turned out to be among the hijackers. Had
the C.I.A. told Soufan what it knew about the meeting,
he might have uncovered the plot.

The C.I.A. knew that Soufan had an interest in this
information?

Yes. He specifically asked the C.I.A. three times for
information about the Cole bombers and their meetings
in Malaysia and Southeast Asia—information that the
C.I.A. had and knew was relevant to his Cole
investigation but did not turn over to him.

Now, assuming that it wasn't sheer ill will on the
C.I.A.'s part, why would it withhold that information?

Well, there are various theories. One is that the
C.I.A. simply wanted to hang on to the information for
itself. The agency was afraid of disclosing something
to the F.B.I. that would then come out in a trial.
Once intelligence is made public, it's no longer
useful to the agency. There are people in the F.B.I.
who believed that the C.I.A. had hoped to recruit, as
informers, the two Al Qaeda cell members who arrived
in America in 2000. It had nobody inside the Al Qaeda
organization, and here were two members of the inner
circle, in America. I think the most likely answer to
your question is that the problem was a mix of
personality clashes and the C.I.A. being overwhelmed
by the number of threats that were coming in at that
time.

In the article, you mention a policy that people
referred to as "the Wall." What was that?

The Wall stemmed from a 1995 law that sought to keep
from criminal investigators information that was
deemed to be relevant solely to foreign intelligence.
It was originally designed to prevent such information
from flowing out of the intelligence division of the
F.B.I. into the hands of criminal prosecutors and into
trials. But the bureau misinterpreted the law and used
it to force its agents to withhold information from
one another—even agents who were on the same squad. So
if you have a criminal agent and an intelligence agent
on the same squad, investigating the same crimes, one
cannot disclose to the other what he knows.

Were there reasons for that divide? For instance,
there's a different standard for wiretapping suspects
with links to terrorist organizations. Was there a
concern that if the F.B.I. could use intelligence
information in criminal investigations this would
create a loophole that would allow it to evade
civil-rights protections?

That's exactly correct. There's a different standard,
a lower one, for obtaining wiretap information on
foreign intelligence, and there was a fear in the
Justice Department that F.B.I. agents would be tempted
to label cases as being related to foreign
intelligence rather than as criminal cases because it
would be far easier to gain permission to surveil
suspects. So the Justice Department erected the Wall.
And the arbiter of what could be "thrown over the
Wall," in the bureaucratic parlance of the bureau, was
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, created
by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, fisa,
which was passed in 1978.

You said that the F.B.I. misinterpreted the Wall, and
so did the C.I.A. Was it a good idea that was misused
and misunderstood, or was the whole idea a mistake?

I think it was a terrible idea from the beginning.
Criminal agents and intelligence agents have always
worked together. For instance, after the 1993 World
Trade Center bombing, there was a subsequent plot by
Islamic extremists in New York to destroy the Lincoln
and Holland Tunnels and landmark buildings in the
city, and it was intelligence wiretaps that uncovered
the plan and the involvement of Sheikh Omar Abdel
Rahman. The wiretaps produced evidence that was used
to convict the Sheikh in court. Had it not been for
the free flow of information between the two halves of
the bureau, it's inconceivable that he could ever have
been put on trial.

At the same time, the Justice Department never meant
the Wall to be the phenomenon that it became. It was
designed so that intelligence would be carefully
monitored and not arbitrarily wind up in criminal
prosecutions. No one intended the Wall to become an
artificial device that restricted the flow of
information to agents who badly needed access to
certain kinds of intelligence. I should also mention
that the Wall has now come down.

How did Soufan react when he realized what had
happened—when he learned that the C.I.A. had this
information?

Soufan finally received the information he'd been
asking for on September 12, 2001. He was given the
information in a manila envelope by the chief of the
C.I.A. station in Yemen. And when he received the
account of the Malaysia meeting, which he had been
requesting for a year and a half, and saw that the
agency had known for twenty months that the agents of
Al Qaeda were in America, he ran into the bathroom and
retched.

We've heard about the warnings that went unheeded
before 9/11, and the famous Presidential daily
intelligence briefing with the headline "Bin Laden
Determined to Attack Inside the U.S." Do you think
that a warning from Soufan would have been received
differently? Or do you think it would have been lost
in what we've come to call the "chatter" of missed
signals before 9/11?

It might have been yet another failure on the part of
the bureau. There's no question that it had other
opportunities, but none was as striking as this one.
These were two Al Qaeda operatives inside America more
than a year and a half before 9/11. Now, it's
conceivable, as one agent told me, that we might have
followed them right up to the point where they got on
the plane. But because of the connection of these two
hijackers, Khaled al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, to
bin Laden, and because there was already an indictment
of bin Laden, the bureau had the authority to do what
is called a full-field investigation on these men.
That means that it had the authority to wiretap, to
surveil them, to clone their computer hard
drives—every single thing you can imagine, it had the
authority to do. It could have easily disrupted the
cell, at least, if not exposed the entire 9/11 plot.
It was certainly its best opportunity, one that it
wasn't given.

Zacarias Moussaoui was recently shown to have done
what you say the C.I.A. did: withholding information
from the F.B.I. that might have allowed it to uncover
the 9/11 plot. What do you think of his prosecution,
in light of your reporting on this story?

It is a mystery to me that people in the C.I.A. have
not been held accountable. The office of the inspector
general in the Justice Department did two internal
investigations, one of the F.B.I. and one of the
C.I.A. The report on the F.B.I. was declassified and
released to the public, and the F.B.I. took a lot of
heat for the revelations about its pre-9/11 missteps.
The report on the C.I.A. has not been released to the
public. I believe that the story of Ali Soufan is part
of what is in that report. I'd like to see it made
public, so the full story can be told.

In your article, you describe Soufan's interrogation
techniques. He engaged the suspects; he won their
respect; he debated them on theological issues. In
interrogations he carried out just after 9/11, these
techniques worked very well; he got crucial
information about the hijackers and their connections.
His methods were very different from the "extreme
measures" that we've been hearing about—waterboarding,
sleep deprivation, humiliation—and that are being
justified on the grounds that they're the only way to
get this kind of information. Have we been given a
false choice between abusing prisoners or letting
something terrible happen?

Ali Soufan has shown that intelligent and careful
interrogation can achieve real results. And it helps
immensely, obviously, to have the language and
cultural skills that he does. There are very few
people in the American intelligence community that
have his set of talents. The U.S. is known to have
used these sorts of tactics you mention. The C.I.A.'s
impulse has been to deliver Al Qaeda suspects to
foreign intelligence agencies that could torture them
and extract information the C.I.A. thought it couldn't
otherwise obtain. However, what this abuse has yielded
from the top Al Qaeda lieutenants is questionable. And
I think that's because it's untrustworthy information
obtained under torture.

So the problem with torture isn't just that it's
torture— that it compromises America ethically,
morally—but that torture doesn't always work.

It doesn't work. It often is misleading, as in the
case of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, an Al Qaeda lieutenant
who was tortured into saying that Saddam Hussein
worked with Al Qaeda and had weapons of mass
destruction. That was the information that the U.S.
was trying to get out of him, and he gave it to the
interrogators under torture, and that became part of
the rationale for the U.S. going to war with Iraq—a
disastrous consequence of choosing an unethical
approach to gaining information.

You mentioned that Soufan was the only Arabic-speaking
F.B.I. agent in New York, and one of only eight in the
country. Why was that? This is a country of
immigrants—there must be a large pool of native
speakers to draw on.

There is a large pool, but, unfortunately, the F.B.I.
and the C.I.A. are very narrow cultures. The F.B.I.,
especially in the hierarchy, is made up largely of
Irish and Italian men. You go to the seventh floor of
the F.B.I. and you feel like you've walked back in
time. It's like being in a Cagney movie. And it was a
real failure on their part not to have expanded to
incorporate more American faces.

Soufan was spotted by a legendary F.B.I. official
named John O'Neill, as you've mentioned. You wrote
about O'Neill for The New Yorker in 2002. Who was he
and how does he fit into this story?

John O'Neill was the head of the counterterrorism
center in the New York office of the F.B.I. It became
the nexus of America's efforts to counter Al Qaeda.
O'Neill was one of the first in the bureau to
recognize the danger that Al Qaeda posed. And, through
the force of his amazing personality, he made New York
the center of America's efforts to stop bin Laden.
Early on, he recognized the talent that Ali Soufan
brought to the table, and he drafted him to the I-49
squad in New York, which was devoted largely to
stopping Al Qaeda. Under O'Neill, the New York squad
was able to obtain the information that led to several
successful terrorism convictions.

But, on 9/11, John O'Neill was no longer with the
F.B.I.

In the summer of 2001, there was a damaging leak in
the New York Times that exposed the fact that John
O'Neill had taken classified information out of the
bureau to an F.B.I. pre-retirement conference in
Florida. His briefcase was stolen. It was discovered
within hours and the information had not been touched,
but because of this revelation he decided to retire.
And he took a job as the head of security at the World
Trade Center. He died on 9/11.

This week's story is taken from your forthcoming book,
"The Looming Tower." There's a lot in your book, of
course, that's not in your article.

That's true. This is just a portion of a vast saga,
beginning in 1948, with the arrival of Sayyid Qutb in
America, and ending shortly after 9/11. It's a story
of the terrorists and the counter-terrorists, of two
cultures in collision. It's told equally from each
side. Much of it has to do with the rise of radical
Islam and our failed efforts to counter it. It's told
through the lives of four individuals: Osama bin
Laden; Ayman al-Zawahiri, his deputy; Prince Turki
al-Faisal, the former head of Saudi intelligence; and
John O'Neill. 

-END/2 of 2-

------------------------------------------
Joyo Indonesia News Service
------------------------------------------