2:16 AM - The Battle Inside
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agents don't prefer to go into mosques. The so-called correct of
sanctuary was drummed into youthful FBI agents throughout their
coaching at Quantico: You don't chase a thief in to the cathedral.
The message was reinforced over time by political correctness and
also the example of careers ruined by rule-breaking. Step on
someone's civil liberties, FBI agents discovered by rote and by
unpleasant history, and also you can wind up utilizing your
retirement savings to spend to get a lawyer at the inevitable
congressional inquisition.But then came the September 11, 2001,
attacks, and also the powerful suspicion that some of the hijackers
had done their plotting in mosques. Suddenly the rules changed.
Agents had been told to be much more proactive, to adhere to the
terrorist trail wherever it led, even into a religious sanctuary.
The message from headquarters was: Do not be afraid to take
dangers. We're behind you. (That is, hedged FBI Director Robert
Mueller, as long as the agent was operating in good faith.) Down
around the street, the brick agents heard the exhortation to go
forth and be bold, but they remained wary. What if an undercover
operation got blown? What if an FBI agent was caught bugging a
mosque? Once the investigative reporters started calling late at
night and the subpoenas arrived in the mail, would the higher-ups
at headquarters really stand by them? Or would the lowly agents be
left holding the bag?Last winter, a squad of FBI agents, assigned
to view a radical imam in an American city on the East Coast,
pondered the dangers. The imam had been detected making get in
touch with with suspected Qaeda terrorists about the planet. Within
the weeks prior to the invasion of Iraq, the case had become 1 of
the bureau's most urgent priorities. President George W. Bush was
kept informed at his morning briefing on the terrorist Threat
Matrix. The agents staked out the suspected imam about the clock,
sitting in their idling vehicles, sipping watery coffee and eating
sugar doughnuts to remain awake. They eavesdropped on his house
telephone. But they didn't go into his mosque. We stayed out of
there with our individuals and our technology, stated 1 agent
involved with the situation, which stays an active investigation.
The calculation, 1 FBI official told NEWSWEEK, was simple: I'm
going to create sure I am on strong legal ground here. I do not
care how much the director wants to report the existence of an Al
Qaeda cell towards the president inside a Matrix briefing. I am not
going to become suspended or fired over this.Were these agents
becoming a little as well cautious? Putting the risk to their
careers more than the danger of a deadly terrorist attack? Or were
they simply becoming prudent, refusing to become swept away by the
hysteria of the second? Would their bosses really back them up if
they got caught going over the line? Within the months after the
9/11 attacks, these sorts of concerns routinely got asked up and
down the ranks with the FBI--and not just the FBI however the CIA
and also the military and the whole national-security
establishment.It has become a cliche by now that the terrorist
attacks two years ago altered everything: 9/11 altered what we do
forever. Forever, stated Jim Pavitt, the CIA deputy director for
Operations, interviewed by NEWSWEEK in his seventh-floor office at
CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. The CIA, he says, is hiring more
spies, operating much more risky covert operations, reaching out to
much more (occasionally unsavory) allies in the war on
terror.Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told NEWSWEEK that the
Bush administration had been itching to take a much more forward
leaning method to terrorism even prior to 9/11. On the eve with the
Inauguration, Rumsfeld and President Bush had discussed how the
United states looked soft towards the rest with the world.
Terrorists believed that all you have to do is bloody us in the
nose and we'll go away, said Rumsfeld. The night with the 9/11
attacks, Bush told his leading advisers that he needed boots on the
ground to go after Al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The president left
[CENTCOM commander] Gen. [Tommy] Franks without any doubt in his
thoughts, said Rumsfeld.Nobody concerns Bush's resolve in the war
on terror. Bush's leading lieutenants have pushed their troops to
take much more chances to ferret out and crush the shadowy
foe--with some real achievement. Most of the Qaeda leadership is
behind bars or dead, the military has won two swift wars and, most
significant, the Usa has not been attacked again. But, more than
many people may realize, the gung-ho, damn-the-torpedoes method of
Bush and his war cabinet has been met with suspicion and pockets of
actual bureaucratic resistance--from normal gum-shoes within the
FBI, CIA situation officers within the area, generals at the
Pentagon, women and men throughout the military and intelligence
neighborhood.Some of this resistance may turn out to possess been
smart in retrospect. It appears, for example, that Bush's war
cabinet just blew previous a yellow light on Iraq--warnings from
CIA analysts that invading Iraq could make a terrorist attack
against the Usa more likely, not much less. And it's also clear
that Rumsfeld was much more concerned with winning the war in Iraq
than he was using the cleanup afterward. Last week's choice to look
for international assist from the United Nations was a tacit
acknowledgment that the Bushies' go-it-alone game strategy was
flawed.There's an unplanned high quality towards the occupation of
Iraq that feels a bit too chancy. The administration regards the
invasion as just one more battle within the war on terror, a
essential demonstration of American energy. Bush and his leading
advisers were so determined to enforce their will on balky
subordinates--reluctant generals, equivocal intelligence analysts,
skeptical lawyers--that they may not have totally thought via the
long-term consequences of bold action.But they cannot be blamed for
thinking that the toughest enemy, at occasions, is their own
bureaucracy. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, a --culture of risk
aversion grew to become deeply embedded within the
national-security establishment. People have lengthy memories
around right here, said a senior CIA official. They keep in mind
the congressional witch hunts after Watergate, when headline-hungry
lawmakers uncovered years of agency dirty tricks, failed
assassination plots and spying on American citizens. The CIA
official recalled an old Navy expression in the days when everybody
smoked: You by no means wish to be the only one at the table
without an ashtray, i.e. the man summoned to explain to the brass
what went incorrect. That's nonetheless the way people here really
feel, said the senior spook. During Vietnam, military males
complained that they had been abandoned, if not stabbed within the
back, by civilian politicians. They were determined by no means to
visit war again without civilian backing and a sure exit strategy.
For an officer trying to climb the ranks in a zero defects culture,
taking casualties could be observed like a fatal error. In some
peacekeeping operations, like Haiti and Bosnia, force
protection--keeping your males from obtaining shot--became the No.
one mission. The troops hunkered down in their armored autos and
flak jackets and were rarely observed on patrol within the
streets.Maybe the institution most scarred from the past is the
FBI. Following a series of scandals going back to the J. Edgar
Hoover era, many FBI brick agents believed they could not trust
their own superiors. None of the people on Mahogany Row [the
bureau's executive suites] backed up agents down the meals chain
when we had been investigated for performing black-bag jobs
[illegal entries] against radical leftists, recalled a veteran
G-man. This kind of a mind-set dies difficult. FBI Director Mueller
tried very hard to alter the culture of 'you make a error and
you're dead', stated a senior administration official. Mueller and
his top aides started insisting that they be informed anytime
agents asked for wiretaps in terror instances, to make sure that
the bureau's lawyers weren't putting up unnecessary roadblocks.It
could be a mistake to image a national-security establishment of
swashbuckling politicians and timorous or jaded troops. The Special
Operations commandos who joined what Rumsfeld delightedly described
as the first cavalry charge of the 21st century while fighting on
horseback against the Taliban in Afghanistan had been as brave and
resourceful as may be. Many junior officers welcome the opportunity
to prove themselves in action. Numerous FBI agents and CIA case
officers risk their lives as well as their careers. Nonetheless,
NEWSWEEK's reporting suggests that the culture of danger aversion
is alive and nicely post-9/11. It often takes subtle forms, but it
is the reality that underlies (and occasionally undercuts) Bush's
hard-charging rhetoric.Rumsfeld insisted that danger aversion was
much less of an issue within the military than elsewhere in the
government. But he acknowledged, from his personal sometimes
irritating expertise, that altering a bureaucratic culture takes
time. Rumsfeld, like many national-security officials, expressed
exasperation using the attorneys who've turn out to be ubiquitous
in government decision-making. In his interview with NEWSWEEK, he
vividly described his frustration at attempting to get the military
to create easy, simple rules of engagement that tell soldiers once
they can open fire.I've spent countless hours on this, said
Rumsfeld. Tired of legal argy-bargy, Rumsfeld decreed that he would
no lengthier be briefed on the guidelines by lawyers. They could
sit within the back row and listen, he said. He needed the rules
written in English. Not legalese. Three times, he had to threaten
to grab the first six individuals he encountered in the Pentagon
hallway and admin-ister a simple test: could they understand the
guidelines? And when the guidelines were finally promulgated, they
had been produced more cautious because they filtered down the
chain of command. At every degree, they took a 5 percent tuck to
become on the safe side, said Rumsfeld. I said, 'That's just not
acceptable!' But in fact, the guidelines of engagement are
challenging to determine in a war that's not quite like any other.
The basic dilemma for the military is the fact that the war on
terror is really a fine political phrase, but it has no which means
in law. The enemy isn't a state, and terrorists are not combatants;
they are merely criminals. The U.S. military is educated to observe
the laws of war. But how scrupulously to apply them to terrorists
has triggered main tussles between the political leadership and
also the bureaucracy. Think about the always uncomfortable topic of
assassination:Political assassinations had been banned by executive
order within the 1970s following the exposure of the CIA's failed
assassination plots from the 1950s and '60s. But the president was
still free to waive the rule, and within the late '90s, President
Bill Clinton signed lethal findings that will have permitted the
CIA to kill Osama bin Laden and other Qaeda leaders. The Clinton
administration lobbed a few cruise missiles in to the Qaeda
training camps in Afghanistan. But neither the CIA nor the military
made a truly concerted work to eliminate bin Laden--and Clinton
never pushed them to. At 1 point, write former Clinton
national-security staffers Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon in
their book, The Age of Sacred Terror, Clinton approached Joint
Chiefs Chairman Gen. Hugh Shelton and said, You know, it would
scare the shit out of Al Qaeda if suddenly a bunch of black ninjas
rappelled out of helicopters in to the middle of their camp. It
would get us enormous deterrence and display these guys we're not
afraid. Shelton, a huge, powerfully built man, blanched, write the
authors. Absolutely nothing came of Clinton's considerably
whimsical suggestion.The military features a way of testing the
seriousness of the civilian leadership. Asked to do some thing
challenging and dangerous, like placing combat troops into a
far-off country like Afghanistan, the leading brass will make not
possible manpower and logistical requirements: whole divisions,
huge airlift and backup, everything including a bowling alley along
with a PX, says one White Home cynic. After 9/11, Rumsfeld says, he
was impatient to obtain troops into Afghanistan. Bush
administration higher-ups made it clear they wanted bin Laden,
because the president place it, dead or alive. But that does not
mean the bureaucracy smartly saluted and set about attempting to
kill the Qaeda leadership.Certainly, inside hours of Bush's
statement, attorneys in the National Safety Council, the State
Department and also the Pentagon launched a flurry of e-mails and
calls warning that Bush's macho rhetoric could be viewed as a
violation of the Geneva Conventions. The notion that Bush might be
prosecuted like a war criminal was rejected by their bosses as
absurd. Nonetheless, while a top administration official told
NEWSWEEK that there was extremely small philosophical discussion in
the top about targeted killings of terrorist leaders, there
continued to be legal qualms--and a reluctance to act--down in the
ranks.The CIA and also the Air Force had lately developed the right
execution machine, the Predator, a remote-control unmanned car in a
position to loiter more than a target and launch Hellfire missiles
with deadly accuracy. On 1 with the initial nights with the
Afghanistan conflict, a Predator spotted a convoy believed to be
carrying Taliban leader Mullah Omar. The passengers got out and
entered a creating. The CIA was almost--but not entirely--sure that
Mullah Omar was within. Ought to the Predator take a shot? At
CENTCOM headquarters, General Franks's top military lawyer, a
female Navy captain, posed tough questions. What if innocent
civilians had been killed? And there was a mosque right next door.
What if the mosque were broken?The strike was aborted; Mullah Omar
got away (and is nonetheless at big somewhere in Afghanistan).
After Rumsfeld and others expressed their dissatisfaction, the
guidelines of engagement were tweaked, and also the Predator was
utilized to kill a senior bin Laden lieutenant near Kabul, among
others. But as soon as the Afghanistan conflict was more than, the
debate resumed. Killing a leadership target in wartime isn't
assassination. But is the war on terror open-ended? Under the laws
of war, can nations strike pre-emptively at an imminent threat?
Just how imminent does the threat have to be?Since Afghanistan, a
senior intelligence official says, the Predator has been utilized
only once to eliminate a Qaeda leader, blowing up a car containing
Abu Ali--a former bin Laden safety guard suspected of plotting the
attack against the USS Cole--in the Yemeni desert final winter.
Even that attack made the lawyers nervous: 1 of the passengers
within the vehicle was an American citizen. The man was a suspected
terrorist; even so, the attorneys asked, was it lawful to execute
him without a trial? If that's the case, did that imply the
president could order a Predator to shoot at suspected terrorists
in Detroit?Inertia may also get within the way of the
administration's go-get-'em philosophy. Mueller hoped to hire
scores of language and pc experts amongst the bureau's thousand new
agents. But the vast majority of new hires had been exactly the
same old ex-cops and soldiers who've usually filled the bureau's
ranks. A Justice Department spokesman says the bureau has hired 146
new Arabic and Farsi translators since 9/11. But the FBI concedes
that's not enough. We have not produced sufficient progress, and
we're redoubling our efforts, says Larry Mefford, the bureau's
counter terrorism chief. In the case of the imam suspected of
plotting with Al Qaeda, the FBI could not afford to send an
interpreter to listen to his home-phone conversations in real time.
In spite of the urgency--the risk that the imam was ready to
perform a plot--the area agents had to FedEx the taped
conversations back to headquarters in Washington, exactly where,
presumably, they joined the backlog of tapes awaiting
translation.The traditional turf battles in between the CIA and the
FBI have died down somewhat--but new turf battles between the CIA
and the Defense Division are springing up. Rumsfeld wants to use
Unique Operations Forces as his action arm against terrorists. But
now CIA officials worry that Delta Force commandos will bump into
the agency's spooks or cause a flap because of their relative
inexperience in the spy game. Studying that Special Forces was
planning an operation to capture a particular terrorist, a leading
CIA official says he had a fit and got the Pentagon to back down.
They weren't even searching in the correct nation, says the
official.Only in the films do commandos drop out with the sky, guns
blazing, and snatch or kill terrorists. The Pentagon brass has
usually resisted using the extremely educated SEALs or Delta Force
on this kind of secret and harmful missions. It was very, very
irritating, Gen. Pete Schoomaker, the former commander of Special
Operations, as soon as recalled. I utilized to say this was like
getting a brand-new Ferrari in the garage and no one desires to
race it because you may dent a fender. Schoomaker features a new
task: he is now the Army's chief of staff. Rumsfeld place him there
to make the Army bolder. But a good numerous Army officers worry
about what will happen if the political winds shift. As 1 serving
three-star common told NEWSWEEK: Nobody relishes the prospect of
appearing before the [Sen. John] Kerry congressional committee of
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