Home » Able Danger and the firewall: getting some perspective

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Able Danger and the firewall: getting some perspective — 23 Comments

  1. “This is an intersting blog you have. I am finding the same acusations of myself, this is especially bad for me (I am Arab American). I live in New England as well, in New Haven of all places, with the whole liberal uni types on the hunt for a “neo-con” or “zionist” (how funny you know?). I think I will link you on my blog.

    Cheers,
    Nouri”

    God, I love the net.

  2. I lay the blame for the whole mess, ultimately, on Richard Nixon. Probably no one after WWII did more damage than he did to conservatism and constitutional government.

    Mind you, it took two to tango, because the press was out to get him. It’s amazing that 30 years later the deadly consequences of all that appalling behavior are still unfolding.

  3. Neocon- as aside. I commented above about the continuing impact of Vietnam on our politics, cultural and diplomacy. I asked a friend of mine about it. His theory was simple: moments of shame, defeat and embarrassment are much more definitional than victories. If true, the Civil War would have more impact on the South than the North (which is probably true).

  4. I think part of the reason for ignoring Able Danger(if this did happen) is the whole sticky issue of domestic intelligence gathering. The CIA isn’t allowed to do it. The FBI needs probable cause and can only do it within reasonable bounds. I also believe that this is partially the reason why there is the “firewall”. Able Danger using public information(or at least a majority of information accessible to the public) did essentially what the USAPatritot act has allowed Homeland Security and other departments to do now.

  5. My limited experience with spooks in the flesh and in writing tells me that they distrust all presidential administrations. In a world of competing goods and lesser evils, it is not difficult for large minorities of intelligence agencies to be in significant conflict with their own agency’s direction, never mind the “allied” agencies and bureaus. If you ask 5 spooks if Reagan was good for America, you’ll get 5 different answers.

    That’s fine. That’s actually good. But keep it it mind whenever these retired agents write books.

  6. I think it’s too early to tell exactly what the fallout will be from Able Danger. Probably the 9/11 Commission was not very effective because of a lot of reasons, one of which was the obvious goal of some of its members to try to embarrass the Bush administration. One only has to read Ben-Veniste & Bob Kerry’s hostile questioning of Condoleezza Rice to get a feeling for this. Rice wouldn’t let them do it & I get a sense from the transcripts of her testimony of a quick-witted & very intelligent mind that was more than a match for their attempts to muddy the record. To them it must have smelled of those golden bygone days of Watergate. How ironic that the Commission’s partisan politics tinted myopia may prove more damaging to Clinton than to Bush.

  7. dave: you’re certainly right about bureaucrats; no argument there. But removing walls between agencies creates a new climate that will be helpful. We’ll always have cravenly desk jockies. But rewarding information-sharing and proaction changes the tone and the climate that these folks work in. It can’t hurt.

  8. Bears crap in the woods, scorpions sting, and bureaucrats refuse to ever place themselves in possible danger, however remote. It’s the nature of the beast. Are the new and startling allegations accurate concerning the Able Danger controversy? I am, at this moment in time, not quite sure who to believe. Still, I have no doubt whatsoever that a culture existed in the intelligence community which would have allowed such a disaster to occur. This is not even slightly debatable.

    Bureaucrats tend to play it safe. When in doubt, they are encouraged to interpret the rules even more severely than explicitly demanded. There is no dogma more strictly adhered to by your long term government employee then “cover your ass, do nothing to jeopardize your career. You only have few more years before you start collecting your retirement benefits.” In other words, the wall is already high—-and the bureaucrats will inevitably make it even higher. The fear of unwittingly stumbling into trouble becomes an obsessive concern. What about defending the country? This is never, at a gut level, the number one priority to the bureaucratic mindset. At the very best, it might be a secondary priority.

  9. “Any spooks or former spooks here?”

    Haha, no I wish. Am unemployeed about 2 years and have had trouble getting a job. Worked at a govt lab in high performance computing research and my refusal to move from east Tennessee has been a pain (not really the hot bed of that type of work, outside of Oak Ridge where I used to work). There are only two things I would move for – “spook” work or weapons design, but alas not much chance of that (but if any are reading – I’m available 🙂 )

    “I’m just curious if the intelligence community has a small section of staff somewhere that just sits around dreaming up means and methods of attack that could be employed against us. The devil’s advocate group if you will. I certainly know what I would do if I were a terrorist wanting to attack the US again.”

    Of course they do, I’ve worked in computer security some and you *always* have such a thing. Even if you do not have people dedicated to that there is a general pervasive idea of “Everyone think of how we can break things”. Not only that but when some of those plans become public (so that we know they do) there is something of a media backlash: “The govt has plans to invade Canada” – of course they do, that’s their job. I would be worried if they didn’t have plans to do so – I fully expect Canada to have plans for us doing so and thier retaliation. Doesn’t mean on a scale of 1-100 of probablity it rates anything other than a 1, but it still has to be considered.

    They have contigency plans for everything they can think of, though even that doesn’t cover everything (say a 9/11 scenario on 9/10, though they did have some similar ideas). Unfortunatly part of the problem in the last few decades is the idea that not only do we not need too, but that it is counterproductive (and is expressed ideas such as the so called firewall). The idea that entertaining the idea makes it possible, no reality makes it possible and the idea allows us to conteract it before it happens.

    I don’t know to what extent it was curbed, but I would highly wager that post 9/11 even the “1”‘s on the former scale are explored, even if they were not before.

  10. Any spooks or former spooks here?
    I’m just curious if the intelligence community has a small section of staff somewhere that just sits around dreaming up means and methods of attack that could be employed against us. The devil’s advocate group if you will. I certainly know what I would do if I were a terrorist wanting to attack the US again.

  11. With the potential for a biochemical or nuclear attack we certainly don’t want our intelligence agencies to remain gutted and castrated. I wonder how far al qaidah would have gotten in Afghanistan with developing some chemical agents? I recall the labratory our forces discovered where they had been experimenting with dogs and there were suspicions they have experimented with humans as well. It certainly is the time to ‘unleash’ the intelligence community and give considerable leeway to black ops and other assorted ‘wetwork’.

  12. The political source for the firewall between the CIA and the FBI goes back much further than the Vietnam war, with its psychological roots in people who were rationally frightened of being found out, because they wanted to destroy the U.S.A., and in people who were irrationally frightened because they were only good-hearted fellow-travelers, and had no idea of how deadly the struggle was in many parts of the world.

    Once again, Horowitz’s “Radical Son” best gives the flavor of both the parents of, and those Vietnam-era red-diaper babies whose inherited distaste for traditional American society led them to viciously attack it, whose antinomianism gave them all the excuses they needed for enjoying its benefits, and who were street-smart enough to not want to be found out, and to build legal defenses.

    If it took 9/11 to make neo-neocon’s generation rethink their history and politics, their liberal parents’ generation might have been even duller and slower to respond.

    Those, like me, who were young adults during and shortly after WWII, might read Thomas Fleming’s “The New Dealer’s War” to gain insight as to why Senator McCarthy’s charges so frightened those who worked with ill-intentions, and even those of us liberals (sensu Harry Truman) who were unwitting fellow-travelers, vaguely worried we might be thought guilty, too, at the same time we were honestly outraged to be told to sign “loyalty oaths.” Isn’t “denial” the first step in dealing with unwelcome facts?

    “Denial” includes constructing attitudes and laws that not only protect the deservingly-outraged, the guilty-feeling, but also the truly dangerous.

  13. This all seems to be a side effect of a belief which has increasing currency: If anything bad happens, it must be the fault of some American in a position of power.

    I am reminded of the French member of Parliament in 1940 who, when his district was bombed by the Germans, shook his fist and denounced..the French government.

    France 1940, USA Today?”

  14. Excellent history and intersting extrapolation. But I wonder if there wasn’t some intevening event that caused the wall to be raised higher.

    Wasn’t Jamie Gorelick in the legal heirarchy of the Pentagon before moving to Justice? Did she have some knowledge of what some spooks were up to? You do think we were monitoring China real close — be a fool to not be.

    This brings me to this fascinating story … http://snookerswamp.blogspot.com/2005/08/gorelick-wall-was-it-just-coincidence.html

    It could be just speculation, it’s easy to do when someone mentions Clinton, but it could be true.

    If it were tre, it sure would explain a lot of the guilty behavior showing up of late.

  15. The 9/11 Commission’s unwillingness to investigate Able Danger was based upon a pre-established Atta timeline. Had the 9/11 Commission further investigated this intellegence information they may have discovered Atta’s relationship to an Al Qaida cell in Germany which itself was connected to Iraq.

    For me this is one of many disturbing aspects of the 9/11 Commission’s failings. Such failure to fully investigate, particularily during an election year, is what has fueled the “Bush Lied”, “no connection between 9/11 and Iraq”, “bring the troops home now” fiasco with which the American public is deluged.

    This screams neon red, Washington power players playing the with American public and, when all is said and done, will most likely end the Democrat Party as we know it.

  16. For good and bad, it amazes me how Vietnam continues to be the template and the touchstone for modern American politics. If you want to understand who and where we are, go back to 1968 or so.

  17. A wonderfully accurate historical post. You’re right about the long and winding road. I remember the Church Committee (a reaction to Watergate, which was a reaction to Vietnam). I thought Church overreacted in tying the hands of our intelligence services. Turns out that instinct was correct. The 9/11 Commission should have focused on this artifical logjam. Instead, it chose politics over substance and tried to make a sacrifical lamb out of Condi Rice.

  18. neo nc–

    This is an excellent and well-researched history of the problem as it exists in the present.

    What is of interest,too, is the American character, which basically resists the cloak-and-dagger part of states’ affairs. We are the antithesis of Michiavelli in our characterological make-up; in our ambivalence we end up tripping over our shoelaces and looking like incompetents.

    When you read some of the founding fathers with their idealistic belief in the Enlightment philosophy evenutating (ugly word, they wouldn’t have used it) in the withering away of the need for “secrets” you get a visceral feel for the origins of our ineptitude…

    Thanks for the work you did here. A real service.

  19. This is an intersting blog you have. I am finding the same acusations of myself, this is especially bad for me (I am Arab American). I live in New England as well, in New Haven of all places, with the whole liberal uni types on the hunt for a “neo-con” or “zionist” (how funny you know?). I think I will link you on my blog.

    Cheers,
    Nouri

  20. Fixed, anon. Thanks for the tip.

    I’ve noticed this is a new problem since I’ve been using a different browser to set up my blog entries–some of the links go wrong when it’s posted. I’ll try to be more aware of the problem.

  21. Pingback:Fausta’s Blog » Blog Archive » Obama might involve Iran in Afghanistan plans, and other posts from friends & FIHMY

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