On October 11, 2001, intelligence officials are worried that al Qaeda sleeper cells inside the U.S. may strike, while Rep. Pelosi apparently worries about the methods the NSA is employing to detect them. Her letter, dated Oct. 11, 2001, to then NSA head General Michael Hayden is quite astonishing. Think about it. America is at war, and the military is on full alert. Thirty days after the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon are hit, killing thousands, intelligence officials are still deeply worried that al Qaeda had inserted other “sleeper cells” into the continental U.S. to carryout more attacks, possibly with chemical or biological weapons. U.S. officials are doing all they can to rapidly detect these cells and destroy them before they can act or escape to a new location. From the Los Angeles Times, “U.S. Believes More Attacks Are Planned,” September 30, 2001:
U.S. intelligence officials believe that Osama bin Laden long ago began orchestrating a significant terrorist counterpunch to the expected U.S. retaliation for the attacks on New York and the Pentagon…. Authorities fear that the Bin Laden operatives who would carry out such terrorist attacks may already be in place, hidden and ready to go–just as they were before Sept. 11…. Another federal law enforcement official confirmed that a significant number of federal agents are not participating in the current investigation into the attacks. Instead, they are being held in reserve in anticipation of possible secondary attacks. The comments by the official mark the first time that the Bush administration has said it believes that Bin Laden and Al Qaeda already have in place follow-up attacks and an infrastructure for carrying them out.
To prevent an attack, the NSA was apparently trying to get any relevant foreign intelligence it collected into the hands of the FBI as fast as possible. But the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee had a different perspective than General Hayden. From today’s New York Times coverage of Pelosi’s October 11, 2001 letter to Gen. Hayden:
In the briefing, Ms. Pelosi wrote to General Hayden, “you indicated that you had been operating since the Sept. 11 attacks with an expansive view of your authorities” with respect to electronic surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations. “You seemed to be inviting expressions of concern from us, if there were any,” Ms. Pelosi wrote, but she said that the lack of specific information about the agency’s operations made her concerned about the legal rationale used to justify it. One step that the agency took immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks, Ms. Pelosi wrote in her letter, was to begin forwarding information from foreign intelligence intercepts to the F.B.I. for investigation without first receiving a specific request from the bureau for “identifying information.” In the past, under so-called minimization procedures intended to guard Americans’ privacy, the agency’s standard practice had been to require a written request from a government official who wanted to know the name of an American citizen or a person in the United States who was mentioned or overheard in a wiretap.
Some may call this pre-9/11 thinking in a post-9/11 world. Republicans should welcome the debate.
