George, obviously the lefties are correct in their assertions that the war on terror is a sham.  The evidence is all around.

They are so far off the wall that they couldn't hit it with an RPG.

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http://www.officer.com/article/article.jsp?siteSection=8&id=24728

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WASHINGTON (AP) -- FBI supervisors in the war on terror have acknowledged they lacked expertise, but Director Robert Mueller says he is unwilling to require such managers to have backgrounds in Arabic, the Middle East or international issues.

''Let me tell you that we want to develop that within the bureau, but making that an absolute requirement _ if you do not have it you would be precluded from advancing in counterterrorism _ no,'' Mueller testified recently.

The subject came up in the case of an agent who complained that he had been passed over for promotion in favor of less-experienced men.

Mueller described his own expertise in Middle Eastern terrorism as having been ''relatively limited'' when he took over the FBI a week before the Sept. 11 attacks. For instance, he acknowledged he didn't know that a blind sheik imprisoned for plotting attacks in New York had been a spiritual adviser to Osama bin Laden.

''I am not certain of the role played between the blind sheik and bin Laden,'' Mueller conceded.

Mueller also testified he didn't give any guidance to his top managers to seek out the bureau's most experienced counterterrorism agents to work on the war on terror immediately after Sept. 11.

''It was in their hands as to how they did that,'' Mueller said in a wide-ranging deposition obtained by The Associated Press.

AP reported Sunday that most of the men Mueller appointed to run the war on terror testified that, despite the FBI's pledge to build national expertise in terrorism, they didn't believe Middle East and terrorism experience had been important for choosing the agents they promoted.

Gary Bald, the bureau's executive assistant director in charge of terrorism, testified he had to get his terrorism training on the job when he came to headquarters two years ago. And when asked about his grasp of Middle Eastern culture and history, he replied: ''I wish that I had it. It would be nice.''

When shown Bald's statements, Mueller defended his selection by saying Bald had run the FBI's Baltimore office during the time of the Washington sniper shootings.

''Running the office gave him some exposure to terrorism,'' Mueller answered. ''Yes, I think absolutely it would give, contribute to his ability to handle counterterrorism.''

The testimony has been given in a lawsuit brought against the FBI by one of its most accomplished pre-Sept. 11 terror-fighting agents, Bassem Youssef, who claims he was passed over for top jobs in headquarters despite his expertise.

The testimony has concerned both Republican and Democratic investigators on the Senate Judiciary Committee who are comparing the FBI's actual practices in the war on terror with its sworn promises to Congress and the American public.

The concerns, however, go beyond Congress.

The staff of the independent commission that reviewed Sept. 11 failures conducted interviews with FBI field agents in the war on terror.

''Many field agents felt the supervisory agents in the counterterrorism division at headquarters lacked the necessary experience in counterterrorism to guide their work,'' the staff wrote in one report.

Mueller described his top anti-terror managers' knowledge of dealing with foreign governments, Middle East history, international terrorism and al-Qaida this way: ''Helpful, not essential.''

''Leadership ability is transferable,'' he said. ''And often you can pick up the subject matter if you've got leadership skills.''

An agent recently named to a top counterterrorism job compared the FBI today with a baseball manager without baseball experience but good leadership skills and experienced people around him.

The manager can ''make a pretty good go of it,'' Deputy Assistant Director John Lewis testified. ''But at the end of the season, he's not going to be able to win over the guy on the other side of the field who has all those same things _ plus 20 years of major experience.''

Lewis suggested it might take the FBI until 2020 to get the sort of top-level anti-terrorism experience it needs.''Hopefully, the bureau is putting forward its best managers today. In this business, we don't have anyone with 20 years experience who has worked counterterrorism to the extent we're working it today,'' he said. ''I would dare say that some of the midlevel managers that we have today who have been willingly neck-deep in this problem for the last two years are probably among our most seasoned and experienced people.''

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WASHINGTON (AP) -- In the weeks and months before Sept. 11, 2001, the FBI had some clues, but didn't see them. It had a lead from one of its own agents, but didn't follow it.

A sobering inside look at pre-Sept. 11 intelligence operations by the Justice Department's inspector general chronicles - in some instances in hour-to-hour detail - how the FBI missed at least five opportunities to uncover vital information that might have led agents to the hijackers.

''The way the FBI handled these matters was a significant failure that hindered the FBI's chances of being able to detect and prevent the Sept. 11 attacks,'' Inspector General Glenn Fine said in a newly released report Thursday.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales acknowledged Friday that there were laws on the books before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks that ''discouraged the sharing of information'' among law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Appearing on NBC's ''Today'' show, Gonzales noted that many of those laws ''have now been dismantled'' and said he thinks the government is in a better position than before to avert such attacks. ''You have the ability to connect the dots'' of terrorist plots, Gonzales said.

An FBI agent suggested to the chain of command two months before the attacks that there was a coordinated effort by Osama bin Laden to send students to the United States to study ways to take down U.S. aircraft.

Failure to fully heed the agent's theory was indicative of an agency that failed to accord strategic analysis the attention it deserved, the report said.

Even when the bureau had hard information shortly before the attacks about the presence in the United States of eventual hijackers Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar, ''the FBI's investigation then was conducted without much urgency or priority,'' the report concluded.

The investigation of Mihdhar ''was given to a single inexperienced agent,'' the report said.

Responding to the IG's criticism, the FBI said it has since taken substantial steps to deal with the issues the report raised.

Today, ''no terrorism lead goes unaddressed,'' and new policies are in place to share information among intelligence agencies, the FBI said.

The IG's review, a year old, is only now being released because of a court fight with lawyers for imprisoned terrorist conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui over how much of it should be disclosed. The portions on Moussaoui were deleted.

According to the report, CIA employees and four FBI agents assigned to the CIA's bin Laden unit on Jan. 5, 2000, accessed incoming cables containing a substantial amount of information about Mihdhar, including that he was traveling and that he had a U.S. visa. Those facts weren't disseminated to the FBI.

The information was written up that day by one of the FBI agents assigned to the CIA's bin Laden unit. The FBI agent sought, but was never able to get, the required go-ahead from the CIA's deputy chief of the unit to send the draft to the FBI. Ten days later, Mihdhar and Hazmi were in Los Angeles.

All of the CIA and FBI personnel who were involved in the matter now say they remember nothing about the document that wasn't sent. The document is called a Central Intelligence Report, or CIR.

''When we interviewed all of the individuals involved with the CIR, they asserted that they recalled nothing about it,'' the report stated.

Mihdhar came under CIA scrutiny because the National Security Agency had picked up communications that al-Qaida operatives were planning travel to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Mihdhar showed up at the meetings.

Once in the United States, Mihdhar and Hazmi lived openly in San Diego and ''should have drawn some scrutiny from the FBI,'' the report said.

The head of the San Diego FBI office responded that the report greatly exaggerates the possibility that local agents could have prevented the attacks.

The two Saudis rented a room in the home of a longtime FBI terrorism informant, and also befriended a fellow Saudi who had drawn FBI scrutiny in the past.

The informant identified the two men to his FBI handler only by their first names, and the report criticizes the FBI handler as ''not particularly thorough or aggressive'' in following up.

The two men also befriended Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi who had established himself in the area. The FBI briefly investigated him in 1998 when the manager of his apartment complex reported that al-Bayoumi had received a suspicious package, had strange wires in his bathroom and hosted frequent weekend gatherings of Middle Eastern men.

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SAN ANTONIO (AP) -- Escalating violence in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, is under close watch but doesn't yet merit sending extra officers to Laredo, Texas, to secure that portal of U.S.-Mexico trade, a spokesman with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection said Monday.

''It has received a lot of attention and from an operational perspective we'll definitely monitor it more closely than other border cities,'' said Salvador Zamora, a spokesman with the agency in Washington, D.C. But ''at this point it does not merit anything more than keeping it as a significant point of interest.''

The Mexican government alerted Border Patrol officials in Washington before launching a major offensive Sunday on drug traffickers in the border states of Baja California, Tamaulipas and Sinaloa. Among the bloodshed prompting this show of force was the shooting death of Nuevo Laredo's police chief last week just hours after he took office.

U.S. border agents have watched traffic on bridges and highways more closely since then, Zamora said, looking especially for a ''ripple effect'' from the beefed-up security measures in Nuevo Laredo in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. But he added that so far the Laredo impact has been minimal.

The violence has attracted the attention of Texas Gov. Rick Perry who was in Laredo the day after the Nuevo Laredo police chief was killed. On Monday, Perry called for more resources from the Mexican government and greater collaboration between U.S. and Mexican border agencies to address the problem.

''This drug war that's going on on the borders of the state of Texas, that's not just impacting Mexican citizens,'' Perry said. ''We need to get those numbers back up from the standpoint of manpower along the border in Texas.''

Zamora said his agency is most alarmed at the brazenness of the drug traffickers, willing to gun down seemingly anyone standing in their way. He declined to specify but said extra officers and resources stand ready if violence were to spread to the U.S. side.

''The government of Mexico's commitment is demonstrated by the approach they have taken,'' he said. ''And we will approach the same threats in the same fashion: zero tolerance.''

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Homeland Security Faces Massive Overhaul

WASHINGTON -- The intelligence arm of the Homeland Security Department is facing a massive overhaul, an admission of shortcomings at what was originally designed to be the government's chief center for analyzing information about terrorist threats.

Homeland Security's directorate for Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection was a top justification when President Bush and Congress created the department in 2002 _ the largest U.S. government reorganization in 50 years.

As part of a department-wide review, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has said he will announce major changes at the agency by the end of June, and several current and former federal anti-terror officials say a major overhaul will be made at the intelligence unit.

Homeland Security spokeswoman Michelle Petrovich said Friday that Chertoff ''has received a variety of recommendations, but no final decisions have been made yet.''

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the announcement has not been made, said the changes probably will include focusing the unit's analysts on identifying potential terror targets instead of also gathering raw intelligence.

Turf wars and vague congressional mandates have led several current and former department and outside counterterror officials to question the effectiveness of Homeland Security's mission within the nation's intelligence network.

Homeland Security's intelligence unit ''was the foundation of why the department was stood up. There's no doubt about that,'' said John Rollins, a former top intelligence official at the department who now works on terrorism issues at the Congressional Research Service.

But officials realized the intelligence unit ''did not have the numbers of people, or anywhere near the expertise required, to fulfill the mission of being the U.S. government's focal point for threat information related to the homeland,'' Rollins said.

Under the leading option, the new office would oversee intelligence analysts from Homeland Security's disparate agencies _ including Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Coast Guard. It would also gather and distribute terror-related information for state and local governments and the private sector.

But Homeland Security is likely to cede most raw intelligence gathering to the CIA, FBI and other agencies, and leave analyzing the data to the new National Counterterrorism Center.

That center's predecessor, the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, was created two months after Homeland Security but had a larger, more experienced cadre of analysts to do a similar job. As a result, the center ate into much of what Homeland Security considered its mission.

One former senior intelligence official who said he has spoken to Chertoff at length about the review said Homeland Security is seeking to eliminate duplication and carve out a niche among the nation's spy agencies.

Part of the problem is the perception that Homeland Security is a junior member of the intelligence community _ and is often left out of the loop.

That will only change on demand by the White House, said William H. Parrish, a former Homeland Security acting assistant secretary for intelligence. He said it is unclear if the proposed changes will boost the department's status on intelligence issues.

''One of the frustrating things I felt was lack of the intelligence community to welcome new members,'' said Parrish, now in charge of homeland security programs at Virginia Commonwealth University. ''And if (Homeland Security) is not a major player, then how do we know all of the information is getting out?''

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