The Scribe

8/17/05: Interview on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" with Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch about FOIA documents, Clinton and bin Ladin

Interviewer:  Neal Conan

Neal Conan:  As we discussed earlier (see interviews with Shaffer, Kean, and Brandon here and here), pre-9/11 intelligence regarding Osama bin Ladin has also surfaced. The State Department warned the Clinton administration in 1996 that Osama's move from Sudan to Afghanistan would make him much more dangerous to the US.  The conservative foundation, Judicial Watch, obtained the declassified documents through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request.  Joining us now by phone from his office is Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch. Nice to have you on the program!

Tom Fitton:  Good afternoon.  Thanks for having me!

Conan:  What do these documents tell us about bin Ladin's capabilities and the move from Sudan to Afghanistan? 

Fitton:... The documents suggest that the move to Afghanistan would put him in an even more ideal location to operate against US interests as long as he could continue to run his businesses and financial networks unmolested.  And they point out his access there -- that he would have -- to the hundreds of Mujahadeen that were being trained in terrorist operations. And in the end it said that we've got to be aware of this, even if bin Ladin on the move can retain the capability to support individuals and groups who have the motivation and wherewithal to attack US interests almost world-wide.  So given that significant... I guess... threat analysis it's fair to say.. and in this document he's implicated or at least suspected in at least two terrorist incidents against US interests -- one wonders if the administration could have done more to roll up this transnational network, to quote from the document, that bin Ladin was able to take advantage of.

Conan:  And this was at a time when the Clinton administration was pressuring Sudan to basically kick bin Ladin out.

Fitton:  That's right.  And there were reports, and there are still some credible allegations, that bin Ladin was offered to the administration by the Sudanese government.  And the actual underlying Freedom of Information Act request that resulted in these documents was asking about that and this was what was turned over.  And the documents first were requested back in December of 2001.

Conan:  You say there have been stories around that the Sudanese offered to turn bin Ladin over to the US, but there's no proof of that though..

Fitton:  There is no proof and the documents don't address it one way or the other.  It's possible, given the tenor of the Sudanese government's discussions with the US that they were desperate to kind of get out from under the gun in terms of terrorist support and financing and were desperate to work with the US.  Which was, understandably, a bit suspicious of the Sudanese government, given its record.  But that issue, specifically, you can't find one way or another whether it happened. 

Conan:  Now, the New York Times reported today that these documents showed that the Clinton administration was watching bin Ladin closely back before his move to Afghanistan.

Fitton:  Yeah.  I mean they were concerned that he had a safe haven in the Sudan and presumably had been pressuring the Sudanese government to go after bin Ladin and other terrorist movements that had safe haven there.  But he went to Afghanistan and the administration knew, in 1996, that it would mean more trouble -- that he would be more trouble because of the terrorist networks in place there.

Conan: Your group, Judicial Watch, is probably best known for taking on the Clinton administration back when it was in office, and I wonder, was this suit part of an agenda?

Fitton:  Well, the agenda is to get the truth out.  And Judicial Watch has a history of asking both Republican and Democratic administrations uncomfortable questions about issues they don't want to talk about.  We famously went to the Supreme Court against Dick Cheney for his Energy Task Force records.  And the New York Times reported on documents the Bush administration released to us showing that the Bush administration had been giving favorable treatment to Saudi nationals in the days after 9/11.  So we call 'em as we see 'em.  And the agenda here is, Why wasn't the government more active in defending the US against this threat as described in this 1996 document.

Conan:  Tom Fitton -- thanks very much!

8/17/05 Discussion on NPR's "Talk of the Nation" about "Able Danger" and intel sharing with Harry "Skip" Brandon formerly of the FBI - 2

This is the second part of the discussion of "Able Danger," posted 8/18.  The first part has interviews with Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer and 9/11 Commission Chairman, Thomas Kean.  This part deals largely with the issues of intelligence sharing among government intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

Neal Conan: We turn now to Harry "Skip" Brandon, former Deputy Assistant Director in charge of counter-terrorism and national security at the FBI.  He's now with us from his offices at Smith, Brandon International, a defense consulting firm here in Washington. 

Harry "Skip" Brandon:  Good afternoon.

Conan:  Assuming that this strategic command group, Able Danger, had passed along its information to the FBI, how much would that have helped?

Brandon:  Well, it's hard to say.  We are in the twilight zone of hindsight but it strikes me that probably had it been passed on, it would have fortified the interest in Atta.  There's no question about that in my mind. Who knows whether it would have led to the prevention or not, but it certainly would have -- could have keyed the FBI to push hard.

Conan:  We always talk about "connecting the dots."  Again, if true, this seems like a pretty big dot!

Brandon:  Yeah, it does!  I'm a little leery of connecting the dots.  I've done this many times afterwards where you reassess where your investigation went, and there are always things that you see that you wish you'd noted as you went. But having said that, this could be a big dot, there's no question about that.

Conan:  Again, remind us too that this would have been one more additional piece -- however important it might have been -- of information amidst a blizzard of information. 

Brandon:  That's very very true.  Even at this stage, pre-9/11, there's no question that the various intelligence and law enforcement agencies of the government were keyed up.  Everybody was expecting something.  We've heard all of that.  We've heard George Tenet say that.  I just have to say that I think it would have been picked up and acted upon.

Conan:  Let me ask you again -- and we're going on Col. Shaffer's statements here, and Congressman Weldon's too -- but that this idea of military lawyers saying, Well, wait a minute!  We're not supposed to necessarily pass on intelligence gathered by military agencies about people who are in this country legally to the FBI.

Brandon:  Yeah, and I think it's important to note that we're going by statements made by two people.  But none of us have all of the facts in front of us.  Having said this, there was always a bit of tension between some of the agencies -- I guess what I'd call the external agencies, the foreign intelligence collectors -- and the domestic intelligence collectors with, I'd say, various agencies that collected foreign intelligence being extraordinarily cautious about passing on information.  It is possible that that's what we saw.  It's unforgiveable. But that may be what we saw.

Conan:  Were there times when people bent the rules and tried to pass along information that they regarded as urgent?

Brandon:  [laughs] You always try to maintain good and close relationships with your counterparts in other agencies! [laughs]

Conan:  [laughs]  I'll take that as a yes!

Brandon:  Well, very often we found that people who really were involved and interested found ways to... whether passing on the information or at least alerting an agency to the fact that there might be information and probably getting the agency to request any information, which kind of reversed the whole flow.

Conan:  I can understand that.  Is this concern, though, that -- again, going back into this story -- that these military lawyers were concerned about the idea of a military intelligence unit passing on information about people who are hear legally?  Was that a legitimate concern?

Brandon:  Well, yes. It could have been a legitimate concern with the value of highsight and seeing what it was.  There was always the option for them to have huddled with the Department of Justice is pointed to as having issued these restrictions and saying, We have something.  Is this what you really mean?

Conan:  And are these the kinds of walls to intelligence sharing that have been torn down since 9/11? 

Brandon: Yes, my impression is -- and I'm on the outside now -- my impression is that most of those walls are gone.  Those walls were there.  They were not helpful.  In fact, at times they were hurtful. And it was just a cross we had to bear, so to speak, at the time.  They never should have been there, in my opinion. 

Conan:  Let me ask you also about the technique that was used -- and again, Col. Shaffer was circumspect.  He said that Able Danger apparently did a lot of stuff.  But one of the things they did was so-called "open source data mining."  Tell us about that.

Brandon: Well, that's simply a technique for going at information that's out there.  Essentially it's public available or at least available on the internet and various other resources.  And just pulling bits and pieces together, and putting them together, and seeing if you can get a complete picture. This can be done rather, I won't say crudely, but rather laboriously by using analysts just to go through information.  Or -- there are computer programs available that try to make the links for you.  Basically using artificial intelligence to put the bits together.  It's very efficient.

Conan: Google on steroids!  Is that...

Brandon: [laughs] Yes, that's a great phrase.  And to a degree it is!  But the programs that are used -- and we don't know what was used -- and I can only guess that it was used by professionals -- would be probably much more sophisticated than that.

Conan:  Now, how would this relate to... I guess there was, a couple of years ago, retired Admiral John Poindexter, was in charge of a program called "Total Information Awareness" that became quite controversial in part because of John Poindexter's involvement in it.  Would this have been along the same lines?

Brandon: I think we could guess that it was something along those lines.  Now, these programs are done, they're kept pretty quiet, simply because in a way they're kind of alarming to civilians like I am now and all of us are.  It's kind of horrifying in a way how much information is out there and available about each one of us.  That's not the fault of Admiral Poindexter or the military or anybody else.  If the information is out there, they're making use of it. 

Conan:  Yes, we did a show with somebody who retrieves information like that and used me as an example and I had to shut him up!

Brandon: [laughs]  I know!  I've actually run myself a few times and not using a sophisticated program and it's kind of scary.

Conan:  [break]  We're talking with Skip Brandon, former Deputy Assistant Director in charge of Counter-terrorism and national security at the FBI. He retired in 1993 after 23 years at the FBI in various jobs... As you look at this story in terms of a counter-terrorism point of view, obviously again in hindsight a lot of mistakes were made.  But ferreting out this kind of information -- this threat here, this threat there -- a huge tapestry of information -- this is extremely difficult work.

Brandon:  It's extraordinarily difficult.  My business partner often likens what's available today to trying to find the right drop of water coming at you from a fire hose!

Conan:  That's a pretty apt analogy. Let's get some listeners involved in the conversation.  We'll talk with Troy...

Troy: Have the lawyers who kept saying, Hey, we can't tell anyone because of there's a difference between military and the FBI -- have they  been placed under oath and asked, Is this true? Or is someone just making up this story, saying, Well, we think it's the lawyers who made this opinion up?  Anyone actually interviewed those lawyers?...

Conan:   So far as I know, Troy, the lawyers have not be identified nor have they been asked to do this.

Troy:   Well, maybe NPR could find that out for us!

Conan:  We'll do our very best. And the Pentagon will certainly be asked a lot of questions about this.

Troy:  And maybe the Senate and Congress could interview those lawyers and ask them the same question!

Conan:  I thought you heard Chairman Kean suggest that maybe Congressman Weldon would be interested in asking some of those questions.

Troy:  Maybe the staff members who were at that meeting should be pulled on the red carpet and asked, Well, did you record this interview?  And where are the tapes?

Conan:  Another good question!  Thank you very much, Troy... Tony's calling from Bear Mountain in New York.

Tony:  ...Why not use, although I know it's illegal to use the NSA on US citizens, what not use their technology on non-citizens within the US? Have they thought of doing something along those lines?

Conan: Skip Brandon -- what, as far as you know, are the regulations about using military intelligence assets to spy on American citizens or those in the US legally?

Brandon:  Essentially, they are not to do intelligence collection on US citizens in the United States or people who are considered to be "US persons" which basically is people who are here legally.  Having said that... be a little careful here... there are provisions for the sharing of information that they acquire about US persons while in the conduct of their [?] collection if they recognize that it is material and important.  There are special procedures which do allow them, after review, to share that information.

Tony:  Wouldn't that take a lot of time?

Brandon:  No.  It sounds rather laborious, maybe the way I explained it, but somebody who gets information they recognize is hot information, sometimes it can be a matter of hours.

Conan:  ...Skip Brandon, we thank you for your time today...

8/17/05 Discussion on NPR's Talk of the Nation about "Able Danger", with Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, Thomas Kean of the 9/11 Commission - 1

Neal Conan: In the days after September 11, Americans began asking questions that still haunt US intelligence officials.  Why didn't we do a better job tracking down Osama bin Ladin?  Did we know there were terrorists among us?  Why didn't we stop them?  Those insistent questions led to the creation of the 9/11 Commission which issued its report a year ago.  Now there's new information about an elite Army intelligence unit code-named "Able Danger" that linked Mohammed Atta and other 9/11 hijackers to an Al Qaeda cell in New York before the attacks, charges that meetings were set up to pass that intelligence on to the FBI, and that those meetings were then blocked by military lawyers.  We'll talk with a 22-year veteran of the group that had oversight of the Able Danger unit and we'll hear from Thomas Kean, Chairman of the 9/11 Commission... Joining us is Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, former chief of Task for Stratus Ivy [?] who supported the Able Danger intelligence unit...

Neal Conan:  First of all, explain what Able Danger was, and your role in it. Lt. Col. Anthony

Shaffer: Essentially, Able Danger was a global targeting effort to look at all aspects of Al Qaeda as an organization.  As you can imagine that's a very daunting task!  Not something easily done.  We knew back in the late '90's that this was a growing threat and because of that the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Hugh Shelton, had asked Operations Command to essentially look at how we could conduct operations on order to begin to try to understand the nature of Al Qaeda, how it functions, what it does, and then be able on call -- that is to say, when it's determined by leadership -- to do something to counter the operations and stop them from being able to do attacks.

Conan:  And the systems that were used, I understand you're not an intelligence analyst, but the systems that were used were data mining -- or one of the systems.

Shaffer:  One of the systems we're talking about in this case, and let me be clear on this there are still a number of aspects of Able Danger which are still highly classified which obviously we won't get into, but the one issue we can talk about here is the fact that yes, data mining and using -- by the estimate of the doctor who put it all together -- 2.5 kerabytes of information, all what we consider open source (not classified government computers) in which using smart algorithms, looking for patterns within that amorphous data, and then pulling those patterns out and trying to have intelligence analysts make their best judgment as to certify or decertify the linkages established by those algorithms.

Conan:  And this linkage analysis, you say, identified Mohammed Atta and three other of the 9/11 hijackers with an Al Qaeda cell in Brooklyn. 

Shaffer:  That's correct. And this is one of the key issues regarding some of the bantering going on right now.  Able Danger was not about locations and times.  It was about linkages and associations.  It was about what we saw in the data that showed that these guys had traits similar to other guys who had conducted terrorrist operations [break in broadcast].. in the past...[...] and in Brooklyn. 

Conan:  Now this information the unit wanted to pass on to the FBI.

Shaffer:  That's correct.  That's also where I came into the picture again because the -- I'm a supporting organization helping them do their job -- internally there was a debate about what to do about the individuals who were "U.S. persons." Now, "U.S. persons" defined back in that era was anyone who was here legally and who had the same rights and privileges as you or me.  And that restriction gives you the right to privacy.  You're not going to be scrutinized or have things happen to you in this case without due cause.  These individuals were given the same rights and privileges as any of us, and therefore the lawyers at the time said... Keep in mind we have a lot of hits on terrorists, not just these guys there...  But for the guys here in the US, somehow located here, we have to leave them alone or pretend they don't exist. 

Conan:  Because... Well, as far as anybody knew, they were in the country legally and they were protected.

Shaffer:  That's correct.  That was the thinking of the time by the lawyers, yes.

Conan:  Okay.  Now, obviously things move on.  9/11 happens. You were then approached sometime afterwards by the 9/11 Commission.  You were then in Afghanistan.

Shaffer:  That's correct.  The time the 9/11 Commission -- Mr. Zelikow -- came to visit, I was there as the Operations Chief of... He came with two staffers and an Executive Branch lawyer and when he visited there -- I was there working as Operations Officer for Defense Humint there on the ground at Bagram.  And [...] asked Hey, does anyone have information that may be relevant to the pre-9/11 era of counter-terrorism, and of course I volunteered through the chain of command, the Commanding General, and said I have this information.  And he said -- and he validated this -- and he said yes, I think you should talk to the Commission staffers.  And at that point in time, I put together a two-page talking point paper in which I laid out all of the issues which you now see swirling around in the news regarding Able Danger.  Obviously there are some other things which are more classified which I'm not talking to anyone about.  But we're talking essentiallly about the open-source data mining and the methodology using the -- and I might add this, the Army's land information warfare activity -- using their technology and their location which essentially produced this outcome regarding the Brooklyn cell. 

Conan:  As you know, the 9/11 Commission has said, Look, we've gone through the notes that our staff members took at that interview in Afghanistan and we didn't hear the name Mohammed Atta.

Shaffer:  You know, I don't know what exactly they heard because I've read their 12 August reponse to my comments.  They attribute things to me which I never said, like something about me complaining about Congress and the Permanent House Select Committee on Intelligence, and I never said anything the Permanent House Select Committee on Intelligence, not in my notes, nor did I say that Able Danger was focused -- it's right there in the paragraph -- about Al Qaeda [...] activities in Afghanistan before 9/11referred to a program referred to as Able Danger [Shaffer speaks rapidly and with apparent irritation or excitement, hard to understand over a phoneline and on tape] but I didn't do that.  I simply talked about Able Danger being a global targeting program of Al Qaeda.  So this concerns me that this paragraph here describing their meeting with me can be so far off -- by the fact that I had my "bullets" and what I talked about. The bottom bullet after I talked about the technology and who all was involved, we found two of the three cells which conducted 9/11 [...]  Now, I don't know if it was so located and recognized but I can tell you that at the time I said what I did, there was a great deal of interest.  People perked up and I talked about one hour and fifteen minutes.  And in addition to that -- after we got done with the discussion -- I was asked by Mr. Zelikow himself to recontact the Commission upon leaving my tour in Afghanistan and when I returned to Washington.  Gave me his card.  One of the other staffers gave me his card and then asked me to please contact them when I got back.

Conan:  We've been unable to reach Mr. Zelikow because he works at the State Department.  We've left messages.  In a moment we're going to be talking with Tom Kean who's the Chairman of the 9/11 Commission.  And I do need to ask you:  there are differing accounts of what you told them and what its significance is. 

Shaffer:  Well, the significance to me is they were very interested in the beginning.  Apparently they did... if you're the individual and you're looking at Al Qaeda and all the aspects of what led to the attack I would think learning of a program that talked about Al Qaeda a year in advance of the attack would be of significance.  And I would cite to you their own, again, 12 August response when they talked about.. "After the meeting, the Commission staff promptly prepared a memo..." and yadda yadda yadda...  and then "in Afghanistan Dr. Zelikow called back to the Commission's headquarters in Washington and requested the information about Able Danger."  So something prompted him to take immediate action.  So, again, I don't know what exactly the recollection is.  I haven't talked to them. My recollection is, obviously, I said something which had them give an instant response to try to get the information. And then again, following up, coming back again and talking to them and offering up a full set of the Able Danger documents which I had in my possession in my office.

Conan:  And finally, Col. Shaffer...

Shaffer: ...yup...

Conan:.. it's almost four years after 9/11.  Why is this coming out now?

Shaffer:  Excellent question and I want this to be very clear.  Congressman Waldon was approached by the DOD.  I've been working with the Navy to resurrect a certain aspect of Able Danger capability, specifically the data mining capability.  The Navy is interested in trying to recreate some of those capabilities to do the data mining and massive parallel processing, etc. etc. As part of that process, one of the things I was sent over to do was request money, to informally talk to the Congressman about getting money for the project. It was during these discussions talking about how we were going to do the project that he started questioning both the Navy officer and myself about, well, what happened to the original project.  And that's where it came up about the fact that we did talk to the 9/11 Commission about that stuff and we figured everybody knew about it.  Then Congressman Weldon started doing investigations.  My hat's off to him.  He actually was the one who kind of uncovered all this stuff.  He found out that the Commission had not been briefed and that there was apparently no real mention made of Able Danger in the final report.  That, I think, was troubling to him and I think that's why we're at where we are now.  Because he did his speech on the floor of the house and that was picked up.  My objective here is to recreate and make sure we have the capabilities which will help us to prevent the next 9/11.  That is the only reason I'm doing this.

Conan:... like Able Danger.

Shaffer:  Yes, exactly.  And unfortunately, for whatever reason, it has become a major issue.  Believe me, sir, after today I have no desire to go down this path. It is exhausting.  But it has to be done in my view because I think information has to get out and I think we have to account for why some of these things weren't looked at as part of the overall Report.

Conan:..Col. Shaffer, thank you very much for being with us.... With us on the phone now is the former governnor of New Jersey and the former Chairman of the 9/11 Commission, Thomas Kean.  It's good of you to be with us.

Kean:  Thank you.  It's good to be with you.

Conan:  I know you've been listening to at least the last few second of what Col. Shaffer had to say.  What's your response?

Kean:  I haven't got a response. I mean I don't know and couldn't say.  I wasn't in any meeting with Col. Shaffer, don't know any of the information he's talking about.  None of the information he's talking about was presented to the Commission.

Conan:  None of it was.

Kean:  No.  What we do have is a meeting, which he refers to which was held in Afghanistan.  There were four people there beside Col. Shaffer, three from our staff, one from the White House.  The question of Able Danger was brought up.  Our staff -- none of them heard the name Mohammed Atta or they would have reacted.[station break]

Conan:  Governor Kean, there is a dispute between your staff members who had the interview with Col. Shaffer and his recollection that the name Mohammed Atta was then mentioned.  But I wanted to ask you about another aspect of this.  The idea that this unit, Able Danger, wanted to pass this information along to the FBI and, according to Col. Shaffer, was prevented from doing so. 

Kean:  He's right and that was obviously a great mistake.  We don't know about that.  There is none of that in the files.  What happened when our staff learned of Able Danger, as we did with everything else we requested documents, anything to do with Able Danger from the Pentagon.  And from the Administration.  The Administration turned over a whole series of documents which they said was everything having to do with Able Danger. We then made a second request and we haven't gotten anything now from the second request or anything else having to do with Able Danger!  They said, We've given you everything.  So we had every document having to do with Able Danger.  Unless the Administration, for whatever reason, withheld information which we hope they didn't.

Conan:  It should be pointed out that the Administration turned over documents to you that did not make them look all that great! Kean:  Oh yes!  And this wasn't even about them.  This goes back to the Clinton administration.  Why the administration or the Pentagon would have withheld documents... I mean it seems strange to me.  There was nothing in those documents.  And we went over them again because, since this all came up, we sent the staff in to look at the documents again to make sure there was nothing about Mohammed Atta.  Nothing about a Brooklyn cell.  Nothing in those documents.  And so all we can do on the Commission is to say, These are the facts.  We didn't draw a lot of conclusions other than recommendations.  The facts in this case -- his recollection of the meeting is different from the four other people who were there.  And the four other people who were there don't remember the name of Mohammed Atta, don't remember the discussion the same way.  It could be they're mistaken!  Four of them -- one from the White House and three from the staff feel that way and the documents we've been able to get and review again.  That's because we went back in the files and had a look -- that is, the staff did last week -- don't seem to bear out some of the things that have been said.  Having said that, that's all we know!  The Commission itself got no information beyond what's in the files.

Conan:  Let me ask you:  there was also a published report today about State Department documents referring to Osama bin Ladin's move from Sudan to Afghanistan back in July 1996, a warning from a State Department analyst saying bin Ladin may be more dangerous in Afghanistan than he even was in Sudan.  This was brought out by a lawsuit filed by Judicial Watch.  We're going to hear from them a little big later in the program. Were you aware of that document?

Kean:  I wasn't aware of that document.  I was aware that a lot of people felt that way.  I mean this was not just whatever document came out here.  We say that actually in the Commission Report.  It was a great mistake to allow bin Ladin to leave and get to Afghanistan and I think everyone has acknowledged that, both people in government and outside government.  The Times said that, and we should get him now!  So this is nothing new.

Conan:  Is there any way should Col. Shaffer's charges turn out to be accurate... there's no way at this point to resurrect the Commission...

Kean: We have up to 2000 documents.  We showed the American people every fact we had.  We've gone out of existence.  We have a small group we've maintained with private funds to try to pursue the recommendations the Commission made to make the American people safer.  And that's what we're pursuing now.  But the Commission itself has been out of existence for a long time.  If there's any documentation of any kind to support what Col. Shaffer is saying then I think that Congressman Weldon or our committee could look into it.  This would certainly be news to us, but a very important part of the puzzle if in fact the Pentagon knew something about the movements of Mohammed Atta, tried to pass it on to other government agencies, and was not allowed to.  That would be a very important allegation, very important fact.  And if there's anything to back it up, the Pentagon should be able to answer questions on it.  We don't have that information.  The Pentagon does.  The Administration does.  If there's any accuracy to them at all, we should be hearing from the Administration.

Conan:  Governor Kean, thank you very much for being with us.

Part 2, including interviews with Harry "Skip" Brandon who worked with the FBI, and Thomas Fitton of Judicial Watch, will be posted soon.

 

8/12/05 -- Interview with Philip Shenon of the New York Times about 9/11 and Able Danger

Source:  Brian Lehrer Show, WNYC, Friday, August 12

Interviewer:  Mike Pesca of WNYC and NPR

Guest:  Philip Shenon, reporter for the New York Times

Subject: "New reports suggest that Able Danger, a covert military program, was following Mohammed Atta a year before the 9/11 attacks. But the information was never shared with other agencies because Atta had entered the country legally. Now some on Capitol Hill want a fuller explanation."

Mike Pesca:  When the 911 commission issued its report, its theme was of unconnected dots, various bits of data that if analyzed together could have led officials to detect the plot against America. now new reporting suggests that theres another major dot, one that the commission was apprised of in the hectic days before the deadline.  This dot concerns a military intelligence unit, "Able Danger."  Able Danger used data mining to identify terrorists, and supposedly picked out four of the nineteen 9/1l hijackers including the lead terrorist, Mohammed Atta, a year before the World Trade Center attacks.  The unit suspected that the four hijackers were members of an Al Qaeda cell and went as far as to compile a chart tracking their locations and terrorist connections.  In fact, they recommended to their superiors that the information be passed on to the FBI.  It wasn't, and the 9/11 Commission did not survey the units' claims even though it has come to light that the intelligence officers briefed the Commission shortly before the report was due out.[...] Philip Shenon,  could you tell me about Able Danger, what intelligence they had, and how did they get it?

Philip Shenon:  I don't know if we can answer many of those questions yet.  We know that there was some sort of operation set up within military intelligence back in 1999.  The idea was that it would sift through all sorts of public and private data bases, looking to try to connect the dots -- initially, we were told, on questions of espionage, not on questions of terrorism.  Some how this team of people, I believe it was ten or eleven people connected the dots on issues of terrorism.  And, according to a prominent Republican lawmaker on the Hill and a member of this team that we have talked to, they connected the dots so that they were able to identify Mohammed Atta as a member of an American-based terrorist cell along with three of the other hijackers.  They were able to make this connection in 1999 or early 2000 -- more than a year before the attacks. 

Pesca:  And the lawmaker is Curt Weldon...

Shenon:  Right... Pesca:  And the intel officer remains unnamed because why?  he's still active?

Shenon:  He's still active, and obviously his career is at risk if he's perceived to be criticizing his superiors in public.

Pesca:  Once the military got the information and said we think we've got the terrorists, who have they told you they tried to get that information to?

Shenon:  The claim is that they went to their superiors in the summer of 2000.  They went to the Army -- military -- special operations command down in Tampa, Florida in the summer of 2000.   They went with a chart on which they say they had the mug-shots of Atta and three of the other hijackers and said, "We need to tell the FBI about this."  And the story as told by this intelligence officer and Representative Weldon is that military lawyers said, "No, you can't do that."  And the reason apparently is that there are all sorts of privacy issues, that Atta was in the US on a legal green card, as were some of these others, and it appeared that this might be the military participating in domestic surveillance.

Pesca:  And didn't I read some quotes in some of your stories that the military itself wasn't that familiar with the people at Tampa whom Able Danger reported to?  didn't know that much about Able Danger?  or was it just that the FBI was unaware of the existence, even, of Able Danger?

Shenon:  An awful lot of people have told us they had no idea there was anything called Able Danger including Defense Secretary Rumsfeld. He said that publicly a couple of days ago. 

Pesca:  But it was created before he was Defense Secretary.  It was created under Hugh Shelton -- is that right?

Shenon:  That's right, and one of the things that's intriguing here is that dots weren't connected during the Clinton administration.  Previously, the focus on unconnected dots was on the Bush administration.

Pesca:  So Able Danger goes to someone higher up in the chain of command who nixes the idea of giving the information to the FBI.  When is the allegation that Able Danger tried to report this -- after 9/11 -- tried to report everything that had happened to the Commission?

Shenon:  The story as told by Congressman Weldon who is the Vice-Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee -- he's the #2 person on that committee -- he says that almost immediately after 9/11, on September 12th, in fact, he gets a call from these military intelligence officers saying, "Hey!  We know who Mohammed Atta is.  We knew more than a year ago who he was and we couldn't get our superiors to act on it.  Weldon says he then marched that material into the White House, into the office of Steve Hadley, who was then the Deputy National Security Advisor and is now the National Security Advisor, and urged him to act on it.  Weldon says he also repeatedly tried to contact the 9/11 Commission during the course of its investigation to get them to act on it.  He says that two of the members of the Able Danger team reached out to the members of the 9/11 team to talk them about Able Danger, yet there's no mention of Able Danger in the 9/11 Commission Report.  The reason for that is, according to the 9/11 Commission is that certain elements of the report being provided by these military officers didn't connect to what they knew to be true about Mohammed Atta and the hijacking plot.

Pesca:  [...]  You just said that they reported to the 9/11 Commission.  In your report it seems like that from one day to the next the story was that the report to the 9/11 Commission first took place during a trip to Pakistan? But then it later came out that a week before the report in Washington, the 9/11 Commission was told about the existence of Able Danger?

Shenon:  We have two instances in which it appears that members of the Able Danger team reached out to the 9/11 Commission.  The first was in October 2003 when a group of staff members from the 9/11 Commission is travelling in Pakistan and Afghanistan collecting information and they are briefed by a member of the Able Danger team about Able Danger.  Apparently the Able Danger team members were in Pakistan on some other duty. The story told by all four staff members of the 9/11 Commission who were there that they did indeed learn about a program called Able Danger but they heard nothing about Mohammed Atta and they heard nothing about the idea of an American terrorist cell.  And, in truth, that seems logical.  If only because if I were a member of the 9/11 Commission staff and I heard about Mohammed Atta, my ears would perk up.  Now, we have a separate incident about ten days before the Commission released its report last July in which a uniformed Navy Captain who's a member of the Able Danger team goes to the 9/11 Commission and says, Listen, you can't finish your report until you know more about Able Danger and he goes in and he has a briefing of, apparently, one or two hours with a senior investigator from the 9/11 Commission. He says, Listen, we know about Mohammed Atta in 1999, 2000.  We tried to get the Pentagon and others to act on it.  We were unsuccessful.  Your report should reflect that fact.  The investigator who conducted this interview says that the information provided by the Navy captain did not jibe with what the Commission knew was true.

Pesca:  Because he had dates off?

Shenon:  He had dates off.  According to the 9/11 Commission, the Navy captain claimed that Able Danger had determined that Atta was in the US in 1999 and 2000 when in fact the Commission knew from its travel investigations that Atta had not entered the US until the middle of 2000.

Pesca:  So here this investigator is, and we're talking a little more than a week before the deadline.  And he gets this information that is explosive but he says, Do I trust it.  Because they didn't want to put into the Commission Report things that they -- not just solid allegations.  Everything they wanted to put in the Report were things that they could say, We firmly believe this to be true.  So he had doubts about the briefing that he got from the Navy officer and he was reluctant to put it in the report.  Is that how you see it?

Shenon: Exactly.

Pesca:  And if it was in the Report -- forget what we knew then but on the basis of now -- would you say that this information would be the least solid of anything in the Report?  It seems to me that not to much of what was in the Report has been gainsaid.

Shenon:  I think that's true.  I think if you talk with the 9/11 Commission staff and some of the Commissioners, I think they'll tell you, Boy, I wish we'd put a footnote in and made mention of the fact that we are now being told that there is this program that existed in the Pentagon but that we have at this point been unable to corroborate.  I think they wish they'd made some mention of this.

Pesca:  And I'll get to Curt Weldon in a second but reading some of his comments -- even though some of the Commissioners say, We need to look into this now, Weldon was critical of the Commission then.  He thought the Commission dropped the ball.  What is he trying to get by criticizing the Commission in retrospect instead of taking the attitude, I understand in that in those hectic days they did the best job they could and there were things to raise red flags.

Shenon:  He has recently written a book about terrorism and he says he gathered much of the material for the book... as part of the research for this book he talked again with these military intelligence officers recently and gained the most explosive information from them only recently which is why he's coming forward now. 

Pesca:  Weldon's book is called "Countdown to Terror:  The Top Secret Information That Could Prevent the Next Attack Against America and How the CIA has Ignored It."  He's made some pretty pointed charges in that book.  CIA Bureau Chief, Bill Murray, who was if not is the Chief of Paris [sic], said that Weldon's main source on this took Weldon down a primrose path, misled him, and is not to be trusted.  Members of the intelligence community are saying that Weldon has little credibility on at least this issue.

Shenon:  Weldon is a very controversial figure in Washington even in his own party.

Pesca:  The timeline on him making this allegation the Times is writing about now --he actually mentioned this on the floor of Congress weeks ago, correct?

Shenon:  Years ago!  He talked about this in a speech to the Heritage Foundation in 2002.  Now it may be a situation where Congressman Weldon is such a controversial figure that people didn't hear him out as they should have a couple of years ago.  And it's not just Curt Weldon who's making these allegations now.  I didn't participate in the interview, but a colleague of mine did speak to a bona fide military intelligence officer who's also providing the same information.'

Pesca:  I got the impression that an organization like yours, in order to put these allegations on the front page, needed something beyond Congressman Weldon. 

Shenon: Well, I think we felt very secure after having talked with the intelligence officer.  Pesca:  And Weldon's allegations. Is the attitude now that, Let's put aside some of the things that he wrote in his book which are widely doubted and probably hurt his reputation in the intelligence community, and just look at this?  Or are people still looking at this with a raised eyebrow because of where it comes from?

Chenon: I think there still is some skepticism.  But I will say that I know the 9/11 Commission is scrambling as we speak to try to figure out what happened here. I think they know that if there's any hint of truth on what Weldon and these military intelligence officers are saying, the Commission has a big problem in terms of its own credibility.  Obviously.  Their report was widely hailed as having been the authoritative account of what happened on 9/11 and the government blunders before.  It does appear that something was brought to their attention and they may not have given in the due diligence it deserved. 

Note:  The Commission statement was released a few hours after this interview, on Friday evening, August 12.   Some of it can be found here.

Pesca:  And as far as the briefing from the Navy intel officer to the 9/11 Commission investigator where the dates were wrong -- which raised the red flag with the investigator.  I guess that was the reason why it wasn't in the report.  Have they explained why the dates were wrong?  Is that a major sticking point?

Chenon:  I don't think we've sorted that out yet.  Congressman Weldon thinks it's not a big sticking point and it certainly demanded some follow-up by the staff.  I will say that I was covering the story at the time but those final couple of weeks before they prepared this monster of a report were crazed for these staff members. To have a guy walk in at the last possible moment with what he claimed to be explosive information that wasn't checking out against what the Commission already knew...  You have to feel for the staff here.

Pesca:  ...This may be one big unconnected dot that the New York Times is writing about...[station break] We have the issue of "walls" where CIA wasn't supposed to talk with the FBI, where intelligence agencies are barred from monitoring US citizens and green-card holders. But Atta was never a green card holder so why does the wall in that instance apply here?

Chenon:  I just think the story as told to us by folks in the Pentagon and within Able Danger is that there were just huge sensitivities about the idea that the military might do anything that smacked of domestic surveillance and when they heard that Able Danger seemed to be gathering information on Atta and company and apparently on some American citizens, they got very nervous and they said, Listen, this is not our mandate.  We can't do anything more with this.

Pesca:  And one member of that Commission who worked for the Clinton administration helped set up those walls. That's Jamie Gorelick.  It has been suggested that perhaps this was a disincentive for the Commission to look into it if it was an over-reliance or misinterpretation of the walls that prevented information from getting to the right people.  But from everything I've been hearing you say and write, it never even got to individual Commission members.  Right?  It was an investigator who made the decision not to pass the information along.

Chenon:  Investigators.  We know of at least four.  But no, the Commissioners don't seem to have known anything about this.  And Jamie Gorelick was saddled during the hearings by some bloggers and others for responsibility for the wall.  The wall had existed for many, many years.  Pesca:  This was an outgrowth of the Church Commission, right? Chenon:  Right.  This has been around for a long time.  Jamie Gorelick happened to write one memo that made one reference to the wall in rather explicit terms.  But the wall was something that had been around for a long time 

Pesca:  And so what are the Commissioners now saying when you call them and say, We have this report..

Chenon:  They're very anxious to get to the bottom of this.  They have all, I think, been enormously gratified by the response to their Report and the action taken on the Report.  They feel great pride in ownership of it.  And I think they're very concerned that potshots are being taken that are unfair.

Pesca:  [Break; recap] Talk about the Commission today. Are they more or less a privately funded shadow Commission?  They don't have official investigative powers.  But what kind of work do they continue doing?

Chenon:  At this moment they're preparing a sort of report card, an update to the 9/11 Report that will be released sometime next month, that will grade the government on how well it has responded to the recommendations that they made last year.  I think all of that is being over-shadowed by this other issue, however.  They are a private group known as the "9/11 Public Discourse Project."  I think it was a very clever move on their part. They raised private funds.  They set up an office in Washington.  They have several staff members.  And I think that's given them, now, the ability to respond in a very concrete way to this controversy.

Pesca:  They're getting less [sic] documents than when they were an officially appointed Commission?  White House, Pentagon giving them some trouble, or at least refusing to hand over all the documents they want.

Chenon:  They're getting no documents. They've put in a request to the White House and to every major Cabinet agency asking for updated information on where things stand on the government's efforts to deal with terrorist threats.  And they've received no response.  Not even a courtesy letter from the White House thanking them for their letter.

Pesca:  I want to ask you about "data mining." I don't know how much you've looked into specific techniques or how much they can tell you -- it's probably classified -- about what kind of data mining Able Danger does.  I've done some reporting on this, and it sounds like one of those phrases that, well, you say "data mining" -- this must be some pretty high-tech stuff.  But with airlines, for instance, there's the COPPS system, a passenger-screening system -- and it does data mining which is a classified system.  But the person who invented this system told me "It's really simple" and has more to do with a person on a grid -- if you're an identifiable person as opposed to if you've been involved in terrorist activities.  He says it's a simple system, the COPPS, the passenger-screening system for airlines which actually pulled out, identified, red-flagged nine of the nineteen terrorists.  But the problem was it also identified thousands of other false positives.  How much do you know about Able Danger's data mining techniques?  Do you know if there were a lot of false positives?  Do you know how in-depth it went?

Chenon:  I don't know the answer.  But I understand from others that the Pentagon -- that one of the problems here was that Able Danger came up not just with names of Mohammed Atta and the other three hijackers.  It came up with a tremendous number of other names of very decent American citizens, people who shouldn't be coming under government surveilance in any way, shape, or form.  Which is part of the reason there was great hesitation to act on the information. 

Pesca:  Right this is how when you hear about programs like that, it's important to keep in mind not just the false negatives, in terms of the false negative being like the Phoenix flight school story -- I don't know if that was a false negative but that was someone who was missed.  Missing the bad guy.  There was also the question of identifying good guys as bad guys, which calls into question the effectiveness of a data mining program...

Chenon:  The effectiveness and the constitutionality of such a program

Pesca:  Let's take a call here.  Robert from Brooklyn:

Robert:  I believe that Jamie Gorelick was one of only two 9/11 Commissioners given access to certain sensitive documents by the White House.  And I believe another Commission member quit because of that.  I think every member should have been given complete access. 

Chenon:  I don't think that's correct, actually.  I think they were all given essentially complete access.

Robert: I could be wrong about that.  I also believe that the mandate of the Commission was to prevent a further catastrophe but not to assign any blame for the previous attack.  If we had this massive intelligence failure and also a failure of air defenses -- just neglect -- and no one was held accountable...  There was no blame assigned.  No one was fired.  No one was even reprimanded.  In fact, some people that were responsible for defense and intelligence were promoted.  I think we need a new independent investigation.

Pesca:  Thanks for the call, Robert. Was that the mandate or was that just how they decided to do their job?

Chenon:  I think that was how they decided to do their job.  There was a lot of criticism of the Commission for not singling out some individuals for blame. And of course, in this case, there really were some individuals to be singled out but I think the Commission, I think they thought that if they got into the business of finger-pointing, it would turn this into a very partisan exercise and make a unanimous report very difficult.  So they chose not to do that.

Pesca: Would this fall into that category? Able Danger?

Chenon:  I don't think so.  I think the criticism often made of the Commission, at least some of the Commission staff members, was that on occasion they went out of their way to defend the interests of the Bush administration or to protect the Bush administration from bad information.  Here we have information which possibly reflects badly on the Clinton administration.  You would think that the people who were trying to protect the Bush administration would want this information out if there's any truth to this theory.  But that's not what happened here.

Pesca:  [Break] I want to ask you about what you could call a local connection.  These hijackers were identified as part of a "Brooklyn Al Qaeda cell." What is the Brooklyn connection there?

Chenon:  [laughs] I think we're going to have to be clear about this at the paper because we're a little unclear about it.  It does appear that somehow the name "Brooklyn" is attached to the cell.  We don't have any information or at least I don' t have any information that these are actually terrorists or terrorist suspect who are actually in the Borough of Brooklyn.

Pesca:  So is it just like Charlie Foxtrot doesn't mean that someone named Charlie...

Chenon:  ...someone who does the foxtrot?  Somehow the name Brooklyn came up in the course of the data mining, not necessarily that they were in Brooklyn, but perhaps some information was passed through Brooklyn, or someone gave them the code-name "Brooklyn," or -- I don't think we've resolved that yet. Pesca:  Okay. So something for the data miners, the members of Able Danger, to sort out which were which... and that made sense to them for some reason we don't know. Chenon:  I don't think the residents of Park Slope have to be real worried!

Pesca:  Let's go to Walid from Brooklyn:

Walid:  [bad cellphone connection]... Able Danger seems like another way for the government to... avoid [?] the truth which is that Mohammed Atta... is really an alcholic [?] and I have new about him that he's really a [?] customer and...

Pesca:... Walid I can't understand your phone line, so.. Steve, from the Bronx.

Steve:  A lot of people think very highly of the 9/11 Commission and they did a very substantial job.

Pesca:  I sense you're not one of those people!

Steve:  No, I'm not one of those people.  First, people should notice that, unlike the Challenger Commission that studied the break-up of the Challenger two years ago and which had Richard Feinman on the Commission, a really honest, brilliant person, there were no people on the Commission who were noted for their extreme honesty.  No Nobel Prize winners or anything like that.  They were political hacks.  One of the things that the Commission said was that Mullah Omar of the Taliban was unconcerned about commerce with the outside world.  And then Madeleine Albright, shortly thereafter, in another presentation said that one of the few things that they had on the Taliban was that the Taliban wanted recognition from the outside world to build a pipeline.  So on the one hand the staff of the 9/11 Commission is saying they're unconcerned with the outside world and Albright is saying that they were concerned...  And nobody noticed those contradictions until I called them...

Pesca:  Thanks for the call.  Of course we have to look back and say the 9/11 Commission had as tough a job as probably any Commission had.  Philip, politics being what they are, everyone has criticism.  And I got the sense at least the 9/11 Commission at least after the Report was hailed pretty much by the public.  Is this tarnishing anything that the 9/11 Commission did?  Is this gaining any traction in terms of hurting their reputation, in retrospect?

Shenon:  I don' t know.  I think the Commission is aware there is a problem, however, which is why they are working aggressively today [Friday, 8/12] to try to get some sort of comprehensive statement about what happened here [statement was released that evening].  I think they know there is a threat to their reputations.

Pesca:  But still they're eager, or at least some of the Commissioners you talked to are eager, to take this up again.

Shenon:  I don't think they're happy about taking this up.  But I think they know they have to take it up.  Because certainly, if there is any truth in the account provided by the Able Danger team members and by Weldon, the Commission missed a very important bit of information in creating the definitive history of the 9/11 attacks.  And I think they need to get that corrected if that's the case.

Pesca:  And what has been the current administration's response?

Shenon:  We know that the Pentagon... we know that Secretary Rumsfeld asked his staff to get to the bottom of this.  We know that within the Special Operations Command at the Pentagon there have been a series of very high-level briefings in the past 72 hours to try to figure out what happened here.  I don't think there is much response from elsewhere in the government, however.

Pesca:  How like is it that Congress -- and I know that some committees have said that they're going to look into that -- how do you think this whole report is going to go?

Shenon:  You know what? The 9/11 Commission had real contempt, in many ways, for how Congress provides oversight on intelligence.  They want to see Congress investigate this.  I'm not sure they're very hopeful Congress will investigate this adequately.

Pesca:  Do you detect a partisan divide on this? Because the timeline here of everything we're talking about took place during the Clinton administration.

Shenon:  Partisan split in the Commission?  No, I really don't.  And one of the things I think was a tremendous accomplishment of this Commission -- your previous caller referred to members of the Commission as "political hacks" -- well, in the end they put aside their partisanship and came together on what everybody acknowledges was a very important report that made a lot of fine recommendationsm many of which have been acted upon.

Pesca:  If we look at this whole incident, does this, to you in your mind, represent a dot, maybe a big dot, that was left unconnected.  Or was it something else? Something of a different type entirely?

Shenon:  I think the former. I think it's just a big dot they may have missed. Actually, one thing that is lost in all this controversy of the past couple of days is, My goodness, if there is truth in this, the US military has a data mininig program that was able to identify terrorists long before they attacked.  That's actually good news.

Pesca: And maybe if these four were identified, could it be possible -- is there any reason to think -- that other organizations or other programs were working on parallel tracks, perhaps identifying other people who wound up being terrorists, or even people inside the country now who might still be terrorists. 

Shenon:  I suppose so. We talked yesterday to the Deputy Defense Secretary in the Clinton administration, John Hamry, and he said, Well, my goodness, maybe this is something we need to revisit in a hurry because apparently we may have had this capability several years ago, to identify terrorists.  And in terms of missed dots, in discussing the history of government action before 9/11, I think this is, if true, this is a hugely important missed dot.  Because if the information had been shared with the FBI in the summer of 2000, if the FBI had found Mohammed Atta and knocked on his door, think how different our nation's situation might be at this moment. 

Pesca:  And Able Danger -- has been disbanded? Is that going on still?

Shenon:  You know, I don't know if some remnant of it exists.  The program no longer exists.

Pesca:  Are the techniques still employed? We talk about false positives but here's an example of it working to some extent.

Shenon:  There are a tremendous number of data mining projects going on all the time.  They're certainly "black" or secret programs but I'm sure there are lots going on, all the time, as we speak. 

Pesca: And do you know if the specific kinds of techniques used here -- was there anything special about them? Do we know what those red flags were that got these four terrorists where other data mining techniques may have missed them?

Shenon:  We don't, and that's intriguing that some data that this team was able to uncover led them to this man that nobody had identified in this country as a potential threat.  Nobody overseas that we know had identified Atta at that point as a potential threat.  How is it that they came up with that data, if indeed they did.  And we don't have the proof at this moment.

Pesca:  And if the thing that prevented the information across the lines was this concept of the walls, even though as we discussed, since Mohammed Atta never had a green card, and they could have, by letter of the law, shared the information, what about now?  Has the law changed?

Shenon:  I think absolutely yes.  And I think that everybody within the federal goverment that has any terrorism/counter-terrorism issue knows that if you come up with a tantalizing piece of information like this, you get it acted on in a hurry.  And if you don't, your career is in grave jeopardy. So I think this information is brought immediately to the attention of superiors and shared.  And now we have a central coordinator for all this sort of information -- Ambassador Negroponte who's our new Director of National Intelligence.

Pesca:  Do you know if the letter of the law has been changed or just how they're interpreting it?

Shenon:  I think the letter of the law has been changed in all sorts of ways, most prominently in the Patriot Act, in terms of how information which was once considered privileged and private can now be pretty widely disseminated in the federal government.

Pesca:  Are you coming out with more reports?

Shenon:  We sure are!

8-12-05-- Re: 9/11 -- Release of New York Fire Department materials to the public following a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit

From an interview on WNYC's Brian Lehrer show on 8/12, conducted by Mike Pesca

Guests: Glenn Corbett, Professor of Fire Science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice
               David McCraw, lawyer for the New York Times which initiated the suit to
               release documents 

Mike Pesca:  Soon after 9/11the New York City Fire Department debriefed personnel and compiled first-hand accounts of what happened that day. Though they were intended for internal use, today written transcripts of those accounts plus transcripts of 9/11 calls and audiotape of fire dispatchers will be released... David McCraw: How did the release of these transcripts and tapes come about?

McCraw:  This all began in 2002 when, after the Fire Department refused to release any of the materials, I filed a suit on behalf of the New York Times and our reporter, Jim Dwyer, to overturn their refusal to release materials under the Freedom of Information Act.  Ultimately,as you know, we ended up litigating this through the Appellate Division to the highest court in New York, the Court of Appeals.  So we're gratified, after three years, to see the materials starting to come out.

Pesca:  Were you joined in your suit or were you helped formally or informally through any of the families of 9/11 victims?

McCraw:  That's right, Mike.  When Jim and I first went to court... we found several family members who'd come out to see the proceedings.  We were approached after that by Normal Siegel, their lawyer, and asked if we'd have any objection to their joining on our side of the suit to seek the release of these materials.  Ultimately I think there were eight families who became intervenors in the suit and who joined us through all the appeals. 

Pesca:  Glenn Corbett, tell me, as a matter of procedure, then-Fire Commissioner Van Essen got these testimonials on the record, what was the purpose there?

Corbett:  I would imagine it was really for historical purposes to document what happened that day.  Everyone understood that this was a tragedy of immense proportions and it was important to put on paper what exactly happened, what people experienced that day... the survivors. 

Pesca:  And was it so that the techniques could be improved?  or was it more of a therapeutic reason?

Corbett:  I don't know exactly what their reasoning was.  It certainly is important from our perspective of looking at what happened that day and certainly the most important is to learn from it and to help for the future.

Pesca:  And do you have any information on that?  What did the Fire Department say, Mr. McCraw?  What did the Fire Department say was their reason for doing these tapes?

McCraw:  That's a very interesting point, Mike, because we started this law suit, fire officials were quoted in the New York Times as saying there were two reasons:  one was for historical purposes -- just to make sure the record wasn't lost to posterity, and the second was that they thought these interviews were useful to family members in finding out what happened to their loved ones who died that day.  Once we filed the suit, they said, No, no, they actually were designed as part of interagency advice to help make sure the preparations were better next time.  We challenged that reason in court because the latter reasons would have allowed them to be held back as secret under the Freedom of Information Law.  Ultimately the Court of Appeals agree with us that these were for historical purposes and should be released in their entirety with an exception for some expressions of personal feelings.

Pesca:  ..... So that was the reason they gave.  And the reasons changed.  Do you get any indication of the real reasons or can we figure this out through common sense why they didn't want to release the tapes?

McCraw:  I don't know what the internal thinking was.  I think there was a range of reasons, as is often the case.  They were concerned that some of the things may actually show less preparation than they thought.  I think they were concerned about privacy in some cases.  Ultimately, though, I was heartened by the press released issued yesterday by the Fire Department which pointed out that the Fire Department officials think that the release of these materials will show -- and I think they will -- that a heroic effort took place that day.

Pesca:  Glenn Corbett, Professor of Fire Science, can I ask you pretty much the same question?  Why, from what you know about the workings of a fire department, why would they be reluctant to release the tapes?

Corbett:  Well, I think they probably had mixed emotions, certainly for the families when it came to putting information about their loved ones out there.  But it's the families who are the ones who want this information.  They're the ones who want to know what happened to their loved ones because they don't know.... One woman I worked with doesn't know very much about what happened to her son.  He just disappeared that day.  And any information that we can glean from these records will certainly be important.

Pesca:  Are there big gaps in your knowledge?  Do we expect to get... you know... twelve thousand pages!  Mostly it's going to be stuff we've heard even if it's in different kind of detail.  Do you expect anything really new to be released today?

Corbett:  Well, I believe so.  Yes. And one of the most important things, in my mind, is how these transcripts, especially the transcripts from the oral interviews, how they square with the conclusions of the 9/11 Commission.  Because -- specifically when it comes to issues of radio communication -- the 9/11 Commission for all intents and purposes said that a large number of firefighters who were killed that day did hear the orders to evacuate but didn't do so.  And I just don't believe it.  From what I've learned and when I've talked to people about it, and anecdotally what we've seen already, and none of that information seems to support what I believe to be an erroneous conclusion in that Commission Report about radio communications that day.  The same radio that, ironically, the firefighters took to the twin towers in 1993 and was well documented was not what they needed that day....[muddled]... to properly communicate within those twin towers.

Pesca: But if you're right, hasn't the Fire Department gone on the wrong assumption and changed a lot of their radio communications since? 

Corbett:  Well, certainly the whole issue about radio communications is still an issue today.  You would have thought that, it's been almost four years now since 9/11, that we'd have a thoroughly robust communication system for firefighters around the City and we don't have that even today. And that's why I think is a most important issue that the transcripts will bring more information to the forefront about what happened back then...

Pesca:  David McCraw, can you explain exactly what the materials are?

McCraw:  ...There are three kinds of materials that we ultimately litigated over, two of which are being released today.  One is -- and the one we've been focusing on -- is mostly the oral history.   These interviews were done not only with firefighters but also with other personnel in the Fire Department in the weeks and months after 9/11.  They've brought folks in, interviewed them, asked them to recount what they remember about what happened to them that day.  There are 504 of those interviews being released today.  And that's going to be the bulk of the material that you're going to see.  Second, we're also getting the dispatch tapes.  These are the tapes of the internal communications and the dispatch centers and the firefighters that morning.  The third thing, which we won't see today but which the City is continuing to work on and will release at some point in the next couple of weeks or month, I hope, are part of the 911 tapes.  These are the tape recordings and in some cases transcripts of the calls made by civilians to the 911 line.  The Court of Appeals rules that we were entitled only to the operator side of those calls.  So when those are released we're only going to hear what the operator said.  Frankly I was hoping that we would get both sides because I think it actually would show much more about what was going on.  But those tapes will be released sometime in the near future.

Pesca:  And with the calls back and forth to dispatchers, we're getting both sides, all sides of those calls?

McCraw:  Right.  The defense, Mike, of the courts it ran something like this:  public employees -- people who were recorded as part of their public duties and public employment -- don't have quite the same privacy interests as a civilian making a call.  So the dispatch tapes are only Fire Department personnel.  That's why we'reg etting all of those today.  On the 911 calls, by 4-3 vote of the Court of Appeals, the Court held that the privacy interest of the callers outweighed the public interest in hearing those tapes.  We thought that was unfortunate.  Across the country, more courts than not have held that 911 tapes are public documents.

Pesca:  Glenn Corbett:  the dispatch calls -- will they give us good information?  Same question with 911 or half the transcripts of the 911 calls?

Corbett:  Yes, I think they will.  Any information that can place companies and perhaps even individuals in specific locations are certainly helpful to the families.  No doubt about that.  But it will also provide a more accurate historical record.  And, again, going back and looking at these will help us plan for the future and help us learn from what happened that day.

Pesca:  These families -- are they involved in official suits?  Are they suits against the City, suits out of curiosity or interest?

Corbett:  The families joined with the New York Times on this particular issue of getting access because, at the end, they have very limited information about what happened that day and they would like to know as much as is available out there.  I think they may find some things embedded in these thousands of pages of transcripts.  There may be some useful information for them there.

Pesca:  I'm wondering if any of them have suits pending or this could lead to a suit against the City or the airlines or any other parties?

Corbett:  Well, I'm not a lawyer but my understanding is that most of the lawsuits that happened filed by a variety of people against the airlines and against the City, some of those cases were tossed out of court for a variety of reasons notwithstanding just the issue of the victims' compensation fund which to all intents and purposes the person accepted the payments they basically waived their rights to sue any parties shielded by Congress in the months after 9/11. 

Pesca:  Right. But not every family did and some did so for whatever reasons and some just missed the deadlines.  But's some indication that some people to have suits pending.

Corbett:  To my knowledge there are still some active cases out there.  I don't know what their status is though.  The people I'm working with aren't really involved with that.

Pesca:  David McCraw.  Tell us about... there's a connection here to the criminal trial of Zacharias Moussaoui.  Could you tell us how that affects this release today?

McCraw:  Yes, that's an interesting angle on this. One of the things the Fire Department told us when we first tried to get these materials made public was that they couldn't be released because they were being used in the Moussaoui prosecution in Virginia.  Now, interestingly enough, Moussaoui has all of these materials redacted as part of his preparation and his right as a criminal defendant.  So we argued in court that there was no need to withhold any material on that basis because so much has been written about 9/11 that release of this material was not going to cause prejudice to a jury at some point in the future in Virginia, and second that it wasn't as if by hold them they were keeping any secrets from Moussaoui who already had the materials.  The court generally accepted our argument.  The trial court said that exemption -- the exemption for investigative materials -- shouldn't apply.  They should be released if that's the only reason to withhold them.  The appellate division upheld that.  The Court of Appeals gave the Justice Department the opportunity to make a further showing of why they should be withheld.  My understanding is that there are only two portions of 9/11 tapes that are being withheld for use in the Moussaoui penalty phase.

Pesca:  And what are those?

McCraw:  We don't know.  And we're still trying to make a decision about whether we should go back and challenge those.  We're working with the City to get a fuller explanation of what materials are being withheld.  If we think they're significant, we'll go back to court and make the same arguments that the release of that is not going to affect proceedings in Virginia. 

Pesca:  What are they being released as transcripts, not audio recordings?

McCraw:  The oral histories are being released as transcripts because, literally, that's what we requested.  We did not request the tapes.  Perhaps some other media organizations [other than the NYTimes] did, so our request is being filled as it was given.  On the 911 materials which haven't been released, we understand that some of those are in both transcript and in audio form.  So both sets will be released.

Pesca:  When you made your request, did you say if it's acceptable if they want to redact the names, or did you use the strategy of "let's request everything, and what they give us, they give us!" If individual firefighters don't want to be named, that's acceptable -- let's not go that far...

McCraw:  You know, our view on this was that the whole record should be made available.  We understand that this is a difficult day for some people just as when the Port Authority released similar materials two years ago.  But overwhelmingly what we found when the Port Authority released materials two years ago was a positive reaction.  People wanted to know.  People needed to know.  And I think the historical record deserves that.  So we took the position, after some thought about it, that whatever privacy interests were here should not outweight the great public interest in having a complete historical record.  There have been two lines of reporting done on this story which I think are important and which related directly to materials being released today.  One is looking at just how well the emergency operation took place, and the second was to look at whether there were structural conditions within the building which contributed to loss of life.  We think these materials help us do a better job of involving the public in the debate over these issues.

Pesca:  Glenn Corbett -- I know you're a professor of Fire Science.   Were you once a firefighter? 

Corbett:  I'm an assistant chief in Bergen County, NJ, right now.

Pesca:  Can you speak at all from the perspective of a firefighter?  I suppose there's a diversity of perspectives.  But would an individual not want his name on a report or even not want a debriefing to be made public?

Corbett:  I'm sure there are some individuals who would prefer that it not be done.  I think most firefighters would want that information put out there so that a body of knowledge can be developed because, even though we're four years out, there's still lot of issues about what happened that day.  Not only here but for other fire departments across the country.  And again, communications, command and control issues -- all things that, unfortunately, we haven't gotten 100% at this point....

End of interview

8-2-05: "Fresh Air" -- hourlong interview with Adam Liptak, New York Times and Anne Marie Squeo, Wall Street Journal, on Novak, Wilson/Plame, and the leak

Adam Liptak is National Legal Correspondent for the New York Times. 

Anne Marie Squeo is staff reporter for the Wall Street Journal, covering the Justice Department

Terry Gross is host of "Fresh Air," NPR's interview program produced by WHYY in Philadelphia

Gross:  Yesterday Robert Novak broke his silence on his involvement in the story.  What does his article tell us that we didn't already know?

Squeo:  I don't think it told us anything that we didn't already know.  He has written a column before, one column between the original column that disclosed Valerie Plame's name and now.  It was in October of '03.  And he seemed to repeat some stuff that he'd already said [then].  So I don't think there was much new stuff in there.  I mean Novak has now twice made reference to Who's Who in America and former diplomat Joseph Wilson's listing there and how it mentions his wife's name.  And he may or may not be trying to signal something, but...

Liptak:  The larger problem with Novak is that we're now in a situation where four different reporters have testified.  All of them have more or less laid out what they've talked about.  One reporter, Judith Miller, is in jail now coming up on a month.  And yet Robert Novak, although he's free to talk about what he may have said to the Grand Jury when he testified, just won't lay out the facts.  And that lack of transparency is a kind of violation of the bond journalists have with their readers -- not to say what their source was, I'm not suggesting that, but he should say what he has done or not done in cooperating with the special prosecutor -- in this case Patrick J. Fitzgerald.

Gross: One of the things Novak did say in his column is that Bill Harlow, the CIA spokesperson, who warned him twice not to publish the name of Valerie Wilson --or Plame -- Novak says Harlow never said she was undercover or that her disclosure would endanger her or anybody else.  And had he said that, Novak said, he wouldn't have printed it! Harlow says he couldn't reveal her identity as a covert officer because it's classified.  He'd be violating the law if he revealed that.  Adam Liptak, how do you interpret those different versions of the story?

Liptak:  He has, from time to time in very cryptic ways in his columns, alluded to what he was told.  And his line is sort of that, yes, the CIA told him not to publish but it was sort of a soft request and if they'd asked better then he wouldn't have published her identity.  And somehow this latest comment got him worked up and he came back to the subject.  But he concedes that he was told by the CIA that they would like him not to publish her identity -- and why else would the CIA ask but that it would compromise some aspect of their operations.    

Squeo:  Just one point to add -- it's a sort of interesting thing -- I haven't covered intelligence per se in my career, but in talking to my colleagues who have, you just don't publish CIA agents' names without really good reasons.  I mean it's fine to publish the Director or the Deputy Director and high ranking official who's in the public sphere, but the average CIA agent isn't named so often you can't know whether they're undercover or not.  And it's always been very widely accepted by reporters that they just don't publish CIA agents' names willy-nilly.  And it appears they have done that in this case.

Gross: Novak is clearly not a fan of Joseph Wilson and doesn't think of Wilson as being very credible.  He says in his column yesterday, Wilson was discarded a year ago by the Kerry presidential campaign after the Senate Committee reported that much of what he said "had no basis in fact".  Covering the story, do you think that Joseph Wilson's credibility has been factually undermined. People have been trying to undermine his credibility, but is there any evidence that he's really not credible as a source about Saddam Hussein's attempts to buy yellowcake from Niger?    

Squeo: Certainly there are people who are less credible who have put themselves out there as experts on Saddam Hussein and Niger.  What's interesting about that original Bob Novak column was that it isn't all that critical of Joe Wilson.  That seems to be a relatively new thing he's gotten into.  The man did have a resume that would make him an obvious candidate for this.  He probably didn't do himself any favors by joining the Kerry campaign which could give this whole situation an air of partisanship.  But he went there [Niger], which is more than a lot of other people did at the time and he talked to a lot of people and he came away convinced that this thing hadn't happened.  And certainly the Administration has since agreed that was something they probably shouldn't have included in the State of the Union address.    

Liptak:  I think you've got to separate out two issues.  One is a detail but probably an important detail, Wilson may have overstated the situation. He fairly categorically said that his wife had nothing to do with sending him to Niger.  Most people now agree and the Senate Committee found that she suggested his name.  She didn't send him.  She didn't have the power to send him!  She didn't authorize sending him.  But she did have a role in sending him to Niger.  And I guess that goes to the question of whether he was there in some sense in a nepotistic way, in a way that undermines the seriousness of his mission.  I'm not sure I buy that but it is a topic that's at least worthy of discussion and Novak would say that's the topic his original column discussed.  On the other hand, it entirely a separate issue from whether one should violate the law for political ends in disclosing the identity of a CIA agent.  Whatever the motivation.

Gross: You could argue that it's in the best interest of President Bush and the White House to downplay this whole story of the CIA leak as much as possible because, let's face it, people in the Bush administration are implicated in this.  Karl Rove.  Lewis Libby.  Did they help leak the name or did they leak the identity of a covert agent.  You could also argue that it's in the best interests of Bush's opponents to keep this story going because it might finally discredit people in the White House.  Are you getting a lot of sources who are trying to spin this story for you now, and are you actually getting leaks from each side trying to spin the story.  Adam?    

Liptak: It's a funny thing.  Because even as this case is supposedly drying up confidential sources all over town in this very case, people are leaking like crazy!  And of course they leak for partisan ends, but that's not unusual in the world of leaking.  People generally have an agenda and it's the job of the journalist to try to filter out the facts from the agenda.  Is this good for Democrats and bad for Republicans?  Seemingly so.  That does of course color the way people talk to you. It's very hard.  Grand juries are secret, meant to be secret, and perhaps Anne Marie has had better luck than me.  But Patrick Fitzgerald, the Special Prosecutor, has run an exceedingly tight ship.

Gross: Would you talk a little more about the difficult of covering a story that involves a grand jury investigation when the special prosecutor has urged everybody not to talk about their testimony?    

Squeo:  As Adam just said, grand juries are meant to be secret.  At the end of the day, most often they end up indicting people.  But they also don't at times based on the evidence they've seen.  And this case has gone on -- I guess this grand jury was empaneled in January 2004.  So they've been at this for a while.  And they've had some big lulls as a result of the appellate process for the media subpoenas and stuff.  But they've gotten a lot of information and no one covering this story... I mean I wouldn't put myself out there as having any idea when there will be any indictments.  It's that secretive.  That's what actually makes this quite hard, because when you get dribs and drabs from one side's attorney or some other folks, you really don't know how they know this except through their client.  Obviously if you're a good prosecutor, you're asking questions that may or may not be giving the witness any sign of where you're going.  At the end of the day, the witness walks out of the room not knowing what you were thinking. So Karl Rove can sit there and testify and he can leave the room -- and he's obviously a very brilliant man but he may have no idea of what Pat Fitzgerald was really after and what question was the most crucial one to him.  That said, Karl Rove has been called back to testify three times which even his own defense attorney would admit is not normal!  That's a fairly aggressive call-back.

Gross: Let's some up what we know so far about this investigation and what we know about different people's involvement.  Let's start with Karl Rove. Adam Liptak, what do we know so far about Karl Rove's involvement?   

Liptak: The only thing we know for sure is that he talked to Matt Cooper and that he talked to Robert Novak and that in each case while not using the name of Valerie Plame (or Wilson) he, at a minimum, confirmed her identity as a CIA operative.  And whether that was benign or not, whether that violated or not the 1982 law that's at the root of this investigation.  It's fairly hard to violate.  But it's a serious criminal statute and it makes it a crime to intentionally -- knowingly -- disclose the identify of an undercover agent who has been in the field in the past five years and whose identity you know the government is trying to keep secret.  That requires quite a lot of knowledge, actually.  And one thing we're hearing from Rove's camp is that Rove contends he heard this information directly or second-hand from journalists which would suggest that he didn't have the kind of knowledge required to violate the law.

Gross: What do we know about Louis Libby's involvement.  Libby is Chief of Staff to Vice President Dick Cheney.    

Squeo: Well in that case we know he spoke to Matthew Cooper because Cooper has testified about that conversation.  ...And Libby also said he heard about it from a journalist.  The interesting element of the journalist defense -- which is an interesting one for this administration! -- is if these guys also knew this, they also had at the same time this State Department memo that everyone has been focused on -- which makes clear that her identity is secret and she's a CIA operative. And they also had access and knew independently that her identity was classified.  Even though they heard it from a journalist, they still broke a federal criminal law for releasing classified information or confirming, even, classified information.  So the 1982 law is, as Adam said, very narrow.  It was written specifically to address the Philip Agee situation where he had list of CIA agents he disclosed maliciously, intending to hurt the US and the potential welfare of these agents.  And that's a hard bar to get over.  But there are federal criminal statutes which require those with access to classified information not to release it and not to confirm it. Now of course that's difficult because in this town classified information is released every single day by accident and on purpose.  But that's certainly available to the Special Prosecutor if he wants to go ahead and make charges in this case.  If he decides that it doesn't violate the 1982 statute but in fact it did violate this other aspect of the law.

Gross: Let's look at the State Department memo that was circulated just before Robert Novak's column was published.  It was written to then Secretary of State Powell.  He is known to have had it on Air Force One.  What is the importance of this State Department memo?    

Liptak: Well, it goes back to Anne Marie's point that to the extent State Department officials may have shared Valerie Plame's identity with journalists knew it from a classified source like that memo they may well be in trouble under the 1982 law.  So what Fitzgerald seems to be doing is trying to nail down what their source of information was because he does need to know that they learned it from classified sources or at least knew it from classified sources at a time when they may also have been hearing it elsewhere.

Gross: Alberto Gonzales, who is now Attorney General and in 2003 was White House Counsel, was told at 8:30 in the evening on September 29th 2003 that there was going to be an investigation into this CIA leak.  But it wasn't until the following morning -- twelve hours later -- that he informed the White House that it had to preserve all materials relevant to the investigation.  There was one person he told the evening he was notified and that was the White House Chief of Staff.  Adam Liptak, what questions does this raise?    

Liptak:  Obviously it would have been better to do everything immediately.  But I have seen no indication and there's been no allegation that in the meantime anyone was destroying evidence, that they have  [...] given access that allowed him to pinpoint particular conversations between particular officials and particular journalists.  So I suppose it would have been better if the email saying "preserve all documents" went out the moment Gonzales knew.  But in the real world a twelve-hour gap is not the most unusual thing.    

Squeo:  Yes, I think that's right.  I think that's a little bit of a red herring folks have latched onto.  Perhaps they did destroy a lot of documents, but as we all know it's kind of hard to destroy phone records and emails have a shelf life longer than a human one these days.

Gross: What do you think is the larger significance -- the larger questions that this story raises?  We're still in the question phase.  We don't have a lot of information.  But, knowing what you know now, what is this story really about -- what is the larger story about?    

Liptak:  You know, I can't help but be fascinated by the press angle here.  The Wall Street Journal -- and Anne Marie was one of the reporters on this -- had a really good story about how Time magazine and the New York Times took quite different positions in the end about how they and their reporters should cooperate in this investigation.  And I think one of the many things that this case has exposed is a sort of fault-line between different kinds of media companies.

Gross: Anne Marie, in the article you co-wrote in the Wall Street Journal about why Matt Cooper and Time ended up getting a different lawyer from the lawyer they originally started out with because they and Judith Miller were originally represented by the same lawyer.  You write about how Matt Cooper and Time felt that their interests were diverging from Judith Miller's.  In what ways?    

Squeo: I think that there were two issues for Matt Cooper. One was that he'd agreed at one point in 2004 to testify about his conversation with Scooter Libby after he'd gotten permission from Mr. Libby to do that.  And Judith was fairly public at that time in saying that she didn't believe that these waivers that the Special Prosecutor had obtained from administration officials were valid.  That they were a requirement, that they had to sign them, that they were coerced.  There was already some friction there.  Cooper has decided that his waiver from some expressed permission from Libby has allowed him to testify.  Miller is out publicly saying that she thinks these waivers were coerced.  And there is this interesting separate thing between Miller and the Special Prosecutor because they've got a separate case going on involving an Islamic charity that may or may not have been involved in terrorist financing.  Patrick Fitzgerald in that case has tried to obtain Judith Miller's phone records in order to prove that the New York Times story about this charity may have tipped them off to the fact that the FBI was going to raid them.  And a judge in New York denied his request.  So there is this tension point between Miller and Fitzgerald.  I don't know if that affects his thinking in any way, shape, or form, but it was another difference between Cooper's situation and Miller's situation.

Gross: In describing Cooper and Miller [...]  Miller didn't think a blanket waiver was a serious waiver.  Cooper's lawyer asked for and ended up getting a personal waiver.  I'm not sure that Miller ever asked for the personal waiver.  She might have accepted it had it been offered, but I don't know that she actually asked for it.    

Liptak:  Let me first say that I'm here as a reporter and I don't speak for Judy and I don't speak for the Times. But I can say that Judy and her lawyers have declined to answer the question of whether they have done anything at all to contact the source and try to obtain a satisfactory waiver.    

Squeo:  Certainly as a bunch of journalists who love to study themselves I think this media stuff is interesting.  But I also think, as someone in this profession who's spent a lot of time in Washington that it kind of revealed in a way we don't see every day this dark underbelly of how the spin machine works, especially in a White House under siege over our war in Iraq.  These are not things that we, well, sort of privy to it ad hoc, depending on your own personal conversations with various people.  But this whole investigation has exposed in a very public way the kinds of lengths that this administration -- any administration, probably -- goes to to protect the boss and try to discredit the folks who are delivering the bad news.    

Liptak:  And, to put the worst spin on it -- it's not clear what the right spin is! -- but to put the worst spin on it, the Administration may have endangered a CIA operative or if not her the sources she dealt with while undercover abroad in order to gain political advantage in connection with a very controversial war.    

Squeo:  And a short term political advantage. I think that's sort of the key.  This has a long-term impact on her and anybody she may have had dealings with overseas, but a short term impact.  Because the Joseph Wilson thing would probably have hit for about a week or two and it would have been upstageed by some other event probably also related to the war but not about Joseph Wilson anymore.  So this is a fairly aggressive attack on something that may or may not have dissipated with the apology they ended up giving for the State of the Union. Had they not turned on the spin machine full blast, perhaps it would have gone away.

Gross: Do you both agree that the story is not just about the leak of a CIA operative's name but it's about White House efforts to discredit information that contradicted their point of view?

Liptak: That's essentially what Patrick Fitzgerald says in his papers.  So that's the raison d'etre of the investigation -- that this was an attempt to silence or punish an Administration critic exercising his First Amendment rights.  And I paraphrase, but only a little bit, from what the Special Prosecutor has put in his court papers.  So that is not a pundit's opinion but the opinion of the person conducting the investigation.

Gross: The New York Times is part of the story. Judith Miller from the New York Times is in prison because she will not reveal the name of her confidential source or sources.  So is the fact that the New York Times a part of the story affecting the kinds of resources the paper is putting behind investigating this story?

Liptak:  I think the answer to that is "no."  I think that Anne Marie's right -- that this is a big story regardless. If anything, on the Judy Miller aspect of it, our executive editor, Bill Keller, has been quoted as saying he doesn't want to see the sort of jailhouse interviews with Judy and "how's Judy doing" kinds of stories that might elicit sympathy for her.  Because that would amount to a sort of special pleading.  And I think the paper is trying to do its level best to make a news judgment unaffected by the fact that it's a player in the case.  At the end of the day, it's for others to judge whether those judgments are being correctly made.  But I have the feeling that we are doing what we can to neither come at it too hard or too soft.  And I do that from a relatively difficult position of covering a story involving a colleague in my own paper that I have never had the sense of being guided in one direction or another other than to write it as straight as I can.

Gross: Has either of you broken new parts of the story? and would you describe what that part was -- how it furthered the story?

Squeo:  Last week -- I think it was last week -- we broke a story on the State Department memo and how the part of it that talks about Valerie Wilson and her role in her husband's trip to Niger was marked, at the beginning, "Secret [?]" which basically means in the world of classified information that this was information, just below "Top Secret," the government knew was not supposed to get out.  We then found out that the entire memo was stamped "Top Secret" which would have given anybody who saw it a clue that they shouldn't have been discussing it very widely.  So that was one of the interesting stories that we just found out about.

Gross: So the implication was that anybody who got the information from this State Department memo...

Squeo:  ...would have known... would have known they shouldn't be talking about it.

Gross: Right.  And would make be likely that they could be charged with breaking the law that forbids you from [sic] revealing the identity of an undercover agent.

Squeo:  Possibly not that law, but the [other] law that says you're not supposed to be disclosing or confirming classified information.  Remember, that [1982] law is so narrow that I'm not sure any prosecutor wants to bring a case under that unless he really has a ton of evidence to support it.

Gross: Anne Marie, did you co-write this story?

Squeo:  Yes.

Gross: What can you tell us about how you got access to the memo?

Squeo:  Well, in this case we talked to people who had the memo.  It wasn't that I necessarily had it.  As we were saying earlier, this is one of those stories where you're trying to figure out every day who else might have a piece of information that I haven't talked to you yet and I talked to as many people as possible. Because we are in this vacuum and the Special Prosecutor is not telling us anything.  Not that he should be, necessarily.  Grand jury proceedings are secret.  There is this appetite to try to figure out what Pat Fitzgerald is trying to figure out.  So we're all trying to act as our own special prosecutors.  I think there's a momentum here.  All the news organizations are trying to do smart analysis, trying to get information that may or may not be shedding light on the investigation. And figure out where this is going.

Gross: Adam Liptak -- parts of the story that you broke?

Liptak:  I think the Times was the first paper to establish that Karl Rove was Matt Cooper's source and that seemed to move the story forward significantly. We had that in a story on the day that Judy Miller was jailed and it got a little lost in there but it was nonetheless a real turning point in the case.

Gross: And did you co-write that article?

Liptak:  Yes.

Gross:  Is there anything else you could say about how you got the information?

Liptak:  I think I shouldn't!

Gross:  Right! [laughter] There are very spirited editorial pages at each of your papers.  I know reporters are separate from the editorial pages of newspapers, but I want to ask you about the editorial position on the story in each of your papers and how, if at all, it's affecting the reporters covering the story.  Anne Marie -- let me start with you and the Wall Street Journal...

Squeo:  ...Oh great!  [laughter] ...

Gross:  ... On the Wall Street Journal on July 13, there was an editorial that read: "We say that the White House political guru deserves a prize.  For Mr. Rove is turning out to be the real whistleblower in this whole pseudo-scandal.  He's the one who warned Time's Matthew Cooper and other reporters to be wary of Mr. Wilson's credibility.  He's the one who told the press the truth, that Mr. Wilson had been recommended for the CIA consulting gig by his wife, not by Vice President Dick Cheney as Mr. Wilson was asserting on the air waves.  In short, Mr. Rove provided important background so Americans could understand that Mr. Wilson wasn't a whistleblower but was a partisan, trying to discredit the Iraq war in an election campaign.  Thank you, Mr. Rove."  Anne Marie, how did that editorial play among the reporters who were out there covering the story, and who were considering the investigation to be a very grave one.

Squeo:  Can I say "no comment"?

Gross: You can say whatever you want!

Squeo: I mean, I make no defense of opinions stated in our editorial page.  They obviously approach a lot of different topics in ways which are frequently at odds with the reporters who are covering the story.  But there's a world of difference between our mission statements, news reporters and editorial writers.  I think it's an important story and maybe Karl Rove should get a prize at the end of the day, but I don't think we know that from any of the information that we have now.  And I certainly would never feel comfortablel stating something like that.

Gross: Adam Liptak -- the New York Times has been, on the whole, very critical of the Bush White House and obviously supports Judith Miller's position in not revealing her source.  Have the New York Times editorials affected the reporters covering the story or affected your ability to get sources to talk with you?

Liptak:  No and no, I think. If there's something to be said about the New York Times editorial page -- and the Wall Street Journal has criticized it on these very grounds -- it did call quite stridently for the Special Prosecutor to investigate the leak and might have done a better job looking over the horizon a bit about where that might lead, which is to say, to our very own doorstep.  So there is, shall we say, an irony to that.  The editorial page's positions do not affect our news coverage.  And I read them with interest and amusement as I read the Wall Street Journal's editorials with interest and amusement.  We're in the business of trying to nail down facts.

Gross: Have your papers changed their policies on leaks? and how to refer to leaked information in articles?  Adam?

Liptak:  Well, over the past couple of years we have become much more sensitive to trying to minimize the number of confidential sources used in our reporting.  And when we do, to try to explain as best we can and be as straight with the reader as best we can in saying who these people are, why they're in a position to know, and what their biases might be.  I think we still have a long way to go on that.  Looking forward, I think our paper is more geared to trying to figure out ways to protect our sources better -- to make sure we don't find ourselves in the position that Time did when it felt compelled to turn over emails disclosing the names of confidential sources and to make sure we don't have phone records in the hands of third party providers or travel records in the hands of travel agents.  Or anything else that might disclose confidential sources that prosecutors, litigants, and others could get their hands on.  So we're taking a very hard look at that.  I think at other papers -- the LA Times and I think I remember the Wall Street Journal's general counsel Stuart Karle speaking to this too -- people are wondering what sort of deal a reporter on his or her own is authorized to make with a source.  Are they allowed to make "I promise to go to jail" deals with their sources knowing that their company will stand behind them if they do?  My impression at the New York Times is that is, was, and will continue to be a deal that I'm authorized to make and that I believe I will uphold.  I'm not sure, if I were a source talking to Time magazine, I'd be all that comfortable knowing that they would protect me to the very end. 

Gross: Do you tell sources you're willing to go to jail to protect their identity?

Liptak:...If they ask...

Gross: Right.

Liptak:  And if it's the appropriate case. It's not always the case.  But in the appropriate case... And let's not forget this:  lots and lots of important information that bears on the conduct of government and powerful institutions can only be gotten by promising people whose jobs, and in the case of Valerie Plame some say their lives, could be in danger except if people manage to keep secrets.  And those secrets have been the basis for Watergate, for the Pentagon Papers, for countless incredibly important stories.

Gross: Anne Marie, has the policy changed at the Wall Street Journal for taking information from confidential sources, or describing that information in the paper?

Squeo:  No.  The policy hasn't changed at all.  The Journal has always been kind of very rigorous and doing seminars with reporters about these kinds of arrangements, what it means.  And certainly that's going on now because our general counsel, Stuart Karle, whom Adam just mentioned, is going round the various bureaus.  He just came to Washington last week and we had an hour sit-down with him and asked him questions.  And the biggest concern, I think Adam rightly stated, for us is how to make sure if we're confronted with the same situation and the Wall Street Journal is in some kind of weird position in which Dow Jones, our parent company, is going to be fined every day because they're in possession of some notebooks... Most of the media outlets and certainly most of the reporters I've spoken to are worried about and actively addressing is how do we take our notes -- how do we do our jobs -- in a way that protects both our sources and ourselves from a subpoena.

Gross: One of the interesting things here is that in some cases you may have to rely more on memory if you don't want there to be a paper trail with confidential sources.  And it puts you in the position of almost being like a spy who has to eat the document and worse, so that there's no evidence.  And one of the important things about reporting is having notes so that you can check yourself.  So that you have not just memory -- which is faulty -- but you have paper, you have evidence of what somebody said.  Is it difficult to do your job and not leave a paper trail?

Squeo:  Yes, I think it is. But you know Matt Cooper's emails to his boss didn't have to take place.  He could have gotten up and gone down the hall and talked to him or called him on the phone.  There are ways we can try to narrow the possibilities.  Right?  We've all gotten too reliant on email.  And cellphones!  Cellphone records are so easy to get that we don't think about it anymore.  It used to be that reporters routinely used pay phones to call their sources.  I had a colleague who used to mail prepaid phone cards to his sources and tell them only to call him on that and we used to joke that he was paranoid.  But apparently he had the right idea!  There are little ways we can do this.  It's impossible not to write stuff down, I think, especially when you're dealing with an elaborate story.  But there are little things you could do that would make a big difference.

Gross: If given your druthers, would you cover this story through to the end?  yourselves?  I mean, do you want to stay on it?

Liptak: Yes!

Gross: Adam, why do you feel so strongly about it?

Liptak:  As we've sort of explored it in the past hour, it's got so many great strands to it.  It's just fascinating.  It's authentically important.  It implicates justice, intelligence, foreign policy, the role of the press.  It's a terrific fascinating story and I only wish it were a little less tangled because I have the feeling that sometimes readers get lost when you try to explain, as we have in paragraph after paragraph, the tangled background of the story.  But the patient reader who is willing to absorb and take it all in will find that it's a very illuminating, interesting story.

Squeo:  Absolutely.  I think that, as a reporter, these are the kinds of stories you want to cover.  It's kind of invigorating and every morning you pick up your rivals' newspapers with dread and anticipation.  They may have scooped you or you're  really excited because you may have scooped them.  If you're a reporter, this is a hot story.  There are a lot of very interesting aspects to it.  And there's still so much intrigue about it that we have yet to find out. And that was one of the interesting points I wanted to make to you.  We don't know if we'll ever find out what has happened in the last two years.  Because at the end of the day, if the Special Prosecutor decided not to bring charges against anyone, because he's not an Independent Counsel under the old Independent Counsel law, he has no responsibility to issue a report to tell us what we've all been chasing for two years, nor why he made the decision that he made.  It's kind of like a cliff-hanger.  We're really trying to put together where the story is going without have any idea whether whether we'll ever know where the story went.

8-3-05: Judith Miller, her reports and sources, and the New York Times

From NPR's Morning Edition:

NPR:  Judith Miller is currently the only person in jail in the investigation into who leaked CIA agent, Valerie Plame. As NPR's David Folkenflik explains, Miller's headlong pursuit of sources and scoops may shed some light on how she landed there. 

NPR:  In February, Miller explained to Terry Gross of WHYY's Fresh Air  why she was defying prosecutors to protect her sources.

Miller:  Because in investigative journalism, confidential sources are really the life's blood of what we do.  We can't operate without people who are willing to take a chance on us.

NPR:  Stephen Engelberg is managing editor for investigations at the Portland Oregonian.  Until spring 2002 he was Miller's boss at the New York Times.  He says Miller builds trust with sources because she shares their obsessions and passions.  But he adds a caution.

Engelberg:  Once you try and get your own information, you are now fishing in the waters the world's intelligence services fish in, water which includes very reliable sources, charlatans and fabricators. 

NPR:  Miller's sources have helped her break important stories.  Engelberg and Miller led the Times to a Pulitzer with the 2001 series about the danger Al Qaeda posed to the West.  The Times' managing editor, Jill Abramson, says Miller took great risks to travel with tribal warlords in Afghanistan.

Abramson:  Talk about guts!  She was, like, hopping on airplanes... that were like leaking gasoline as they went and had holes in the bottom of them...

NPR:  Miller joined the Times in 1977 after contributing stories to National Public Radio.  Since then she's written extensively on terrorism in the Middle East.  On September 8, 2002, Miller and Michael Gordon reported on the front page of the Times that US intelligence officials had concluded that Iraq had "stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons."  The clinching evidence involved aluminum tubes said to be for the production of nuclear weapons.  That morning, Vice President Dick Cheney, on "Meet the Press" said:  "There's a story in the New York Times this morning and  I don't want to talk about specific intelligence sources but it's now public..."  Just five days later, Miller and Gordon wrote another article.  They briefly noted that some government experts challenged whether the tubes could produce nuclear weapons.  That story appeared on page 13.  After the invasion of Iraq in 2003, Miller was embedded with a military task force charged with finding "weapons of mass destruction."  In April, Miller wrote that an Iraqi scientist told the task forced troops had destroyed the equipment days before the invasion.

Miller:  I think that they found something more than a "smoking gun."

NPR: Miller spoke on PBS' News Hour.

Miller:  What they found was a silver bullet.

NPR:  But the military didn't allow Miller to interview the scientist.  Instead, she watched from a distance as he pointed to sites in the sand for US task force members where they said he said the chemical weapons had been buried.  No evidence emerged verifying the man's claims, and as the Times conceded more than a year later, the so-called Iraqi scientist said that he was a military intelligence official.  Former Times investigations editor, Steve Engelberg, says he was appalled.

Engelberg:  What in the world is this!  I mean that was just so patently, as far as I'm concerned, below the standards that I thought the Times had for such things.

NPR:  Engelberg blames Times' editors for printing that story and others on "weapons of mass destruction" that the newspaper later acknowledged were seriously flawed.  Journalists say it's uncomfortable to criticize Miller while she's in jail.   Several current and former Times colleagues spoke on condition that they not be named.  They say Miller's record has been marred by her inability to sort reliable sources from unreliable sources.  A key one was Ahmed Chalabi, now an Iraqi government official.  As an exile, he gave American  reporters and officials information that often turned out to have been untrue.  Other journalists also relied on Chalabi.  But critics such as William Jackson of Editor & Publisher say plenty of them struck a more cautious tone than Miller did.

William Jackson:  The enemy "had weapons of mass destruction."  And I think that explains her involvement in the Plame case.

NPR:  On July 6th, 2003, Ambassador Joseph Wilson wrote in the Times about a government-sponsored trip to Niger.  He said he found no evidence Iraq sought nuclear materials there.   And his comments struck at the credibility of Bush administration officials.  That same month the Times asked a team of reporters to explain why the weapons of mass destruction had not been found in Iraq.  Miller was to report on why the task force she accompanied in Iraq came up empty. 

On July 14th, syndicated columnist Robert Novak cited "unnamed White House sources" who reported Wilson had been sent to Niger on the suggestion of his wife, Valerie Plame, a covert agent for the CIA.  The leak may have been a crime.  Top White House figures such as Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove and Lewis Libby, the Vice President's Chief of Staff, testified before a grand jury.  So did reporters. 

Miller did not, and her role remains a mystery.  Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has argued Miller can help confirm whether government officials were leaking information about Plame to punish Wilson.  But Miller never wrote about him.  Miller would not comment for this story.  She told Managing Editor Jill Abramson she's read several books in jail.  One was Alexander Solzhenitisyn's Gulag Archipelago, a memoir of life in a Soviet prison camp.