Ashcroft blames Clinton

[lukpac]

"Let's just forget about what we didn't do, just look at what Clinton didn't do (even if it may be a lot more than what we did)!"

Ashcroft blames previous administration for leaving country vulnerable to terrorist attack

Tuesday, April 13, 2004

BY CURT ANDERSON
ASSOCIATED PRESS

WASHINGTON - In a veiled swipe at the Clinton administration, Attorney General John Ashcroft testified Tuesday the nation was stunned by the Sept. 11 attacks because ``for nearly a decade our government had blinded itself to our enemies.''

Appearing before a commission investigating the worst attacks in the nation's history, Ashcroft also said he moved quickly once in office to overturn a ``failed policy'' that he said allowed American agents to capture terrorist leader Osama bin Laden but not assassinate him.

In a nationally televised appearance, Ashcroft said the Justice Department had become addicted to a legal wall that had been put in place to separate criminal investigators from intelligence agents . ``Even if they could have penetrated bin Laden's training camps, they would have needed a battery of lawyers'' to take action, he said dismissively.

A long day marked by testimony and the release of a pair of written reports also raised questions about a briefing paper prepared for President Bush on Aug 6, 2001 and declassified over the weekend at the request of the commission.

Thomas Pickard, who was acting director of the FBI at the time, said he was unaware the document had been prepared. The report said the FBI had 70 field investigations under way of individuals linked to al-Qaida. But one member of the commission, Slade Gorton, suggested that many of the probes related to fundraising activities and not the threat of terrorist attacks.

Ashcroft slid into the witness chair on a day on which the panel issued reports indicating that a more nimble FBI and CIA working together might have uncovered the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist plot, and laying out an agonizing series of missed opportunities, half measures and bureaucratic inertia.

``We did not have great sources in al-Qaida,'' conceded Pickard, who was acting FBI director briefly at a critical period in the summer of 2001.

``We didn't have enough people to do the job and we didn't have enough money by magnitudes,'' added Cofer Black, former head of the CIA's counterterrorism activities. ``When you run out (of money) people die. When people die you get more money,'' he said bitingly.

The day also produced a clear-cut case of contradiction between Pickard and the man who was briefly his boss, the attorney general.

The panel's report quoted Pickard as saying Ashcroft told him in the summer of 2001 that ``he did not want to hear'' additional information about possible attacks, and the former FBI acting director confirmed that in his testimony.

But Ashcroft denied it forcefully.

``I did never say to him that I did not want to hear about terrorism,'' he said, removing his glasses for emphasis. Rather, he said, he ``interrogated'' him and asked him about the threat of terrorists.