Posted on 06/29/2005 6:25:41 AM PDT by OESY
It is no mystery why Frances Fragos Townsend, President Bush's homeland security adviser and a former mob prosecutor in Manhattan, was called The Hurricane by the Federal Bureau of Investigation agents she once worked with in New York.
"You don't want to get on her bad side," said an admiring Pasquale J. D'Amuro, a former assistant director in the F.B.I.'s New York office. "If you think you're going to manipulate your way around, or not be aggressive in your approach, she'll rip you to shreds."
That personality has served Ms. Townsend well since Mr. Bush gave her the job of pressuring the obstinate bureaucracies at the F.B.I., the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon to adopt the radical reorganization urged by a presidential commission examining intelligence on unconventional weapons in Iraq....
The commission, led by Laurence H. Silberman, a federal appeals court judge, and Charles S. Robb, a former Democratic senator and governor of Virginia, made dozens of recommendations to overhaul the nation's intelligence system. Mr. Bush had little choice but to embrace the ideas, and he promptly gave Ms. Townsend - whose official title is assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism - until the end of June to carry them out.
Ms. Townsend is expected to announce the changes on Wednesday. Her White House team sided with the C.I.A. by rejecting a commission recommendation to give the Pentagon greater authority to conduct covert action, senior government officials have said. But Ms. Townsend endorsed a proposal to create a new, powerful intelligence chief at the F.B.I. and other recommendations to bolster the nation's spying operations....
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The NYTs?????????????????
"You don't want to get on her bad side," said an admiring Pasquale J. D'Amuro, a former assistant director in the F.B.I.'s New York office. "If you think you're going to manipulate your way around, or not be aggressive in your approach, she'll rip you to shreds."
That personality has served Ms. Townsend well...
Really? Sounds like the same description the NYTimes and disgraceful Dems have given to Mr. Bolton. I don't recall any glowing media admiration accompanying it, however.
If Elisabeth Bumiller likes her, you have to wonder whether Bush picked the right person for the job. This isn't just the Slimes, it's the Slimes personified by one of its worst Bush-hating insiders.
She is the woman who savaged Bush at a press conference for daring to question NewsWeak's destructive lies about flushing Qurans down the toilet at Guantanamo.
Well, if her nickname is "Frag"..that can move mountains of bureaucrats..
Yeah. If the NYT's likes her, she must be doing something very very wrong.
Might have something to do with this (from the article):
"She started......as a trusted but controversial adviser to President Bill Clinton's attorney general, Janet Reno, who asked Ms. Townsend to oversee how much information from wiretaps and search warrants could be legally shared by investigators and prosecutors - part of the so-called wall blamed for many of the intelligence failures before the Sept. 11 attacks ."
There is a ringing endorsement if there ever was one.
imo
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.