Shelton used to have lots of respect within the Spec Ops community, but when he became Chairman, JCS under Clinton he turned into a POS.
"The Rowley Memo
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
WASHINGTON Why did F.B.I. Director Robert Mueller desperately stamp "classified" on last week's memo to him from the Minneapolis agent and counsel Coleen Rowley?
Answer: Because he is protecting the bureau's crats who ignored warnings from the field before Sept. 11, and because he is trying to cover his own posterior for misleading the public and failing to inform the president in the eight months since.
In an example of gutsy newsmagazine journalism, Time reports this week on "The Bombshell Memo: How the FBI Blew the Case." The entire 6,000-word memo from the field agent who dared to blow the whistle — edited presumably for national security and libel — can be found on the Web site of time.com.
Last summer, the Phoenix field office, on the trail of a couple of radical Islamists, recommended strongly that F.B.I. headquarters examine flight schools around the nation for potential terrorists; the Washington bureaucrats did nothing.
Soon after, Minneapolis agents took action to jail another radical, Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen now accused as "the 20th hijacker," for overstaying his visa. The agents asked F.B.I. headquarters for permission to examine his laptop computer. Permission was denied, despite reports from French intelligence relayed from our Paris embassy of his involvement with international terrorists. Not until after Sept. 11 did we learn it contained the phone number of Mohamed Atta's roommate.
Intimidated by the brouhaha about supposed ethnic profiling of Wen Ho Lee, lawyers at John Ashcroft's Justice Department wanted no part of going after this Arab. F.B.I. Washington bureaucrats were, in agent Rowley's words, "consistently, almost deliberately thwarting the Minneapolis F.B.I. agents' efforts."
To this day, Mueller — Eric Holder's gift to Justice, held over by an entranced Ashcroft and determined to protect his benefactor from embarrassment — insists that even an unencumbered investigation would not have stopped 9/11. Not so, says Rowley; her memo told Mueller last week that his protestation was "an apparent effort to protect the F.B.I. from embarrassment and the relevant F.B.I. officials from scrutiny."
She asserts that "discovery of other terrorist pilots prior to September 11th may have limited the attacks and resulting loss of life" and "your statements demonstrate a rush to judgment to protect the F.B.I. at all costs."
This is an unprecedented indictment not only of the time-servers at Justice and F.B.I. headquarters last summer, but also of the director who has been insisting that the bureau is blameless ever since. Rowley, a 21-year veteran of the F.B.I. and mother of four (superagent and supermom), suggests that Mueller's men have been neglecting their duty to report potential violations of relevant directives to the president's Intelligence Oversight Board (as if that sleepy gang would lift a finger).
I was struck by déjà vu in her account of headquarters' dismissal of the warning from French intelligence about the suspect detained in Minneapolis. Higher-ups told the field agents that maybe it was another Zacarias Moussaoui — just as the spooks at C.I.A. told reporters that the Arab photographed meeting an Iraqi spymaster in Prague was another man with the name of Mohamed Atta.
Last week, recalling last August's request by George W. Bush to the C.I.A.'s George Tenet for a memo detailing the terrorist threat inside the U.S., I opined that the president had asked the wrong man. The officer charged with that responsibility is the director of the F.B.I., and the C.I.A. chief failed to ask the F.B.I. for his information. That would have blasted loose the suppressed reports from Phoenix and Minneapolis.
In unattributable response, a "senior administration official" claimed that some analyst at C.I.A. talked to somebody down the line at the F.B.I. That's foof dust; when the president needs to know the threat, our national security staff must knock top heads to provide it quickly and thoroughly.
Instead of identifying and promoting the best antiterrorist field agents experienced in operating within the U.S., as Rowley suggests, Director Mueller is importing from the C.I.A. a flock of analysts he touts as a "super squad." That compounds his mistakes and may undermine law enforcement. The C.I.A. and F.B.I. can work more closely together while remaining distinctly apart.
Mr. Bush: don't tear down that wall."