Why Did It Happen? John F. Lehman, a member of the 9/11 Commission, speaks out of school at a restaurant
Interview, The Spectator
SPECTATOR INTERVIEW Why Did It Happen? The Spectator Interview: John F. Lehman A member of the 9/11 Commission speaks out of school—at a restaurant. As secretary of the navy under Ronald...
...All police agencies in the UK have a Special Branch responsible for national security issuescounter-terrorism—mainly, until recently, against The FBI, certainly the pre-9/11 FBI, had a deep cultural set of problems that go way back...
...TAS: They are still prohibited from enforcing immigration laws...
...LEHMAN: The president wanted to retaliate each time, but the bureaucracy, usually led by the Pentagon and the CIA, prevented him from doing so...
...For instance, in the '93 attack on the World Trade Center, none of the information developed by the FBI on the perpetrators was shared until the trial was over, years after, so that some people who were the main perpetrators were able to escape...
...We've had access to sensitive White House presidential documents and we have uncovered a lot of things ourselves quite apart from the documents...
...the police are prohibited from cooperating with INS, prohibited from enforcing immigration laws...
...TAS: If we understand correctly, the CIA was tracking some of the plotters but failed to pass the baton off to the FBI...
...They've got their own preconceived notions and most of them are depending on translators...
...It came as little surprise, then, that he was tapped to be one of the ten members of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States to investigate "what really happened" on September 11: What went wrong and why...
...TAS: Sounds like a bipartisan coalition...
...Still we don't have anything like a fraction of the number we need...
...TAS: Granted, the lawyers contribute to this, but the legal regime in this country does not encourage anti-terrorism measures...
...TAS: According to Philip Jenkins, the terrorism scholar, in counter-terrorism, if an arrest is made, that's usually a failure...
...TAS: More incompetent: CIA or FBI...
...That's a big issue...
...Nobody gets promoted in the FBI for sharing evidence...
...If you want to come to the U.S...
...In only a few cases were cruise missiles lobbed...
...LEHMAN: Prior to 9/11, very bad...
...LEHMAN: We will make very concrete recommendations to make changes, to fix things that are wrong now...
...once you're Ours is the only country in the world of any major size that doesn't have transit lounges...
...And then we've had people back...
...You never actually enter the country...
...He left the hallowed halls ofgovernment for the business world, eventually founding the eponymous J.F...
...FBI director Robert Mueller has done, I think, a really first-rate job within the parameters of trying to fix FBI, so much so that I think the organization that he's building—and it's not built yet—should become the core of any domestic intelligence agency...
...Carter we The chambers of commerce and the ranchers and large agriculture business don't want a tight immigration regime...
...TAS: What about customs...
...And then, if it can, it must be protected because if it's shared it can be disallowed as evidence...
...They had no discreet rapid retaliatory options ready...
...As long as you leave those loopholes open it doesn't matter...
...JOHN LEHMAN through the gates you're home free...
...Everybody in the bureaucracy has to be afraid of their shadow because we have created a culture where it is officially mandated that you shall rat on your brother anonymously...
...TAS: What will the commission's findings lead to...
...So you couple the transit without visa with these sanctuaries...
...If you have F-15s on alert in Massachusetts as the closest alert aircraft and they're being guided by radars that are looking out, not in, and the nearest alert aircraft near Washington is down near Norfolk at Langley field, that needs to be fixed...
...You can tighten up immigration as much as you like...
...The American Spectator spoke with Lehman about his work on the 9/11 commission—about national security, the intelligence community, immigration, lawyers, transit lounges—at an undisclosed Japanese restaurant in downtown Washington, D.C...
...One of these is Arabic speakers, Farsi speakers...
...LEHMAN: The Republicans are even more guilty than the Democrats because the small business lobby—the chambers of commerce and the ranchers and large agriculture business—don't want a tight immigration regime...
...LEHMAN: If you look at immigration, for instance, we have stirred up a lot of specific attention to anomalies—holes in security like the transit without visa mess...
...FBI has this cultural obsession that everything gathered cannot be considered relevant unless it can pass the evidentiary test of a grand jury and a judge...
...Not the State Department, which everybody tends to blame...
...TAS: Should the FBI continue to be in charge of domestic intelligence...
...LEHMAN: Under the transit without visa program, the traveler needed a valid passport and had to go through immigration...
...Until then, the airlines, the Air Transport Association, and various lobbyists had blocked every attempt by INS to get rid of TWOV or to force the airlines to build and pay for transit lounges...
...We've had access to far more material than any commission in history...
...So they never did get his hard drive...
...LEHMAN: Yes...
...They viewed it as a prosecution...
...One of the fights we have now with the administration is that we want access—direct access—to some designated people who are currently in detention, because we can't rely only on the CIA interrogators...
...This is a red hot issue in Texas, California, New York—anywhere where there are large immigrant populations who feel very strongly about keeping the door wide open for illegals...
...MARCH 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 27 SPECTATOR INTER EW of the government...
...They are not allowed to notify INS...
...TAS: What about under Clinton...
...LEHMAN: I can't take official positions just yet, but I think we've got to look at that...
...Are changes in law needed...
...More often than not, it was on the hawkish side...
...We're going back to what Osama bin Laden has said himself in interviews was the beginning of his plotting, namely the attack on the Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, and the fact that the Americans never retaliated against anybody, and then promptly withdrew...
...TAS: What other major national security shortfalls have you discovered...
...LEHMAN: (Laugh...
...And Congress actually passed, in that immigration reform law, sanctions against employers...
...It's MI-5 that makes the decision when to call the Special Branch in and MI-5 that makes the call when to roll the guy up and arrest him, or whether to keep running him, or to double him...
...Even when elements of the military did, as in Beirut, they hadn't been adequately staffed through the JCS process, and the bureaucracy slow-rolled the president, until it became weeks upon weeks...
...The British MI-5 model is the easiest to use as an analogy...
...TAS: Is it true that a lot of current CIA staffers are political liberals...
...Just because he's an Arab, you can't get a writ and search his apartment...
...They kidnapped the CIA station chief and they tortured him to death, and there was no retaliation for that...
...And so the voting power of these populations, in cities like Houston and Miami, and most of California, and New York City, is very substantial...
...The interested lobbies are a combination of agricultural and other industries in Texas and Southern California—states that have businesses that have become very dependent on foreign laborers...
...LEHMAN: I think the PATRIOT Act has given all the authority that was needed...
...As agencies get older, theybecome driven more by bureaucratic imperatives and careerism rather than the need to get the job done...
...What went wrong...
...LEHMAN: They both have deep-rooted but different problems...
...LEHMAN: Well, let's say they were of a particularly different worldview from the people they replaced...
...There was episodic and totally ineffectual enforcement...
...They kidnapped him 26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 2004 and then publicly executed him—hanged him—and sent the tapes everywhere...
...The two have a pretty seamless fusion of sharing, but the important thing is that neither of them has police power—neither of them is out to make its mark by putting Dillinger in jail...
...Why did the intelligence community fail to interfere with the plot...
...If you want to find the consistent obstructionist as an institution, it was the Joint Chiefs of Staff bureaucracy...
...Not just the big names, although we have had long interviews with the key Cabinet officials in the Clinton years, in the Bush years, and subcabinet people...
...MI-6 is the foreign intelligence...
...TAS: What kinds of change...
...LEHMAN: It made spying a much more gentlemanly business...
...It doubled, almost overnight, the flow of illegals into the country...
...They didn't share any of that information, which would have been very helpful to the CIA, and very helpful to people that were trying to put the al Qaeda picture together, because the perpetrators were very definitely, very tightly part of the same network from which al Qaeda sprang...
...And of course we have a whole new overlay since that onslaught of legislation in the early '80s, of whistleblowers and hotline calls and IGs...
...LEHMAN: It's a lot of identifiable things that are wrong that can be fixed...
...Many Hill staffers came in from the Pike and Church committees...
...TAS: So tell us about the fact-finding process...
...You've got three choices: continue to listen and learn...
...MARCH 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 31 We want access direct access to some designated people who are currently in detention, because we can't rely only on the CIA...
...FBI mishandled the investigation...
...So you can't share it with anybody...
...It is particularly important to know where the F-15s were at 15 minutes and 45 seconds on the day of 9/11...
...So essentially nothing has been done...
...TAS: How often is an inconsistency simply a matter of bad memory...
...JOHN LE AN the IRA...
...LEHMAN: That's often the case...
...LEHMAN: We are writing it as an unclassified report because most of what we have to say does not have to be done with classified information...
...Who are the translators and how are they translating...
...try to double them, try to co-opt the bad guys...
...They usually put things under seal if it's good hard fact...
...Anybody that got a little off from the house view or did anything that might find disfavor in Church Committee precincts risked having a dime dropped on them and facing an internal investigation that, even if they were exonerated, would hardly be helpful to their career...
...It's in every terrorist's handbook...
...The lawyers at Justice said no, you can't go in and grab his hard drive because that would be racial profiling...
...LEHMAN: I don't want to get into specific details at this point but there were a number of conspirators who were known, who were on watch lists, and there have been the many publicized huge breaches by the intelligence agencies—about not sharing information, about the famous Phoenix and Minneapolis memos that never went anywhere when they got to Washington...
...In New York and other municipalities like LA...
...It's about the Nazi saboteurs in 1942 that landed in Florida and Long Island, and how they were handled...
...It was supposed to tighten up immigration and tighten up borders while granting amnesty to illegals already here...
...TAS: What about the FBI...
...The FBI has a culture which is very good as cops...
...We're getting close to a thousand interviews with all the significant players...
...TAS: Well, we're with Shakespeare on this one...
...TAS: Let's turn to the intelligence agencies...
...TAS: How will the president's quasi-amnesty proposal affect efforts to close security loopholes...
...We will name names...
...The '86 amnesty was a disaster...
...But the PATRIOT Act was needed because more and more lawyers interpreted the existing national security wiretapping and surveillance regulations narrower and narrower and narrower, so that, in effect, according to press reports, they weren't allowed to go after Moussaoui...
...Since they are illegal, they're not going to bring any OSHA claims or EEOC claims, because the last thing they want to do is talk to any authority...
...But the attacks of 9/11 exposed a totally dysfunctional government...
...LEHMAN: You can trace it as far back as the Reagan administration but it gained real steam in the Bush administration: the increasing dominance of decision making by lawyers...
...How did FAA and the National Command Authority deal with it...
...TAS: Just how bad is the FBI's overall approach...
...TAS: Come again...
...Then we will have some classified annexes, some specific findings that are highly classified, that deal more with very specialized technical issues, or more sensitive areas...
...Ours is the only country in the world of any major size that doesn't have transit lounges...
...A perfect example, which did get into the press, was during the early days of the Afghan war, when they had Mullah Omar in their sights and asked for a fire order, and the lawyer for central command talked the commander out of it, because he said it would be assassination and in violation of Gerald Ford's executive order because you can't target a state official, and so they didn't fire...
...There are many, many shortcomings...
...I'm reviewing a book for the Washington Post right now called Saboteurs...
...Instead of having deep-cover operatives who engaged in dubious behavior, most of the spying became people under official cover in embassies...
...That was a huge changeover at CIA...
...In fact you could argue that the president inherently had the power and could have given it to his subordinates before the PATRIOT Act...
...It's going to be a full, probably bestseller, book, published by Norton...
...He's in the room, you know, and if don't cooperate, we'll turn you over to him...
...They always said well, first, we need more time to plan, second, we need 500,000 troops...
...TAS: Sounds like the Children's Hour...
...How did FAA and the National Command Authority deal with it...
...Ironically, many of the big unions are strongly in support of illegal workers as well, because illegals like to join unions for the union cards, which function as important documentation...
...TAS: Why did the Reagan administration not retaliate...
...That is why, by the way, the war against the Taliban was run by the CIA...
...Lehman & Co., a private equity firm that currently controls over $130 million in assets...
...TAS: Sounds like it also prohibited a lot of spying...
...It is fundamentally a mistake to have police prosecutors doing domestic intelligence, except forensic intelligence...
...LEHMAN: For those on the commission who have not had direct national security experience it's been something of a surprise to confront the huge dysfunctions in the intelligence community...
...It was Tenet's war plan, fully supported by Rumsfeld...
...When we put people under oath it's not because we think they're lying...
...There are plenty of Americans who would take these jobs if they paid more, but businesses like illegals because they'll work for half what an American will work for...
...TAS: Why...
...We want to know: How did NORAD react...
...At this point, the commission and its staff of 75 people almost certainly know a great deal more about this subject than anybody else, because we have had a great deal of cooperation from the administration, from the White House, and from most of the agencies How did NORAD react...
...FBI agents are the best in the world but they are trained to find criminals and put them away, not to penetrate cells, share and pool information, or prevent things...
...It's going to be on bookshelves within a month after we finish...
...You buy a ticket to somewhere else through New York or through LA, and when you arrive there you simply flash your transit without visa ticket and go through immigration, ditch the airline rep, get a taxi, and you're home free...
...CIA was more paralyzed by political correctness...
...TAS: What's the status of the transit without visa problem...
...LEHMAN: Our job is to find out the facts and fill in the blanks as to what were the origins of the 9/11 plot, who the plotters were, what they actually did, how it was put together, who financed them, where did the money come from, how did they get in the country, who assisted their logistics, and then what actually happened on the day of the attacks...
...TAS: You've been on the 9/11 commission how long...
...We caused the issue to be raised at the White House and the White House did the sensible thing...
...I think the president's policy is a good one if it is enacted with both sides of the coin: coupling a regime that documents and allows foreign workers, that does not give them citizenship but allows them to come and go seasonally...
...and you try to get a visa and you can't because you're on a watch list, all you do is go to a travel agency and pay extra for a transit without visa...
...TAS: So what now...
...What orders were given...
...They let him go...
...These had been longstanding and getting worse right up to 9/11...
...It's sporadic and ineffectual because after six years you have to rotate off, so it's a constant rotating chairmanship and a constant rotating membership, which means that nobody ever gets to fully understand the issues, so there's no clear direction...
...JOHN LEHMAN: Since it was set up, which was about December 15 of '02...
...Spies should be penetrating and co-opting terrorist cells...
...And then, following on the attack, Hezbollah kidnapped Lt...
...And that's part of a culture that's trained into them from day one...
...Even if the guy tells him that he's an illegal, the cop isn't allowed to do anything about it...
...Far more than the Pearl Harbor or Warren commissions...
...So they don't want to bear the cost of building transit lounges...
...LEHMAN: Transit without visa is a loophole that the 28 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 2004 airlines had kept open even though the INS has been trying to close it for years, because it has been a great source of revenue for the airlines...
...LEHMAN: Yes, absolutely...
...Obviously, we're drawing on what we have learned from classified information...
...It's to concentrate their minds so they go back and look up their records and give us their considered recollection...
...LEHMAN: More often than not...
...But if you allow that without enforcing the immigration laws it's a disaster...
...LEHMAN: The commission scheduled a hearing on the loophole last August after found out about it, and after some specific intelligence was circulated it came to the White House's attention, and they immediately suspended TWOV...
...Mike Higgins...
...We still don't have all the pieces as to what happened hour by hour...
...LEHMAN: In the Clinton years you've got Kobar, JOHN LEHMAN you've got Somalia, you've got the assassination plot of President Bush, you've got the Kenyan and Tanzanian embassies, and you have the murderous attack on the USS Cole...
...If you go through any country by way of any other country—say Thailand through Delhi—you don't need a visa to get to India in order to transfer to a plane to Thailand...
...Osama has said in several interviews that the scales fell from his eyes and he saw that the Americans were cowards and would not accept any casualties...
...TAS: Similar to the Danny Pearl killing...
...In every case, the lawyers were major decision makers in the process and especially in the Clinton years, which were dominated totally by lawyers...
...They were brought in wholesale during the Watergate period—during the Pike Committee-Church Committee hearings and the purges of CIA—specifically to create a new approach to intelligence which prohibited assassination, prohibited special operations, prohibited all of the bad things associated with the Cold War...
...The biggest problem was the development of an orthodoxy—a house view of things—within CIA, coupled with this huge process of bureaucratization...
...The intelligence community is in drastic need of repair...
...It has to be mandated for anyone who owns the airports to build the transit lounges, and of course the airlines have to pay for the cost of security, which they then have to pass on to their happy customers...
...We want to get to them and interpret the answers ourselves, and ask the questions that we want to ask them, not what Stansfield Turner's proteges want to ask them...
...They would share nothing with naval intelligence or Coast Guard intelligence or anybody else...
...Because the Pentagon—the JCS—couldn't come up with the plan...
...It's still prohibited for a New York policeman to even ask a person for his green card...
...There had been the unprecedented seizing of hostages in Iran and holding them for 300 days or so, and no retaliation...
...It is domestic intelligence...
...TAS: What form will the final report take...
...But it's the wrong kind of skill set and culture for the intelligence function which is, as you say, penetrating, running agents, countering, doubling them, learning, sharing, putting pieces together...
...LEHMAN: Congressional oversight of the intelligence community is appalling...
...As secretary of the navy under Ronald Reagan, John Lehman presided over the rebuilding of America's fleet...
...They cooperate...
...From this we hope to establish what went wrong—where our system of intelligence and defense failed in letting this massive conspiracy go forward, undetected and undealt with...
...Often they use the bad cop as the threat...
...The way it works at MI-5 is that MI-5 makes the decision, when they're running something, and there's a cell that's breaking the law, whether or not to turn them over to the Special Branch of one of the 50 or so regionally based police departments...
...It's foolish to say there are no Americans who will take these jobs...
...On what timelines...
...There's certainly no presumption that people are trying to mislead the commission or cover anything up, but putting people under oath really does help them to be rigorous with the facts...
...The mandate was, first, find out the real facts of what happened, starting from what we would see as the beginning of the plot...
...There was no enforcement so everybody said, Oh, we'll cross the border and live there and periodically we'll have an amnesty and become citizens...
...Where there've been inconsistencies, we've put people under oath to sort them out...
...LEHMAN: We've established quite a bit...
...We're assembling a minute by minute chronology of the response to the attacks...
...Now there is always a choice that has to be made when you penetrate a cell...
...TAS: Is that a likely tradeoff...
...LEHMAN: It can help if it's coupled with real enforcement, like doing away with these sanctuaries and doing away permanently with loopholes like transit without visa...
...MARCH 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 29 SPECTATOR INTERVIEW appointed Stansfield Turner, who believed all of that was bad, ineffective, immoral, and anyway irrelevant: now we had satellites and we could do spying with technical intelligence...
...They kicked everybody else out...
...LEHMAN: This is what was supposed to have happened in the '86 amnesty...
...They were then supposed to be turned over to the airlines which were supposed to shepherd them around until their connecting flight, but it was on the honor system...
...It is not, however, terminated...
...MI-5 has no police powers...
...This has been an interactive process with the bureaucracy, and we're not waiting until the report comes out to be a catalyst for change...
...And that's when he really began his jihad...
...or arrest them and prosecute...
...The reason that retaliations weren't made in most cases was that the lawyers involved counseled that this would violate one or another congressional restriction or executive order, or it wasn't really a state of war, so you can't make an act of war...
...LEHMAN: The FBI, certainly the pre-9/11 FBI, had 30 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 2004 a deep cultural set of problems that go way back...
...The bureaucratization and politicization of CIA, particularly after Watergate with the Church and the Pike committees, purged all human intelligence and special and covert operations...
...At that point, another outrageous national security loophole kicks in...
...On what timelines...
...There was a whole string of them...
...Most of the effective spies in the Directorate of Operations retired or were fired...
Vol. 37 • March 2004 • No. 2
