WP op-ed: Freeh's Self-Whitewash
By John Podesta
Sunday, October 16, 2005; Page B07
During his tenure as director of the FBI, Louis Freeh presided over a series of blunders and failures that brought the bureau to a low point in its history. From the embarrassment of the Russian mole Robert Hanssen to the bungling of the Wen Ho Lee investigation to the wasting of hundreds of millions of dollars in a failed attempt to build a modern, computerized case management system, the bureau under Freeh's leadership stumbled from one blunder to the next, with little or no accountability. The nadir, as the nation knows too well, was reached in the astonishing string of failures that helped leave America vulnerable to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
In the face of this record, Freeh has now published "My FBI," a book distinguished by its shameless buck-passing. Nothing, it seems, was ever Louis Freeh's fault.
Who was to blame for the fact that there weren't enough FBI agents working on counterterrorism? According to Freeh, it was Congress. But in testimony three years ago, Freeh declared that "Congress has shown great foresight in strengthening" counterterrorism efforts, tripling the FBI's counterterrorism budget from $97 million in 1996 to more than $300 million in 1999. Whose fault was it that the FBI remained incapable of basic file management? Congress's, Freeh contends -- it underfunded the bureau's technology program. But as the report of the Sept. 11 commission points out, Congress did not meet FBI requests in the late 1990s because the bureau had squandered so much money already. Equally appalling is Freeh's recent claim on "60 Minutes" that the bureau was too distracted by the many "scandals" in the Clinton White House to attend to the terrorist threat. Of course, none of those politically motivated witch hunts, in which Freeh did the bidding of his congressional patrons on the partisan right, resulted in a conviction. And never mind that Freeh's FBI ought to have been able to protect the American people while pursuing other investigations at the same time.
Freeh's claim, moreover, that no one, including White House counterterrorism official Richard Clarke, told him that radical Islamist terrorism was a major threat, is totally disingenuous. As the Sept. 11 report, the congressional joint inquiry and a book by former National Security Council officials Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon show, there were countless memos circulating in the bureaucracy and numerous meetings that Freeh refused to attend. As Benjamin and Simon aptly wrote in "The Age of Sacred Terror," the FBI under Freeh was "a surly colossus" that listened to no one, provided intelligence to no one and took direction from no one....
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I can understand why Freeh would write a book such as "My FBI" defending his tenure. After all, no one else would.
(John Podesta was President Bill Clinton's last chief of staff and earlier served as counsel to the Senate subcommittee on security and terrorism, which had oversight of the FBI. He is now president of the Center for American Progress.)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/14/AR2005101401784.html?sub=AR
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