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August 30, 2005

Was Townsend at Bagram in October 2003?

Dafydd at Captain's Quarters raises some interesting points about the President's newest Homeland Security Advisor, Frances Townsend:

Acting Counsel for Intelligence Schroeder left in 1998, and was replaced by the soon-to-be controversial Frances Fargo Townsend. Townsend -- a Republican and former deputy to Rudolph Giuliani in the U.S. Attorney's Office in New York City, but a very close friend of Attorney General Janet Reno nevertheless -- was elevated to that position at Reno's request; since Townsend was also the protege of then FBI Director Louis Freeh (another recipient of Gorelick's memo), she was a shoe-in for the job heading OIPR.

U.S. News and World Report profiled Townsend last December. Although they did not discuss Able Danger, they did report on the feeling among nearly all of Townsend's critics that she was too enamored of that wall of separation, and that she was just as conservative in applying for wiretapping and surveillance warrants from the FISA court as Schroeder and Scruggs had been.

Townsend found herself in the middle of that debate over how much of a "wall" should exist between intelligence-gatherers and prosecutors, and her tenure at OIPR remains controversial today. Many FBI agents say Townsend was crucial in obtaining FISA wiretaps, especially during the period of heightened terrorism concerns around the new millennium. But many prosecutors felt that Townsend was less than helpful in making sure the FBI shared wiretap data with lawyers at Main Justice when there was evidence of criminal activity. Townsend believed that the FISA court and its chief judge at the time, Royce Lamberth, would refuse to approve search warrants and wiretaps if they believed too much information sharing was going on and if prosecutors were controlling or directing the intelligence-gathering efforts....

Both the Government Accountability Office and the 9/11 commission have blamed OIPR in part for the government's intelligence failures before the terrorist attacks. Sources say that OIPR's narrow interpretation of FISA led to misunderstandings and overly cautious behavior by the FBI. As a result, in July and August of 2001, FBI intelligence analysts prohibited their own criminal-case agents from searching for two men on the government's terrorist watch list who they knew had entered the United States. The men later proved to be two of the 19 hijackers.

The Washington Post has some more details on Townsend:

The next leap came in spring 2003, when two Townsend patrons urged Rice to hire her at the National Security Council. Both Clarke, the publicity-savvy former counterterrorism chief who later criticized Bush for failure to pay early enough attention to the al Qaeda threat, and Gen. John A. Gordon, at the time Bush's homeland security chief, lobbied for Townsend.

"They used all the right adjectives," Rice recalled. "Smart, tough, persistent, which is important. . . . Somebody who will not let anything slip past her."

It was a controversial hire. Political hands in the White House worried about her past as a Democratic appointee. Republicans on Capitol Hill circulated a stinging memo with details of her connection to the Wall. National security veterans worried, as one career official who worked with her put it, "Is she senior enough for this?" Columnist Robert D. Novak wrote that Reno's onetime protege could turn out to be an "enemy within."

At the time, Townsend told an interviewer she had volunteered to resign. But by December, she was coordinating government response to terrorism scares that led to the grounding of holiday season flights from Europe. She had also bonded with the president.

We also know that Townsend was at Abu Ghraib in November 2003:

Jordan, the top military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib, described "instances where I feel that there was additional pressure" to get information from detainees, including a visit to the prison last fall by an aide to Rice that was "purely on detainee operations and reporting." And he said he was reminded of the need to improve the intelligence output of the prison "many, many, many times."

Rice staffer Fran Townsend said Thursday that she spent about two hours at Abu Ghraib last November and recalls that Jordan was her guide. Townsend, then deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism, said she did not discuss interrogation techniques or the need to obtain more information from detainees, and neither witnessed nor heard about abuse of detainees.

Townsend said in an interview that she was in Iraq to learn more about the nature of the anti-U.S. insurgency and was particularly concerned about ensuring that whatever information was collected by various agencies there could be shared effectively. Townsend said she spent about 15 minutes in the detention areas at Abu Ghraib and remembers that her guide was "exceptionally polite." But she said that if his implication was that she was pressuring him to extract more information from detainees, that's "ridiculous."

That's the same time frame as the 9/11 Commission's secret trip to the Mideast which included the stop at Bagram:

The commission's staff director, Philip Zelikow, told United Press International that he and two other staff members interviewed "scores" of people, including officials from the countries and U.S. government personnel serving there.

"We wanted to get information about and their perspective on the events that led to the [September 11] attacks, and on the prosecution of the ongoing war on terror," said Mr. Zelikow, a former National Security Council official.

During their travels, which ended Friday, Mr. Zelikow and his colleagues visited Britain, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan and Afghanistan, he said.

He said the trip was successful and useful in terms of building a narrative of the run-up to the attacks, adding that the commission members learned much that had not been made public.

Was she the "NSC attorney" at Bagram who TIME says corroborates Zelikow's story?

The panel also said that a Bush Administration lawyer—who, sources told TIME, was a National Security Council attorney present as a "minder" on behalf of the White House—agreed that Shaffer did not mention Atta's name. But Shaffer told TIME that he remembers specifically saying that the staff on the secret project had "found through the effort two of the three cells which conducted the 9/11 attack, to include Atta."

If so, wouldn't that constitute a conflict of interest on her part?

Posted by Mike at August 30, 2005 01:58 PM

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