The Clipboard: Is that all there is?

From an article¹:

Since then, the justice department has failed to track down any serious al-Qaida cells, nor has it caught the person responsible for sending anthrax-laced letters to politicians and journalists last year. It is in danger of bungling its case against Zacarias Moussaoui, the Frenchman accused of being the 20th hijacker in the September 11 plot, mistakenly handing him 48 classified FBI reports among the court documents he required for his defence...

The department's other much-publicised arrests, of four Arabs in Detroit in August and six Yemeni-Americans in Lackawanna, New York, last month, have been controversial. In both cases, the evidence so far revealed against the suspects has fallen well short of the dramatic claims made at the time of the arrests. (link)

And see also Is the NY "Terrorist Cell" for Real?

In another passage in this article, the author says the description "sleeper cell" is accurate only because the groups were "more dozy than surreptitious".

If this is the best the FBI can do even after more than a year of investigating, it appears that there aren't any actual terrorist operatives in the U.S. at all.

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Ashcroft fails to produce arresting developments, by Julian Borger

After the arrest of four alleged followers of al-Qaida and the Taliban last week, John Ashcroft declared it "a defining day" in the fight against terrorism.
It may well turn out the attorney general was right, but not in the sense he intended.

The arrests, in Portland, Oregon and in Detroit, defined Ashcroft's performance so far at the justice department in that they were low-level, seemingly timed to create the impression of progress in the struggle with terrorism, and extravagantly hyped to emphasise the threat of the "enemy within".

In that sense, they had a lot in common with the arrest in May of Jose Padilla, dramatically portrayed by Ashcroft as the lynchpin in a plot to detonate a radioactive "dirty bomb" on US soil, but who now appears to be little more than a disoriented thug with grandiose ideas.

Certainly, there is much less talk about dirty bombs emanating from the justice department these days. The four suspects arrested last week, plus two more still at large abroad, were described as a "sleeper cell", but the label is apt more because they were dozy than surreptitious.

They made so much noise practising with their guns in a Washington state quarry that they drew the attention of a local policeman who - startled to see men in flowing robes and turbans shooting assault rifles a few days after the September 11 attacks - took down their names.

Undeterred, the suspects left the country a few weeks later allegedly with the intention of fighting alongside the Taliban - unorthodox behaviour for a supposed sleeper cell already ensconced in suburban America.

Moreover, they took the hardest possible route. Instead of wandering over the ultra-porous Pakistani border, they tried entering through China, whose short frontier with Afghanistan is heavily patrolled by the People's Liberation Army. The mojahedin wannabes were unsurprisingly turned back, although this Chinese assistance in Washington's war on terror went unacknowledged by the attorney-general.

Five of the six alleged cell members were American citizens. Two were of Arab origin, and the other three were African American converts to Islam, in an apparent echo of the black West Coast radicalism of another era. One of the suspects, Patrice Lumumba Ford, is the son of a former Black Panther member.

There was no sign that the would-be cell was planning an attack on US soil, nor is it clear why the authorities waited so long after their abortive trip to Afghanistan before arresting them. But Ashroft's justice department has had few victories to boast about lately.

Ashcroft downplayed the threat of terrorism before September 11, turning down an FBI request to recruit extra agents and analysts on the day before the attacks, even though at the time the bureau had only one analyst working full time on the al-Qaida threat. In retrospect, Ashcroft was lucky to hold on to his job.

Since then, the justice department has failed to track down any serious al-Qaida cells, nor has it caught the person responsible for sending anthrax-laced letters to politicians and journalists last year. It is in danger of bungling its case against Zacarias Moussaoui, the Frenchman accused of being the 20th hijacker in the September 11 plot, mistakenly handing him 48 classified FBI reports among the court documents he required for his defence.

The FBI is also under fire for refusing to hand over documents to Congress about a government informer in San Diego who turns out to have been the landlord of two of the September 11 hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq al-Hazmi, a year before the attacks.

The refusal is in line with Ashcroft's regime of secrecy which has often appeared more geared towards obscuring mistakes than towards national security. The link to al-Midhar and al-Hazmi would certainly raise yet more questions over whether the FBI could have prevented September 11 by looking more carefully at the evidence it had in its hands.

Nor has intelligence-sharing between the FBI and the CIA improved all that much over the past year. For all the plans for reorganisation at the top, in the shape of the planned homeland security department, there is entrenched resistance to change in the lower ranks, who have seen reforming administrations come and go before.

The department's other much-publicised arrests, of four Arabs in Detroit in August and six Yemeni-Americans in Lackawanna, New York, last month, have been controversial. In both cases, the evidence so far revealed against the suspects has fallen well short of the dramatic claims made at the time of the arrests.

The incidents have also revealed the extent of the close electronic surveillance being routinely carried out in Arab-American communities, bringing with it accusations of racial profiling and abuse of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires a lower standard of evidence to set up a wire-tap than normal criminal cases.

If this is indeed a war against terror, John Ashcroft is not having a good one. He has chopped away at some basic American civil liberties but has had very little to show for it apart from a handful of American fellow travellers with no serious plans for attacks on American soil.

However, he is almost certain to keep his job. His presence at the justice department always had more to do with the deal George Bush made with the religious right than the former Missouri senator's own aptitude.

With congressional elections looming and the presidential campaign due to kick off after that, all that is required of him is to produce a few arrests from time to time, and proclaim more "defining days" in America's perpetual struggle.

reference=http://www.guardian.co.uk/elsewhere/journalist/story/0,7792,809073,00.html