Wes Vernon, NewsMax.com
Wednesday, Apr. 14, 2004

In an interview with NewsMax.com, Kessler said, "On the one hand, they didn't put together all the possible clues," none of which by themselves would have led to actually uncovering the 9/11 plot.

But if all of them had been "put together," he said, it would have "raised the level of alert within the Bureau and started more investigations, which possibly could have led to even uncovering the plot. We don't know."

Using scattered information might have made the difference, Kessler believes.

"That was the role of both the FBI and the CIA," and in Kessler's judgment, "the FBI simply was not focused on this whatsoever. And you never got any sense of that from Louis Freeh's testimony."

Nowhere in Freeh's testimony, Kessler complained, was there acknowledgement that the real problem was that there was no real effort to penetrate this organization [al-Qaida]."

Freeh's testimony followed a long article in Monday's Wall Street Journal, where he noted that prior to 9/11 the political will by either the Clinton or the Bush administration to "declare and fight this war didn't exist."

What about the fact that prior to 9/11 the FBI and CIA never talked to each other?

Kessler believes that is not an excuse for the FBI's not doing more. Even with that lack of communication, "it is still possible for the FBI to develop this information or the CIA."

There are those who say the 9/11 commission is doing a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking.

Again, Kessler says the hindsight does not let Freeh's FBI off the hook. It's the FBI's job to keep ahead of the curve of public awareness of threats to our security and "protect us from these plots and penetrate these organizations," as they have done with other threats, such as the mafia and -- during the Cold War -- the Communist Party.

The FBI Mandate

"Within the FBI's mandate, they simply were not doing a good job," he told NewsMax. Noting that al-Qaida burst on the scene in 1997-1998 time period, he added "You know, we didn't have to be at war with al-Qaeda, as we should have been, to do a better job than the FBI was doing."

The investigator/writer credits the Patriot Act, enacted after Freeh was out as FBI Director, with "making it possible for agents who are pursuing intelligence to share information with agents who are pursuing criminal cases," but even before Congress acted post-9/11, much "could have been done despite those problems."

Kessler faulted President Clinton's attorney general, Janet Reno, for imposing on the FBI "unnecessary" mandates such as "guidelines that said law enforcement and intelligence [within the Bureau] could not talk to each other," even though they had previously communicated, and in so doing, had completed successful cases that had been upheld in the courts.

'Totally Absurd'

"It was totally absurd," in the author's view, that one bureaucrat in Reno's Justice Department, Richard Scruggs, "decided he was going to come up with these guidelines, and it really had a negative impact on the FBI."

But that does not excuse Louis Freeh, who "had lawyers -- in fact, he was a lawyer -- and those lawyers could've objected, could have" protested that "this is ridiculous."

Kessler won't go so far as to say Freeh should have known about 9/11. But a proper focus "would have helped."

"In the end, it just comes down to hard work, and that wasn't being done," he said.

However, Kessler thinks Americans can probably sleep a little better at night because the FBI has "a good director now in Robert Mueller," Freeh's successor. Even before 9/11, on the job for only a few days, Mueller had ordered badly needed new computers and upgraded the "analytical side of the FBI."

"They're on the right track," Kessler concluded.

Editor's note: