Remembering John O'Neill. Kudos to PBS Frontline for its timely rebroadcast of John O'Neill: The Man Who Knew. As one of the few people who took the Al Qaeda threat seriously in advance of 9-11-01, John's been on our minds a lot recently because of the heightened attention paid to his friend Richard Clarke and his arch-nemeses Tom Pickard and Barbara Bodine.

Someone on NPR was saying this morning that our intelligence problems aren't structural; they're cultural. Probably they're founded on the shifting sands of the Peter Principle: that everyone rises to his level of incompetence. Although it's a general principle that applies to all administrations, the Bush administration seems to have brought it to a shiny new state of perfection, a Platonic ideal of the Peter Principle, the ne plus ultra of pious incompetence, with examples as far as the eye can see of an insular Dilbert-like universe rewritten as tragedy: Rice, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Cheney, and, of course, the lifelong exemplar of the Peter Principle, George W. Bush.

There was plenty to dislike about O'Neill. Like Clarke, he's accused of "arrogance," the standard code word used by the incompetent against anyone who makes them look bad. What the street-smart (even in Yemen!) O'Neill managed never to be, as opposed to Bodine or Pickard or any of Bush's cronies, was inert or leisure-oriented or obsessively focused on politics over actual threats.

O'Neill had investigated Al Qaeda to the point where two of the Flight 77 hijackers' names were on his desk when he was forced out of Yemen by Barbara Bodine in 2000 and out of the FBI by acting weasel Tom Pickard in August 2001.

Pickard, Ashcroft, and Rice were all responsible for national security in August 2001. The fact that they live in a frenzy of bureaucratic cowardice, pointing fingers at anyone else in their testimony to the 9-11 Commission, while O'Neill died in the World Trade Center is the purest demonstration that they do not deserve their positions.

If John O'Neill were alive to go before the 9-11 Commission, no one would be holding his hand. In that, he is more of a man than the cowardly president of the United States, who will cling behind closed doors to his security blanket Dick Cheney.

A clarification: This is not about State vs. Defense, or FBI vs. CIA, or Democrat vs. Republican. National security is like engineering: either the building stands or it doesn't. The World Trade Center fell.

It's about competent vs. incompetent.

{ 10:18 AM }

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Three stories.

"Last year, a record 317 Americans applied for refugee status in Canada."

"He's one of an untold number of contractors fleeing Iraq as attacks and kidnappings of civilians escalate."

The tragedy of Master Sgt. Kenneth Lee Schweitzer, 38, of Louisville, Ky.

{ 8:32 AM }

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Funeral photo from The Agonist.

{ 10:57 AM }

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On a scale of 1 to 10, it's orange. Now we know why the Bush administration made the switch to preschool colors to indicate terror warnings. The numbers weren't working (CSM):

At the end of May, 2001, the CIA's counterterror chief, Cofer Black, told Ms. Rice that on a scale of one to 10, the threat level was seven - but was going to get worse.

Illegitimate, illiterate, and innumerate too....

{ 6:52 PM }

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Military photo from The Agonist.

{ 9:49 AM }

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Thomas Pickard, lard-ass. The cowardly bureaucrat is lying to the 9-11 Commission right now. "Tom Pickard, at one point interim director for the FBI, did everything in his power to silence and frustrate [John] O'Neill. The compartmentalized bureaucrats simply could not tolerate a maverick investigator whose only motivation was protecting the country from terrorism. He was forced out of the FBI in the late summer of 2001." Sorry, I couldn't help but quote myself in this capsule review of the O'Neill PBS Frontline episode from a year and a half ago quoted in the post below.

{ 1:16 PM }

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John O'Neill knew. Orcinus reminds us that at least one man in the FBI was well aware of the Al Qaeda threat and was gutsy enough to do something about it, as Richard Clarke explained to PBS Frontline:

I saw a report that indicated that the man who had plotted the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the ringleader, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, was about to move within Pakistan. There was a closing window to catch him. So, thinking there might be somebody in the FBI on a Sunday morning, I called and John answered the phone. I said, "Who's this?" He responded, "Well, who the hell are you? I'm John O'Neill." I explained, "I'm from the White House. I do terrorism. I need some help."

So I told him my story on the classified phone line. He had never worked on the case before, but he obviously knew the importance of it. He went into action over the course of the next two or three days; he never left the office. He worked the phones out to Pakistan, he worked the phones to the Pentagon, and he worked the phones at the State Department. Together with us, [he] put together the rush team that managed to catch Ramzi Ahmed Yousef in Pakistan just before he moved into Afghanistan, which would have been beyond our reach. It was a pretty intense couple days, but it worked. It was, in the way, the beginning of a beautiful friendship, because the same drive he brought to that first encounter, he brought to everything he did.

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I think the intelligence community, the FBI, were unanimous, certainly throughout the year 2000 into 2001, that there was in fact a very widespread Al Qaeda network around the world in probably between 50-60 countries -- that they had trained thousands, perhaps over 10,000 terrorists at the camps in Afghanistan; that we didn't really know who those people were. We didn't have names for very many of them, and we didn't know where they were; but since bin Laden kept saying the United States was the target, the United States was the enemy, that we had to expect an increasing rate of sophistication of attacks by this large Al Qaeda network against the United States.

As John O'Neill kept saying, there was no reason to think they're always going to go after us in Saudi Arabia or Africa or Yemen. They tried to go after us, O'Neill would say, in 1993, in the first World Trade Center attack. O'Neill was convinced, in retrospect -- and it took the FBI others a long time to realize it, many years actually -- but O'Neill was convinced by the year 2000, certainly probably earlier than that, that the 1993 attack was in fact a bin Laden-led attack. We hadn't heard the phrase Al Qaeda at the time.

We now know, going back through historical documents, that there was an Al Qaeda [back then]. It had just been formed, just been given that name. It was small. But O'Neill would say the attack of 1993 was Al Qaeda. The attempted attack at the millennium in the United States was Al Qaeda.

Whatever deterrents we had that said "you should never try to attack us in the United States," that hadn't worked. Therefore, he would say -- and I think everyone in the FBI leadership and the CIA leadership was saying -- "The attack is going to be big. It could be in Saudi Arabia or the Middle East. It could also be in the United States."

Our obsession with John O'Neill began with his obituary in the New York Times in September 2001, followed by this post on the PBS Frontline episode David Neiwert cites above.

The names of two of the hijackers who flew into the Pentagon on Flight 77 were on O'Neill's desk before he left the FBI. Not exactly a "lack of specificity" of information, as the White House now claims. There was plenty more that could have been done by any administration that chose to pay attention.

{ 10:00 AM }

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A gift hub with a billion spokes. Charitable cheerleader Philip Cubeta has established Gift Hub, a site that connects "Funders, Active Citizens, and Advisors." With its illustrious board of Active Citizens and an upcoming July conference in Chicago, this is the place to be for web-enhanced philanthropy. In Phil's words, "Gifthub hopes to connect small autonomous units (citizen groups, nonprofits, thoughtful funders) with resources most often tapped, hitherto, by the plain grey forces of stasis. What works for war, works even better for a peaceful and open civil society."

{ 5:02 PM }

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The pressures of guilt. Thanks to mmw of bad things for noting Jeff Skilling's "out, out, damn spots" Lady Macbeth moment on the Upper East Side in the wee small hours:

Former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling was taken to a Manhattan hospital early Friday after several people called police saying he was pulling on their clothes and accusing them of being FBI agents, a police source told The Associated Press.

Police took Skilling to the hospital after finding him at 4 a.m. at the corner of Park Avenue and East 73rd Street and determining he might be an "emotionally disturbed person," said the source, speaking to the AP on condition of anonymity.

Speaking of raining on Enron employees' parades, did you know Jeff's brother Tom Skilling is my weatherman?

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