US STAR CHAMBER COURT IN THE SPOTLIGHT OF POST 9/11 INVESTIGATION By Martin Dillon The ultra secret U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court will have to reveal its role in the pre 9/11 intelligence failures if Senator Arlene Specter has its way. As a member of the committee investigating the intelligence background to the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon, he has said he will call FISA chief judge, Royce Lamberth. A demand for the Attorney General and Congress to investigate him for possible links to Iranian fundamentalists in the mid 1980s was made by Barbara Honegger, a former White House aide now employed by the Department of Defense. Honegger said she wrote an alert message to Attorney General, John Ashcroft, fingering Lamberth. She was subsequently interviewed by the FBI about her allegations. The seven sober-suited judges of FIA fly into Washington from all over the US every fortnight to decide who are the next American citizens, resident aliens, foreign embassies and companies to be secretly spied upon because they represent a threat to national security. Each judge is provided with armed FBI bodyguards as they make their way to and from the Justice Department building where they meet. To reach their court on the sixth floor of the building, they use special swipe cards whose codes are regularly changed. They then pass through five doors to a tastefully paneled courtroom where they sit in hand-tooled leather chairs. The court is unlike any other in the United States. Normal judicial rules play no part and Defence lawyers are not permitted access. The only lawyers present are those from the Justice Department seeking permission for the FBI and other agencies to eavesdrop on people and organisations considered a security threat. Born out of the Watergate era at the request of the FBI, it is a court against which there is no appeal. An aspect of the court which may come under serious scrutiny is not just whether Royce Lamberth and his fellow judges denied wiretaps on some of the 9/11 hijackers but whether FISA procedures should now be reformed. The spotlight will, an FBI source told Globe-Intel, ?finally bring to light the obstructionist policies and tactics of OPIR (The Office of Intelligence and Policy Review). They as much as FISA hindered operations prior to 9/11.OPIR represents a critical part of the secret court process. Traditionally, FBI applications for wiretaps had to be first approved by OPIR before they were passed to Royce Lamberth and his fellow FISA judges. Our experience is that the whole FIA wiretap procedure should have been reformed a long time ago. The OIPR presented obstacles when there were none. We would build a case for a wiretap and then we?d find that when it was passed to the Office of Intelligence Policy Review, it went nowhere or when it got to FISA it was either too late or denied, the FBI source also told Globe-Intel. The surveillance request procedure usually took the form of a three or four page document known as a letterhead. It was signed by the FBI assistant director for national security. During the Clinton years there had been mooted criticism of the OIPR and FISA because of their reluctance to grant wiretap orders against Chinese individuals and companies believed by the FBI to be involved in espionage within the US. In particular, the then Attorney General, Janet Reno, was privately fingered by senior FBI officers for hindering requests to the secret court. Critics of the Clinton Administration pointed out it had received large election campaign contributions from Chinese businessmen and his policy was to deepen relations with Beijing. If that required a softer approach on Chinese spying that was the price he had been willing to pay. That happened even though a senior Clinton supporter, Senator Kerry admitted he had no doubt ?technology transfer and Chinese espionage have already seriously damaged our national security. Now the scrutiny will be on whether, as Barbara Honegger claimed in recent days FISA denied wiretaps requests against senior Al Qaeda operatives before 9/11. Her allegations followed earlier suspicions about the inability of the OIPR and FISA to forcefully contribute to the war against terrorism.The National Commission on Terrorism first shone the spotlight on the secret court in its report Countering the Changing Threat of International Terrorism prior to the 9/11 attacks. t he Commission heard testimony that ?the FISA process can be slow and burdensome, requiring information beyond the minimum required by the statute. The Report reserved its strongest criticism for the Office of Intelligence Policy Review. It recommended that the Attorney General should direct OIPR staff to cooperate with the FBI. Inherent in the National Commission on Terrorism findings were misgivings about the FISA process and a concern that OIPR had been uncooperative. If that had been the case, Senator Arlen Specter, and others on the Congressional investigation committee now sitting in Washington, will want to know if FISA and the OIPR were part of the serious intelligence failure leading to 9/11. Did OIPR and FISA reject wiretaps that could have led to the FBI to identify some of the 9/11 hijackers before the catastrophe? The National Terrorism Commission report and the fact that it was pre 9/11 raise other questions about the failure of the US government to address issues raised by the report?s authors. They had called for a major overhaul of the intelligence community citing the lack of cooperation between the FBI and CIA. They also pointed to the dangers of organisations like Al-Qaeda and the intention of terrorists to use civilian aircraft in an unorthodox fashion. Somehow those who had the power to take action on the basis of the report findings failed to do so. If Judge Royce Lambert is now called to testify before the Congressional investigation committee, the secrecy of Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Court may be lifted for the first time, providing a unique glimpse into its workings. Ends |
US, STAR CHAMBER COURT IN THE SPOTLIGHT OF POST 9/11 BY MARTIN DILLON |