Opening Statement of Senator Patrick Leahy, DOJ Oversight: Terrorism and Other Topics

[ A little old, but still valid points. Apologies if i have already 
posted this. can't remember. PS. thanks Pat, I am proud to have you 
representing my home.]

Statement
United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary
DOJ Oversight: Terrorism and Other Topics
June 8, 2004

The Honorable Patrick Leahy
United States Senator , Vermont
Opening Statement of Senator Patrick Leahy,
Ranking Member,
Senate Judiciary Committee
Oversight Hearing
Attorney General John Ashcroft
June 8, 2004

Welcome, Mr. Attorney General. It is good to have you back before the 
Committee, and we are pleased to see you have recovered so swiftly from 
your surgery earlier this year. It has been a long time since our last 
oversight hearing with you. Fifteen months have passed since your last, 
brief appearance in March last year.

Sparse And Grudging Cooperation

Mr. Attorney General, I must speak frankly about an issue that has 
emerged as a basic problem during your tenure. There are two words that 
succinctly sum up the Justice Department’s accountability and its 
cooperation with congressional oversight on your watch. Those two words 
are “sparse,” and “grudging.” Even those of us who have served through 
several presidents cannot recall a worse performance record when it 
comes to responsiveness.

Too often we on this Committee, on both sides of the aisle, get the 
sense that under your direction and example, the Justice Department and 
its agencies consider oversight by Congress to be nothing more than a 
nuisance.

But lack of oversight has costs and consequences, and we are beginning 
to reap them. Why is oversight important? Beyond the fact that the 
Constitution prescribes such checks and balances among the three 
branches of government, proper oversight – with cooperation from 
Executive agencies – helps make government work better. It also 
contributes to accountability. How is the Justice Department using all 
of the tools this Congress has provided in the USA PATRIOT Act? With the 
lack of oversight cooperation we have received, and with the secrecy 
that shrouds several aspects of the law, how would any of us know the 
real answer to that question, or dozens of other questions on other 
vital topics?

Now more than ever, the American people need the Justice Department and 
the FBI to be as good as we need them to be in combating terrorism. 
Congressional oversight is an essential ingredient in identifying 
problems and forging solutions.

Just days ago we learned of Justice Department involvement in devising 
legal arguments to minimize our obligations under such U.S. laws and 
international agreements as the convention on torture. Yet a letter I 
wrote to you last November, well before most of these abuses came to 
light, went unanswered for months, and when we are lucky enough to get 
responses, the premium is on unresponsiveness. Few of the answers we get 
are worth much more than the paper they are printed on. We often learn 
more about what’s really happening in the Justice Department in the 
press than we do from you.

Could the Administration’s cooperation with Congressional oversight have 
prevented such disasters as the prison abuse scandal? The answer is obvious.

What We Know

So in the meantime, the problems and the questions just keep on piling up.

In the 1000 days since the catastrophic attacks of September 11th, we 
have learned little from our Justice Department. We know this:

• Osama bin Laden remains at large;

• At least three senior al Qaeda operatives who helped plan the 9/11 
attacks, including the suspected mastermind of the plot, are in U.S. 
custody, but there has been no attempt to bring any of them to justice;

• The Moussaoui prosecution has bogged down because the prosecution 
refuses to let the defense interview witnesses in U.S. custody;

• A German court acquitted two 9/11 co-conspirators, in part because the 
U.S. Government refused to provide evidence for the cases;

• Three defendants who you said had knowledge of the 9/11 attacks did 
not have such knowledge; the Department retracted your statement, and 
then you had to apologize to the court for violating a gag order in the 
case;

• The man you claimed was about to explode a “dirty bomb” in the U.S. 
had no such intention or capability, and because he has been held for 
two years without access to counsel, any crimes he did commit might 
never be prosecuted;

• Terrorist attacks on Capitol Hill and elsewhere involving the deadly 
bioterror agents anthrax and Ricin have yet to be solved, and the 
Department is defending itself in a civil rights action brought by a man 
who you publicly identified as a “person of interest” in the anthrax 
investigation;

• U.S. citizens with no connection to terrorism have been imprisoned as 
material witnesses for chunks of time -- with an “Oops, I’m sorry” when 
a “100 percent positive” fingerprint match turns out to be 100 percent 
wrong;

• Non-citizens with no connection to terrorism have been rounded up on 
the basis of their religion or ethnicity, held for months without 
charges and, in some cases, physically abused;

• Interrogation techniques approved by the Department of Justice have 
led to abuses that have tarnished our nation’s reputation and likely 
given strength and driven hundreds, if not thousands, of new recruits to 
our enemies;

• Your Department turned a Canadian citizen over to Syria who was tortured;

• Documents have been classified, unclassified, and reclassified to 
score political points rather than for legitimate national security reasons;

• Statistics have been manipulated to exaggerate the Department’s 
success in fighting terrorism; and

• The threat of another attack on U.S. soil remains high, although how 
high depends on who, in the Administration, is talking and what audience 
they are addressing.

Unfinished Business After 1,000 Days

Your testimony here comes about 1,000 days after the September 11th 
attacks and the subsequent launch of your efforts against terrorism. As 
National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice acknowledged in her testimony 
before the 9/11 Commission, the terrorist threats to our nation did not 
begin in September 2001. Yet preliminary findings of the 9/11 Commission 
suggest that counterterrorism simply was not a priority of the Justice 
Department before September 11th. In fact, just one day before the 
attacks, you rejected the FBI’s request to include more money for 
counterterrorism in your budget proposal. Arab language translators were 
so sorely lacking that when we did intercept information, we did not 
have the capacity to learn from it. The FBI lacked computer analysis 
capability to make sense of the valuable information we did have, such 
as an informant’s claim that he and other al Qaeda operatives had been 
sent to the United States to hijack planes. The strong concerns of FBI 
agents like Coleen Rowley in Minnesota and Kenneth Williams in Phoenix 
were falling on deaf ears. The Justice Department failed to understand 
and apply the correct standard to get a search warrant for the computer 
of Zaccarias Moussaoui, who was in federal custody in August 2001. We 
were more concerned about Mexican immigration along our southern border 
than with securing American borders from terrorists. We were not 
coordinating effectively with international allies or our own State and 
local law enforcement agencies. And while you have recently been sharply 
critical of the so-called “wall” between criminal investigators and 
intelligence agents, you did nothing to “lower” it during your first 
seven full months in office. The President is fond of saying that 
September 11 changed everything, as if to wipe out all the missteps and 
misplaced priorities of the first year of this Administration.

Now, 1000 days later, there is ample cause for concern about whether, 
even now, the Justice Department is using its increased resources well 
and is setting its priorities toward the right goals.

Another Suspected Terrorist Goes Free

After the attacks you promised a stunned nation that its Government 
would “expend every effort and devote all necessary resources to bring 
the people responsible for these crimes to justice.”

Last week we learned from press reports that you chose to deport rather 
than prosecute Terrorist No. 27 on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. This is 
one of the most disturbing and frankly, stunning, revelations to emerge 
from the home front in the war on terrorism. According to the Associated 
Press, seasoned prosecutors like Chicago U.S. Attorney Patrick 
Fitzgerald believed that a prosecution was viable. Instead, the Justice 
Department declined this case on the ground that the United States could 
not effectively prosecute terrorists without giving away intelligence 
sources and methods. And instead, this suspected terrorist was deported 
and turned loose where he presumably could still wage jihad against us.

This was not the only instance since September 11 that the Government 
has chosen an easy option instead of effective criminal prosecution. I 
hope that you can explain how mere deportations, dragnets, detentions 
contrary to international law and definitional charges to inflate 
“terrorism” statistics serve to make American safer in the long run.

Mr. Attorney General, you have spent much of the past two years 
increasing secrecy, lessening accountability and touting the 
Government’s intelligence-gathering powers under the PATRIOT Act. I and 
others here in Congress from both sides of the aisle worked together in 
unparalleled cooperation to pass the PATRIOT Act shortly after September 11.

But now I must ask, to what end? The threshold issue really is: What 
good is having intelligence if we cannot use it intelligently? 
Identifying suspected terrorists is only a first step. To be safer, we 
must follow through. Instead of declining tough prosecutions, we need to 
bring the people seeking to do us harm to justice. That is how our 
system works. Instead, your practices seem to be built on secret 
detentions and overblown press releases. Our country is made no safer 
through self-congratulatory press conferences when we face serious 
security threats.

A Responsibility To Deliver Justice

In December 2001, you announced the indictment of Zacarias Moussaoui and 
told the world that al Qaeda would now “meet the justice it abhors.” At 
that moment, those who watched the Twin Towers fall in New York City, 
the destruction of the Pentagon and the carnage in a field in rural 
Pennsylvania, embraced your promise that “the awesome weight of justice 
against the terrorists who blithely murdered innocent Americans” would 
now be brought to bear.

But in the 1000 days since the attacks, the public justice we yearn for 
has eluded the very criminal justice system we hold up as a successful 
symbol of democracy to the rest of the world. We need to know why our 
Government is unwilling or unable to investigate and prosecute the 
crimes of September 11. From the moment that maniacal scheme was hatched 
and through its implementation on that terrible day, those responsible 
in any way must be identified and held accountable.

The Government agency that bears the name of Justice has yet to deliver 
the justice for the victims of the worst mass murder in this nation’s 
history. The 9/11 Commission is working hard to answer important 
questions about the attacks and how the vulnerabilities in our system 
that allowed them to occur, but it cannot mete out punishment for those 
involved. Neither the 9/11 Commission nor this Committee can do the job 
of the Justice Department.

You spoke recently about efforts that are under way in a number of 
nations to transform their criminal justice systems from an 
inquisitorial system to one modeled after our own -- a system that 
relies on evidence and adversarial proceedings. But you are not allowing 
our system to work.

The United States should not be afraid or reluctant to accord those 
charged with heinous crimes basic due process. Our prosecutors and 
criminal investigators are ready, willing and able to do their jobs. We 
have techniques to provide security for sensitive information through 
the Classified Information Procedures Act, the Foreign Intelligence 
Surveillance Act and other provisions. This Administration’s expansion 
of all manner of government secrecy has, however, served to undercut the 
mission of the Justice Department.

There are times and occasions when the United States must act 
militarily. There are aspects of this effort that must be undertaken 
diplomatically in the international community and the President is 
belatedly discovering the benefits of diplomacy and alliances. But our 
criminal justice system is another dimension of our efforts against 
those who commit terrorist acts against the United States and our 
citizens. The skilled and hard-working men and women of the Justice 
Department and the FBI deserve so much credit for all they do, day and 
night, month after month, to protect the security of the American 
people. But under your leadership the Justice Department seems to have 
all but abandoned the field on so many of these cases. Instead, you 
deploy the Justice Department’s resources to deny justice to the 
American victims of terrorism who have sought compensation in the 
courts, while failing to implement the victim compensation program that 
Congress called for nearly four years ago.

For 1000 days now, the families of the victims of September 11 have 
waited for the killers of their loved ones to pay the price for their 
crimes. As you yourself recognized, the indictment of Zaccarias 
Moussaoui was an important step in securing justice for the victims of 
September 11. Unfortunately, it appears to have been the last step.

A Time for Accountability

Mr. Attorney General, since September 11 you have blamed former 
Administration officials for intelligence failures that happened on your 
watch; you have used a tar brush to attack the patriotism of Americans 
who dare to express legitimate concerns about constitutional freedoms 
and civil rights; and you have refused to acknowledge these problems, 
even when your own Inspector General exposed widespread violations of 
the civil liberties of immigrants caught up in your post-September 11 
dragnets.

Secretary Rumsfeld recently went before the Armed Services Committee to 
say that he should be held responsible for the abuses of Iraqi prisoners 
on his watch. Director Tenet is resigning from the Central Intelligence 
Agency. Richard Clarke went before the 9/11 Commission and began with 
his admission of the failure that this Administration bears for the 
tragedy that consumed us on 9/11. I am reminded this week as we mourn 
the passing of President Reagan that one of the acts for which he will 
be remembered is his concession that while his heart told him that the 
weapons for hostages and unlawful funding of insurgent forces in 
Nicaragua should not have been acts of his Administration, his head 
convinced him that they were and that he took responsibility.

We need checks and balances. There is much that has gone wrong that your 
Administration stubbornly refuses to admit. For this democratic republic 
to work, we need openness and accountability.

Mr. Attorney General we all know that your style is to come to attack. 
You came before this Committee shortly after 9/11 to question our 
patriotism when we sought to conduct congressional oversight and ask 
questions. You went before the 9/11 Commission to attack a Commissioner 
by brandishing a conveniently declassified memo in so unfairly slanted a 
presentation that the President himself disavowed your action. I 
challenge you today, however, to abandon any such plans for this session 
and begin it, instead, by doing that which you have yet to do: Talk 
plainly with us and with the American people about not only what is 
going right in the war on terrorism, but also about the growing list of 
things that are going wrong, so that we can work together to fix them. 
Let us get about the business of working together to do a better job 
protecting the American people and ensuring that wrongdoers are 
effectively brought to justice.
_______________________________________________
heads mailing list
[email protected]
http://ballistichelmet.org/mailman/listinfo/heads/
http://ballistichelmet.org/donate/