Two members of the National Security Council staff under Clinton have written a book that criticizes the FBI and its former director, Louis Freeh, for failing to provide the White House with information on terrorist activities and plans prior to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The book is titled The Age of Sacred Terror, and the authors are Dan Benjamin and Steven Simon. On 60 Minutes 2, Dan Rather described them as "being at the center of America’s Counter-terrorism team during the Clinton administration.

Rather said, "One would think Benjamin would have gotten the best information the FBI had....He was the director of the National Security Counsel’s Counter-terrorism team." He and Simon were coordinating intelligence on terrorism for the National Security Advisor. Benjamin said that every day they received about 300 cables or messages relative to their work from the CIA, State Department and the Defense Department. He said, "There was never one message from the FBI. We were not getting anything."

Benjamin said that in the early ‘nineties they asked the FBI for information about one of Osama bin Laden’s top aides who had been here to raise money. He said the FBI official responded, "We got it covered. Don’t worry about it." He said that rather than giving them any information, they just blew them off. Steven Simon explained this saying that Director Louis Freeh "held the President in contempt."

Benjamin agreed. He said the FBI was investigating the President for most of the time he was in office and that limited the pressure the White House could apply to the FBI. They both thought highly of Clinton and they gave the CIA high marks, especially under George Tenet, for finding terrorists and having them arrested. The only example they cited was the foiling of the Millennium plot to explode a bomb at the Los Angeles airport. That was actually foiled by an alert Customs inspector who found explosives in a car that came across the Canadian border and had the driver, Ahmed Ressam, arrested. Neither the CIA nor the FBI had anything to do with it.

The claim that the FBI under Louis Freeh did not do the bidding of the White House is absurd. On White House orders the FBI hounded Billy Dale, the man the Clintons fired as head of the travel office and prosecuted on charges of embezzlement for which they had zero evidence. It went after one of its own agents, Dennis Sculimbrene, for testifying on Dale’s behalf. The FBI general counsel violated regulations by giving the White House a copy of a book manuscript former special agent Gary Aldrich had submitted for clearance.

On a higher level, the FBI called the death of Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster a suicide, ignoring the evidence that the White House knew it was a murder and that the so-called suicide note was a forgery and Hillary knew it. They blocked the presentation at the official public hearing of evidence known to the White House that TWA Flight 800 was shot down by missiles. They even had a video designed to discredit hundreds of eyewitnesses aired on TV.

Reed Irvine can be reached at ri@aim.org