News Feeds

I argued yesterday that Mahmoud Khalil, the ex-Columbia grad student and pro-Palestinian activist snatched by ICE, had been illegally detained and was facing deportation simply for exercising free speech. That of course was my first reaction, and I explicitly said I didn’t know what else he was being charged with, or what evidence the government had.

We even had a pro-Palestinian demonstration on campus yesterday, though it involved issues besides Khalil.  Still, the deportation has caused cognitive dissonance in many of us who detest pro-Hamas demonstrations or sentiments: Khalil was clearly a public espouser of Palestinian terrorism, but that espousal is not a violation of free speech, which I strongly support. The big questions are a). did Khalil do more than simply verbally espouse terrorism, a “more” that would make him subject to laws that could cause his deportation? and b.) are those laws just?

I’m not going to adjudicate question b.) as I’m not a lawyer or judge and don’t know the historical underpinnings of the U.S. Code that deals with “aliens,” as they call them. As for a.), well, let’s hear what venues who want Khalil deported say.

I’ll highlight posts from three sites: the National Review (conservative) the Elder of Ziyon (pro Israel), and City Journal (conservative). All three ultimately claim that Khalif was not only lawfully detained, but that deporting him is a no-brainer.  I’ll simply give you their arguments and then my own conclusion based on their pro-deportation stands, which I see as the strongest arguments for deportation I can find.

The National Review actually had two articles on Monday by Andrew McCarthy. The first (archived here) dealt largely with Khalif’s alleged activities and the second (first headline below) arguing that those activities meet the standards for deportation. In contrast, the Elder of Ziyon piece simply argues that Khalil’s membership in an organization promoting terrorism, regardless of his activities, warrants deportation. The third is similar, not detailing what Khalif actually did to promote terrorism.

But in the end all three come down to the same thing, arguing that Khalil violated the same provision of the U.S. Code §1182 on Inadmissible Aliens: section 3B.

Click if you subscribe to the National Review (or find the article archived here):

First realize that Khalil, who had a green card (and a graduate degree from Columbia) was regarded as a “lawful permanent resident alien” (LPR), giving him special rights, though not rights equivalent to those of a U.S. citizen.  But he is married to an American citizen, who happens to be pregnant.  He was picked up by ICE and apparently taken to Louisiana, where he was held. Two days ago, a federal judge blocked Khalil’s removal from the U.S., and there will be a habeas corpus hearing today. As far as I know, he has not been formally charged with any crimes.

This is from the first National Review article detailing the law and how what Khalil supposedly violated it:

To be sure, visas and green cards are saliently different. Unlike a mere student-visa holder, a green-card holder, such as Khalil, is an LPR. That is the highest category of alien: a non-American who has lawfully relocated to the United States and is on track to become a naturalized citizen (see §1427 of federal immigration law — Title 8, U.S. Code). In many contexts — e.g., tax law and the privacy protections — federal law deems green-card holders to be “U.S. persons,” meaning they are part of our national community. Their rights can approximate those of American citizens but, as the administration will surely argue, they are not equal to those of Americans citizens (who, of course, may not be deported).

. . . Section 1182 of federal immigration law controls the categories of aliens who may be excluded from the United States. In the category of national security, the statute mainly targets aliens who have “engaged in terrorist activity,” who are “members” of terrorist organizations, or who have received paramilitary training from terrorist organizations. Fortunately, though, there is additional latitude: An alien may be excluded if he has “endorsed” or “espoused” terrorist activity — see subsection (a)(3)(B)(i)(IV)(bb), under the subheading “Terrorist activities.” The statute defines terrorist activity to include violent attacks and the planning of such attacks. That should be sufficient to bar from entry into the United States aliens who support Hamas, which has been a designated terrorist organization under U.S. law since the mid-Nineties (when the designation process began).

. . . His most prominent role seems to have been as a negotiator of sorts on behalf of student radicals with the university administration. Objectively speaking, his activities are pro-Hamas, but I assume that if the government had strong evidence that he’d committed the crime of providing material support to a designated terrorist organization — such as recruiting or fundraising on behalf of Hamas — the Justice Department would indict him.

Fortunately, it need not be provable in criminal court that an alien agitator committed crimes in order to establish that the alien should be deported.

That is weird to me. One can violate the law, but you don’t have to prove that the law was violated to deport a green-card holder.

The second National Review article argues that Khalil should be deported because the judgement of the Secretary of State should override that of any judge:

The Supreme Court has repeatedly held that the executive branch has broad discretion when it comes to national security judgments about which aliens may be admitted and which should be expelled from the United States. Nevertheless, because §1227 says the Secretary of State must have a reasonable ground to believe the alien’s presence or activities in the U.S. could cause “serious adverse foreign policy consequences,” counsel for Khalil will argue that the court has authority to review whether Secretary Rubio’s judgment is “reasonable.”

It would be highly controversial for a politically unaccountable judge — who has no constitutional responsibility for foreign policy, national security, or immigration enforcement — to substitute the court’s judgment for that of the Secretary of State, especially one who was just unanimously confirmed by the Senate to steer American foreign policy. I do not believe a majority of the Supreme Court would abide such judicial imperialism.

. . . To repeat, §1227 incorporates by reference the “terrorist activities” provision in the exclusion statute — specifically, subsection (a)(3) of §1182, which prescribes the excludability of aliens who, among other things, represent “a political, social, or other group that endorses or espouses terrorist activity” (that’s subsection (a)(3)(B)(i)(IV)(bb) — a mouthful, I know).

But there is one free-speech-like exception in the law:

“An alien … shall not be excludable or subject to restrictions or conditions on entry into the United States … because of the alien’s past, current, or expected beliefs, statements, or associations, if such beliefs, statements, or associations would be lawful within the United States, unless the Secretary of State personally determines that the alien’s admission would compromise a compelling United States foreign policy interest. [Emphasis added.]”

This is what I argued yesterday: to me, speech alone cannot justify deportation. But author Andrew McCarthy argues that this exception is “maddening” and legally insupportable.  In addition, he argues that Khalil did more than just speak: he acted:

I do not believe that Khalil’s activities in the U.S. should be deemed lawful speech and association. If reports are correct, Khalil was active as an agent of agitators who carried out lawless activities. That is not mere speech and association, and it would be unlawful if engaged in by Americans — indeed, that is why dozens of Americans were arrested in connection with the campus unrest.

I still have not heard the details of Khalil acting as an “agent of agitators,” except as a negotiator with Columbia on behalf of the two expelled students. Even if he demonstrated on behalf of Palestine or Hamas, that a statement, not a promotion of terrorism. But as McCarthy says:

. . . If the government can prove that Khalil was in a campus group that endorsed or espoused Hamas’s atrocities against Israel, it should be able to deport him regardless of his LPR status. And if it can deport him, there are likely to be thousands of others who can be deported, too — and should be.

That is also the argument of the Elder of Ziyon below, who claims that Khalil’s mere membership in an organization that foments or endorses terrorism is enough to get him deported, and the case is “airtight”. Click to read:

An excerpt:

According to 8 U.S. Code § 1227 – Deportable aliens, “Any alien who is described in subparagraph (B) or (F) of section 1182(a)(3) of this title is deportable.” The relevant part of those subparagraphs say:

The Elder argues, then, that Khalil was a “representative” of a Columbia group that endorsed terrorism:

There is no question that Khalil is a representative of Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD.) He represented CUAD in negotiations with Columbia a number of times; he was interviewed on TV numerous times as its lead negotiator, he is described as one of CUAD’s leaders.

There is also no question that CUAD endorses and espouses terrorist activity. For example, on the one year anniversary of October 7, it handed out newspapers on campus called “The New York War Crimes” that included this full page “ad:”

And the Elder continues, trying to demolish the idea that Khalil was merely exercising free speech:

Besides that, CUAD chants include explicit support for Hamas (“Yes, we’re all Hamas, pig!” and “Al-Qassam, you make us proud, kill another soldier now.”) Yet even without explicit support for Hamas, CUAD has praised “resistance’ over and over again, and that “resistance” is terrorism. One example is that they praised the October 1 shooting attack in Tel Aviv that murdered seven civilians, saying “On October 1, in a significant act of resistance, a shooting took place in Tel Aviv, targeting Israeli security forces and settlers. This bold attack comes amid the ongoing escalation of violence in the region and highlights the growing resolve of those resisting Israeli occupation.”

What seems clear is that CUAD did indeed endorse terrorism. But did Khalil himself? Is his membership in the organization sufficient to show he endorsed terrorism? You could say that it certainly is, but then you are saying that Robert Oppenheimer deserved to lose his security clearance because at one time he was a member of the Communist party, which to the government implied that he endorsed the Communist plan to overthrow capitalism (Oppenheimer didn’t, of course). To me it seems necessary to give evidence that Khalil himself endorsed terrorism. Perhaps the government has that information, but I haven’t seen it.  Thus I don’t find the Elder’s argument below convincing:

Even if Khalil claims that he is personally against the pro-terrorism stance of CUAD and only acted as their liaison, even if he claims that he never uttered a word of support for terror, he is CUAD’s representative by the legal definition and CUAD unambiguously endorses or espouses terrorist activity, making him subject to deportation. Free speech is a red herring.

Under US law, Mahmoud Khalil should be deported.

Finally, we have the article below by Ilya Shapiro arguing briefly that Khalil (or any supporter of Hamas) should be deported). Note the Shapiro himself was an immigrant who had to swear fealty to the U.S. twice (upon arriving and upon getting his green card). Click to read.

A short excerpt:

it’s a basic application of U.S. immigration law, which says that people here on a visa (tourist, student, employment, or otherwise) who reveal themselves to be ineligible for that visa—“inadmissible,” in the parlance of the Immigration and Naturalization Act (INA)—can have their visa revoked. As I wrote in a broader analysis of campus-related civil rights issues after the October 7, 2023 attacks on Israel, “The Immigration and Nationality Act allows the denial or revocation of a visa of ‘any alien who . . . endorses or espouses terrorist activity or persuades others to endorse or espouse terrorist activity or support a terrorist organization.’” Biden’s State Department also told then-Senator Marco Rubio that it could revoke the visas of Hamas supporters.

But that’s not all Trump can do. The INA’s inadmissibility provision also empowers the president to “suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens” whom he determines to be “detrimental to the interests of the United States” or to impose on them “any restrictions he may deem to be appropriate.” During Trump’s first term, the Supreme Court upheld that broad grant of presidential discretion to vet, restrict, and even ban immigrants—and thus to direct executive-agency action in that regard—at the culmination of the high-profile “travel ban” litigation. In Trump v. Hawaii, the Court okayed an executive order restricting travel from various countries, with Chief Justice John Roberts affirming that the only statutory requirement is that the president “find” the entry of the affected aliens to be “detrimental to the national interest.”

That’s exactly what’s happening now.

Shapiro is arguing about whether immigrants should be admitted under a visa, but concludes that the same restrictions prohibiting one’s admission should permit one to be deported when they’re already here—even if you have green card, which apparently counts as a visa:

While the government can’t send foreigners to jail for saying things it doesn’t like, it can and should deny or pull visas for those who advocate for causes inimical to the United States. There’s nothing objectional or controversial about removing those who harass, intimidate, vandalize, and otherwise interfere with an educational institution’s core mission. More, please.

MY TAKE:  As I noted yesterday, Khalil undoubtedly holds sentiments that I detest and was part of a group that holds similar sentiments—a group that seems to have approved of terrorism and thereby (the government argues) promoted it. However, I’ve seen no evidence that Khalil himself engaged in such activities, nor do I think it’s okay to deport somebody for saying something that would be legal if uttered by an American citizen.  Given that Khalil was one step away from citizenship, and (at least in the press) has not been shown to actually promote terrorism beyond being a member of a group that arguably does, I don’t think that what he does rises to the level of deportation.

Nor do I think that one should slough off the problem by saying “let Marco Rubio decide”.  Clearly the Secretary of State is an agent of the President, and of course our President wants anybody deemed “anti-American” kicked out of the U.S. (I would be making this argument, however, no matter who is President.) This seems to me—because Khalil is charged with violating immigration law—that it is the law—the courts—that must ultimately decide about his deportation.

This case may go to the Supreme Court.  Regardless of that Court’s conservatism, their judgement is the law, a law that should be obeyed. Right now, though, I haven’t seen any grounds for deporting Khalil.  That may change, but we are a country of laws, not of dictators.

The Jesus and Mo artist is back from hols, and proffers a new strip called “unsafe,” mocking the Emotion of the Decade. As so often, the theme is hypocrisy: the boys are unsafe because they can’t make others feel unsafe.

Our local star, the Sun has been under the watchful gaze of ESA’s Solar Orbiter since its launch in 2020. It’s been slowly getting closer and grabbing images using its Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) which citizen scientists have been stitching together into wonderful time-lapse videos. A recent video covers just 15 minutes of real time but within, you can see an M-Class flare that was unleashed by the Sun. The flares can produce brief radio blackouts here on Earth.

We continue with photos from the journey of Robert Lang through Brazil’s Pantanal region last year.  Robert’s notes are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them:

Readers’ Wildlife Photos: The Pantanal, Part XI: Birds

Continuing our mid-2025 journey to the Pantanal in Brazil, by far the largest category of observation and photography was birds: we saw over 100 different species of birds (and this was not even a birding-specific trip, though the outfitter also organizes those for the truly hard core). Here we continue working our way through the alphabetarium of common names.

Sunbittern (Eurypyga helias):

Rufescent tiger heron (Tigrisoma lineatum). This one could warrant an alternate name, “giraffe bird,” because…

…when it wants to see something far away, it does this:

Toco toucan (Ramphastos toco). Another amazing coloration. (It also makes me want to go get a bowl of cereal for some reason…):

Turkey vulture (Cathartes aura).

A pair of the same, warming up in the morning:

Blue-fronted amazon (Amazona aestiva):

Unidentified species—I wasn’t able to find this one (and the guide probably told us, but I couldn’t find a note). Any of our birder enthusiasts have an idea?:

Vermilion flycatcher (Pyrocephalus obscurus). He was very distant, so the photo isn’t great, but I couldn’t resist including it for its brilliance:

Wattled jacana (Jacana jacana). Also called the Jesus Christ bird for its ability to walk on water (or rather, walk on the tops of aquatic vegetation) without sinking. Alas, this one seems, like the Apostle Peter,to have lost his faith:

Coming next: the final birds.

It didn’t take long for concerns about RFKs unscientific ideological approach to healthcare to manifest. We are in the middle of a measles outbreak – the exact kind of situation for which we need a strong federal response. The person in charge of that response, RFK Jr., is a notorious anti-vaccine crank who is not a scientist or healthcare expert, even though […]

The post Vitamin A Does Not Treat or Prevent Measles first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Palaeontologists have discovered 66 three-toed dinosaur footprints in a slab of rock that has been on display for 20 years at a school in Queensland

Of all the moons in the Solar System, Europa is perhaps one of the most fascinating. With a thick ice shell surrounding a subsurface ocean, astrobiologists hope maybe there is life down there! Finding a way through the ice to explore what’s below is one of the biggest challenges. It’s possible however that the vital chemicals from life could find their way to the surface and through out into space. A new paper proposes an ultraviolet laser could be used to cause amino acids to fluoresce giving away their presence.

The closest single star to our own Solar System is Barnard’s Star. It’s 6 light years away and astronomers have just found four new mini-Earth planets in orbit around this red dwarf star. The discovery was made with the MAROON-X instrument on the Gemini North telescope which makes use of the radial velocity method to detect exoplanets. One planet was found in August 2024, the other three were only just added.

Researchers created 'growth printing,' which mimics tree trunks' outward expansion to print polymer parts quickly and efficiently without the molds and expensive equipment typically associated with 3D printing.

Scientists are using artificial intelligence to better capture how healthy cells surrounding tumors influence cancer cell behavior and how those interactions can inform treatments.

“If there is no enemy within, the enemy outside can do us no harm.”1

Ever since a Hezbollah suicide bomber in 1983 blew up a truck packed with explosives and killed 241 Marines in Beirut, combating Islamic terrorist organizations has been a priority for U.S. intelligence, security, and law enforcement agencies. However, for those of us who have followed the spiraling growth of Islamic terrorism in the 1980s and 1990s, it seemed as if the U.S was sluggishly reactive. They made little headway in extensive counterterrorism programs designed at penetrating and dismantling Islamic terror groups.2

How was it possible for the hijackers and their plot to remain off the radar of intelligence and law enforcement?

The 9/11 attack put a spotlight on the failures of the security agencies tasked to protect the U.S. against acts of terror. How was it possible for 19 hijackers and their ambitious plot to remain off the radar of intelligence and law enforcement? The truth, as I discovered during 18 months of reporting for my book, Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11, was not that the plot had gone undetected, but rather that the agencies responsible for monitoring and fighting terrorism had failed to share information, something that would have made it possible to connect the dots before the attack occurred.

The failures were more substantive than mere interagency rivalries between the CIA, FBI, NSA, and local law enforcement. Exclusive interviews I had with top intelligence officers and FBI officials revealed that the origins and depth of the dysfunction inside America’s counterintelligence programs was an internecine bureaucratic war that left little room for working together. Sharing information was given lip service but seldom practiced, particularly when the intelligence at stake was judged as having “high value.”

If the CIA had alerted the State Department, the two Saudis would have been on a watch list that barred them from entering the United States.

The most serious failure was the CIA’s tracking of two terrorists, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, when they moved from Saudi Arabia to California in 2000. If the CIA had alerted the State Department, the two Saudis would have been on a watch list that barred them from entering the United States. Once in California, however, the CIA could not legally monitor them domestically. The Agency not only lost track of the two Saudis but failed to let the FBI, which is specifically authorized to act within the U.S., know they were here. In July of 2001, only two months before 9/11, an FBI memo warned the American intelligence community that some bin Laden followers might be training at U.S. flight schools in preparation for an aerial terror attack. The CIA was unaware that al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi had taken flight training while living in the U.S.

If the CIA had shared its information about the two Saudis, al-Mihdhar might have been detained in June 2001, when he returned to Saudi Arabia and his visa had expired. Or when an Oklahoma state trooper pulled over al-Hazmi for speeding and a driver’s license check in the national database would have triggered security alerts. Sharing the CIA security concerns about the duo would have meant the Transportation Department had a red flag on them. The pair even used their own names when making reservations on American Airlines Flight 77, which was flown into the Pentagon.

“Responsibility and accountability were diffuse,” the 9/11 Commission Report concluded a year after I had published Why America Slept.3 That was a diplomatic understatement of the paralyzing dysfunction between intelligence and security agencies and policy makers. The unintended consequence of such discord was to give the advantage invariably to the terrorists.

My reporting revealed that the dearth of cooperation between the country’s top security and intelligence services was not new to 9/11. Exposing how and why the breakdowns to communicate between agencies had begun and persisted for decades explains why the world’s best law enforcement and intelligences agencies ended up fighting each other instead of combating Islamic terrorism.

“We knew that the Islamic threat was the next security problem for the U.S., and we had known it since the 1970s,” Duane “Dewey” Clarridge told me in a rare no-questions-off-limit interview in the wake of 9/11.4 Clarridge was a CIA legend. He was twenty-three when he joined the Agency in 1955 and over the next thirty years earned a reputation as one of its most accomplished covert operatives. Clarridge served in Nepal, India, and Turkey, before returning to headquarters in the 1970s. He became the chief of covert operations for the Near East Division, later ran Arab covert ops, then moved to the Latin American Division, before becoming the Rome station chief. It was during his three years in Arab operations that Clarridge became familiar with the key Islamic terrorists.

“We were running operations in Beirut against an alphabet-soup of Palestinian terror groups,” recalled Clarridge. “At the same time, Carlos the Jackal was running around Europe, pulling off stunts like trying to use a grenade launcher to down an El Al airplane at Orly, or shooting his way into the Vienna OPEC meeting, killing three, and kidnapping the Saudi and Iranian oil ministers. We had our hands full.”5

The Rivalry for Control of Operations and Investigations Between the CIA and FBI continues.

Terrorists ambushed and murdered Richard Welch, the CIA’s Athens station chief, two days before Christmas in 1975. Clarridge and his senior CIA colleagues wanted to go after the terrorists with covert assassination plans. The Agency’s timing was poor, however. Senate hearings into past misdeeds produced months of sordid headlines about the Agency’s 1960s assassination plots working with the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro, mind-control experiments, and failed foreign coups. Those hearings “permanently changed the way Clandestine Services operated,” says Clarridge. “It changed the rules of the game for us.”6

Congress initiated a process by which the Agency had to submit plans for its covert ops to a committee chaired by the president. Congress would be notified within sixty days after the president signed off. Permanent congressional oversight committees were established. The coup de grâce was President Ford’s Executive Order 11905 on February 18, 1976, that barred U.S. government agencies from undertaking assassinations.

The CIA abruptly halted its plans to eliminate Welch’s killers. For the next seven years, the Agency instead engaged in a mostly unsuccessful campaign to gather intelligence on leading Islamic terror groups in the hope of alerting allies to upcoming attacks.

The suicide truck bomber changed everything.

The suicide truck bomber who struck the U.S. embassy in Beirut in 1983 changed everything. CIA Director William Casey and FBI Director William Webster immediately dispatched teams to find out what happened. There were conflicts between those teams from the start. They got so bad that the agents of the rival agencies sometimes got into screaming and shoving matches. The FBI team returned home early, angry and frustrated by what it complained was dismissive treatment by its CIA counterparts.7 The CIA’s new Beirut station chief, William Buckley, ultimately offered an olive branch to the FBI: he invited the Bureau to dispatch another team to Lebanon and investigate free of CIA micromanagement. The FBI solved the case by tracing a fragment of an axle from the bombing truck to an Iranian factory that had links to the Iranian-backed Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

But by the time the FBI reached that conclusion, Iranian-sponsored terrorists had managed to kidnap Buckley in Beirut. That prompted President Reagan to create the government’s first joint task force to battle terrorism. The Restricted Interagency Group for Terrorism was chaired by the CIA’s director of covert operations, and it consisted of single representatives from the CIA, FBI, and the National Security Council. Dewey Clarridge was the Agency rep. The FBI’s man was Oliver “Buck” Revell, the assistant director for criminal investigations (I knew Buck well; he was the FBI Supervisor in Charge of the Dallas office when I researched the JFK assassination for my 1993 book, Case Closed). The National Security Council selected a U.S. Marine lieutenant colonel named Oliver North as its representative.

The new anti-terror group was in a rush to free Buckley before he could be tortured into giving up secrets. North wanted to use DEA informants—heroin traffickers who promised to deliver Buckley for $2 million. Dallas businessman Ross Perot agreed to finance the ransom to avoid U.S. laws that prohibited paying money to drug dealers. But the FBI, under the cautious leadership of William Webster, a former judge whom Jimmy Carter had appointed to run the Bureau, strenuously objected. North then backed a Clarridge operation to kidnap a Lebanese Shiite cleric, the head of Islamic Jihad, the organization holding Buckley. Clarridge wanted to trade the cleric for the CIA station chief. Again, the FBI’s fierce resistance scuttled the plan.

Clarridge fumed at the FBI’s intransigence and lobbied Casey to give the Agency more power in fighting terrorism. In January 1986, with a green light from Ronald Reagan, Casey created the Counterterrorism Center (CTC). Clarridge became its chief and he directed a staff of two hundred CIA officers, mostly analysts, as well as ten people loaned from other government intel and security agencies.8

Clarridge initially wanted to rely on the CIA’s foreign stations for surveillance, intel gathering, and informer recruitment, but that was not feasible since they were running at capacity. And, as Clarridge recalled, “the station chiefs were each narrowly focused on their own geographic divisions, while terrorism was a global problem that respected no boundaries.”9

Much to Clarridge’s disappointment, his only remaining option was to rely on the FBI for most of CTC’s field and operational assistance. It was against his better judgment since he thought the Webster-run FBI was far too risk-averse. Working with the Bureau also meant Clarridge had to run operations plans past FBI lawyers. “No one was very excited at the prospect of sharing national security secrets with lawyers at Justice,” recalled Clarridge.10

Clarridge quickly proposed an ambitious and risky operation to kidnap the Islamic Jihad hijackers of TWA Flight 847 and to fly them to America for trial. Webster contended the operation was likely to fail and that it likely violated both international and U.S. laws. The standoff between Clarridge and Webster killed the plan.

The next proposed CTC op was to kidnap Mohammed Hussein Rashid, a top bomb maker who had gotten explosives past airport security machines hidden in a Sony Walkman. A CTC operation to grab Rashid in the Sudan failed. Clarridge blamed the FBI, whose field agents were responsible for what the bureaucracy dubbed an “extraordinary rendition.” The Bureau complained that the Agency’s intelligence was flawed.

The unintended consequence of such discord was to give the advantage invariably to the terrorists.

The deteriorating CIA and FBI tensions worsened during a series of bungled operations. Not only did it botch the Rashid kidnapping, but a squad dispatched to free Beirut station chief Buckley also failed. It was also unsuccessful in tracking down the Libyan terrorists who bombed a Berlin disco frequented by American soldiers. The 1985 hijackings of TWA Flight 847 and the cruise liner Achille Lauro were headline news and made the U.S. look vulnerable and weak.

The FBI began a whisper campaign in Washington that the CIA’s jealous stewardship of CTC was its ruination. Those back door complaints resulted in a task force headed by Vice President George H.W. Bush. It proposed the FBI run its own “intelligence fusion center” to complement the CTC, but its recommendations were never implemented.11

Senior CIA officials complained bitterly to Reagan’s national security team that the FBI was overly cautious.

Senior CIA officials complained bitterly to Reagan’s national security team that the FBI was overly cautious and that America was vulnerable to Islamic terrorists who had entered on legal visas and had set up sleeper cells. Reagan responded in September 1986 by creating the Alien Border Control Committee (ABCC), an interagency task force designed to block the entry of suspected terrorists while also finding and deporting militants who had entered the country illegally or had overstayed their visas. The CIA and FBI joined the ABCC effort with great fanfare.

The ABCC had its first success only six months after its formation. The CIA tipped off the FBI about a group of suspected Palestinian terrorists in Los Angeles and the Bureau arrested eight men. But instead of being lauded, civil liberties groups contended that the ABCC should not be allowed to use information from the government’s routine processing of visa requests. Massachusetts Democratic Congressman Barney Frank, a strong civil liberties advocate, led a successful effort to amend the Immigration and Nationality Act so that membership in a terrorist group would no longer be sufficient reason to deny anyone a visa. The Frank amendment meant a visa could only be denied if the government could prove that the applicant had committed an act of terrorism.12 The amendment thereby rendered the ABCC toothless.

Meanwhile, the worsening relationship between the CIA and FBI hit a nadir within a couple of years when the weapons-for-hostages (Iran–Contra) scandal broke. The three key figures were the CIA’s Casey and Clarridge and the National Security Council’s North, all senior Counterterrorism Center officials. The FBI’s Buck Revell worried that the CIA and NSC might have violated U.S. laws prohibiting aid being given to the Contras and negotiating with terrorists. After Casey testified to Congress in November that he did not know who was behind the sale of two thousand TOW missiles to Iran (though the Agency was actively involved), Revell told FBI Director Webster that he thought Casey and other top Agency officials were obstructing justice. Webster authorized the Bureau to open a criminal investigation.

The failure of the country’s two premier national security agencies to work together seamlessly … only works to the benefit of America’s many enemies.

Casey was incapacitated by a stroke and hospitalized in early December. He resigned as CIA Director after surgery for a brain tumor a month later. Reagan tapped Robert Gates, the Agency’s Deputy Director, to take charge. But Gates soon withdrew his name when it became clear that questions about his role in Iran– Contra had scuttled any chance for Senate confirmation.13 After Gates’s withdrawal, Reagan offered the CIA job to Republican Senator John Tower, the head of the president’s Iran–Contra board. Tower declined. Reagan then got a no from James Baker, his chief of staff.14 Reagan and his team were in a panic. There were a dozen names on their list of possible CIA directors, but the president was set to make his first comments about the Iran–Contra scandal in a highly anticipated address to the nation on the evening of Wednesday, March 4. Reagan wanted to pick a new CIA director before that speech. Everyone agreed it had to be someone who would easily obtain Senate confirmation. That narrowed the field. On the morning of his national speech, Reagan met with FBI Director William Webster—who was in the final year of a 10-year contract to run the FBI—and surprised everyone by offering him the CIA post.

The news that the cautious FBI director had been asked to run the CIA sent shock waves through Langley and the ranks of senior spies. Webster was a Christian Scientist who relished a reputation as an inflexible straight arrow. He boasted his only vices were chocolate and tennis. Historian Thomas Powers concluded that the “CIA would rather be run by a Cub Scout den mother than the former head of the FBI.”15 Webster was disparaged by top officers like Clarridge, who had come to know his risk-averse management style.

“Since we at CTC had been working so closely with the FBI on terrorism,” Clarridge told me, “we had already heard a lot about Webster, and none of it was good. From the street level to the top echelons, they detested Webster because they saw him as an egotistical lightweight, a social climber, and a phony.”16

Webster had no background in foreign policy or world affairs. While Casey was judged inside the CIA as a kindred risk-taking spirit, especially by the covert teams, Webster’s cautious nature was exacerbated by an overwhelming fear of failure coupled with his strict insistence on not bending the letter of the law.

One of Webster’s first moves was to replace the CIA’s popular George Lauder, who had spent twenty years in the Operations Directorate, with William Baker, an FBI colleague. It was such an unpopular choice that no one clapped when Baker was introduced in the CIA’s main auditorium. When Baker told the agents they should study a new house manual called “Briefing Congress” and embrace the four “C’s”—candor, completeness, consistency, and correctness—many in the audience audibly snickered. “It was vintage FBI,” one agent in attendance told me. “It was what we expected.”17

Baker was not the only FBI colleague Webster brought along. Peggy Devine, his longtime executive secretary, had earned the nickname “Dragon Lady” at the Bureau. Also, his FBI chief of staff, John Hotis, and a group of “special assistants” made up what CIA employees derisively dubbed either the “FBI Mafia” or the “munchkins.” Some in the FBI contingent had Ivy League law degrees, but none had any intelligence background. And they effectively sealed Webster off from the rest of the Agency.

There was a widespread sentiment inside the CIA that the FBI had gone from being a partner to an avowed enemy.

Meanwhile, the FBI investigation that had begun under Webster into the Iranian arms sales had kicked into high gear. FBI agents raided Oliver North’s office and retrieved key documents his secretary did not have time to shred. Another FBI team served an unprecedented warrant at CIA headquarters in Langley, VA. The agents ordered Clair George, the CIA deputy director for operations, to open his office safe. It contained a document, with two of George’s fingerprints, that showed he had misled Congress. That produced a ten-count indictment against George and the removal of three CIA station chiefs. As for Clarridge, a few days before the statute of limitations expired, he was indicted on seven counts of perjury and making false statements to Congress. Inside the CTC, many employees wore T-shirts with slogans supporting him.

There was a widespread sentiment inside the CIA that the FBI had gone from being a recalcitrant partner to an avowed enemy whose purpose was to destroy the Agency’s hierarchy and its way of conducting its operations. As Clarridge noted:

We could probably have overcome Webster’s ego, his lack of experience with foreign affairs, his small-town-America world perspective, and even his yuppier-than-thou arrogance. What we couldn’t overcome was that he was a lawyer. All his training as a lawyer and a judge was that you didn’t do illegal things. He never could accept that this is exactly what the CIA does when it operates abroad. We break the laws of other countries. It’s how we collect information. It’s why we’re in business. Webster had an insurmountable problem with the raison d’être of the organization he was brought in to run.18

Clarridge was not the only one who thought Webster’s legal background was a handicap for running a spy agency. Pakistan’s President Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq once asked Webster how it was possible for a lawyer to head the CIA. Webster did not answer.

Even before Clarridge’s indictment, Webster had officially reprimanded him for his role in Iran–Contra and after promising to reassign him as the CTC director, had forced him to resign in June 1988. I spoke to nearly a dozen former operatives from the Directorate of Operations who confirmed, on background only, that the anger Clarridge expressed on the record about Webster was widespread throughout the CIA. The Agency had long prided itself on an unwritten code—Loyalty Up and Loyalty Down—and many CIA veterans felt that Webster had trashed that by going after agents like Clarridge.

It got worse for Webster when he tasked his chief of staff, John Hotis, and Nancy McGregor, a 28-year-old law clerk who had been one of his FBI administrative assistants, to rewrite the CIA’s regulations for covert operations. Webster had infuriated many intelligence agents when he compared covert ops to the FBI’s use of undercover agents in criminal probes. Under the new Webster rules, lawyers had to sign off on all covert plans. There was a long checklist required to get operations approved. The informal and fast-moving process of the past was history. Webster argued his rules instilled long overdue accountability in the Agency’s covert work. It was, countered CIA officials, the same framework that existed at the FBI and that had hindered the Bureau’s investigations for decades.

With the new rules in place over covert operations and having purged the CIA of half a dozen senior officers connected to Iran–Contra, some of the criticism of Webster started going public. Tom Polgar, a retired agent, wrote in an opinion editorial in The Washington Post that “the new watchword at the agency seems to be ‘Do No Harm’—which is fine for doctors but may not encourage imagination and initiative in secret operations.”19

Meanwhile, William Sessions, a former federal judge from San Antonio and a close friend of Webster’s had become the new FBI director. With encouragement from Webster, Sessions expanded the number of FBI agents serving in counterintelligence abroad. Instead of welcoming the help, it further irritated the CIA leadership who considered the FBI as inept competitors who were only likely to compromise intelligence operations.

Webster thought he could reform the Agency to share information with the FBI. In April 1988, Webster announced a totally redesigned Counterintelligence unit. Headquartered in Langley, VA, its mission was to teach CIA and FBI agents how to compile, organize, and share data that would be useful to both agencies. The first test of that cooperation happened in December 1988 when 270 people were killed when a bomb blew up Pan Am Flight 103 above Lockerbie, Scotland. The U.S. government did not disclose that three Middle East-based CIA officers flying home for the Christmas holidays were among the victims.

Israel’s Mossad intelligence had warned the CIA two weeks earlier. The CIA had never passed the warning to the FBI.

Israel’s Mossad intelligence had warned the CIA two weeks earlier that they had intercepted information that a Pan Am flight from Frankfurt to the U.S. would be bombed in December. Pan Am Flight 103 was a Frankfurt to U.S.-bound plane. The CIA had never passed the warning to the FBI.

Webster’s redesigned CTC was put in charge of the U.S. investigation. In Scotland, more than a thousand police, soldiers, and bomb technicians scoured hundreds of square miles around the crash site. They bagged thousands of pieces of evidence, and in that haul was a fragment of a circuit board the size of a small fingernail. It matched an identical board found in a bomb-timing mechanism used in a 1986 terror attack in the West African country of Togo. CTC tracked the circuit board to a consignment of timers manufactured by a Swiss company that had sold twenty of them to Libya.

Although progress had been made on finding out how the bombing was done, according to one U.S. official, it was not very long before the investigation was a “chaotic mess” of noncooperation.20 Within a few months, there were competing theories about who was responsible. The CIA blamed Iran for hiring a Damascus-based radical Palestinian faction to carry out the operation. Taking out the American plane was, according to Vincent Cannistraro, a CIA’s senior CTC officer, payback for the mistaken 1988 downing of an Iranian Airbus by a U.S. naval cruiser, which resulted in 290 civilian deaths. Cannistraro had become, after Clarridge’s departure, the major power inside CTC and its driving force.

Meanwhile, the FBI thought Libya was the sole culprit, seeking revenge for the U.S. bombings in 1986.

Both agencies leaked their internal disagreements. Anonymous CIA officials were quoted in the press mocking the FBI’s analytical reports on the bombing as being “like essays from grade school,” whereas an unidentified FBI agent said that “CIA believe they have a lot, but it’s a Styrofoam brick.”21

Even when the Libyans became prime suspects, the two agencies fought over what should be done. The FBI wanted to wait for indictments and then arrest those charged. The CIA’s Webster, not surprisingly, supported the letter-of-the-law approach. But inside the CIA, especially in CTC, agents bristled that the Libyans were beyond the reach of U.S. law. Cannistraro argued for “removing” the suspects at any cost, even if that meant assassinating them or allowing Israel to do it on behalf of the U.S. But Webster would broker no such discussion. Frustrated with Webster’s limitations on covert ops, Cannistraro abruptly resigned in September 1990, just before Iraq invaded Kuwait. “The CTC is starting to look too much like the FBI,” he disparagingly told a former colleague after giving Webster his notice.22

A 1990 Senate panel concluded that Webster’s efforts had failed to overcome the extensive fragmentation and competition in the government’s counterintelligence efforts. The panel concluded that it was virtually impossible to cure the dysfunction by merely insisting that the CIA and FBI drop their long-standing mutual distrust and dislike. Only by completely recreating America’s intelligence and crime-fighting apparatus, the panel suggested, might it be possible to make substantive progress.

The CIA and FBI have overhauled their training … but skepticism that there is any benefit to partnering remains a significant obstacle.

The 9/11 Commission made a series of recommendations for changes that could finally force the CIA and FBI and other elements of the national security apparatus to work together more effectively. There are thousands of internal intelligence documents released since 2001, as well as Inspector General Reports from the CIA and FBI, that have given great lip service to the “imperative of reform.”

The result over two decades later?

The CIA and FBI have overhauled their training of intelligence analysts, streamlined the management of the information collected and analyzed, and improved the coordination between the analytical units and operational teams. There are now redundancies designed to prevent intel from falling between the cracks. And there is greater accountability for failures.

Do the CIA and FBI work together better today than before 9/11?

What about the cooperation between the premier American law enforcement/intelligence agencies? Conversations with half a dozen currently serving and former officials from both the CIA and FBI give a mixed picture at best. The deep animosity from the Clarridge/Webster days is now mostly history. No one thinks of the other agency as a threat to its own survival. But skepticism that there is any benefit to be had by partnering with one another remains a significant obstacle to cooperation. CIA officers continue largely to view the FBI as highly paid police officers who are hobbled by Department of Justice lawyers. The FBI officials to whom I spoke pointed repeatedly to the CIA’s approval of torture for 9/11 detainees as a key reason the main terrorists at Guantanamo Bay have not gone to trial. “Maybe they would be better off,” one former FBI Counterintelligence officer told me, “if they had lawyers who told them when they were crossing the line instead of just rubber stamping every wild idea coming out of Langley.”

Do the CIA and FBI work together better today than before 9/11? Yes, in many respects. They have often had little choice with the rapid growth of more than 200 Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF) since 1980. In the JTTFs, the FBI and CIA are only two of more than 30 law enforcement and intelligence agencies supplying analysts, investigators, linguists, and hostage rescue specialists, to combat international terrorism directed at the homeland. Since they do not run the operations, their sniping at each other is not as evident. But that does not mean the JTTFs are free of finger pointing between all the partners. For instance, a 2009 arrest of three Afghans in a terror plot in New York City was widely heralded as a law enforcement triumph, but I discovered that FBI agents were privately furious at New York Police Department detectives for blowing a chance to snare a larger terror sleeper cell.23

Infighting among those tasked with enforcement makes it exponentially more difficult.

The rivalry for control of operations and investigations between the two 900-pound security gorillas in the U.S.—the CIA and FBI—continues. So does the desire to take credit for successful missions and put the blame on the other for failures. There are billions in annual budgets at stake and the reputation each seems jealously to guard. “They don’t make us better,” one retired CIA analyst contended in a conversation I had this summer. “They just compromise what we do best.”

That attitude cannot be eliminated through any series of bureaucratic reforms suggested by presidential commissions and Congressional hearings. It is a shame, however, because the failure of the country’s two premier national security agencies to work together seamlessly to fight terrorism and today’s enormous criminal cartels only works to the benefit of America’s many enemies. Crime and punishment is a difficult enough subject when the targets are international terrorists. However, infighting among those tasked with enforcement makes it exponentially more difficult.

Young stars grow by gobbling up nearby gas and dust. Over time, they can become extremely massive. The most massive stars we know of have up to 200 solar masses. But the flow of matter isn't a one-way street. Instead, young protostars eject some of the matter back into space with powerful jets.

Saturn has dozens of new moons, bringing it to a total of 274. All of the new moons are between 2 and 4 kilometres wide, but at what point is a rock too small to be a moon?

Saturn has dozens of new moons, bringing it to a total of 274. All of the new moons are between 2 and 4 kilometres wide, but at what point is a rock too small to be a moon?

Analysis of samples brought back to Earth from the asteroid Bennu reveal that it has a bizarre chemical make-up and is unusually magnetic

Microplastics have been found almost everywhere that scientists have looked for them. Now these bits of plastic -- from 1 to 62 micrometers long -- have been found in the filtered solutions used for medical intravenous (IV) infusions. The researchers estimate that thousands of plastic particles could be delivered directly to a person's bloodstream from a single 8.4-ounce (250-milliliter) bag of infusion fluid.

Astronomers have revealed new evidence that there are not just one but four tiny planets circling around Barnard's Star, the second-nearest star system to Earth.

Farming arose on multiple continents among populations with radically different cultures and environments and with no means of communicating with each other – how did it crop up independently at about the same time?

Where there's water, there are waves. But what if you could bend water waves to your will to move floating objects? Scientists have now developed a technique to merge waves in a water tank to produce complex patterns, such as twisting loops and swirling vortices. Some patterns acted like tweezers or a 'tractor beam' to hold a floating ball in place. Other patterns made the ball spin and move precisely in a circular path. In the future, the technique could be scaled down to precisely move particles the size of cells for experiments, or scaled up to guide boats along a desired path on the water.

Cost, technical performance and environmental impact -- these are the three most important aspects for a new type of LED technology to have a broad commercial impact on society.