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Fran Townsend: Iraq Withdrawal Means al-Qaida Attacks on U.S. Ronald Kessler A quick withdrawal from Iraq could lead to devastating casualties within the U.S. from al-Qaida attacks, Fran Townsend, the White House's chief of counterterrorism, tells NewsMax. "I think there is an attraction and a very sincere commitment by everybody, Republicans or Democrats, to bringing the boys and girls home," Townsend says. "Nobody wants our men and women in the military to be there one day longer than they need to be." But, Townsend says, "What you don't hear is the same people talk about the consequences of bringing them home. The consequences could very well be dead Americans inside the United States if Iraq becomes a safe haven. "I've never heard a good explanation of, 'OK, if your plan is you want to bring the men and women in our military home, what is your plan to deny them safe haven in Iraq?' Frankly, that's the right next question, and I haven't heard a good answer to that."
As assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism, the 5-foot-tall former organized crime prosecutor meets with President Bush every morning. Townsend is known to utter expletives when she encounters foot dragging and will cut people off in mid-sentence if she thinks they are not giving her the straight scoop.
At the same time, says an FBI counterterrorism official, "She understands our business and is completely supportive of the intelligence community."
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A Prosecutor Made The daughter of a Greek-American father, who was a roofer, and an Irish-American mother, who was an office manager for a construction company, Townsend was raised in Wantagh, Long Island.
At age 11, Townsend wrote letters to her priest, bishop, cardinal and finally the Vatican asking to be an altar boy. Turned down, she tried to sneak into Mass in a borrowed robe, before her priest caught her.
Townsend was the first in her family to finish high school. Because money was tight, she took an accelerated course load in college and worked as a waitress. She graduated cum laude from American University in 1982 and received a law degree from the University of San Diego School of Law in 1984.
A frightening incident at her college dorm room, where she was physically threatened by a man who was let off with little more than a warning, led to her interest in becoming a prosecutor. After law school, she prosecuted Gambino crime-family members for the U.S. attorney's office in New York City under Rudolph Giuliani. She went on to take a high-level position at the Justice Department.
When I interviewed Townsend in her West Wing Office, she sat at the head of a small conference table under a photo taken of her at the National Counterterrorism Center in McLean. With her at the operations center were Bush, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden, and Vice Adm. John Scott Redd, director of the NCTC. The NCTC symbolizes the changes in the intelligence community since 9/11. Contrary to the impression created by the media that the FBI and CIA don't talk to each other, at the NCTC, more than 200 FBI, CIA, and other intelligence personnel sit side by side 24 hours a day, analyzing intelligence and parceling out leads.
Similarly, the media recently highlighted a finding in a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that al-Qaida has established a safe haven in the tribal areas of Pakistan. But the estimate also said that terrorist groups "perceive the homeland as a harder target to strike than on 9/11." Al-Qaida Resurgence in Pakistan While The New York Times ran that positive conclusion as part of the text of the NIE, the paper ignored the point in its story about the resurgence of al-Qaida in Pakistan. Only three other newspapers — the Virginian-Pilot, the Mobile Register, and the Cincinnati Post — referred to the finding. There was no mention of it by any television network. The safe haven in the tribal areas resulted from a 10-month-old truce between tribal leaders and Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf. Now Pakistan is beginning to go after terrorists in the ungoverned region, Townsend notes. "Pakistan has been an incredibly important ally," Townsend points out. "Those top operational leaders like Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, Abu Zubayda, and Ramzi Binalshibh were captured or killed as a result of Pakistani action or joint Pakistani-American action." The Pakistanis also helped roll up the August 2006 plot to explode airliners crossing into the U.S. from London. "The tribal areas have never seen the real writ of the Pakistani government," she says. "It has been an ungoverned space for a long period of time, and President Musharraf made a judgment that cutting the peace deal with the tribal elders in the tribal areas was a piece to a bigger plan of extending the writ of the Pakistani government." Part of the deal was that tribal elders would keep foreign fighters out. "It hasn't happened, and in fact quite the opposite," Townsend says. "So we will now work with the Pakistani government to make sure that we don't permit them that safe haven." Currently, the Pakistanis have over 80,000 troops in the region. "They've taken hundreds of casualties in the fight. They are engaged," Townsend says. "We need to work with them to make sure they stay aggressively engaged, and to the extent they need additional assistance or capability, we will work with them to make sure they have it.
"We have offered military assistance. They have not indicated a need for that. But the president has made very clear that job one is protecting the American people, and when it comes to that job, if we have actionable intelligence, there are no options that are off the table." When Bush says that Iraq is the "central front" in the war on terrorism, he means that Iraq harbors the greatest number of al-Qaida fighters, Townsend says. Confirming the point, Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaida's ideological leader, has called Iraq "the place for the greatest battle of Islam in this era." A few weeks ago, in a taped message, al-Zawahiri urged Muslims to "hurry to Iraq." Intercepted communications show that al-Qaida central considers al-Qaida in Iraq to be a subsidiary of the terrorist organization. And while he is isolated, Osama bin Laden communicates orders through couriers, Townsend says. If the U.S. pulls out before Iraqi forces can take over, al-Qaida will use Iraq as a safe haven to train, plot, recruit, and generate propaganda. "Al-Qaida's vision is to establish a caliphate," Townsend observes. "Nobody should make any mistake: These smaller groups, these affiliates, are not separate entities with a separate agenda. There is a strategic — if you will corporate — vision of al-Qaida, and they are all pieces in that puzzle." As outlined in the NewsMax article FBI's Mueller: Bin Laden Wants to Strike U.S. Cities With Nuclear Weapons, al-Qaida is "intent on acquiring nuclear materials to create a device," Townsend says. "We don't believe, based on our intelligence, that they have that capability now. We have no doubt that, if they acquired it, they would use it." Turning to the homeland, a Pew Research Center poll found that about a quarter of U.S. Muslims who are age 18 to 29 believe that suicide bombings could be justified. Those attitudes, in turn, are generated by imams who preach jihad in American mosques and by postings on the Internet, according to FBI sources. Muslim Suspicions Townsend says she hesitates to guess how many mosques advocate extremism. But one FBI official says it could be as high as one in 10 of the 2,000 mosques in the U.S. "This is a very small, not representative section of extremists, who frankly pervert the meaning of the Quran and Islam to promote this ideology," Townsend says.
At the same time, "I find in speaking with many Muslim Americans that there is a sense of suspicion about our motives," Townsend says, referring to the FBI and other government agencies. "They want to know if we are truly looking for a partnership with them rather than targeting them. I think it's going to require a sustained and persistent effort on the part of the government to build these bridges, and it's going to take time." Just as many Americans do not understand that Islam inherently is a peaceful religion, they often are overly suspicious of Saudi Arabia, Townsend observes. Among the Persian Gulf states, no country has worked more effectively with the CIA and FBI to roll up terrorists than Saudi Arabia, Townsend says. Referring to mabahith, the Saudi internal security force, Townsend says, "They suffer the same losses, the same threats that we do, and we work quite closely with them." At the urging of the U.S., Saudi Arabia now requires anyone leaving or entering the country to declare currency valued at the equivalent of U.S. $16,000 or more. "This was instituted because of our concern that terrorists can use cash to finance their operations and evade efforts to trace their transactions and seize their money," Townsend says. As with any partner, the U.S. wishes Saudi Arabia would do more. "But as a partner, we work with them to find our mutual interests."
What does undermine the war on terror are media disclosures of intelligence sources and methods, Townsend says. With the CIA's release in June 2007 of documents detailing the agency's abuses in the 1960s and 1970s, the media pounced, suggesting that those illegalities were similar to the Bush administration's practices, thus justifying use of leaked information.
In fact, in contrast to the past practices, the Bush White House disclosed its aggressive efforts to combat terrorism to key leaders and committees of Congress and to the courts. In the case of the USA Patriot Act, Congress itself enacted the legislation. As for coercive interrogation techniques, Congress recently enacted legislation which still allows the president to order such techniques.
Calling the leaks "devastating," Townsend says, "It's not just a question of you're putting individuals at risk. The real risk is to the lives of Americans who may suffer an attack because we couldn't stop it, because the source was taken out. When a technical program is compromised, literally hundreds of millions of dollars are lost because a technique that's been invested in over many years is no longer productive." The disclosures impair the morale of FBI and CIA personnel who are trying to protect the country from another attack. "My responsibility is to help the president make good decisions to protect the American people," Townsend says. "The leaks make my job that much harder, and they make me not only frustrated but angry, because leaking classified material when no abuse is involved puts us all at risk." Ronald Kessler is chief Washington correspondent of NewsMax.com. View his previous reports and get his dispatches sent to you free via e-mail. Go here now.
© NewsMax 2007. All rights reserved.
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