People of my political tendencies have many reasons for disliking former FBI Director Louis Freeh. He a) was an uptight moralizer who gave the Clinton White House no end of headaches, b) hobnobbed with Hill Republicans to no good purpose, and c) presided over an FBI which was responsible for a series of big time screw-ups which ended up creating even more headaches for the then-Clinton White House. Basically, Freeh inhabited a netherworld created by the antagonism between Bill Clinton and congressional Republicans in which accountability did not exist.
So Clinton partisans have reason to dislike him and want to saddle him with having left the FBI unprepared for 9/11. But, my god, you don’t have to look very hard to find lots of justification for doing so. I’ve been working for a bit more than a week on an article about problems with the FBI and US counter-terrorism efforts and the more I learn the less I think of Freeh. He really blew it. For everything that ended up counting on 9/11 he was a really big time disaster.
What’s ironic is that Mueller and George Tenet are the ones getting grilled because as nearly as I can tell they’re both pretty solid. In Mueller’s case he was already talking about doing stuff to clean up Freeh’s mess even before 9/11, even though he only took office slightly before then. As to Tenet, my reporting has also given me a better sense of him and the work that he’s done since he came in in 1997.
