it comes up again and again. and partly on the left it s so much easier to blame americans than it is to tell the truth about who our enemies are. it may be this is a cultural story more than a political story. don t you think, though, it has to be seen through the prism of the election? because the narrative was that al-qaeda had been beaten, that bin laden was dead? i would have said that if the person speaking was from the white house staff. but the person speaking is secretary clinton s agent. you may well be right. that s certainly, in washington, the smaller view. but i m just really struck, even as recently as the boston bombing, when you have two chechnyans engaged in a bombing and the first reaction is, gee, i wonder what their motives were. you almost want to break down and cry. this is a wilful hiding from the truth that goes on over and over among our elites. so i think they were eager to
communicating in the best way with the other branches of it. i was going to ask you, the frontline special covers this. you brought up the issue of sharing. have the intelligence agencies learned the lesson of 9/11? i think they share when they have a particular mission. if you look at the bin laden raid, the lesson there is you put people on a very narrow and deep subject. bin laden, or chechnyans or hezbollah, and they become specialists in it and understand and learn who throughout the government is a specialist in that area. there are places in the government where that happens, and those are the places where things work well. what doesn t work well. you have people not specialists in an area, combing the waterfront, the idea that the
in this country for obvious reasons. but we rarely talk about terror affecting the united states. that comes from chechnya, that comes from russia. have u.s. intelligence agencies been looking hard enough from terror threats in that region? well, we have been looking, and a lot of our information, of course, comes from the russians who are concerned about people of interest coming back to the to russia in order to carry out these types of attacks. in particular, remember the russian population has gone through about a dozen major attacks from al qaeda-linked chechnyan organizations. and in particular, if we remember, the moscow subway bombing, the bombing of the school, the bombing of the theater. i mean, these are ongoing events. not just in russia, by the way, but the chechnyans have a califate that would include all of southern russia but also afghanistan, pakistan.
it s just a big country with a lot of immigrants and there s no perfect computer system that takes care of this. okay. bill gavin, fbi getting a lot of flack at the moment. you ve been in high shoes over at the fbi. how much of it is deserved? i think, you know, we have to trace it back, piers, to say how did this whole thing start. you know, being chechnyans, the russians have pretty good coverage of everybody s phone in their country and particularly chechnyan. the way these things originate, they intercept a call, they find out who the call came from, then they ll contact whether it be an intelligence agency or the bureau and say listen, this person could be engaged in terrorism. that may or may not be true, based on any conversation they overhear, but it s a way to get the attention of authorities. so the fbi does the backgrounds. they do whatever they can on the computer and whatnot, and they ll do some interviews. if there s no red flags that go up, this is a very difficult p
he doesn t have the same rights as americans. he should have been pulled aside, questioned, his documents gone through. if he had a laptop, his address book and the rest of it. so yes, when you have an attack like this, there is some sort of breakdown. this guy was all over the internet. there s no other way to describe it. we cannot pinpoint the fault with the fbi, the cia or immigration. it s just a big country with a lot of immigrants and there s no perfect computer system that takes care of this. okay. bill gavin, fbi getting a lot of flack at the moment. you ve been in high shoes over at the fbi. how much of it is deserved? i think, you know, we have to trace it back, piers, to say how did this whole thing start. you know, being chechnyans, the russians have pretty good coverage of everybody s phone in their country and particularly chechnyan. the way these things originate, they intercept a call, they find out who the call came from, then