-Caveat Lector-
{{Oh, they lost it because they need more funding!! The computers
were too old. Well, that might have been so but an organization of
that size should be able to handle something this important and
should have in place double-checks on a computer system no matter
how old or current it may be. It couldn't be that they were going
for a conviction and the death penalty no matter what so this could
be yet another case solved with the "lone gunman, bomber, perp." Or
could it? And would he have confessed if he had not already
received the death penalty? Why not just TELL people they are going
to be executed and see if they confess? The whole world is watching
now for sure to see the barbaric Americans watch an execution in
which the govt conducted an unfair trial. IMHO~Amelia~ }}
May 12 - Former FBI agent Jospeh Cantamessa blames an outdated
computer system. How the FBI
lost the evidence
Failure blamed on lapses in document storage
By Edward Walsh
THE WASHINGTON POST
WASHINGTON, May 12 - The FBI four times ordered its field offices
to turn over to prosecutors any material they gathered during the
investigation of the Oklahoma City bombing. But it was only in
response to a fifth directive, sent in December, that the field
offices discovered they had overlooked thousands of pages of
documents, FBI officials said yesterday.
'I just see poor management and bad databases and, unfortunately,
an element of incompetence.'
- MICHAEL R. BROMWICH
former Justice Department inspector general THE OFFICIALS
WERE unable to explain why the earlier searches failed to turn up
all the material. But others familiar with the case said it appeared
to be the result of a sloppy data storage and retrieval system that
the FBI was warned about in 1999.
"I just see poor management and bad databases and,
unfortunately, an element of incompetence," said Michael R.
Bromwich, a former Justice Department inspector general.
The problem, which led yesterday to a delay in the execution
of convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy J. McVeigh, was
widespread, affecting 46 of the FBI's 56 field offices across the
country. In a letter to McVeigh's lawyers, Justice Department lawyer
Sean Connelly listed 3,135 pages of documents and other items of
evidence that had not been turned over to the defense before McVeigh
's 1997 trial.
The largest amount of overlooked material was in the Los
Angeles Field Office, which missed 426 pages, and the Miami Field
Office, which missed 226 pages. The Washington and Cincinnati field
offices overlooked relatively small amounts, three pages each. Bill
Carter, an FBI spokesman, said 10 field offices assured FBI
headquarters that they already had turned over all their material.
The bulk of the missing documents, which were given to
McVeigh's lawyers Thursday, consisted of reports summarizing FBI
interviews of witnesses. They also included material such as
photographs and tapes, Connelly wrote.
Connelly and other Justice Department and FBI officials
continued to insist that none of the recently discovered material
had any bearing on the convictions and sentencing of McVeigh and his
co-conspirator, Terry L. Nichols, who was convicted in a separate
trial and sentenced to life in prison. But Connelly said the
material should have been given to McVeigh's lawyers before trial
under the terms of a "reciprocal discovery agreement" between
prosecution and defense.
The material was denied not only to McVeigh's lawyers, but
also to the federal prosecutors.
SHORTCOMINGS WELL-KNOWN
While Attorney General John D. Ashcroft ordered an
investigation yesterday into how and why the missing material was
overlooked in earlier searches, the shortcomings of the FBI's
information management system are well known inside the bureau and
the Justice Department.
In a July 1999 report on the FBI's handling of intelligence
information in connection with an investigation into 1996 campaign
finance abuses, Bromwich - then the Justice Department's inspector
general - said, "The FBI's procedures for culling information from
its teletypes and electronic communications and inputting it into
its databases essentially make it impossible for the FBI to state
with confidence that a database search has yielded all information
in the FBI's files about a particular subject," the report said.
Advertisement
It added that the problem was exacerbated by inadequate
training of FBI personnel and by internal regulations that allowed
agents to forgo entering "important investigative information" into
the databases.
Last month, the leaders of a key House committee asked FBI
Director Louis J. Freeh to provide information on the "deficiencies"
in the FBI's information technology. "The committee is concerned
that the FBI has information technology systems that are slow,
unreliable and obsolete," Reps. F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wis.),
the chairman, and John Conyers Jr. (Mich.), the ranking Democrat on
the House Judiciary Committee, wrote Freeh.
Bromwich said yesterday the FBI "is best at throwing huge
amounts of resources at a case and trying to solve it quickly. What
that leaves are massive coordination and organizational problems
later on, and not enough centralized, institutionalized knowledge of
where everything is."
"I doubt you will find intentional misconduct on anybody's
part in burying these documents for years," he added. "The more
credible explanation is lack of organization, lack of management and
lack of managing their data resources."
An FBI official said that in response to the December
directive to the field offices, material began to come into a
central processing center in Oklahoma City in late January. The
material was cross-checked against what was in the FBI's databases
from the Oklahoma City investigation, and most of the it proved to
be duplicates of reports, he said.
Latest on McVeigh
MATERIAL APPEARED TO BE NEW
But almost from the start, a small percentage of the material
appeared to be new, the official said. At some point early in the
process, Danny Defenbaugh, the FBI agent in charge of the Oklahoma
City investigation, became involved in cross-checking the material.
But Defenbaugh and others apparently decided to wait until they had
completed the process before they informed FBI headquarters of the
new material, the official said, speaking on the condition of
anonymity.
Defenbaugh notified headquarters on Tuesday, according to a
statement he issued, and Freeh was informed of the new material
Thursday, the FBI official said.
The official added that some field offices may have
interpreted the first four directives as applying only to material
directly related to the prosecution of McVeigh and Nichols. But the
fifth directive asked the field offices to produce material that
would allow the bureau's archivist to assemble a complete record.
They may then have decided to forward every scrap of paper, he said.
Beth Wilkinson, a former Justice Department prosecutor who
argued to the jury that McVeigh should receive the death penalty,
said that late in the discovery process prosecutors asked Freeh to
issue a directive ordering the field offices to produce all of their
Oklahoma City-related material and requiring the special agent in
charge of each office to certify that its files had been searched
and the material produced. She said that Freeh was happy to comply
with the request and that, as far as the prosecutors knew, the field
offices had conducted a thorough search.
"There is no reason to believe that this was anything but an
unfortunate error," Wilkinson said.
Wilkinson said the discovery agreement that prosecutors
reached with McVeigh's lawyers required them to turn over material
that they were not otherwise required to disclose and that normally
would not be made available to defense lawyers in a federal criminal
trial. Another source familiar with the Oklahoma City investigation
said the purpose of the broad agreement was to prevent a conviction
from coming under attack after the trial.
"The prosecution team decided we would turn over everything
so there would not be a question like this," the source said.
Staff writers Bill Miller, Susan Schmidt and David A. Vise
contributed to this report.
� 2001 The Washington Post CompanyEducation
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