In late May 2000, an Army major named Erik Kleinsmith sat in his office at the Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) with a chief warrant officer named Terri Stephens, weighing two options. Delete the data his team had spent a year assembling on al Qaeda’s global network, or go to jail. Kleinsmith and Stephens had mapped the organization across the Maghreb, the Balkans, the Far East, the Middle East — and into New Jersey, with a thread running back to Kleinsmith’s own hometown of Plymouth, Michigan. They had names, camp imagery, front businesses, a communications architecture their small team had mapped faster and more completely than several agencies many times their size and budget. On the orders of Army JAG lawyers enforcing a regulation written for a different era of intelligence collection, they deleted all of it. Sixteen months later, some of what they had mapped walked onto four airplanes.

Kleinsmith has been on the public record about that day for two decades. He testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the destruction order in September 2005, and again before the House Armed Services Committee the following February, describing an order that was “not hostile or aggressive,” just policy. What he offered this week, marking the 25th anniversary of September 11, was not a new set of facts so much as new candor: the conversation with Stephens about hiding the tapes rather than destroying them, the idea of relabeling the files, the phone call to the United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM) and the silence that followed it, the analyst who asked to be pulled off the team out of fear of prosecution. Twenty years of testimony had given the public the fact. Only now has he given it the room. He remains, by every account of people who know him, an unusually restrained man about where to place blame — he calls what happened “a parade of errors,” not a conspiracy, and reaches for the Titanic rather than a single villain. That restraint is itself worth noting, because the explanation he’s willing to offer in public — an outdated oversight........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)