[Infowarrior] - WH Homeland Security Adviser Resigns

[Richard Forno]

November 19, 2007
Homeland Security Adviser Resigns
By BRIAN KNOWLTON

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/19/washington/19cnd-townsend.html?hp=&pagewan
ted=print

WASHINGTON, Nov. 19 ‹ Frances Fragos Townsend, the White House adviser on
terrorism and homeland security, whose tough and aggressive approach had
made her one of President George W. Bush¹s most trusted aides, has resigned.

In a statement issued by the White House this morning, the president said
that Ms. Townsend ³has played an integral role in the formation of the key
strategies and policies my administration has used to combat terror and
protect Americans.²

³We are safer today because of her leadership,² he said.

The statement gave no reason for Ms. Townsend¹s departure.

Ms. Townsend, 45, a street-wise onetime mob prosecutor in Manhattan whose
hard-driving style led coworkers to call her ³The Hurricane,² has been the
homeland security adviser since May 28, 2004, serving during a time of
bitter debate over the Iraq war and its impact on the fight against
terrorism, and the remaking of American intelligence agencies.

Mr. Bush gave her the task of ensuring that the prickly bureaucracies at the
F.B.I., the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon changed their ways
after expert panels studying the Sept. 11 attacks concluded that as a group
the American spy agencies were dysfunctional.

While Ms. Townsend¹s tenure saw no major terror attacks on United States
soil, it also yielded scant progress in fighting the Al Qaeda leadership in
Pakistan, a failure that Ms. Townsend acknowledged this summer. Even before
the latest political crisis in Pakistan, a vital ally, American officials
were expressing doubts that the government of General Pervez Musharraf was
losing the fight in the rugged northwest region where Osama bin Laden is
thought to be hiding.

Her departure is the latest in a series by top Bush advisers and confidants
this year, including the president¹s political adviser, Karl Rove; his
senior adviser, Dan Bartlett; his spokesman, Tony Snow; his attorney general
and former White House counsel, Alberto Gonzales; and from a post in the
State Department, Mr. Bush¹s longtime friend and communications adviser,
Karen Hughes.

Ms. Townsend grew up in Wantagh, N.Y., a Long Island suburb, and graduated
from American University and the University of San Diego Law School. She
returned to New York to take a job in the Brooklyn district attorney¹s
office, where she gained the attention and support of two prominent federal
prosecutors: Louis J. Freeh, who later served as F.B.I. director, and
Rudolph W. Giuliani, who became mayor of New York and is now running for
president. While he was United States attorney, Mr. Giuliani recruited Ms.
Townsend to run his office¹s organized-crime unit, where she impressed peers
with her tough face-to-face interviews of reputed mob figures.

She then moved to the Justice Department in Washington for 13 years,
becoming a trusted adviser in the Clinton administration to Attorney General
Janet Reno. When Mr. Bush became president, the new attorney general, John
Ashcroft, dropped her, presumably for being too close to Ms. Reno, and in
the summer of 2001, she became the Coast Guard¹s intelligence chief. It was
a ³backwater² job, she quipped at the time ‹ until the attacks of Sept. 11
propelled it, and her, to greater prominence, and ultimately into the
president¹s circle of advisors.