http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/nyc-dugg0414,0,4290919.column?... Searching for a fall guy Dennis Duggan April 13, 2004, 8:14 PM EDT We've got to have a fall guy, Humphrey Bogart's Spade tells Sidney Greenstreet in the 1941 film The Maltese Falcon, _base_d on a novel by Dashiell Hammett. I've got to find a victim , says Bogart. If I don't, I'll be it. Greenstreet reluctantly agrees and both agree to pin a string of murders on a cheap gunsel and Greenstreet sidekick Elisha Cook Jr., a great Hollywod character actor. There will be a fall guy in this administration, too, an Elisha Cook Jr. Someone will have to be thrown to the wolves to atone for the massive blunders of the Bush administration. It won't be President Bush, who is running for re-election and whose poll numbers are falling. It won't be his close adviser Condoleezza Rice either. But both know they have plenty of bodies they can throw into the breach. And both have sent none too subtle messages about whom they claim led them down the garden path, although the intelligence message to the president in a presidential daily briefing seemed explicit enough and was even headlined in capital letters: Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S. That was in August of 2001, a month before bin Laden did just that. Neither Bush nor Rice will play the victim. The Republicans have invested too much time and money into Bush. Rice is insulated by her closeness to the president. So the question now is who will be the fall guy? If you listened carefully to what Bush told the press on Monday, it will be someone in the intelligence community, exactly the area the commission zeroed in on yesterday. Bush said, Now may be the time to revamp and reform our intelligence services, meaning the FBI and CIA and other intelligence agencies. Some of the prospective fall guys from those agencies came into view on television yesterday. They included Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller III and former Director Louis J. Freeh. Freeh, director from 1993 to 2001, seemed to be sweating the most under the critical questioning from several commission members. Could he be the fall guy? He would be the perfect fall guy, says author and journalism professor Bruce Porter, who spent several weeks interviewing Freeh for an article that appeared in The New York Times Sunday Magazine in the fall of 1997. Porter liked Freeh then but now thinks along with other critics such as Sen. Charles Schumer that he wasn't able to bring the agency's computing system up to snuff, and it was that failure that prevented other agencies from connecting the dots on other intelligence from U.S. agencies. I think he got distracted with other problems, the Unabomber and Ruby Ridge, and with critics of the agency, says Porter, 65, who now teaches journalism at Columbia University after a long career at Brooklyn College. The FBI's computing system was and is a disgrace, says Porter - an assertion also made yesterday by Schumer - and they had other communication problems such as the fact their radiophones didn't work well. Porter, who is the author of Blow , a novel about drugs which was made into a movie starring Johnny Depp and Penelope Cruz in 2001, wrote that Freeh's candid assessment of his agency made him a hero among recruits back at Quantico and with ordinary agents in the field. He agrees with Baruch professor Douglas Muzzio that John Ashcroft will get a pass on the fall guy slot. That would bring politics into it, says Porter. He is from Missouri, which is a crucial election state. Muzzio also tags Freeh as best bet for the fall guy and notes that Ashcroft has the protection not only of Bush but of the Christian right, which pushed for his appointment to the job. It's too bad Bush doesn't have the sign on his desk that President Truman had. It read The buck stops here. That sign was brought to my attention yesterday by Queens College mathematics professor Robert Cowen. It's sickening that the only person who has apologized for the mess we are in was Richard Clarke, he said. Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.