Sad Tale of FBI Negligence
Scott Shane and Neil A. Lewis write in The New York Times: At Sept. 11 Trial, Tale of Missteps and Management. It is a sad tale.
[tease] (emphasis added)
At the F.B.I., a few agents pursued clues that would later prove tantalizingly close to the mark, but they could not draw attention from top counterterrorism officials. A Minnesota F.B.I. agent, Harry M. Samit, warned in a memorandum that Mr. Moussaoui was a dangerous Islamic extremist whose study of how to fly a Boeing 747-400 seemed to be part of a sinister plot.
“As the details of this plan are not yet fully known, it cannot be determined if Moussaoui has sufficient knowledge of the 747-400 to attempt to execute the seizure of such an aircraft,” Mr. Samit wrote on Aug. 31, 2001. He had already urged Washington to act quickly, because it was not clear “how far advanced Moussaoui’s plan is or how many unidentified co-conspirators exist.”
[tease] (emphasis added)
The sentencing trial made clear the frustration of the Minneapolis F.B.I. office in its repeated efforts to interest bureau headquarters in Mr. Moussaoui.
Gripping testimony came from Mr. Samit, who arrested Mr. Moussaoui on Aug. 16 and quickly became convinced that he was a terrorist who knew about an imminent hijacking plot. Mr. Samit said that he had sent about 70 warning messages about Mr. Moussaoui, but that they had produced no results.
The agent said he had been puzzled at the reluctance of Michael Maltbie, a supervisor with the Radical Fundamentalist Unit at bureau headquarters, to seek a search warrant for Mr. Moussaoui’s belongings from a special intelligence court.Mr. Samit seemed unable to satisfy Mr. Maltbie’s demand that he provide a tangible link between Mr. Moussaoui and a foreign power, a requirement for a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. He thought he had sufficient evidence from two French intelligence reports showing Mr. Moussaoui had recruited someone to fight in Chechnya for an Islamist group allied with Mr. bin Laden.
I don’t understand why there is not a firestorm of protest about Michael Maltbie misguided handling of 70 (!) warnings about Moussaouri. Is this guy still on the FBI payroll?
Where is our anger and revulsion about this missed oipportunity to avoid the 9/11 catastrophe? And while we are on this soapbox, why ha snobody gone to jail for the totally incompetent, criminally negligent handling the of Katrina disaster?