|
How al-Qaeda and the FBI viewed the lead-up to 9/11
Three weeks of testimony and dozens of documents released in the sentencing of Zacarias Moussaoui have offered an eerie parallel view of two organizations, al-Qaida and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and how they pursued their missions before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.Al-Qaida, according to the newly revealed account from the chief plotter, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, took its time in choosing targets - attack the White House or perhaps a nuclear plant in Pennsylvania? Organizers sized up and selected operatives, teaching them how to apply for a visa and how to cut a throat, a skill they practiced on sheep and camels. Despite the mistakes of careless subordinates and an erratic boss, Osama bin Laden, Mohammed tried to keep the plot on course. Mohammed, a Pakistani-born, American-trained engineer, "thought simplicity was the key to success," says the summary of his interrogation by the Central Intelligence Agency. It is all the more chilling for the banal managerial skills it ascribes to the man who devised the simultaneous air attacks. If Mohammed's guiding principle was simplicity, the U.S. government relied on sprawling bureaucracies at feuding agencies to look for myriad potential threats. The CIA had lots of information on two of the hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, but the FBI did not know the men had settled in San Diego, where Mohammed had instructed them to "spend time visiting museums and amusement parks" so they could masquerade as tourists. At the FBI, 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 FBI agent, Harry M. Samit, warned in a memo that 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," 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." But to high-level officials, the oddball Moroccan-born Frenchman in Minneapolis was only one of scores of possible terrorists who might be worth checking out. An FBI official in Washington edited crucial details out of Samit's memos seeking a search warrant for Moussaoui's possessions and said that pressing for it could hurt an agent's career, Samit testified. The picture of a large and lumbering bureaucracy trying to defend against a small and flexible enemy is striking, said Timothy J. Roemer, a member of the national Sept. 11 commission. "It's like the elephant fighting the snake," said Roemer, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana. Posted by: Dan Darling 2006-04-01 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=147146 |