The FBI knew about specific suspected al Qaeda fundraisers before the Sept. 11 attacks but failed to tackle the problem, the Sept. 11 Commission said in a staff report released on Saturday.
| On the other hand, if they had, they'd have been hit with more lawsuits than you can shake a stick at. They'd have been accused of profiling, of racial, religious, and cultural discriminaiton. There would have been a blood purge at FBI headquarters, with the politically insensitive taken out and... well, maybe not shot, but reassigned. The Nome field office would have been overstaffed for years, with not a single promotion to be found. |
In a broad critique of the government's surveillance of terrorist financing, the report said "gaps appear to remain in the intelligence community's understanding of the issue."
| Possibly. But I think it was politically impossible to do at the time, as well. |
The report said the government should resist creating "a terrorist financing czar" or some other specialized entity to focus on the problem. Instead, it backed an existing interagency committee led by the National Security Council.
| How about a single person within the NSC who's responsible for tracking terror financing? How about a single person somewhere to be in charge? We're still living in a world of committees and roundtable discussions when we need action — something the first paragraph was pointing out didn't occur. |
"The total elimination of money flowing to al Qaeda ... is virtually impossible," the report said.
| Maybe we can't get it all, but I'll bet we've gotten a bunch since 9-11, and assuming the breaks continue to fall our way we'll get more — as long as there's somebody with an impressive job title and and a Theory X personality to drive the effort. |
But it added that efforts to detect and disrupt terrorist money flows are important to limiting "al Qaeda's ability to plan and mount significant mass casualty attacks."
| Thank you for today's Statement of the Obvious™. |
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