THE FBI COULDN’T, OR WOULDN’T, CONNECT THE DOTS

Even with its extensive use of an electronic eavesdropping system originally named “Carnivore,” and despite specific reports from FBI field offices that directly pointed to the imminent attacks, the top tier of the FBI couldn't seem to piece together the available information. In some cases “probable cause” data was presented to FBI Headquarters (FBIHQ) that would have led any reasonable person to conclude that Middle Eastern terrorists were working diligently on plans to attack the United States by hijacking airplanes. Or, perhaps reasonable persons at the FBI weren't allowed come to such conclusions.

Just six days after the 9/11 tragedy, FBI director Robert Mueller stated, “There were no warning signs that I’m aware of that would indicate this type of operation in the country.” Clearly contradicting his statement is the suppressed evidence from FBI investigations held at the Phoenix, Minneapolis, Oklahoma City, and Chicago field offices that came to light in the mainstream media in the months following the attacks, not to mention the reports cited in the last section of this book. One can add to this the August 6, 2001, President's Daily Brief report, soon to be examined, that was revealed during the hearings of the 9/11 Commission.

The Carnivore electronic monitoring system created so much consternation from persons concerned with individual rights and privacy that it is now called simply DCS-1000 (Digital Collection System). According to some press reports, the FBI in early 2005 mostly abandoned the use of Carnivore for commercially available software, such as NarusInsight. In at least one instance, Carnivore actually prevented the bureau from gaining information on a suspected terrorist.

In May 2002, the Electronic Privacy Information Center acquired FBI memos under the Freedom of Information Act, which showed that a bureau wiretap in the year 2000 aimed at an unnamed suspect was ineffective because a low-level FBI technical person destroyed the information.

According to David Sobel, general counsel for the center, “The FBI software not only picked up the emails under the electronic surveillance of the FBI’s target…but also picked up emails on non-covered targets.” One of the obtained memos showed that an FBI supervisor explained, “The FBI technical person was apparently so upset [about intercepting unauthorized emails] that he destroyed all the email take.”

The FBI had previously issued assurances that Carnivore could only capture a narrow field of information authorized by a court order. “This shows that the FBI has been misleading Congress and the public about the extent to which Carnivore is capable of collecting only authorized information,” Sobel said.

Sobel also discovered that, when Chief Judge Royce Lamberth—heading the special, and mostly secret, Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), which reviews national security wiretaps—found out that in 2000 the FBI had been misrepresenting information in their requests for eavesdropping, an investigation was ordered forcing many FBI wiretaps to be shut down. This disciplinary action foreshadowed the Bush administration's later use of warrantless NSA wiretaps that entirely bypassed the FISC, which came to light in 2006.

Despite the problems with their Carnivore system and bungled wiretaps, many agents within the bureau were actively working on the problem of terrorism by other means.

Perhaps the most knowledgeable person within the FBI on Middle Eastern terrorism in general and Osama bin Laden in particular was John O’Neill. In 1995 O’Neill was promoted to head the FBI’s counterterrorism section and began working out of FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. One of his initial jobs was the capture of Ramzi Yousef, then a key suspect in several acts of terror including the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Through the late 1990s, O’Neill, according to Lawrence Wright writing in the New Yorker, became “the bureau's most committed tracker of Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network of terrorists.”

But O’Neill came to believe that his superiors did not carry the same zeal against terrorism as he did. “John had the same problems with bureaucracy as I had,” said Richard A. Clarke in a 2002 magazine interview. Clarke had served as White House coordinator for counterterrorism since the George H. W. Bush administration in the late 1980s. “The impatience really grew in us as we dealt with the dolts who didn't understand.”

Despite the 1996 defection of Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, a long-sought al Qaeda terrorist, and his subsequent detailing of the network to both the CIA and FBI, the State Department refused to list al Qaeda as a terrorist network. Even with O’Neill's growing ire over perceived indulgence of terrorists by higher authorities and his contentious personality, he was hired to the post of special agent in charge of the National Security Division in New York City. Here he created a special “al Qaeda desk” and worked doggedly to pinpoint Osama bin Laden. O’Neill, one of the top-level terrorism experts within the FBI, knew well who and what he was up against. “Almost all of the groups today, if they choose to, have the ability to strike us here in the United States,” O’Neill said in a 1997 Chicago speech.

By the summer of 2001, O’Neill had been passed over for promotion and was growing weary of fighting his superiors on the issue of terrorism. Adding to his disillusionment was O’Neill's experience trying to conduct an investigation of the bombing of the USS Cole destroyer, which had been severely damaged by a small boat filled with explosives operated by two suicide bombers.

O’Neill, commanding about three hundred heavily armed FBI agents, claimed his investigation was being hampered by everyone from Yemen president Ali Abdullah Saleh to US ambassador Barbara Bodine. The FBI force believed they were never given the authority they required to conduct a strenuous investigation.

“… O’Neill came home feeling that he was fighting the counterterrorism battle without support from his own government,” noted Wright in the New Yorker. When he tried to return to Yemen in early 2001, O’Neill was refused entry. “The last two years of his life, he got very paranoid,” writer Lawrence Wright was told by Valerie James, a close friend of O’Neill's. “He was convinced there were people out to get him.”

In the end, it appears it was his old archenemy, Osama bin Laden—or perhaps more precisely bin Laden's covert handlers in the US government—who got him.

By the summer of 2001, events and O’Neill's career were coming to a head. Someone had leaked information on some of O’Neill's bureau gaffes to the New York Times and information on terrorism was pouring into government agencies. “Something big is going to happen,” he told a friend. “It all came together in the third week of June,” recalled Clarke. “The CIA’s view was that a major terrorist attack was coming in the next several weeks.” Clarke said orders to beef up security were passed to the FAA, the Coast Guard, Customs, the INS, and the FBI.

But O’Neill had had enough. By August 23, he had retired from the FBI and accepted a job paying twice his bureau pay—as chief of security for the World Trade Center. Conspiracy researchers could not help but note the irony that America's leading counterterrorism expert—the one man who would have known of the true activities, plans and backers of Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network—died at the WTC on 9/11.

John O’Neill was not the only FBI agent to see definite warning signs. In mid-2002 twelve-year FBI veteran Robert G. Wright Jr. charged the bureau's counterterrorism efforts were ineffective and “not protecting the American people.” Going further, Wright charged that FBI superiors had derailed investigations that could have prevented the 9/11 attacks, even claiming the bureau had evidence that the World Trade Center was a possible target.

Wright already had excellent credentials as an FBI agent fighting terrorists. His own investigation initiated in 1998 resulted in the seizure of financial assets of one Yassin Kadi of Chicago, who has since been identified as one of the chief money launderers connected to Osama bin Laden. He then launched an investigation into money laundering by other terrorists within the United States only to have his probe terminated by higher authorities.

On May 9, 2002, Wright, who worked out of Chicago, called a news conference in Washington to publicly accuse the bureau of gross negligence in investigating terrorists in America, despite orders from FBI director Robert Mueller for him to stay home and stay quiet. At the same time he filed a lawsuit against the bureau in Washington's US District Court accusing the bureau of violating his First Amendment rights by prohibiting him from speaking out about FBI wrongdoing.

He charged senior bureau officials “intentionally and repeatedly thwarted and obstructed” his own efforts to root out terrorists and that they prevented his attempts to file cases that could have broken up their operations. In the press conference, Wright revealed that he has been given written orders not to disclose what he knew—either in speech or in writing—and that he was threatened in writing with disciplinary action, civil suits, revocation of security clearances, and even criminal prosecution.

“I love America, and likewise I love the FBI, particularly its purpose and mission,” agent Wright told newsmen, echoing the thoughts of many bureau personnel. “However, the mission has been seriously jeopardized to the point where American lives have been needlessly lost.” “Knowing what I know,” Wright added, “I can confidently say that until the investigative responsibilities for terrorism are transferred from the FBI, I will not feel safe.”

As might be expected by now, The 9/11 Commission Report makes no mention of Wright and his attempt to reveal the truth about Bureau officials blocking terrorist investigations. Wright's suit was filed just one day after Congress berated the FBI for failing to vigorously act on a July 2001 recommendation from its Phoenix field office that aviation schools should be checked for Middle Easterners seeking flight training.

Counterterrorism experts in Phoenix were concerned after noting that several Middle Eastern men were seeking information on airport operations, security, and flight training. One wrote in a memo to Washington, “FBIHQ should discuss this matter with other elements of the US intelligence community and task the community for any information that supports Phoenix's suspicions.”

The memo was written by Phoenix Special Agent Kenneth J. Williams and noted, “Osama bin Laden and Al-Muhjiroun supporters [were] attending civil aviation universities/colleges in Arizona.” FBI officials merely passed the memo, which actually pointed to bin Laden by name, along to about a dozen of its offices for “analysis.” There was no follow up on this lapse by the 9/11 Commission.

Arizona also became a focus for former “black ops” pilot Philip Marshall. In his book entitled False Flag 9/11, Marshall wrote, “…from several old Iran-Contra sources I began hearing about a hush-hush airport used by the government contractor and mercenary outfit Blackwater [now Xe Services LLC], to train covert, special operations flight crews. I soon learned that major flight training had been conducted in the middle of the night with military and civilian airplane in top-secret fashion. Blackwater is one of several operators that use the very airport I had run across [in his research]—Pinal Airpark, a secluded desert facility near the town of Marana, Arizona, and near the former home of Saudi Arabian pilot Hani Hanjour, the hijacker pilot of American 77. I discovered that over 80 perfectly airworthy commercial airliners are scattered around the airport and heavily guarded by a mercenary army with covert Saudi ties. The opportunities are perfect to ‘borrow’ a Boeing for unlimited and undocumented air training in the dedicated practice range over the desert. The means and the opportunity to slip hijackers in for training were all in place.”

One former FBI agent, Gary Aldrich, described the bureau's top management as “incompetent lunkheads and deadheads.” Aldrich too said many opportunities to stop the attack were missed. Aldrich blamed Bill and Hillary Clinton for the breakdown of the FBI as well as other federal agencies. He said the Clinton's blatant disregard for national security procedures made the government weak and vulnerable and that they showed more concern for political opponents than foreign enemies.

According to several FBI sources, when the Clinton administration arrived, emphasis in the bureau shifted from antiterrorism to investigating militias, white supremacists, anti-abortion groups and other “right-wing” extremists. “When I left [the FBI] in 1998, domestic terrorism was the number one priority,” said retired agent Ivan C. Smith, former head of the analysis, budget, and training sections of the FBI’s National Security Division. “And as far as I know, it was still a higher priority than foreign terrorism on September 11.”

With the arrival of the Clintons, FBI probes were aimed at local militias, right-wing organizations, the fledgling Patriot movement—everywhere except at foreign terrorists. Veteran agents said some forty boxes of evidence gathered in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing were never analyzed, including almost ten boxes of material from the Philippine side of the investigation. The Clinton-era disinterest in foreign terrorism was not limited to the FBI. Commerce Department officials told reporter Paul Sperry they were ordered to “sanitize” a Y2K counterterrorism report by removing mention of Islamic threats. Only “right-wing” groups were included in the report.

But on March 23, 2004, Richard A. Clarke, former counterterrorism czar under Clinton and Bush, told CNN’s Inside Politics a different story about the Clinton administration's terrorism strategy. “I would argue that for what had actually happened prior to 9/11, the Clinton administration was doing a great deal,” Clarke said. “In fact, so much that when the Bush people came into office, they thought I was a little crazy, a little obsessed with this little terrorist bin Laden. Why wasn't I focused on Iraqi-sponsored terrorism?” In their appearances before the 9/11 Commission in March 2004, Clarke and former Clinton-era officials defended the Clinton record on al Qaeda, claiming that it was the Bush people and especially Bush's FBI and CIA that dropped the ball immediately after the new administration entered the White House.

Mere negligence or incompetence cannot explain the obvious moves by both the Clinton and early Bush administrations to block any meaningful investigations into foreign terrorism. Many theories have been advanced for this odd behavior, including an argument that no one in high authority wanted to incur the anger of the oil-producing states or even that deep probes might have brought to light deep-rooted business and banking connections. It should also be noted that many of the officials within both the Clinton and early Bush administrations were ranking members of globalist organizations such as the Council on Foreign Relations and the secretive Bilderberger group. These high-level connections have prompted some researchers to suspect that overlapping conspiracies may have taken place regardless of party affiliation.

By mid-2002, even FBI director Robert Mueller was forced to acknowledge that the FBI had missed many “red flags,” including the Chicago investigations and the Phoenix memos as well as two from the Oklahoma City office. There, FBI agents and one FBI pilot reported “large numbers” of Middle Eastern men receiving flight training at local airports and warned this activity might be related to “planned terrorist activity.”

The revelations of FBI misconduct prompted an unusual two-hour press conference in late May 2002 in which a defensive Mueller told reporters, “There was not a specific warning about an attack on a particular day. But that doesn't mean there weren't red flags out there, there weren't dots that should have been connected to the extent possible.” Mueller even admitted that he had misspoken in fall 2001 when he denied the existence of any pre-9/11 attack warnings.

Mueller outlined his plan to reorganize the FBI, which consisted primarily of shifting agents from the War on Drugs to the War on Terrorism and to create a new Office of Intelligence headed by a CIA analyst. Many observers saw this plan as an attempt to merge the FBI and CIA into a terrorist-fighting force that would only bring more centralized authority to Washington. This same plan—to combine the worst of two worlds—was later duplicated in the Homeland Security Department legislation.

One government informant, a self-confessed Florida con man named Randy Glass, said he worked undercover for the bureau for more than two years and learned specifically that the World Trade Center Twin Towers were to be the target of terrorists. Hoping to lessen a prison term for a conviction of defrauding jewelry wholesalers out of $6 million, in 1998 Glass contacted federal agents and said he could set up illegal arms deals. Aided by veteran Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent Dick Stoltz, Glass began to arrange deals with a variety of persons. He claimed he had acquired heavy weapons such as Stinger and TOW missiles stolen from military facilities.

Business was good but none of the deals seemed to work out until Glass contacted a Pakistani-born New Jersey deli owner. This man helped arrange arms deals with Pakistanis who claimed contacts to Pakistani intelligence, the Taliban, and even Osama bin Laden. Many hours of tapes were made of their meetings.

However, during the lengthy and detailed maneuvering to arrange the financing in early 2001, the Pakistanis grew suspicious and left the country. Only the deli owner and one other man were arrested. The other man pled guilty to trying to sell weaponry and was sentenced to thirty months in jail, while the deli owner went free and his court records were sealed from the public.

ATF agent Stoltz said cases against the men were hampered by the fact that government prosecutors had to remove references to Pakistan in court filings because of diplomatic concerns. Internet Commentator Allan P. Duncan took note of this case and wrote: “Between the Fall of 1998 and June 2001, a group of Middle Eastern men living in New Jersey is caught on tape in an ATF weapons sting conspiring to buy millions of dollars of weapons including components for nuclear bombs. Three years after the operation ended, all of the people involved in the deal are free.

“Federal agents who worked on the case were frustrated because it was handled as a criminal case instead of a counterterrorism case. In an in depth look at ‘Operation Diamondback’ I reveal that one of the suspects who was accused of skimming millions of dollars from a fraudulent HMO to offshore accounts where the money allegedly went to finance terrorism, was defended in the HMO case by a lawyer who later became the assistant attorney general in charge of the Criminal Division, under John Ashcroft. The lawyer, Michael Chertoff, was in his position as assistant attorney general when Operation Diamondback ended and his client was never arrested even though an intelligence document claimed he and his brother in Egypt had links to Osama bin Laden. “Is this why the ATF operation was handled as a criminal case and not a terrorism case by the federal government?”

One of the men Glass taped was the brother of New Jersey neurologist Dr. Magdy Elamir [real name: Magdy El Sayed El Amir] who also said he wanted radioactive materials. Dr. Elamir owned an HMO which was under investigation following a foreign intelligence source accusation that more than $15 million had been siphoned from Elamir's HMO and sent to bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network.

“So at this point we now have information that Dr. Magdy Elamir along with his brother Mohamed El Amir have ties to Osama bin Laden and yet neither one of them is arrested. Randy Glass says in fact that federal agents told him to drop the matter,” wrote Duncan.

Chertoff, who participated as a lawyer in two of the investigations into the death of Clinton administration official Vincent Foster, was named in 2005 by President Bush to head the Department of Homeland Security, an odd choice considering Chertoff's actions in the Diamondback operation.

This case took a step closer to the 9/11 attacks when Glass told news reporters that on one occasion in 1999 he met with one of the Pakistanis in the Tribeca Grill in Manhattan. “At the meeting, [he] said Americans are the enemy and they would have no problem blowing up this entire restaurant because it is full of Americans,” Glass recounted. “As we left the restaurant, [he] turns and says, ‘those towers are coming down.’” The man was indicating the World Trade Center.

But perhaps the most provocative evidence of governmental foreknowledge came from the man who led the prosecution in President Bill Clinton's 1998 impeachment in 1998 as the chief investigative counsel for the judiciary committee in the US House of Representatives.

Chicago attorney David Schippers, who by mid-2002 was representing Wright and other disgruntled FBI employees, said in a late October 2001 interview that he had been approached by FBI agents a month and a half prior to the 9/11 attacks. The agents revealed that they had knowledge that lower Manhattan was to be the object of a terrorist attack using airplanes as flying bombs and they wanted to prevent this. They were seeking legal advice because their FBI superiors had ordered them off the case and threatened them with the National Security Act if they spoke out. Schippers said he tried in vain to warn Attorney General John Ashcroft.

“[A]gain I used people who were personal friends of John Ashcroft to try to get him. One of them called me back and said, ‘All right, I have talked to him. He will call you tomorrow morning.’This was like a month before the bombing. The next morning I got a call. It wasn't from Ashcroft. It was from somebody in the Justice Department…He said, ‘We don't start our investigations at the top. Let me look into this and I will get back to you.’ As I sit here today [October 10, 2001], I have never heard from him.” Once again, no mention of this incident or even the name of David Schippers, a very prominent Republican attorney, can be found anywhere in The 9/11 Commission Report.

Schippers echoed FBI Agent Aldrich's charge that national security precautions were stripped away during the Clinton administration. Speaking of his attempts to warn authorities, Schippers said, “I tried the House, I tried the Senate, I tried the Department of Justice. I didn't go to the FBI because I know there is a roadblock there and I didn't go to the Justice Department until Ashcroft got in there because I know there are roadblocks out there. These are the very same people who put up roadblocks on the attack against the terrorists under Clinton, they are still there. They still constitute, almost like a moat, between the people with the information and the people who should hear the information…”

One particularly damning indictment of both the bureau and the Bush administration came in 2004 when a woman hired as a translator for the FBI revealed that senior US officials knew of al Qaeda's plans to attack targets with aircraft months in advance of 9/11. She claimed that the proper handling of intelligence flowing into the FBI could have prevented the 9/11 attacks and that Condoleezza Rice's statement to the 9/11 Commission regarding no foreknowledge of the attacks was an “outrageous lie.”

Sibel Edmonds, a Turkish-American, then 32, explained in a 2004 radio interview, “I started working for the Bureau immediately after 9/11 and I was performing translations for several languages: Farsi, Turkish, and Azerbaijani. And I do have top-secret clearance. And after I started working for the Bureau, most of my translation duties included translations of documents and investigations that actually started way before 9/11.

“The most significant information that we were receiving did not come from counterterrorism investigations, and I want to emphasize this. It came from counter-intelligence, and certain criminal investigations, and issues that have to do with money laundering operations.

“During my work there I came across some very significant issues that I started reporting in December of 2001 to the mid-level management within the FBI. They said to basically leave it alone, because if they were to get into those issues it would end up being a can of worms. And after I didn't see any response from this mid-level bureaucratic management I took it to higher levels all the way up to [Assistant Director] Dale Watson and Director Mueller. And, again, I was asked not to take this any further and just let it be. And if I didn't do that they would retaliate against me.

“At that point, which would be around February 2002, they came and they confiscated my computer, because, they said, they were suspecting that I was communicating with certain Senate members and taking this issue outside the Bureau. And, at that point, I was not. They did not find anything in my computer after they confiscated it. And they asked me to take a polygraph as to the allegations and reports I’d made. I volunteered and I took the polygraph and passed it without a glitch. They have already confirmed this publicly.”

In March 2002, Edmonds was fired by the FBI for reporting shoddy work and security breaches to her supervisors that could have prevented those attacks. She remains under two court gag orders that forbid her from testifying in court or mentioning the names of the people or the countries involved. After her firing, Edmonds took her information to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which requested an investigation by the Department of Justice Inspector General's office. Today, the findings of this investigation have not been made public, citing concerns of “national security.” Furthermore, at least four attempts to bring Edmonds’ gag order into court were rejected with no explanation.

Finally, on Tuesday, July 6, 2004, Judge Reggie Walton dismissed her case. “Under his ruling, I, an American citizen, am not entitled to pursue my 1st and 5th Amendment rights guaranteed under the Constitution of the United States,” lamented Edmonds. “The vague reasoning cited, without any explanation, is to protect ‘certain diplomatic relations for national security.’ Judge Walton reached this decision after sitting on this case with no activity for almost two years. He arrived at this decision without allowing my attorney and I any due process: NO status hearing, NO briefings, NO oral argument, and NO discovery [emphasis in the original]. He made his decision after allowing the government attorneys to present their case to him, privately, in camera, ex parte; we were not allowed to participate in these cozy sessions. Is this the American system of justice we believe in? Is this the due process we read about in our civics 101 courses? Is this the judicial branch of our government that is supposed to be separate from the other two branches in order to protect the people's rights and freedom?

“This court decision by itself would have been appalling and alarming enough, but in light of all other actions taken against my case for the past two years it demonstrates a broken system, a system abused and corrupted by the current executive, a system badly in need of repair.”

“This [suppression of her case] was mainly for the reason of accountability,” Edmonds said. “As you know… to this day, not a single person has been held accountable [for the failures of 9/11]. And certain issues, yes, they were due to a certain level of incompetence. But there were certain other issues—you know they keep talking about this ‘wall,’ and not having communication. I beg to differ on that, because there are certain instances where the Bureau is being asked by the State Department not to pursue certain investigations or certain people or certain targets of an investigation—simply citing ‘diplomatic relations.’ And what happens is, instead of targeting those people who are directly related to these illegal terrorist activities, they just let them walk free.”

It should be pointed out in this connection that according to multiple knowledgeable sources, the State Department has been under the control of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) since before World War II. Ranking CFR members filled both the Clinton and Bush administrations. “I have seen several top targets for these investigations of these terrorist activities that were allowed to leave the country,” Edmonds continued. “I’m not talking about weeks, I’m talking about months after 9/11…I can tell you that there is so much involvement, that if they did let this information out, and if they were to hold real investigations…we would see several significant high level criminal prosecutions in this country. And that is something that they are not going to let out. And, believe me; they will do everything to cover this up.” It would appear that Edmonds’ words were prophetic. Despite her three and a half hours of testimony to the 9/11 Commission, there was only one reference to her in a footnote buried on page 473 of their 567-page report. Far from mentioning any of her serious charges, the note merely indicated the need for “quality control” of FBI translations.

In a scathing letter to 9/11 Commission Chairman Thomas Kean after the report was issued, Edmonds noted several incidents that indicated advance knowledge of the 9/11 attack within the FBI and added, “…I must assume that other serious issues I am not aware of were in the same manner [as her testimony] omitted from your report. These omissions cast doubt on the validity of your report and therefore on its conclusions and recommendations.”

The muzzling of Sibel Edmonds at the highest levels of the federal government prompted US Senators Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Charles Grassley (R-IA) to write then-Attorney General John Ashcroft stating, “…we fear that the designation of information as classified in some cases [such as Sibel Edmonds] serves to protect the executive branch against embarrassing revelations and full accountability…Releasing declassified versions of these reports, or at least portions or summaries, would serve the public's interest, increase transparency, promote effectiveness and efficiency at the FBI, and facilitate congressional oversight.”

Due to what has been described as persecution, in August 2004, Edmonds founded the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, a group that by 2010 counted more than 50 former and current US government officials from more than a dozen agencies who had gone public to address weaknesses within US security agencies.

It is now clear that still other bureau employees also tried to send warnings upstairs regarding the flight training of terrorists but got nowhere. In August 2001, the FBI arrested Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker, after a Minnesota flight school warned the bureau that Moussaoui appeared to be the type of person who might fly a plane loaded with fuel into a building. FBI Special Agent Harry Samit followed up by writing more than one memo to superiors stating that Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent, was the type of individual to take a plane and hijack it, perhaps even fly it into the World Trade Center. He also noted that Moussaoui told a flight instructor that he only wanted to learn to maneuver a Boeing 747 but did not need to learn how to land it.

CBS’s 60 Minutes II reported on May 8, 2002, that a ranking French jurist and terrorist expert had also sent a report on Moussaoui, a French citizen, to the FBI weeks before 9/11. US authorities denied there was anything in the report to alert them. One FBI supervisor even questioned the French report, asking how many men named Zacarias Moussaoui must live in France. When informed that there was only one listed in Paris, the supervisory special agent continued to stall any action.

Meanwhile, FBI attorneys turned down or blocked repeated requests from their agents in the Minneapolis field office to search Moussaoui's computer and apartment. If they had, they would have found numerous small knives, jumbo-jet pilot manuals, the names of flight schools and other clues that might have sounded an alarm. As a result of all this inaction, Moussaoui was simply held on immigration charges until after 9/11 when FBI agents finally were able to make their search. They recovered incriminating financial records linking Moussaoui to al Qaeda, flight simulators, and information on crop dusters.

Moussaoui, who in 2006 was sentenced by a jury to life imprisonment without parole, was known as the “twentieth hijacker” based on the theory that he was to replace an original “twentieth hijacker,” Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a former roommate of Mohamed Atta, who reportedly sent $14,000 to Moussaoui. Al-Shibh, who also was unable to gain entry into the United States, was arrested in Pakistan in late September 2002. Moussaoui and al-Shibh were the only two men in custody believed to be directly involved in the 9/11 attacks.

The feds were further embarrassed in 2002 when government prosecutors left forty-eight classified documents, summaries of FBI interviews, with Moussaoui. They were later found in searches of Moussaoui's Alexandria, Virginia, jail cell. Moussaoui eventually pled guilty to six charges in connection with the 9/11 attacks and was sentenced to life in a maximum security prison in 2006, to the disappointment of prosecutors seeking the death penalty. Previously, he had been thrown out of court more than once for creating a scene and reportedly shouting, “I am al Qaeda!”

FBI Special Agent Hamit, who arrested Moussaoui prior to the 9/11 attacks, caused a brief sensation during the penalty phase of the trial when he stated in court that his superiors in the bureau were guilty of “criminal negligence and obstruction” for blocking his attempts to learn if Moussaoui was part of a group planning to hijack aircraft in the United States. Samit said under cross-examination, “They [FBI superiors] obstructed it.” He said this was a calculated management decision “that cost us the opportunity to stop the attacks.”

Such top-side interference in the Moussaoui case briefly made headlines in the late spring of 2002 with the publication of a scathing thirteen-page letter from FBI special agent and Minneapolis chief division counsel Coleen M. Rowley to Director Robert Mueller. In her May 21 letter, Rowley, a twenty-one-year veteran of the bureau, described a top-heavy FBI management bureaucracy riddled with “many who were failures as street agents” and “careerists” who placed advancing their own careers over integrity and truth.

“I know I shouldn't be flippant about this, but jokes were actually made that the key FBIHQ personnel had to be spies or moles like Robert Hanssen [an FBI agent arrested in 2001 and now serving a life sentence after being convicted of spying for the Russians], who were actually working for Osama bin Laden, to have so undercut Minneapolis's effort…

“I have deep concerns that a delicate and subtle shading/skewing of facts by you and others at the highest levels of FBI management has occurred and is occurring in an effort to avoid or minimize personal and/or institutional embarrassment on the part of the FBI and/or perhaps even for improper political reasons,” she told Mueller. She added, “I’m hard pressed to think of any case which has been solved by FBIHQ personnel and I can name several that have been screwed up!”

Rowley, after hearing the news media continually quote Director Mueller as saying the bureau would have taken action if only they had had advance warning of the attacks, sent a message informing him of the intelligence sitting in the Minneapolis files. She said when the same denials of knowledge continued, she and other agents again attempted to inform Mueller of the facts.

“Finally, when similar comments were made weeks later we faced the sad realization that the remarks indicated someone, possibly with your approval, had decided to circle the wagons at FBIHQ in an apparent effort to protect the FBI from embarrassment and the relevant FBI officials from scrutiny,” Rowley wrote the director.

She also pointed out that the only difference between incidents when informed FBI agents were denied a search warrant on Moussaoui and when one was approved was the fact of the 9/11 attacks, events that certainly could not be swept under the rug.

Rowley was one of many persons who pointed out the fact that FBI headquarters personnel “were privy to many more sources of intelligence information than field division agents.” Despite this fact, she said, “key FBIHQ personnel whose job it was to assist and coordinate with field division agents on terrorism investigations continued to, almost inexplicably, throw up roadblocks and undermine Minneapolis's by-now desperate efforts to obtain a FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] search warrant, long after the French Intelligence Service provided its information and probable cause became clear.”

Even after the 9/11 attacks had occurred, Rowley said higher authorities still would not untie their hands. Taking a call from a bureau superior just after the attacks had begun, Rowley said she told him in light of the attacks it would be the “hugest coincidence” if Moussaoui were not involved with the terrorists. Her superior replied that coincidence was the right term; it was just that and the Minneapolis office should not do anything without headquarters’ permission because “we might ‘screw up’ something else going on elsewhere in the country.”

Rowley's insightful and damning critique of FBI inefficiency in light of the 9/11 attacks prompted widespread, though brief, mass media coverage. Now a well-known federal whistleblower, Rowley was among three women in 2002 selected as a “Person of the Year” by Time magazine. Yet, her testimony to the 9/11 Commission was not made public, and she was relegated to one fleeting footnote on page 557 in its report. One Internet columnist noted that the Bush administration took advantage of the cover of the “Rowley firestorm” to announce the rescission of some of the government's meager rules against indiscriminate domestic spying, rules prompted by the many abuses of the FBI during the 1960s.

Steve Perry with CounterPunch, a biweekly newsletter, commented that the Bush team defused Rowley's revelations by choosing that time to announce plans to reorganize the entire intelligence apparatus. Such a move would be time consuming and require much preparation, yet the administration requested no funding for its proposal. According to Perry, this tactic indicated that the timing of the announcement may indeed have been meant to distract attention from Rowley's accusations.

It might also be added that any failures at the FBI cannot be laid off on lower level agents and supervisors. In August 2001, Attorney General Ashcroft, apparently more concerned with the long-lost War on Drugs and pornography, had turned down a bureau request for $50 million to beef up its counterterrorism efforts. All critical information flowing upward within the FBI routinely ended at the desks of Director Mueller and his boss, Ashcroft, both of whom worked closely with President Bush in the period leading up to the events of 9/11.