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9/11 See other 9/11 Articles Title: Why the FBI failed to stop 9/11 Rant: Unconnected Dots Why the FBI failed to stop 9/11 Jeff Taylor | December 2007 Print Edition For years federal authorities have argued that antiquated laws kept the cops from stopping 9/11. They said the failure to prevent the terrorist attacks demonstrated the need for the PATRIOT Act and every other proposed expansion of the governments surveillance powers. But in testimony before Congress in September, Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell changed tack, saying 9/11 should have and could have been prevented after all; the authorities simply didnt connect the dots. McConnell did not draw the obvious conclusion: If greater federal power was not needed pre-9/11 to stop terrorists, then even more federal authority is not needed now. Instead, McConnell argued that the Protect America Actwhich allows the attorney general and the director of national intelligence, without judicial oversight, to authorize surveillance of international phone calls and email involving people in the U.S.made vitally needed changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. How does the supposed need for greater surveillance power square with McConnells declaration that 9/11 was preventable and his lament that we didnt connect the dots? How did we get the dots without the Protect America Act? Via good old-fashioned police work that top officials in the Federal Bureau of Investigation ignored. Federal agents on the ground knew that hijackers Khalid al Mihdhar and Nawaf al Hazmi had sought pilot training. They knew Zacarias Moussaoui had sought the same sort of training; he was carrying 747 manuals when he was picked up on immigration charges. In the days leading up to 9/11, Minneapolis FBI agent Harry Samit repeatedly tried to obtain permission to search Moussaouis laptop computer and belongings. Headquarters refused to seek a warrant. New details on just how costly that denial proved to be were first published in a widely overlooked September 10 story by Greg Gordon, McClatchy Newspapers Washington reporter. Gordon discovered that the FBI had enough information to arrest part of Al Qaedas financing network in the days before 9/11information that could have stopped the hijackings. Cue McConnells dots. Moussaouis fellow jihadists considered him a loose cannon and security risk. They were right: The key to the whole network was right there in his notebooks. Al Qaeda operative Ramzi Binalshibh wired $14,000 to Moussaoui in August 2001, and Moussaoui sloppily recorded the routing number. But authorities never looked at that notebook. Instead, FBI brass rejected Agent Samits attempts to search Moussaouis belongings, citing lack of information that Moussaoui was a known terrorist or foreign agent. The notebooks were not searched until after the attacks. Gordon notes that investigators almost certainly could have traced Moussaouis money back to an Al Qaeda moneyman in Dubai; Binalshibhs transactions would have led them there. The Dubai contact used one of his Western Union receipts to jot down a phone number in the United Arab Emirates. That number received calls from 9/11 hijackers while they were living in Florida prior to their attack. As Gordon reports, FBI agents at Moussaouis trial testified that had he confessed to the plot after his August 16 arrest on immigration charges, thus giving them access to his notebooks pre-9/11, they could have moved on 11 of the 19 hijackers. But Washington steadfastly refused to move on information developed from the field offices. Rather than endlessly tweaking the intelligence-gathering statutes, the White House should have spent the past six years addressing the obstructionism, criminal negligence and careerism that Samit cited as the roadblock in his investigation. It obviously has not. It was bureaucratic hubris, not a lack of actionable intelligence, that allowed 9/11 to happen. The same hubris continues to demand that ever more raw surveillance data be dumped into the same slavering but useless federal maw. Contributing Editor Jeff Taylor is a writer in Charlotte, North Carolina.
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The FBI agents who tried to warn of the 9-11 attacks were thwarted at every juncture by the open suppression of the John Ashcroft Attorney General's office. When the composite of all materials are compiled, they show a federal government that aggressively ignored and suppressed any information at any level - military, CIA, FBI, FAA - that would have and should have stopped the attacks. The Bushies wanted and needed a reason to impose fascist laws and requirements, the wanted an excuse to attack Muslim countries, and they created it.
This is something that predates the Bush administration. Here is the original "Wall" memo, authored by Jamie Gorelick in 1995. Its purpose was to shield the Clinton administration from the Chinagate scandal, and it is the primary cause of the failure to share intelligence between government agencies. http://www.nationalreview.com/document/document_1995_gorelick_memo.pdf I find it very interesting that so many people want to pretend this didn't exist. Gorelick sitting on the 9/11 Commission is a primary reason why I believe its report to be utter garbage. She should have been a testifying witness, not a commission member.
Neat, you've found something that 2-party zionists are talking about all the time. That means the wall memo is part of an elaborate plausible deniability scheme. When the blowback part of the blowback theory starts looking a little too self- guided, it's "hey everybody, look at this memo!"
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