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John O'Neill of the FBI (Ass't Special Agent in Charge of Counterterrorism and National Security) was passed over for promotions because of minor security breeches in the past. In the summer of 2001, he decided to leave the FBI and become the security chief for the World Trade Center. Before going, someone leaked to the NY Times information to dirty him as he was going out the door. O'Neill confronted then acting FBI chief Thomas Picard, next week's Ashcroft critic before the 9-11 commission.

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"But the US government would not let O'Neill do his job. O'Neill was known throughout the FBI as the go-to guy on bin Laden, but he was not made aware of the Arizona flight school FBI memos or the custody of the alleged '20th hijacker' Zacharias Moussaoui. Barbara K. Bodine, US ambassador to Yemen, denied his visa to return to investigate the Cole bombing. Tom Pickard, at one point interim director for the FBI, did everything in his power to silence and frustrate O'Neill. The compartmentalized bureaucrats simply could not tolerate a maverick investigator whose only motivation was protecting the country from terrorism. He was forced out of the FBI in the late summer of 2001."

http://skimble.blogspot.com/2002_09_29_skimble_archive.html

The whole story of this man is very strange. Maybe he isn't dead, is it confirmed? Maybe he just went deep under cover or something.

This Frontline show will be shown again. April 15th. Please try to watch or record it!

On the eve of Sept. 11, O'Neill is with friends on the town. According to Jerry Hauer, O'Neill warns him that night: "We're due for something big." O'Neill explains, "I don't like the way things are lining up in Afghanistan." Still, O'Neill tells friends that he is happy about his new job. "[It] doesn't get better than this," he says.

Observant man. I became very suspicious also, AQ and the Taliban had stepped up an offensive against the Northern Alliance and assasinated their most charismatic commande.

And the point of all this hear say and rumor would be what?

That mistakes were make prior to 9-11? AH DUH, that is why 9-11 happened! How about they address the fact that the Patriot Act, Bush's doctrine of Preemtion and the Department of Homelands Secutiry were all created BECAUSE of the failures that lead to 9-11? Instead of hyperventalting about what happened BEFORE 9-11 how about PBS, and all the other hysteric Bush haters, look at what has happened SINCE 9-11?

One look at Pickard and it was clear he was a lying bastard.

Clarke immediately spotted in O'Neill an obsessiveness about the dangers of terrorism which mirrored his own. "John had the same problems with the bureaucracy that I had," Clarke told me. "Prior to September 11th, a lot of people who were working full time on terrorism thought it was no more than a nuisance. They didn't understand that Al Qaeda was enormously powerful and insidious and that it was not going to stop until it really hurt us. John and some other senior officials knew that. The impatience really grew in us as we dealt with the dolts who didn't understand."

Osama bin Laden had been linked to terrorism since the first World Trade Center bombing, in 1993. His name had turned up on a list of donors to an Islamic charity that helped finance the bombing, and defendants in the case referred to a "Sheikh Osama" in a recorded conversation. "We started looking at who was involved in these events, and it seemed like an odd group of people getting together," Clarke recalled. "They clearly had money. We'd see C.I.A. reports that referred to 'financier Osama bin Laden,' and we'd ask ourselves, 'Who the hell is he?' The more we drilled down, the more we realized that he was not just a financier—he was the leader. John said, 'We've got to get this guy. He's building a network. Everything leads back to him.' Gradually, the C.I.A. came along with us."

O'Neill worked with Clarke to establish clear lines of responsibility among the intelligence agencies, and in 1995 their efforts resulted in a Presidential directive giving the F.B.I. the lead authority both in investigating and in preventing acts of terrorism wherever Americans or American interests were threatened. After the April, 1995, bombing in Oklahoma City, O'Neill formed a separate section for domestic terrorism, but he concentrated on redesigning and expanding the foreign-terrorism branch. He organized a swap of deputies between his office and the C.I.A.'s counter-terrorism center, despite resistance from both agencies.

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In the spring of 1996, Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, who had supported a plot by Al Qaeda against American soldiers in Somalia four years earlier, arrived at the American Embassy in Asmara, Eritrea. The C.I.A. debriefed him for six months, then turned him over to the F.B.I., which put him in the witness-protection program. Fadl provided the first extensive road map of the bin Laden terrorist empire. "Fadl was a gold mine," an intelligence source who was present during some of the interviews told me. "He described the network, bin Laden's companies, his farms, his operations in the ports." Fadl also talked about bin Laden's desire to attack Americans, including his ambition to obtain uranium. The news was widely circulated among members of the intelligence community, including O'Neill, and yet the State Department refused to list Al Qaeda as a terrorist organization.

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In the Khobar Towers case, neither the Saudis nor the State Department seemed eager to pursue a trail of evidence that pointed to Iranian terrorists as the likeliest perpetrators. The Clinton Administration did not relish the prospect of military retaliation against a country that seemed to be moderating its anti-Western policies, and, according to Clarke, the Saudis impeded the F.B.I. investigation because they were worried about the American response. "They were afraid that we would have to bomb Iran," I was told by a Clinton Administration official, who added that that would have been a likely course of action.

Freeh was initially optimistic that the Saudis would coöperate, but O'Neill became increasingly frustrated, and eventually a rift seems to have developed between the two men. "John started telling Louis things Louis didn't want to hear," Clarke said. "John told me that, after one of the many trips he and Freeh took to the Mideast to get better coöperation from the Saudis, they boarded the Gulfstream to come home and Freeh says, 'Wasn't that a great trip? I think they're really going to help us.' And John says, 'You've got to be kidding. They didn't give us anything. They were just shining sunshine up your ass.' For the next twelve hours, Freeh didn't say another word to him."

Freeh denies that this conversation took place. "Of course, John and I discussed the results of every trip at that time," he wrote to me in an E-mail. "However, John never made that statement to me. . . . John and I had an excellent relationship based on trust and friendship."

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key members of the Al Qaeda cell that planned the operation had been living in one of the most difficult places in the Western world to gain intelligence: the United States. The F.B.I. is constrained from spying on American citizens and visitors without probable cause. Lacking evidence that potential conspirators were actively committing a crime, the bureau could do little to gather information on the domestic front. O'Neill felt that his hands were tied. "John was never satisfied," one of his friends in the bureau recalled. "He said we were fighting a war, but we were not able to fight back. He thought we never had the tools in place to do the job."

O'Neill never presumed that killing bin Laden alone would be sufficient. In speeches, he identified five tools to combat terrorism: diplomacy, military action, covert operations, economic sanctions, and law enforcement.

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O'Neill was worried that terrorists had established a beachhead in America. In a June, 1997, speech in Chicago, he warned, "Almost all of the groups today, if they chose to, have the ability to strike us here in the United States."

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