911 - The Man Who Knew

PBS - Frontline ^

[Del Rio Wildcat 2]

The Man Who Knew is the story of the life and death of FBI Special Agent John O'Neill. As the bureau's top counter-terrorism agent, O'Neill had investigated the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Africa and the USS Cole in Yemen. For six years, O'Neill was the FBI's leading expert on Al Qaeda. He warned of its reach. He warned of its threat to the U.S. He came to believe that the United States should kill Osama bin Laden before Al Qaeda launched a devastating attack on America. But O'Neill's often lonely voice was muted by a headquarters bureaucracy that found his hot pursuit and James Bond style an anathema. Forced out of the job he loved, he had taken a job in the private sector just weeks before as the director of security at the World Trade Center. He died there when the buildings collapsed. His controversial years at the helm of the New York FBI's anti-terrorism section provide a rare glimpse inside the bureau and help answer the question: What did the government know?

[lexington minuteman 1775]

I doubt that the vaunted 911 commission much looked into what John O'Neil feared would happen.It is incredibly ironic that his theories were rebuffed by bureaucrats and led to him leaving the FBI only to be killed by the terrorists he feared would attack us. God Bless the John O'Neils of the world who put duty ahead of organization and politics!

[tkathy]

It's naive to think that, if OBL had been killed, that AQ wouldn't come back with something even more devastating. All this talk of why didn't we kill OBL is intellectually dishonest.

[maestro]

Amen!

The Man Who Knew is the story of the life and death of FBI Special Agent John O'Neill. As the bureau's "top" counter-terrorism agent,.....

J.Edgar Hoover and James 'Jesus' Angleton are rolling over...

(This has nothing to do with the 'INS'....)

/sarcasm

BTTT

[Khurkris]

Thanks. The series looks like it can be watched online. Thank you.

[justshutupandtakeit]

What is intellectually dishonest is comments which detract from the exposure of the last admininstration's corruption, treachery and total incompetence. It refusal to do anything about Osama is a perfect example of its failures.

[Dilbert56]

If you believe Kahlid Sheik Mohammed, killing Bin Laden might have had an impact. According to KSM, some Al Qaida big shots counseled against 9/11 (shades of Yamomoto and Pearl Harbor). They had their sanctuary in Afghanistan and didn't want to jeopardize it. OBL thought the Somalia withdrawl showed America as weak and irresolute and decided to go forward.

Unfortunately for him, Somalia showed a lack of character only on the part of America's then current President. 537 cleanly-punched chads in Florida reversed that.

[Killborn]

I strongly believe that if it was Bush the elder in charge of the Somali situation either the Black Hawk Down incident wouldn't occur or if it did anyway, that scumbag Aidid and his ogre hordes would be hanging from helicopters as we do a fly by over the Mog to the cheering and jeering of all the anti-Aidid Somalians (they are pretty much the whole country, not a lot of pro-Aidid Somalis except in his stronghold, and even then, it may be a "Saddam syndrome", praise Aidid or die.)

And come Rwanda, all Pres. Bush has to do is tell the Hutus to behave or they'll have more Marines than they'll know what to do with.

The Toons are responsible for the deaths of millions in Somalia and Rwanda.

[Hat-Trick]

I would have loved to hear what Agent O'Neil might have said after 9/11, had he survived, regarding Jamie Gorelick's "wall of seperation" and the fact that she ended up on the commission when she should have been called before it to testify.

I just finished reading the entire report, and they completely gloss over the "wall", and understate it's contributions to the inability to detect and track leads that could have led to the disruption 9/11.

[maestro]

FYI.......ping.

[Alamo-Girl]

Thanks for the ping!

[Getsmart64]

Smells like the Toons might have known 911 was going to happen...bring down the Bush presidency....would anyone put that past them?

[maestro]

Good post..........BTTT

[PhilDragoo]

Richard Miniter, Losing Bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror, Regnery, 2003, is of interest regarding O'Neill's efforts against Clintonian inertia.

O'Neill knew immediately the Cole attack was the work of OBL, but he was thrown out of Yemen by Clinton's ambassador Barbara Bodine.

SecDef William "Poet" Cohen argued against any retaliation as "disproportionate".

Per Mansoor Ijaz and other sources, Clinton refused Sudan's repeated offers of OBL--

--and Clinton's bozos (Albright, Berger, Cohen, Reno, Clarke, Freeh) would not take the shot when OBL showed up on the video of a Hellfire-armed Predator in late 2000.

O'Neill was sandbagged when his briefcase containing classified files was stolen while attending an FBI symposium.

O'Neill was hated by the bureau that also went after SA Colleen Rowley--damn the whistleblowers spoiling a perfectly good donut run.

[devolve]

To top it off the FBI could not even email photos of the skyjackers and other suspected accomplices to FBI branch offices!

Yet my dinky circa 2000 56K dialup RCA WebTV sent capture TV photos of CBS and Brian Gumball's voice on 30 second WebTV email .wav captures from CBS in NYC as the 2nd jetliner hit the 2nd WTC tower and then later as both towers fell.

I emailed them to my liberal NYC sister's office where the telephones had been knocked out by 911 yet their computers were still up but they did not know what was happening.

Now the FBI finds their computers are obsolete per latest reports.

How could the FBI not even have one FBI agent and one computer with TV capture able to grab and email photos and scanned documents as I do daily on my El Cheapo WebTV?

Less can be more....

In 1993 after the WTC I bombing attack I told my construction engineeer/contractor brother that the WTC would be hit again by Islamic terrorists but next time they would go both down.

[ntnychik]

Two excellent books:
The Man Who Warned America: The Life and Death of John O'Neill by Murray Weiss

The Cell by John Miller and Michael Stone. The author is the John Miller who was on 20/20 and is now in charge of Homeland Security for Los Angeles. There is much info on John O'Neill in this book.

The Frontline shows are interesting, but rely too much on Richard Clarke as a source.

[GOPJ]

Has anyone mentioned the meeting in Florida where O'Neill leaves his briefcase in the room -- and pays a high political price? It was briefly covered in the Frontline story, but not the why and wherefore. Was that meeting about Hillary's "vast right wing conspiracy" rather than about the real terrorists? Could it cause O'Neill to walk out and leave classified documents? Was there an intent to sidetrack him? It's hard to understand. How could such an insightful man then be mauled by endless paper pushers? Do you have any insights?

[MeekOneGOP]

[potlatch]

Good writeups - both of you. Sometimes I feel OD'ed on helplessness when I read all of this because if the government isn't going to take care of it, what can I possibly do?

Informing other people is about it!

[maestro]

......

?.....Matthew 10: 12-14

:-(