Former FBI supervisory agent: U.S. ambassador to Yemen in 2000 hindered FBI investigation into USS Cole bombing
A naive and muddleheaded multiculturalist ambassador impedes anti-terror efforts. “Coddling Terrorists In Yemen,” by Ali H. Soufan, an FBI supervisory special agent from 1997 to May 2005, in the Washington Post :
Seven years after al-Qaeda terrorists Jamal al-Badawi and Fahd al-Quso confessed to me their crucial involvement in the bombing of the USS Cole, and three years after they were convicted in a Yemeni court — where a judge imposed a death sentence on Badawi — they, along with many other al-Qaeda terrorists, are free. On Oct. 12, 2000, when I flew to Yemen to lead the FBI’s Cole investigation, I had no idea how uncooperative the Yemeni government would initially be. Nor could I have imagined how disconnected from reality the U.S. ambassador to Yemen then, Barbara K. Bodine, would prove.
I have hesitated in the past to share my view of the conflict between Bodine and the FBI’s counterterrorism leader, John O’Neill. I feel compelled, however, to respond to Bodine’s recent comments, which slander the efforts of many dedicated counterterrorism agents and divert attention from the significant terrorist problem within Yemen, our “ally” in the “war on terror.”
A recent Post report on Yemen allowing al-Qaeda operatives to go free offered insight into the challenges the FBI faced. Bodine was quoted in the article not urging the Yemeni government to rearrest the terrorists but, instead, denigrating the agents who investigated the attack. She faulted the FBI as being slow to trust Yemeni authorities and said agents were “dealing with a bureaucracy and a culture they didn’t understand. . . . We had one group working on a New York minute, and another on a 4,000-year-old history.”
In fact, our team included several Arab American agents who understood the culture and the region. Even so, such comments were irrelevant. The FBI left Yemen with the terrorists in jail.
It is true that while tracking the terrorists we worked “on a New York minute.” We owed that much to the sailors murdered on the Cole and to all innocent people who remained targets as long as the terrorists were free.
It is also true that we did not trust some Yemeni officials. We had good reason not to:
When the FBI arrived in Yemen, some government officials tried to convince us that the explosion had been caused by a malfunction in the Cole’s operating systems. Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh even asked the U.S. government for money to clean up port damage the United States “caused.”...
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2008/05/former-fbi-supervisory-agent-us-ambassador-to-yemen-in-2000-hindered-fbi-investigation-into-uss-cole.html
RE: The FBI's John O’Neill
I posted this reply eight years ago:
"Yes, two weeks before the attack on America [John O’Neill] became the Head of Security at the World Trade Center.
"Reading a little about [John O’Neill] you find he was on the WTC 1993 investigation team. He knew that bombing was far more than a 'police' matter of a couple of criminal nuts and a truck bomb. By the time of the overseas attacks he was the expert and he knew it was Al Qaeda and Bin Laden. No one would listen.
"Leftist pig vomit spin his leaving the FBI in 2001 as being anger at the Bush administration. But he had about eight years of interference from BJ's pukes incuding Ms Bodine."
BTW, leftist pig vomit is short for
1960s Marxist-Alinsky campus radical, psycho spoiled brats who were celebrated in the establishment MSM as the most intelligent generation ever!. They are now arguably that very establishment that praised them and they hold themselves and their ideological issue in even higher regard.
