Posted on 05/22/2002 7:04:50 PM PDT by Dallas
Over the past decade, numerous missteps have provoked criticism of the FBI:
UNHEEDED WARNINGS BEFORE SEPT. 11
FBI Director Robert Mueller has said he wished the FBI had acted more aggressively in addressing some leads, but the FBI had nothing before Sept. 11 that pointed to the multiple-airliner hijacking plot.
* A Phoenix FBI agent wrote a memo to headquarters last July warning about Arabs training at an Arizona flight school. The memo was set aside, and Mueller said he did not learn of it until after the Sept. 11 hijacking attacks by terrorists who studied at U.S. flight schools.
* A month after the memo, FBI agents in Minnesota arrested a French citizen of Moroccan descent, Zacarias Moussaoui, after a flight school instructor became suspicious of his desire to learn to fly a commercial jet. The Justice Department refused an FBI request to search Moussaoui's computer. Moussaoui, who was in jail on Sept. 11, has been charged as a conspirator in the attacks.
* In 1995, Philippine authorities alerted the FBI that Middle Eastern pilots were training at U.S. flight schools and that at least one had proposed dive-bombing a jetliner into a federal building.
OTHER CASES
* The FBI withheld thousands of pages of documents from attorneys representing Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, turning them over just days before his scheduled execution last year. The execution was delayed for a month. U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch said the FBI's conduct was shocking but ruled it had no bearing on McVeigh's guilt.
* FBI agent Robert Hanssen spied for Moscow for two decades before his arrest in February 2001. He's been sentenced to life in prison.
* Wen Ho Lee, a Taiwanese-born Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist, was arrested in December 1999 on suspicion of spying for China and held in solitary confinement for nine months. He was indicted on 59 felony counts, but the government's case collapsed. Lee, a naturalized American, finally pleaded guilty to one felony count of downloading sensitive material and was set free with an apology from the judge on behalf of the American people.
* The FBI targeted Richard Jewell in the bombing at the 1996 Summer Games that killed one person and injured more than 100. Jewell was never charged and was publicly cleared three months later.
* In the mid-1990s, the FBI suffered an embarrassing investigation of its world-renowned crime lab. The Justice Department's inspector general criticized the lab for flawed scientific work and inaccurate, pro-prosecution testimony in major cases, including the Oklahoma City bombing.
* The FBI has been widely criticized for its handling of a 1993 standoff with the Branch Davidian sect in Waco, Texas. Four federal agents and more than 80 Davidians died during the siege and the fire that ended it.
* During a 1992 shootout in Ruby Ridge, Idaho, an FBI agent killed white separatist Randy Weaver's wife, Vicki, while she held her 10-month-old baby.
Copyright © 2002, The Associated Press
BTW,
FBI agent Ken Williams from Phoenix told the FBI and DOJ AND the CIA in July 2001 about his memo on the terrorists training at US flight schools. Bush got a memo from the CIA in AUg 2001 talking about terrorist attacks using airplanes. The CIA was in effect passing on Williams research along in the CIA memo to Bush in AUg 2001. Bush is still trying to block the COngress Senate intell committee from seeing this CIA memo.
What did Bush do in AUg 2001 in response to the CIA memo? Bush ordered the FBI to shut down the FBI investigation of Saudis businessmen close to Bush (Harken)including Khalid Mafhouz and the Bin Laden family known to have been helping AlQaueda, Hamas and pilots in the US via Holy Land FOundation and Infocom via Bush attorneys and board member advisors Akin and GUmp.
In my opinion Bush actions in Aug 2001 with resperct to the FBI invetigation of the Saudis made it more likely that the hijackers would succeed even if that is not what Bush intended.
By Jerry Seper
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
A Phoenix FBI agent whose July 2001 memo seeking a search of flight schools for possible al Qaeda terrorists went unheeded by FBI headquarters also took his concerns to officials at the CIA, but it is not clear what they did — if anything — with the information.
According to government sources, Agent Kenneth Williams told a closed-door session of the Senate Judiciary Committee that after alerting FBI headquarters that followers of Osama bin Laden were training at an Arizona flight school, he gave the names to CIA officials for background and intelligence checks.
Mr. Williams, accompanied to the session by FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, said CIA officials ran checks on eight of the flight-school students, but they proved negative, the sources said.
The agent, a 10-year FBI veteran and counterterrorism expert, said after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that killed about 3,000 people, new checks were conducted and one of the Arizona men was identified as an al Qaeda associate.
A CIA spokesman yesterday said it was "routine" for the agency to run names for law enforcement officials, but the CIA never received any specific request concerning the so-called Phoenix memo prior to the September 11 attacks, and never received a copy of it.
"It is not unusual to run names, we talk everyday and will continue to talk," said the spokesman. "But nothing was done in context with a Phoenix memo."
According to the sources, the committee wants to know who at the CIA ran the checks on the eight men and what they did with the information. They said the committee also will try to determine why it was necessary to conduct a second round of checks to turn up the al Qaeda connection.
The committee, the sources said, also was told that after the September 11 attacks, it was learned that one of the Arizona men called a "very close associate" of bin Laden, identified as Abu Zubaydah, the highest-ranking al Qaeda member now in U.S. custody. Zubaydah has been described as al Qaeda's operational commander.
The sources also said the committee heard that: cMr. Williams' July 10 memo went to the Radical Fundamentalist Unit, or RFU, at the counterterrorism unit at FBI headquarters, and was addressed to the Osama bin Laden desk. The memo also was sent to the FBI's New York field office.
cThe memo concluded there was an inordinate number of individuals of "an investigative interest" attending flight schools in Arizona. It said several of the men also were taking courses on airplane construction and one had inquired about airport security.
•Several of the Arizona men had ties to al-Muhajiroun, a radical Islamic organization based in London that is closely aligned with bin Laden and has called for the destruction of the United States.
•Mr. Williams documented several "fatwas," or religious edicts, against the United States, including one that described America's civil aviation and its airports as legitimate targets.
FBI officials told The Washington Post on Tuesday that midlevel executives at FBI headquarters who received the Phoenix memo lacked sufficient manpower to carry out follow-up investigations before the September 11 attacks.
But government sources insisted yesterday that no such claim was made during the committee's closed-door session.
The Phoenix memo has caused an uproar on Capitol Hill, where Democrats are calling for an independent commission to investigate how the administration responded to warnings about possible terrorist attacks before September 11. Democrats and several Republicans want to know whether the administration failed to heed the warnings.
The Phoenix memo focused on eight students enrolled at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Ariz., where they took classes in pilot training, aircraft mechanics and security.
None has since been named as having any direct link to the September 11 attacks, although two were described as having ties to al Qaeda and are under active investigation, the sources said.
Mr. Mueller has ordered a reorganization of the bureau in the wake of September 11 that relies heavily on upgraded information technology and an infusion of computer specialists better able to detect and deter would-be terrorist attacks. The FBI plans to hire 900 new agents by the end of summer.
His planned reorganization will concentrate authority for terrorism investigation at the FBI's Washington headquarters.
How about the Iraqi soldier asylumed here involved in the Murrah attack going to work at Logan Airport?
Where is he now?
What did everybody know and when did they know it?
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