Never Again by John Ashcroft

Author:John Ashcroft [ASHCROFT, JOHN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780759568730
Publisher: Center Street
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Someday someone will die and, wall or not, the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain “problems.” Let’s hope the National Security Law Unit [the lawyers whose advice was followed] will stand behind their decisions then, especially since the biggest threat to us now, UBL [Usama Bin Laden], is getting the most protection.6

Sadly, the FBI agent’s warning fell on deaf ears and blinded eyes. He was told that headquarters was also frustrated with the issues surrounding the wall, but rules were rules. Nobody found al-Mihdhar or al-Hazmi. As far as I know, nobody has ever found their remains either, since they flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon. Maybe—and admittedly, it is a big maybe—had we not been so concerned about perceived legal problems of mixing intelligence and criminal investigations, somebody might have connected the dots well enough to have gotten to those men before they got to us. And maybe somebody would have noticed that they had shared addresses with Mohamed Atta, the terrorist who flew a commercial airliner into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, and his cohort Marwan al-Shehhi, who piloted the plane that slammed into the South Tower. Maybe.

We know this for a fact: for two and a half weeks in late August and early September, we knew the names of at least two al Qaeda terrorists who were here to kill us. And we missed them.

Similarly, we missed Zacarias Moussaoui. Mistakenly referred to as “the twentieth hijacker,” Moussaoui was nonetheless an al Qaeda operative in the United States. He had trained in a terrorist camp in Afghanistan, and received large sums of money from Ramzi Binalshibh, one of the 9/11 financiers. He had been attending flight school in Eagan, Minnesota, when his instructor had misgivings about his motivations for wanting to learn to fly. The school shared its concerns with the FBI, and Moussaoui was detained on an immigration violation on August 16, 2001. When the Minnesota field office of the FBI sought to obtain a warrant to search Moussaoui’s computer, the request was denied because FBI officials feared breaching the wall.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff believes to this day that 9/11 might have been averted had a warrant been allowed. “Had we known a week before—had Moussaoui told us, or had we gotten into his files, that would have given us some information that may have made a difference in preventing 9/11. It seemed obvious to me—his flight training, the martial arts, and then when we put the money piece together, we discovered that there was a common funding stream to Moussaoui and some of the hijackers.”7 As prosecutors later argued in convicting Moussaoui, the information he had and withheld would have substantially sharpened the pre-9/11 picture for investigators.

Although it is impossible to know for sure, had a warrant been granted, FBI agents might have found the information in Moussaoui’s possession that would have linked him to the financial flow of al Qaeda money that was used to pay expenses for the other hijackers as well as himself.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.