Letters to the Editor
-
Bungling, Shooter
By retarded Republican partisan hack bumblers like you.
The Banality of Truth
The government finally admits pre-9/11 bumbling
Jeff Taylor | September 21, 2007
On Tuesday Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell told the House Judiciary Committee things that, had a government official said them in the days, weeks, or months following 9/11, would have sparked public outrage—and may have significantly blunted the push for greater police and surveillance powers like the PATRIOT Act.
McConnell told lawmakers that "9/11 should have and could have been prevented."
[...]
"For whatever reason, we didn't connect the dots," McConnell said, not quite coming clean on the reasons.
Nevertheless, this position moved McConnell beyond previous remarks in June in which he held that "in his view" the terror attack was preventable, but that law adopted for a Cold War world prevented swift action to stop terrorists.
What happened to change the shading? For one, a widely overlooked story first published on September 10 by McClatchy Newspapers Washington reporter Greg Gordon happened.
In his dispatch, obviously timed to coincide with the sixth anniversary of the attacks, Gordon returns to the Moussaoui case. As the case unfolded in the spring of 2006 it became increasingly clear that top FBI officials likely missed an opportunity to stop the attack in late August 2001.
While the dogged investigation of Moussaoui by Minneapolis FBI agent Harry Samit and Samit's repeated attempts to get a warrant from FBI HQ in Washington to search Moussaoui's laptop and belongings has been well documented, Gordon's reporting uncovers new information that the FBI absolutely had information in its hands to roll up a large chunk of al Qaida's financing network in the days before 9/11 and stop the hijackings.
Moussaoui had long been regarding by his fellow jihadis as something of a loose cannon and security risk. Turns out they were right. Moussaoui's notebooks included Western Union routing numbers, routing numbers used by al Qaida operative Ramzi Binalshibh to send $14,000 to Moussaoui in August 2001.
But authorities never looked at those notebooks. Instead, FBI brass repeatedly blunted Agent Samit's attempts to search them, citing lack of information that Moussaoui was a known terrorist or foreign agent.
Gordon writes:
Instead, Moussaoui's tattered, blue spiral notebook sat in a sealed bag at an immigration office—unopened until after four hijacked jets slammed into New York's World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania countryside, killing 2,972 people...
http://www.reason.com/news/show/122604.html
Blaming FISA is just incompetent bunglers trying to shift the blame from themselves. It happened on your watch and you incompetents let it happen.