Inquiry Into Attack on the Cole in 2000 Missed 9/11 Clues (NYT)

[huckleberry]

By DAVID JOHNSTON and JAMES RISEN
Published: April 11, 2004

WASHINGTON, April 10 — The American investigators probing the October 2000 terrorist attack against the Navy destroyer Cole came tantalizingly close to detecting the Sept. 11 plot, F.B.I. and C.I.A. officials now say. But the government missed the significance of a series of clues because some investigators believed that the evidence fit narrowly into their case against the ship bombers and, others say, they did not have access to all the information.

The lost opportunity, described by the officials for the first time in interviews this week, involved two of the eventual Sept. 11 hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi, who fell under suspicion by the C.I.A. early in 2000 but were not put on a watch list of foreigners barred from entering the United States until August 2001, after they were already in the country.

A reconstruction of events shows that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency failed to recognize the significance of the two men and to act in concert to intercept them because of internal miscommunications and legal restrictions on the sharing of C.I.A. intelligence information with criminal investigators at the F.B.I. Problems developed even though F.B.I. agents and C.I.A. officers were assigned to each other's operational and analytical units.

The reconstruction also shows that the importance of the two men, who have figured centrally in examinations of the government's failure to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks, was misunderstood before the attacks because investigators thought the two were associated with the Cole bombing, and they were not connected to a plot to strike targets within the United States before Sept. 11, 2001.

more at
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/11/politics/11COLE.html?hp

[keithyboy]

1. And the Bush administration was pre-occupied with undoing the Clinton

legacy and before that the Republican-led Congress was pre-occupied with investigating Clinton's sex life. And, yes, I remember Joe standing in the well of the Senate...good ol'e Joe. What on earth was Al thinking when he put Joe on the ticket? It excapes me.

[Ravy]

2. They can say that the FBI and the CIA didn't communicate...

... but they can't hide the fact that Tenet (CIA) knew about the flight school trainees that were uncovered by the FBI.

They talked enough to suspect something was up.