John O'Neill's 'Lost' Briefcase...

[reprehensor]

Yeah, sure, lost. In Tampa, FLORIDA!

FBI Terror Expert Lost Track of Top-secret Plans

Stolen briefcase held report on N.Y. operations

by David Johnston
The New York Times
August 19, 2001

Washington -- The FBI has begun an internal investigation into one of its most senior counterterrorism officials, who lost track of a briefcase containing highly classified information last year. The briefcase contained a number of sensitive documents, including a report outlining virtually every national security operation in New York, government officials said.

The official, John O'Neill, 49, is the special agent in charge of national security in the FBI's New York office. The job is among the most powerful in the FBI, and, although O'Neill is not widely known, he has overseen cases like the terrorist bombing of the Navy destroyer Cole in Yemen last year and the bombings of American Embassies in East Africa in 1998.

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Officials identified one document in the briefcase as a draft of the annual field office report for national security operations in New York. The closely guarded report contained a description of every counterespionage and counterterrorism program in New York and detailed the manpower for each operation.

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O'Neill started as an entry-level clerk at the bureau and has been an agent for more than 25 years. Throughout his career, associates said, O'Neill has been regarded as a dedicated, relentless and hard-charging investigator who was one of the FBI's brightest stars. But associates said he sometimes chafed at the restrictive rules at the bureau, and his single-mindedness had sometimes irritated colleagues in the bureau, at the CIA and at the State Department. O'Neill's aggressiveness has led to serious frictions in the Cole bombing case, for example.

This year, the U.S. ambassador to Yemen, Barbara Bodine, blocked O'Neill from returning to Yemen to oversee the FBI investigation of the bombing of the Cole. O'Neill had led the initial team of agents in Yemen after the bombing last fall, but ran afoul of Bodine over what she considered his heavy-handed style, State Department officials said. She considered the FBI contingent too large and objected to the agents' insistence on carrying heavy weapons, they said.

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Geez, Barbara, they were only hot on the trail of Osama Fucking Bin Laden.

It all makes sense if you look at it a certain way...

Today, after nearly four years since 9/11, the American people still do not know that thousands of lives can be jeopardized under the unspoken policy of ‘protecting certain foreign business relations.’ The victims family members still do not realize that information and answers they have sought relentlessly for almost 4 years has been blocked due to the unspoken decisions made and disguised under ‘safeguarding certain diplomatic relations .’