How The FBI Let 9/11 Happen

[smb]

From an article by Jeff A. Taylor in the June 2006 Reason (pages 18-19) -- I figure five key paragraphs out of two pages ought to qualify as an acceptable excerpt:

The trial of September 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui provided definitive proof that the U.S. government missed some clear opportunities to stop the 9/11 attacks. Those missed opportunities had nothing to do with the legal restrictions later loosened by the PATRIOT Act. It was bureaucratic hierarchies and power trips that led the Federal Bureau of Investigation ignore the carefully gathered evidence of an attack.

The March 20 testimony of the Minneapolis-based FBI agent Harry Samit buries the notion that 9/11 was unprevantable. Beginning with Moussaoui's arrest on August 16, 2001, Samit mounted a global, indefagitable investigation of the man and concluded that an attack involving hijacked airplanes was imminent....

This decision not to seek a warrant gave rise to the myth that the "wall" between overseas intelligence and criminal investigations made the PATRIOT Act necessary. This myth is cherished among right-wing radio talkers and has now morphed into a clumsy justification for the White House's warrantless wiretaps. It is pure fantasy. Samit cited "obstructionism, criminal negligence, and careerism" by top FBI officials -- not domestic spying restrictions -- as the factors that stopped his investigation....

Five years later, the bureau still isn't an effective anti-terrorism agency. Instead, it's morphed into Stasi Lite, keeping tabs on domestic subversives: assorted peaceniks, Communists in Texas, and the League of Women Voters in Michigan, which had the gall to invite a critic of the PATRIOT Act to a panel discussion. This is what the FBI is good at, so this is what it does.

Otherwise, the FBI remains unreformed. The same vapid bureaucratic tautology that made Zacarias Moussaoui unimportant because he was not known to be important still holds sway. Don't be surpirsed if some other agent is told one day to back off a hunch and get with the program.

[politrix]

1. They Allowed The First One To Happen, Too

And, supplied the explosives:


THE NEW YORK TIMES

* * * * *

Thursday October 28, 1993 Page A1

"Tapes Depict Proposal to Thwart Bomb Used in Trade Center Blast"

By Ralph Blumenthal

Law-enforcement officials were told that terrorists were building a bomb that was eventually used to blow up the World Trade Center, and they planned to thwart the plotters by secretly substituting harmless powder for the explosives, an informer said after the blast.

The informer was to have helped the plotters build the bomb
and supply the fake powder, but the plan was called off by
an F.B.I. supervisor who had other ideas about how the informer, Emad Salem, should be used, the informer said.

The account, which is given in the transcript of hundreds of
hours of tape recordings that Mr. Salem secretly made of his
talks with law-enforcement agents, portrays the authorities as
being in a far better position than previously known to foil
the February 26th bombing of New York City's tallest towers.

-snip-

In an undated transcript of a conversation from that period, Mr. Salem recounts a talk he had had earlier with an agent about an unnamed F.B.I. supervisor who, he said,

"came and messed it up." "He requested to meet me in the hotel," Mr. Salem says of the supervisor.

"He requested to make me to testify, and if he didn't push for that, we'll be going building the bomb with a phony powder, and grabbing the people who was involved in it. But since you, we didn't do that."

-snip-

Mr. Salem said Mr. Anticev had told him, "He said, I don't think that the New York people would like the things out of the New York Office to go to Washington, D.C."

Another agent, identified as Nancy Floyd, does not dispute
Mr. Salem's account, but rather, appears to agree with it,
saying of the `New York people':

"Well, of course not, because they don't want to get their butts chewed."

-snip-

Salem asserts that the original plan was to have the plotters build the bomb using a harmless powder instead of actual explosive, but that an FBI supervisor decided that a real bomb should be constructed instead.

He substantiates his claims with hundreds of hours of secretly-recorded conversations with his FBI handlers, made during discussions held after the bombings.

Salem says he wished to complain to FBI headquarters in Washington about the failure to prevent the bombing despite foreknowledge, but was dissuaded from doing so by the New York FBI office. The FBI has not explicitly denied Salem's account."

http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&rls=en&q=Salem+says+he+wished+to+complain+to+FBI&sourceid=opera&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

[Rich Hunt]

2. ah yes, the "New York Times"

....right there when the federal government needs undermining, handmaidens of the fascist puritans who cower and play divide-and-conquer games.

It's over, whitey.

This isn't the sixties. Cease and desist, or I'll post your dirty laundry some more. How's your buddy "Bill", for starters?

[politrix]

3. ?????????????????????

What are you talking about?

[rman]

4. Fed govt. already has been undermined, infiltrated,

compromised - much more so now then in the 60's. It's not that the fascist puritans are only outside the government.
Sometimes stuff that reveals some of it makes it in the MSM; see Watergate, Iran-Contra, 9-11.