MORE EVIDENCE OF DROPPED BALLS at the FBI:
Two weeks before the Sept. 11 terrorism attacks, a desperate FBI agent begged his superiors to launch an aggressive hunt for one of the men who would participate in the suicide hijackings, warning that “someday someone will die” because his request was denied, according to testimony before a congressional panel yesterday.
The New York special agent, testifying behind a screen to protect his identity, choked back tears as he described how he asked his Washington superiors on Aug. 29, 2001, to allow his office to join the search for Khalid Almihdhar, who would later help commandeer the aircraft that slammed into the Pentagon.
But lawyers in the FBI’s National Security Law Unit refused. They said information obtained through intelligence channels — that Almihdhar was an al Qaeda associate who had recently reentered the United States — could not legally be used to launch a criminal investigation.
“Someday someone will die — and [legal] wall or not — the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain ‘problems,’ ” the agent responded in a blistering e-mail to headquarters. “Let’s hope the National Security Law Unit will stand behind their decisions then, especially since the biggest threat to us now, UBL [Osama bin Laden], is getting the most ‘protection.’ “. . .
On Sept. 11, after the World Trade Center was struck, the FBI agent and his colleagues received the passenger manifests from the four fatal flights. Yesterday he told the panel that he yelled angrily: “This is the same Almihdhar we’ve been talking about for three months!”
His supervisor, trying to reassure him and the others, answered back: “We did everything by the book.”
It’s time to fix these problems.
UPDATE: PowerLine says I’m wrong about this, and that the real story was bad laws, not FBI screwups. That, however, seems to be the Bureau’s spin, not the truth. At least, this Senate report says that the FBI misunderstood the applicable law:
In the Moussaoui case, the report found, F.B.I. counterterrorism specialists and the bureau’s lawyers were so ignorant of federal surveillance laws that they did not understand that they had ample evidence to press for a warrant to search the belongings of Mr. Moussaoui, a French national who was arrested weeks before the attacks after arousing the suspicion of instructors at a Minnesota flight school.
Instead, the report found, the F.B.I. supervisors and lawyers aggressively blocked the search warrant sought by desperate field agents in Minnesota who believed last August that they might have a terrorist on their hands who might use a commercial airplane as a weapon.
Of course, this could just be Congressional spin, but I doubt it.