Word: moussaoui
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...protecting the public--and whether it still deserves the public's trust. While saying she does not believe the FBI director engaged in a post-9/11 cover-up, Rowley accuses Mueller and senior aides of having "omitted, downplayed, glossed over and or/mischaracterized" her office's investigation of Moussaoui. After Sept. 11, top FBI officials decided to "circle the wagons," as she puts it, and deny--as Mueller did immediately after the attacks--that the FBI had any knowledge that Islamic terrorists might be planning an attack involving hijacked airplanes. "I have deep concerns," she writes, "that a delicate shading/skewing...
...name a handful of midlevel officials who "almost inexplicably" blocked "Minneapolis' by now desperate efforts to obtain a FISA search warrant... HQ personnel brought up almost ridiculous questions in their apparent efforts to undermine the probable cause." One supervisor complained that there might be plenty of men named Zacarias Moussaoui in France; how did the agents know this was the same man? (The agents checked the Paris phone books and found but one Moussaoui.) At another point the field office tried to bypass their bosses altogether and alert the CIA's Counterterrorism Center; Rowley says FBI officials chastised the agents...
...NSLU turned down the Minnesotans' FISA request. Rowley's letter does not provide any specifics to back up the allegation that the supervisor altered or withheld evidence. (Only after Sept. 11 did the FBI successfully obtain a warrant to search Moussaoui's belongings; among other things, the search turned up crop-dusting information, a letter to Moussaoui from an al-Qaeda operative in Malaysia and a notebook that contained an alias eventually traced to the roommate of hijacker Mohamed Atta.) According to Rowley, the supervisor has since been promoted. FBI officials refused to comment on the tampering charge last week...
...likely Mueller will have plenty more accounting to do. He has already been pressed to explain why the FBI did not investigate Moussaoui more aggressively; on May 8, he told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that the lead Minnesota case agent "did a terrific job in pushing as hard as we possibly could with Moussaoui. But did we discern that there was a plot that would have led us to Sept. 11? No. Could we have? I doubt it." But in its most searching passage, Rowley's letter lays out the case that the FBI made fateful miscalculations...
...Rowley's admittedly speculative view, more decisive action might have enabled the authorities to put the pieces together in time. FBI counterterrorism officials continue to dispute that line of reasoning. They doubt Moussaoui was the 20th hijacker: there is no hard evidence that any of the 19 hijackers communicated with Moussaoui, and he showed up for flight school months after the others had completed their training. (They have a darker worry: that he was on an entirely different suicide mission and that his cell mates are still at large.) And the survey of flight schools proposed by Williams would have...