Word: phoenix
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...high levels of government, the awful possibility is dawning that things could have been different. "If we'd had access to Moussaoui, if we'd had access to the Phoenix memo, could we have broken up the plot?" asks a White House official who works on counterterrorism. Then he answers his own question: "We would have taken action, and there's at least a distinct possibility that we may at the very least have delayed it." Bush was outraged at the suggestion that he might have been warned about impending strikes and failed to act. To ward off Democratic criticism...
There might have been more discussion of the risks of hijackings in the President's briefing if its writers had known about the Phoenix memo. But they hadn't seen it, nor had anyone in the CIA or the White House. Yet Senator Richard Shelby, the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, calls the memo, which is said to contain detailed descriptions of named suspects, "one of the most explosive documents I've seen in eight years." The memo, on which the Senate Intelligence Committee was briefed last November, has now become the focus of a huge political...
...person who isn't talking about Williams' memo is the man who wrote it. "I'm really sorry," Williams, 42, told a TIME reporter who approached him outside his North Phoenix, Ariz., home Saturday, "but I would get in trouble if I talked to you." He is a mild and graying man, but a transcript of his testimony from a terror-related trial in February provides a glimpse of his fierce work habits. After Sept. 11 proved him right, he didn't blow the whistle on the disturbing breakdown in the chain of intelligence that followed his memo. He didn...
Everyone is caught up in the blame game. But nobody talks much about the fact that the now-famous Phoenix FBI memo, which warned last July that terrorists might be studying in American flight schools, is hardly unusual. The memo raised the possibility of attacks similar to what occurred. But reams of other, equally plausible memos--written before and after 9/11--are in the files as well. A constant stream of theories and proposals comes from FBI field offices to the bureau's headquarters in Washington. We agents see things we think are worth a closer look. We recommend opening...
...Phoenix memo's main proposal--a nationwide sweep of flight schools in search of al-Qaeda terrorists--now appears to be solid and rational. But if I had been a unit chief at FBI headquarters reading it last summer, my first thought would have been that such a sweep would lead to a massive hue and cry over "profiling" of Muslims. I would have been disinclined to push the memo upstairs. To justify such a sweep would have required far more than knowing that bin Laden was possibly trying to hijack a plane...