Word: riyadh
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...came under criticism in the U.S. for sluggishness in investigating the attacks, in which 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens. Now it appears that the U.S. bears some responsibility for the slackness with which leads were pursued. According to several former employees of the U.S. embassy in Riyadh, the FBI legal attaché's office housed within the embassy was often in disarray during the months that followed 9/11. When an FBI supervisor arrived to clean up the mess, she found a mountain of paper and, for security reasons, ordered wholesale shredding that resulted in the destruction of unprocessed...
...appears that the bureau's team never got on top of the thousands of leads flowing in from the U.S. and Saudi governments. In a June 6 letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller, the Senate Judiciary Committee renewed a request for information about allegations that the FBI's Riyadh office was "delinquent in pursuing thousands of leads" related to 9/11...
When the senior FBI supervisor was sent to the Riyadh office nearly a year after 9/11, she found secret documents literally falling out of file drawers, stacked in binders on tables and wedged behind cabinets, according to an FBI briefing to Congress. The process of sending classified material to the U.S. had fallen so far behind that a backlog of boxes, each filled with three feet of paper containing secret, time-sensitive leads, had built up. Since embassies must be prepared for the possibility of a hostile takeover, the rule is that officials should need no more than 15 minutes...
...statement to Time last week, the FBI said the shredded material was "duplicative" or "only informational." But the Judiciary Committee's letter cites reports that some of the documents "had not been translated or reviewed." Or copied, according to several former Riyadh embassy employees. The result, they say, was that over two or more months, agents had to go back to Saudi security officials to try to obtain copies of what had been destroyed. "It was leads, suspicious-activity material, information on airline pilots," says an employee. In a deposition for a lawsuit filed by Bassem Youssef...
...democracy appeared to dissolve into simply a difference in interpretation of history, Bush-watchers were left with important questions: Is the president really as serious about spreading democracy as he claims to be? Will he apply his democratic doctrine to the authoritarian regimes in Havana and Pyongyang, Rangoon and Riyadh? Will he put America’s money where his mouth is and encourage worldwide democracy with rhetorical carrots as well as sticks? The president has three more years in office during which he will have to answer these questions...