Word: yemen
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...investigation was troubled from the start. On Oct. 13, within hours of the suicide blast that killed 17 American sailors on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen, FBI agents assigned to the case touched down in the port city of Aden--and started to wait. For several hours the agents sat on their plane while the Yemenis searched through their luggage, itemizing every piece of high-tech equipment the gumshoes were bringing in. It was downhill from there. When they finally arrived at the Hotel Movenpick, where they would bunk three or four sweaty bodies to a room, they realized nobody...
Nine months later, the investigation into the attack in Yemen has ground to a halt. The bureau and the Yemenis have tried and failed to bridge the cultural chasm between them, haggling over investigative methods and security. The FBI and the U.S. State Department began a bitter feud over dealing with the Yemenis, leading to an open rupture between the agency's chief investigator and the U.S. ambassador there. The upshot, U.S. officials say, is that the FBI still cannot prove what it believes: that the notorious Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist network are behind the attack...
...established proof of bin Laden's involvement in the attack on the Cole, and it is unlikely to do so in the near future. On June 17, the last 13 FBI investigators in Yemen were pulled out because of a terrorist threat to U.S. forces. "They talked about it," says a State Department official, "changed their minds three times, and finally, suddenly, they informed us, 'We've got an airplane on the way to pick our guys...
...situation became so bad that some weeks before the FBI finally pulled out, U.S. Ambassador Barbara Bodine refused to let the head of the FBI's investigative team, John O'Neill, who matches her reputation for combativeness, back into Yemen. She continues to bar his entry. "O'Neill has been thrown out of better places than that," an FBI agent says. "They hate each other," says a U.S. official. "And that's obviously worked to the detriment of the case...
...while there was some hope for progress. In the weeks before the FBI cleared out of Yemen, it got access to suspects the Yemenis had arrested earlier. "It looked as if we were going to get access to a group of people right before we pulled out," says a State Department official. But the U.S. was not entirely pleased with the results. "There is some reason to believe the prisoners have been coached," says a U.S. counterterrorism official. "We've still not received all the help we were assured," he says. In the latest attempt to secure such help, William...