Word: yemen
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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...
...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...
...Setting the guidelines for cooperation with the Yemeni government had been difficult enough. It took nearly a month after the attack for the U.S. and Yemen to sign a protocol, the contents of which remain classified, delineating how the investigation would be carried out and what responsibilities would be shared. Even as the FBI was tackling forensics, the Yemenis were making quick progress in their specialty-arrests. "They arrested everybody they could find with a beard," says a Yemeni official. Now Yemeni sources have told TIME that the Yemeni Attorney General's office could soon bring the suspects...
...That seems to be enough for the Yemenis. "Osama bin Laden prepared, financed and perpetrated the Cole attack," says Abd al-Karim al-Iryani, Yemen's Prime Minister at the time of the attack and now a senior adviser to Yemeni President Ali Abdallah Salih. But that is not quite enough for the Americans. The FBI and other U.S. officials say they still don't have the evidence to prove their case in a U.S. court, and that all goes back to not being able to conduct an American-style investigation. And even though the Yemenis have suspects...