Could September 11 have been averted

ON May 21, Coleen Rowley, the Chief Counsel of FBI’s Minneapolis field office, flew to Washington to hand-deliver a 13-page letter to FBI Director Robert Mueller and two copies of letter to two influential members of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The letter accused FBI not only of terrible intelligence failure but also of deliberately obstructing the investigations that could have prevented the September 11 terrorist attack. The memo gave all the details as to how the officials at FBI headquarters in Washington repeatedly dismissed requests from Smt. Rowley’s Minneapolis field office to issue a search warrant to examine the belongings and the laptop computer of Zacarias Moussaoui---the French-Moroccan operative arrested in Minnesota last August and now facing trial as the sole person charged with conspiring the September 11 attack. The FBI officials also turned down Smt. Rowley’s request for tapping Moussaoui’s telephone.

Smt. Rowley also charged FBI with ignoring an earlier report from a Phoenix field office that raised suspicion about Muslims coming from the Middle East and enrolled in US flight training schools. According to her view, an arrest of these suspicious persons could have averted the September 11 attack. She writes:  “Bureaucratic incompetence is responsible for uncovering the plot of Osama bin Laden…. A proper investigation might have enabled FBI to obtain prior intelligence that the terrorists were planning to attack with hijacked airplanes”.

Smt Rowley’s letter came when the top officials of FBI, including Robert Mueller, were warning the Americans of a chilling terrorist attack in the near future with the Bush Administration raising alarm about an imminent terrorist attack on the Statue of Liberty and the Brooklyn Bridge. These warnings along with Smt Rowley’s letter sent shudders through the entire nation and the recent arrest of Abdullah al Mujahir, an American accused of plotting to explode a radioactive “dirty bomb”, made the Americans panic- stricken.

The developments forced Senate majority leader Tom Daschle to raise the demand for appointing an independent investigation committee to examine the allegations of intelligence failure raised by Coleen Rowley. But surprisingly, the proposal has been vehemently opposed by the Bush Administration. Despite such stiff opposition, Shri Daschle declared in the last week of May that he would bring a bill in this regard on the floor of the Senate as soon as possible. He also said that Smt Rowley would be one of the star witnesses to the proposed investigating committee. Meanwhile, Charles Grassley, a Republican Senator from lowa, offered Smt Rowley a written assurance that her job would not be jeopardized if she cooperates with the investigation. Shri Grassley, at the same time, warned Shri Mueller of any possible retaliation against Smt Rowley.

As said before, the chief allegation of Smt Rowley against FBI officials was that they turned down her repeated requests for obtaining a search warrant to examine Moussaoui’s laptop and belongings. In fact, federal agents arrived at Moussaoui’s hotel and arrested him on August 15 on charges of violating immigration laws and overstaying. While Moussaoui was in custody, the French police provided FBI with all the information they had about Moussaoui. According to French intelligence, Moussaoui was not only operational in the militant Islamic world, but enjoyed some authority and autonomy as well. It said that the French police placed Moussaoui on the watch list right from the 1980s. He was found to travel to Kuwait, Turkey and other Islamic countries for maintaining links between the radical Islamic groups in continental Europe and Islamic terrorist organizations in the Middle East. French intelligence also told FBI that Moussaoui had his last trip to Pakistan, just before his arrest in the United States.

Immediately after obtaining French intelligence, the agents of the Minneapolis field office desperately tried to examine the laptop computer they seized from Moussaoui. But, to their utter disappointment, they faced series of roadblocks thrown up by their superiors in Washington. They wanted to obtain a search warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which the high officials in Washington turned down on the excuse that evidence against Moussaoui were not enough for the application of the particular law. But Smt Rowley was convinced that the Frence intelligence was more than enough to establish Moussaoui’s ties with terrorist Islamic groups for application of FISA.

In her letter, Smt Rowley also blasted FBI for its failure to team up with other federal agencies like CIA for gathering more intelligence about Moussaoui. On the contrary, one of the FBI supervisors said, “There may be plenty of men named Zacarias Moussaoui and how could one find out that this is the same person?” In fact, resistance from FBI headquarters in Washington got so bad that some agents of Rowley’s office joked that some Bureau top officials were working for Osama bin Laden and they should be spied upon.

Only after the September 11 aerial attack, the Minneapolis field office got the much wanted search warrant and during searching operation the agents discovered a letter written to Moussaoui by an al- Qaeda operative in Malaysia. They also found the name of a man in Moussaoui’s notebook that was once upon a time a room- mate of the hijacker Mohammad Atta.

These documents and other evidence forced the officials of FBI’s counter- terrorism wing to believe that Moussaoui was the 20^th hijacker. Although he showed up for the flight training schools months after the others completed their course, Bureau agents are now more or less convinced that Moussaoui was in line with 19 hijackers that took part in the September 11 attack.

Thus, the present investigations prove that the points made by Smt Rowley were correct and hence her letter points to a colossal failure of the chief Us investigating agency to the face of the biggest terrors operation ever mounted the American soil. The entire soil indicates that a prompt and aggressive investigation by FBI could have averted the terrible September 11 terrorist attack.