The Moussaoui Memo

by tristero

Here’s a reminder in case the Bush epoch has caused you to forget why you need a competent, knowledgeable administration and not a bunch of ignorant fools and top officials who value faith over facts. Someone has to make sure the right dots are getting connected. During the spring/summer of 2001, that did not happen:

“Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, Clarke wrote, scowled and asked, ‘why we are beginning by talking about this one man, bin Laden.’ When Clarke told him no foe but al Qaeda ‘poses an immediate and serious threat to the United States,’ Wolfowitz is said to have replied that Iraqi terrorism posed ‘at least as much’ of a danger. FBI and CIA representatives backed Clarke in saying they had no such evidence.

‘I could hardly believe,’ Clarke writes, that Wolfowitz pressed the ‘totally discredited’ theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Center, ‘a theory that had been investigated for years and found to be totally untrue.'”

And sure enough, when your leaders are total morons, that leads to a clear pattern of inexcusable neglect and wasted effort:

The FBI agent who arrested Zacarias Moussaoui in August 2001 accused headquarters of criminal negligence for its refusal to investigate Moussaoui aggressively after his arrest, according to court testimony Monday.

Agent Harry Samit testified under cross-examination at Moussaoui’s trial that FBI headquarters’ refusal to follow up “prevented a serious opportunity to stop the 9/11 attacks” that killed nearly 3,000 people.

…

Under cross-examination by defense attorney Edward MacMahon, Samit acknowledged that he predicted in an Aug. 18, 2001, memo that Moussaoui was a radical Islamic terrorist in a criminal conspiracy to hijack aircraft. Moussaoui ended up pleading guilty to two specific counts that Samit had explicitly predicted in his Aug. 18 memo.

Despite Samit’s urgent pleadings, FBI headquarters refused to open a criminal investigation and refused Samit’s entreaties to obtain a search warrant.

“You needed people in Washington to help you out?” MacMahon asked.

“Yes,” Samit said.

“They didn’t do that, did they?”

Samit said no.

He confirmed under questioning that he had attributed FBI inaction to “obstructionism, criminal negligence and careerism” in an earlier report.

It makes me sick to read about this. How do these people sleep at night?