"How 9/11 Was Almost Stopped" (New Yorker)

[RedSock]

The July 10-17, 2006 issue of The New Yorker has a 12-page article by Lawrence Wright entitled "The Agent: Did the CIA stop an FBI dectective from preventing 9/11?" (The FBI agent is apparently Ali Soufan.)

Wright's new book "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11" will be out in August and this is likely taken from it.

The article is not online, but there is a web-only Q&A with Wright.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/content/articles/060710on_onlineonly01

I bought the magazine today. Has anyone else read it?

[petgoat]

1. Not yet but I'm looking forward to it. Woo Hoo!

I ♥ MSM 9/11!

[AZCat]

2. I'm about half-way through the article.

Fell asleep this afternoon before I finished it.

[mirandapriestly]

3. Red Flag from his Bio:

"He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations."
http://www.lawrencewright.com/bio.html

This is your basic "intelligence failure due to turf wars" kind of bullshit, which is worse than the "incompetence theory"


Beyond that on the Q N A:
"People who were involved in the planning of the Cole bombing were connected to the people who planned 9/11." (Oh, the Cole bombing was an inside job? bwaha-my comment)


Q "Now, assuming that it wasn't’ sheer ill will on the C.I.A.’s part, why would it withhold that "information?

A:"In the article, you mention a policy that people referred to as “the Wall.” What was that?

The Wall stemmed from a 1995 law that sought to keep from criminal investigators information that was deemed to be relevant solely to foreign intelligence. It was originally designed to prevent such information from flowing out of the intelligence division of the F.B.I. into the hands of criminal prosecutors and into trials. But the bureau misinterpreted the law and used it to force its agents to withhold information from one another—even agents who were on the same squad. So if you have a criminal agent and an intelligence agent on the same squad, investigating the same crimes, one cannot disclose to the other what he knows."

"Soufan finally received the information he’d been asking for on September 12, 2001. "

"It is a mystery to me that people in the C.I.A. have not been held accountable"
"The report on the C.I.A. has not been released to the public"

[BuddyYoung]

4. I was wondering how long it would take before someone would call BS...

on an article like that from the "New Yorker". Like many others here, I suppose, I've been a NYer subscriber for many years, but after the last financial crisis at the magazine, and in an apparent effort to court more so-called conservative readers/subscribers/prospective subscribers/advertisers, they've taken a decided turn to the right in their "Talk of The Town" feature and in articles and comments such as the one cited in the original post here. I haven't read the article yet, but I was sure it would turn out to be something like what you (MP) discovered.

Thanks for your post.

[dailykoff]

6. Yep.

Same old same old, from the sound of it. The New Yorker is not a place I'd expect to find credible 9/11 truth-seeking.

[KJF]

5. The most interesting thing was...

... when asked why the CIA withheld information about Al Mihdhar and Nawaf Al Hazmi from the FBI, one of the options he gave was:

"There are people in the F.B.I. who believed that the C.I.A. had hoped to recruit, as informers, the two Al Qaeda cell members who arrived in America in 2000. It had nobody inside the Al Qaeda organization, and here were two members of the inner circle, in America."

It's not the first time I've seen this possibility being floated and I can see why people in the FBI might believe it. Maybe it's right, maybe it isn't. We'll see.

However, Wright's preferred answer is:
"I think the most likely answer to your question is that the problem was a mix of personality clashes and the C.I.A. being overwhelmed by the number of threats that were coming in at that time."
I can't really buy that. It wasn't that just one opportunity to stop 9/11 was missed, dozens of opportunities were missed. Sometimes it is understandable, like when 1 hijacker associated with someone who was a peripheral figure in a FBI counterterrorism investigation, but sometimes it isn't understandable, like when Nawaf Al Hazmi and Al Mihdhar associate with a millenium plotter and then fly to the location of one of the millenium attacks and the CIA knows about it but takes no action.

Another thing that bugs me is how the DCIA could have known about Moussaoui in late August, but the FBI's deputy director for counterterrorism only heard of him after the attacks. Who told Tenet? It was an FBI investigation, so it must have been somebody in the FBI. If it was important enough to tell the DCIA, then why wasn't it important enough to tell the FBI's own deputy director for counterterrorism?

I'll certainly be buying Wright's book.