Cole Bombing Clues Could Have Helped Stop 9/ll -Report

FBI (news - web sites) and CIA (news - web sites) Investigators probing the October 2000 terrorist attack against the U.S. Navy (news - web sites) destroyer Cole came close to detecting the Sept. 11 hijacked airliners plot, The New York Times reported in Sunday's editions.


"The lost opportunity, described by the officials for the first time in interviews this week, involved two of the eventual Sept. 11 hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi, who fell under suspicion by the CIA early in 2000 but were not put on a watch list of foreigners barred from entering the United States until August 2001, after they were already here," The Times reported.


The FBI and the CIA failed to intercept the two men because of internal miscommunications and legal restrictions on the sharing of CIA intelligence information with criminal investigators at the FBI, the newspaper said.


The importance of the two men was misunderstood before the attacks because investigators thought the two were associated with only the Cole bombing," according to The Times.


Failure to pursue leads about al-Midhar and Alhazmi will be a focus of hearings next week by the 9/ll commission studying the government's response, commission members told The Times
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=578&e=4&u=/nm/20040411/ts_nm/security_cole_report_dc

First they kept the FBI's top Al Quaeda investigator away from the Cole investigation because he was getting too nosey. Then they framed him for "losing" his briefcase in an FBI meeting. Finally he quit and went to work at WTC where he died.

If he had been allowed to stay on the job, those guys would have been fingered MUCH earlier.

Wasn't the Cole bombing just about three months before Bush came into office? I wonder how the families of the victims felt when Condi said they felt that they didn't want to engage in "tit for tat," or "embolden" the terrorists... She's just awful.

i forgot about this. everytime i say i forgot, i just think how much there is to remember in all this. bush stopped that one. part of the dominoes