US acted to conceal evidence of intelligence failure before 9/11

[KansDem]

3. "...would allow the FBI and NSA to record or listen live..."

Davis said that in 1998 the FBI seized upon an opportunity to eavesdrop on every landline and telephone call into and out of Afghanistan in a bid to build intelligence on the Taliban. The Bureau discovered that the Taliban regime had awarded a major telephone network contract to a joint US-UK venture, run by an American entrepreneur, Ehsanollah Bayat and two British businessmen, Stuart Bentham and Lord Michael Cecil.

"The plan was simple" Davis said. "Because the Taliban wanted American equipment for their new phone network, this would allow the FBI and NSA, the National Security Agency, to build extra circuits into all the equipment before it was flown out to Afghanistan for use. Once installed, these extra circuits would allow the FBI and NSA to record or listen live to every single landline and mobile phone call in Afghanistan. The FBI would know the time the call was made and its duration. They would know the caller's name, the number dialled, and even the caller's PIN."

But weren't we told that the intel agencies lacked agents fluent in mideast languages? Why, "yes," we were--

When Soufan finished training at Quantico in November 1997, he was assigned to one of the FBI's busiest field offices in New York. He was the only agent in the office who spoke Arabic at the time; one of only eight agents in the country who was fluent, he says.

A new job is an exciting time for anyone, and Soufan was thrilled and nervous.

"You want to talk about fear? I was scared, I was nervous on my first day," he said. "I thought, really, my God, how the heck did I end up here? It was fear mixed with excitement, mixed with adventure."

In his first months on the job, Soufan relied on his language ability and his personal interest in the Middle East and North Africa to keep close watch on what mattered in the region.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/09/30/world/meast/fbi-interrogator/index.html

So what's the use of tapping into every phone in the MidEast when you don't have enough agents who know the language to monitor the calls?