The pre-9/11 blunder you’ve probably never heard of [View All]

[donsu]

http://www.laweekly.com/ink/04/20/news-corn.php

The real question for the 9/11 commission — and the American public — is not whether George W. Bush considered al Qaeda an urgent threat before 9/11, but this: How did the U.S. government let Khalid al-Mihdar and Nawaf al-Hazmi get away with it?

Don’t know who al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi are — or were? Their names should be household words; they should be as famous as Lee Harvey Oswald. They were two of the 9/11 hijackers who took control of Flight 77 and crashed it into the Pentagon. But they were

different from the other 19 hijackers. The CIA had been watching them as early as January 2000. Yet the CIA failed to let the FBI know that these two men — who had attended an al Qaeda summit in Malaysia in early 2000 — were in the United States or heading toward it. Consequently, the FBI lost what probably was the best opportunity it had to unravel the 9/11 plot.

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Here’s the story in short, according to the final report of the 9/11 congressional inquiry. The CIA had spied on an al Qaeda meeting in Kuala Lumpur that occurred the first week of January 2000. Within days, the CIA knew that al-Mihdar and al-Hazmi had been present, and the agency had enough information on the two to add them to a State Department watch list that could have been used to deny them entry to the United States. Yet it did not do so. In early March 2000, the CIA learned that a week after the Malaysia gathering, al-Hazmi traveled to Los Angeles. It also knew that al-Mihdar had accompanied al-Hazmi part of the way, but the CIA did consider the possibility that al-Mihdar, too, had been heading toward the United States. In February 2000, the two settled in San Diego. They rented a place and obtained driver’s licenses using their own names. They took flight lessons. In July 2000, al-Hazmi applied for a visa extension. In December, he moved to Arizona with another 9/11 hijacker. And at some point, al-Hazmi’s brother came to the United States. He, too, would become one of the 9/11 hijackers.
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more fuel for the fire under the feet of the criminal bushgang