FBI Blocked Agents' Request to Probe Terrorist
Phil Brennan for NewsMax.com
Monday, Oct. 8, 2001
Top officials of the FBI stopped local agents from an in-depth investigation of a suspected terrorist, now believed to have been slated to be one of the hijackers.
Had the agents been allowed to investigate the terrorist, it may have given them advance warning of the September 11 disasters in New York and Washington, the New York Times reported in editions over the weekend.
On August 17, FBI agents in Minneapolis arrested Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen, on immigration charges.
Their suspicions had been aroused when a local flight school reported that Moussaoui wanted to learn how to fly large jet aircraft, but had insisted he did not need to know how to take off or land.
Moreover, he had specifically asked for information about flying in New York air space.
After the arrest, the FBI asked both the CIA and French intelligence for any information they had on Moussaoui.
French intelligence officials reported that their anti-terrorist files showed him to be both an extremist and a man with some very suspicious connections to terrorist groups, having reportedly traveled to Afghanistan and Pakistan several times.
With Moussaoui in detention, agents asked FBI headquarters for permission to check the hard drive on his computer and to launch a full scale criminal investigation of the man.
Superiors at the FBI's Washington office flatly turned down the agents' request.
Only after the September 11 attacks did FBI headquarters finally give approval for agents to examine Moussaouio's hard drive and open up a broader inquiry.
Reportedly the FBI discovered that that Moussaoui had compiled data on how wind patterns affect crop-dusters, as well as a large amount of information on crop-dusting aircraft.
That was the critical information led the government to ground all crop-dusting flights in the U.S. Law enforcement sources told the Times that had the FBI leadership not stymied the Minneapolis probe of their local office, the information they could have unearthed, combined with other intelligence available to them, could have alerted the government to the coming disaster.
"The question being asked here is if they put two and two together, they could have gotten a lot more information about the guy - if not stopped the hijacking," one investigator told Newsweek magazine.
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