![]() ![]() But the bottom line is I do not believe that we would have been able to prevent September 11th." That there are things we should have followed up on. But looking back he's reached a conclusion: "I can tell you there are things I wish we had done differently. The mishandled leads came before Mueller's watch. "That took us several months, to follow that lead, and it also required the full support of the German authorities, and it would have been very, I think impossible to have followed that particular lead in the days between the time in which Moussaoui was detained and September 11th," says Mueller. After the terror attacks, they found he had a German phone number linked to al Qaeda. But FBI headquarters ruled there wasn't enough evidence to search him. Zacarias Moussaoui had acted suspiciously at a flight school and was picked up three weeks before Sept. "There are thousand upon thousands of students going to flight schools in the United States, not only from countries around the world but particularly from middle eastern countries, and how would you differentiate these individuals who were the potential hijackers from the thousands of others from the middle east who were here in the united states legitimately obtaining training?"īut one did 'differentiate' himself. 11 have been prevented? "I do not believe that we could have prevented September 11th," Mueller said. If the FBI had done its best running down that theory, might Sept. 11 plot, including a July memo from a Phoenix agent who theorized that some Arab men in U.S. He asked about other leads that might have uncovered the Sept. Pelley's interview with Mueller came before the al-Mihdhar revelation. They had, between the Department of Justice and the FBI, they had a whole task force working on finding a couple of houses of prostitution in New Orleans. Says Leahy: "Prior to September 11th, they had one analyst at the FBI working on al Qaeda matters, one, to give you some idea of the priority. And people in headquarters are ignoring them," says Grassley. "What this really shows is that there's a lot of very sincere, hard-working, very sophisticated agents at the local level that are doing the job the way it should be done. Judiciary committee chairman Patrick Leahy and Republican committee member Charles Grassley are among the senators with the most authority over the FBI. The frustrated agent wrote headquarters, warning "someday someone will die… the public will not understand why we were not more effective…" Two weeks after that memo al-Mihdhar helped fly American Flight 77 into the Pentagon. The New York agent wanted to track him down but FBI headquarters said no, telling the agent that foreign intelligence information could not be used in a criminal investigation. In August, 2001 the CIA told the FBI that al-Mihdhar was likely connected to the Cole bombing and that he was probably in the United States. ![]() The agent told the committee that he'd been working on the criminal investigation of the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen. The latest came last week in Congress, when a New York undercover agent, testifying behind a screen, said headquarters wouldn't let him track down a suspect named Khalid al-Mihdhar. Since then there have been revelations that FBI headquarters missed crucial warnings before the September attacks. The next month brought the anthrax attacks. Mueller is a former federal prosecutor, who took over the FBI Sept. And consequently, I cannot say that we have disrupted the organization to the extent that we have precluded them from finding the financing for an operation such as September 11th." "To the extent that we've been able to investigate what it cost to them, it was something in the range of anywhere from $400,000 to $500,000 at the max, which is not a substantial sum for an organization. disrupted their finances enough to prevent the kind of massive attack that we saw on Sept. ![]() A plan developed fairly early on to disrupt the worldwide financing of al Qaeda. ![]()
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