This is a reposting, with one more document obtained being added at the bottom of the Catcher’s Mitt section. For a list of unsuccessful FOIA requests see here.

Hijackers Timeline

The most interesting thing I got is an FBI document called the Hijackers Timeline, which even made it to Raw Story. It was 298 pages, heavily redacted and came in a tightly bound FedEx package. It contained a lot of new information about 9/11, for example we found that two of the hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, said they moved in with a suspected Saudi agent immediately after arriving in the US, instead of 2-3 weeks later, as was claimed after 9/11. The document also shows there is video of two of the hijackers at Dulles airport the day before the attacks; this may be related to the account of security guard Eric Gill, who said the hijackers attempted to penetrate a secure area there on that day, but was largely ignored by the FBI and 9/11 Commission. There are lots of other interesting snippets, such as Marwan Alshehhi and Hamza Alghamdi spending hundreds of dollars on “pornographic video and sex toys,” Abdulaziz Alomari losing his plane ticket just before 9/11, and the length of a call (16 minutes) between the hijackers in the US and al-Qaeda’s main communications hub in Yemen. We know the call was intercepted by the NSA, but it allegedly did not figure out one party to the call was in the US.

FAA Calls on Day of 9/11

After this comes a transcript of calls involving FAA facilities and other organisations on the day of 9/11, which you can find here (summary here). The calls provide information about the FAA’s awareness of the hijacked flights. For example, the military liaison at New York Center was informed of the hijacking of Flight 175 at about 9:02 a.m., one minute before it crashed into the World Trade Center; the FAA and American Airlines discussed the hijacking of Flight 77 for a third time before it hit the Pentagon; and United Airlines called the FAA some time around 10:00 a.m. and claimed Flight 93 was over Hagerstown, Maryland, although it allegedly crashed in Pennsylvania some time before it reached Hagerstown.

Catcher’s Mitt

The next three documents we obtained were from a request for documents we think might be related to an FBI programme called “Catcher’s Mitt.” We think Catcher’s Mitt deals with surveillance of al-Qaeda-related extremists in the US. We found the references to the documents in the DoJ Inspector General’s report on the FBI’s performance before 9/11.

The first is a memo from FISA Court Chief Judge Royce Lamberth about problems with requests submitted by the FBI for warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). It is dated 9 March 2001 and referenced in the event March 2001: Justice Department Investigation Finds FISA Applications Are Misleading. The memo says that errors (essentially, the FBI was completely ignoring the “wall”) keep being made, despite measures to prevent them. The memo bans one FBI agent, Michael Resnick, from submitting any more affidavits about compliance with “wall” procedures to the court (reading between the lines, they thought he was deliberately flouting the procedures). The Department of Justice redacted Resnick’s name from the memo, even though it is clear which agent it is talking about from media accounts. My understanding is that although most of the errors pertained to surveillance of al-Qaeda targets in the US, Resnick was in charge of the Hamas section, and this memo related to Hamas.

The second is a memo from Attorney General John Ashcroft and is referenced in the event August 20, 2001 and After: Key Justice Department Unit Not Consulted about Moussaoui Warrant Request. The memo, dated 18 May 2001, sets out new procedures for dealing with requests under FISA. What is interesting about it is that it provides for closer coordination between field offices and the FISA Court, but this did not occur in the Zacarias Moussaoui case (no warrant application was submitted to either an ordinary criminal court or the FISA Court), and no warrant was issued.

The third is a cover letter for a report by the DoJ’s Office of Professional Responsibility into the errors. Apparently, the rest of this report will be forthcoming.

USS Cole Bombing

There is also a set of documents pertaining to the bombing of the USS Cole, which you can read about here. I got various documents in response to the request, but none of them was the one I wanted and none of the them was particularly interesting.

There are still several FOIA requests outstanding, so hopefully some more news in the not-too-distant future.

The FBI has sent me a largely uninteresting cover letter in response to an FOIA request filed when your grandfather was a small boy. The letter was originally sent in 2003 with a report about an investigation by the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) into FBI abuse of the so-called “wall” procedures, which regulated information sharing between intelligence agents on one side and prosecutors and criminal agents on the other.

Together with the cover letter, the report totals 244 pages, but will not be forthcoming from the FBI. As it was done by the OPR, it should come to me from the DoJ. The bureau also sent me a six-page list of the other page numbers (3 to 244, understandably) and next to each number is the text “Referral/direct.” If you don’t believe they could do anything this pointless, see here.

At the bottom of a fairly confusing letter from the FBI that came with the cover letter for the report, it says:

The 242 pages withheld from the enclosed file originated with the Department of Justice and were referred to that agency for their review and direct response to you. Due to an administrative error, these pages have not previously been forwarded.

I take this to mean that they only just sent the DoJ the other 242 pages to review for redaction. This despite the fact that on 10 May 2007, 9 August 2007, and 16 June 2008 the bureau wrote to assure me, “Currently your request is being reviewed by an analyst.” One can only wonder what the analyst was reviewing for over 14 months. All she had to do, apparently, is send me a two-page cover letter and pop the rest of the report in the internal post. How can that take more than a few minutes?

Whereas most FOIA requests generate an instant demand for money, followed by a long silence, this request (which was for other documents as well, and some of them have already been produced) led to a bewildering array of correspondence and much amusement on my part.

You can find a list of unsuccessful FOIA requests here, and a list of successful ones here.

This is an entirely personal blog post, and has almost nothing to do with the Commons. But for this case, I’m gonna exercise executive privilege.

A friend passed away the other day, Dan Schulz. You can read the tributes to his memory and his legacy on the SitePoint forum.

Dan didn’t write a thing for the Commons, and he and I didn’t agree at all politically. What he did do was help me, like he helped hundreds of other people, improve my web design and HTML/CSS coding skills, often at length and with no expectation of recompense. I’m a fairly good amateur Web designer, and am now polishing and broadening my skills by designing sites for a number of non-profit organizations for free (I’ll post the links if anyone’s interested).

And like so many friendships nowadays, ours was entirely Internet-based. We never laid eyes on one another. But he had a strong impact on my life, and I hope I had some meaning to his.

Dan’s willingness to spend inordinate amounts of his time and expertise to help others, with no expectation of return, makes him an exemplar of the Commons mentality that we hold in such high regard here at HC.

He will be greatly missed.

The New York Times had a long article yesterday about the “Italian job” rendition of an Islamist extremist known as Abu Omar. I liked the last two paragraphs best:

Most of the top C.I.A. officers said to have planned the Abu Omar rendition have left the agency, with the exception of Stephen R. Kappes, who at the time was the assistant director of the C.I.A.’s clandestine branch.

He is now the C.I.A.’s second ranking official.

This is the first mention of Kappes’ involvement I know of. Nice of the NYT to wait until the last two paragraphs to drop him in it. I’m sure it was read with interest at the prosecutor’s office in Milan.

Hattip: Scott Horton.

Documents newly found at the National Archives show that in the weeks before the 9/11 Commission issued a subpoena for tapes of events at the Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) on the day of the attacks, it told the military not to send some or all of them to the commission. The documents are internal commission e-mails and a memo, as well as communications between the commission and the military. They were found at the National Archives by History Commons contributor Erik Larson (a.k.a. paxvector) and posted to the 9/11 Document Archive at Scribd.

The tapes became one of the cornerstones of the commission’s account of the day of 9/11, which differed significantly from previous statements by the military and FAA. Although the military had previously claimed it had launched fighters from Langley Air Force Base in response to the hijacking of Flight 77, which hit the Pentagon, and to have been tracking Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania, the commission found otherwise. It said the Langley fighters were launched for another reason, and failed to find any mention of Flight 93 in military records until around 10:00 a.m., shortly before it crashed

If the commission’s version is correct, it is unclear why the military gave the public and then the commission such a misleading account. Did the Pentagon knowingly lie to overstate its readiness to intercept errant airliners, was it just a SNAFU in the Pentagon investigation, or was there some other reason? The concealment of the tapes from the commission would have indicated a deliberate lie by the military, but the newly found documents show the military repeatedly referred to them in communications and made an apparent offer to provide some or all of them to the commission five weeks before the commission issued its subpoena.

The newly found documents show that the commission received a partial transcript of the tapes on 2 June. However, this transcript was incomplete and, according to a commission memo dated 29 October 2003, only reflected 5 or 6 tapes. Some of the tapes were first released to the public by the makers of the documentary Loose Change, and a fuller set was later obtained by Government Attic, which received a total of 21 tapes. This means the initial transcript reflected at most about one quarter of what NEADS had.

The memo indicates the commission thought the 2 June transcript was a full transcript of all the tapes. However, it ended at 10:15 a.m., just a few minutes after the last airliner crashed, and the commission wanted it to be supplemented to continue after this time. According to the memo, the commission made repeated requests for supplementation, on 8 September, 20 October and 24 October. The memo says that prior to flying to visit NEADS the commission “stressed the significance of receiving all tapes and transcripts relevant to 9/11.” It is unclear which military component these requests were made to.

At the same time the commission was asking the military for the tapes, it was also telling it not to send them.

In an e-mail dated 29 September 2003 (page 8), Miles Kara, one of the commission staffers slated to visit NEADS, wrote to his NEADS point of contact Kasey Blaney. Instead of asking for the tapes and transcripts in advance of the visit, he wrote, “[P]lease have tapes of the transcripts available on site and then provided to us for retention through the document process.”

The next day, he wrote (same as previous link, page 1) to other staffers investigating the air defence on the day of the attacks, telling them: “She [Blaney] confirmed that they have the tapes, but are concerned about fragility—they are reel-reel [note: a problem occurred when NEADS attempted to transcribe them, and NEADS came to believe a couple of the tapes had been accidentally deleted, although they were later recovered]. I told her to hold on making copies and we would make that judgment on site in consultation with their technical folks.” The purpose of making copies would be to provide the copies to the commission, in advance of the visit.

An e-mail dated 21 October from Blaney to Kara and copied to the other relevant staffers also mentions the plan to listen to the tapes. Blaney asks: “When did you envision us listening to the relevant tapes for the period 1015 EDT onward? Cross your fingers, if all works well, the tapes will be copied to a hard drive and will be available on our local area network. You’ll be able to listen to them at your convenience!”

However, when the commission staffers arrived at NEADS in the last week in October, team leader John Farmer apparently became displeased and suspended the visit. He then flew to see Commission Chairman Tom Kean, and demanded that the tapes be subpoenaed. According to Philip Shenon’s The Commission, Farmer intended to resign if the commission did not issue a subpoena.

The exact source of the displeasure is not wholly certain. Possibly, although Farmer had gone to NEADS specifically to listen to the tapes, he did not realise how many tapes they had (i.e. by providing the transcript of 5-6 channels, the military had implied it had only recorded those many channels). Therefore, he was angered by the lack of an explicit reference to the amount of tapes and their non-provision of the commission.

Seen in this light, the subpoena may seem somewhat harsh on the Pentagon. The e-mails between Kara and Blaney show the commission previously told NEADS not to send the tapes in advance. However, commission staffers went to listen to the tapes, and then demanded a subpoena for them, citing NEADS’ non-provision of the tapes beforehand.

On the other hand, the commission may have not understood exactly how many tapes NEADS had. In addition, there were numerous other pieces of documentation being withheld by the military, which had also made other false claims, and subpoenas are hardly extraordinary in Washington.

In addition, some critics of the commission have attacked its policy of not issuing subpoenas. In one instance, the commission only issued a document request to the CIA for detainee materials, and the CIA withheld recordings of the detainees Abu Zubaida and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri being questioned. The recordings were then destroyed. The withholding was not an illegal act by the CIA in regard of the commission’s document request, which was not backed by the force of law, although the tapes’ destruction may have been illegal for other reasons.

The commission issued the subpoena in early November; the tapes were provided promptly.

Finally, there is the question of the incorrectness of the 29 October memo, a report from Team 8 to the commission’s front office about the need for a subpoena. It states:

Because the [2 June] transcript ends at 10:15 am, we asked in repeated telephone conversations that the tape be further transcribed. This request was memorialized in an email on September 8^th. (See tab B). On October 20, after receiving no response to our September 8^th message, we again wrote and stressed the importance of both continuing the NEADS transcript and of receiving all relevant NEADS documents prior to flying out to Rome, New York.”

It is hard to understand how Team 8 could have thought there had been no response to the 8 September e-mail, as in late September Kara and Blaney discussed this issue and came to an agreement, of which Kara then informed the other staffers on Team 8. Perhaps if the front office and commissioners had known of this, they would have viewed the subpoena request differently.

UPDATE: Kara responds here. He mentions private correspondence between us, but prints only his side, which is completely fine. The main thrust of his post seems to be to repeat that the commission got all the documents that were available (although, in fact, this happened nearly a year after the commission was formed and months after it had requested them). Reading between the lines, he seems to think I have a hidden agenda regarding NEADS that I don’t actually have. For the record, Erik spent days going to the National Archives and posting the commission files, so I figured I could do him the courtesy of reading the damn things. If I read a document and think it contains news, I write it up. I don’t look for files specifically supporting a certain point of view. Before finding these documents, I had an open mind on whether the military lied deliberately to the commission. Now, I would lean slightly towards SNAFU.

The verdict is in in the trial of CIA, US Air Force and Italian military intelligence personnel over the kidnapping of Islamist extremist Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr (a.k.a. Abu Omar). 22 low-level CIA officers got five to eight years, the air force officer got five years and two low-level Italian officials were also convicted. Three CIA officers were acquitted, including Jeff Castelli, the station chief who dreamed up the whole operation. The acquittal was on the grounds of diplomatic immunity. Other Italian officials were acquitted on state secrecy grounds. Former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and CIA Director George Tenet signed off on the operation, but were not even put on trial.

This is not justice by any stretch of anyone’s imagination. Some low-level people got sentenced to prison, the higher-ups stay free. Some of them weren’t even put on trial because they ordered their subordinates to keep their mouths shut and take the fall. As the Americans will not go to Italy, the only people who will be punished are the two low-level Italians, who will go to prison, and former CIA officer Robert Seldon Lady, whose villa near Milan will be sold to compensate Nasr. Lady actually opposed the operation and was not that heavily involved in it.

As I blogged a while back, the rendition made no sense.

Update: Soctt Horton has more at Harpers. Unsurprisingly, everybody is going to appeal.

New details of a NORAD exercise called Amalgam Virgo 01-02 have been found in a document at the National Archives. The exercise involved a suicide pilot attacking a military installation in the US. It was run in early June 2001, just three months before 9/11.

The document was found in the 9/11 Commission’s files at the National Archives by History Commons contributor Erik Larson (a.k.a. Paxvector) and uploaded to the 9/11 Document Archive at Scribd. Some information about the exercise was revealed at the History Commons Groups blog in June, when we publicised a commission document summarising a group of military exercises designed to help the military deal with suicide hijackings. However, the newly-found three-page scenario provides more detail.

In the scenario, a Haitian AIDS sufferer named Reginald Montrose forms an alliance with Columbian drug lords. This link-up is inspired by funding the Columbians have provided to treat AIDS patients in Haiti. Montrose plans to crash a Cessna into the headquarters of the Southeast Air Defense Sector (SEADS) in Florida. Its destruction will draw attention to the Haitians’ plight and “allow the drug cartel to flood the US with flights of aircraft and to increase their market share in the US drug market.”

The exercise starts with a call from a local airport manager to SEADS saying that they have found a suicide note in a suspicious car, and one of their small aircraft is missing. Another call then comes in based on FBI information. Montrose’s sister has contacted the bureau and told it of a second suicide note. The target is believed to be a Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida, where SEADS is located.

The text of both suicide notes is included in the scenario. The first even states that Montrose has taken out an insurance policy with Lloyds of London to cover the cost of the plane he intends to crash into SEADS, and has filled the gas tank of his rental car, which is to be returned to the Alamo facility at Tampa International airport.

SEADS launches fighters to intercept and identify the incoming Cessna, and to attempt to turn it away from the Florida coastline. However, Montrose is to remain on course, without turning. The scenario states, “This will develop into an ROE [Rules of Engagement] drill that will challenge the battlestaff as they work to keep the target aircraft from impacting SEADS.” It adds, “Target will remain on course… throughout scenario or until simulated shot down…. Scenario fruition is up to Blue Forces.”

I recently read People of the Veil by Andrew Warren. Warren is a CIA officer accused of date rape I blogged about yesterday. Understandably, I didn’t stumble on the book just by chance, but bought it specifically because I was curious what a book by an alleged CIA rapist would look like.

The plot is that during an Islamist uprising in Algeria some terrorists attack the US embassy in Algiers, and the embassy personnel are only saved by Nick Phillips, the daring consul. After evading the bad guys and delivering the embassy’s staff to waiting choppers, Phillips goes back to save his Algerian girlfriend, who he reaches in the nick of time.

The book comprises two sections. The first concerns the build up to the attack on the embassy, where the characters are set out and plans laid. The dialogue is fairly leaden, albeit not quite as bad as Dan Brown, but the characters are as black-and-white as they come and you would search for a redeeming defect in vain. However, Warren does at least try to address the potential plot hole that the GIA was completely penetrated by government moles by basing the uprising on an alliance between Islamist radicals and tribal elements angry at the government at being moved off their land. On the other hand, the novel is set in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and bin Laden does not get a mention until over half-way through. You would really have thought 9/11 would be more on the mind of the people at the embassy there. You would also wonder why there were no CIA officers at the embassy.

The second part is better, and you can enjoy the wooden characters machine-gunning each other while Warren keeps the pace reasonably high. The best bit is the ending, where one of the people you are sure is not going to get killed in the final battle gets shot.

Other than that, the book’s most enjoyable feature is its interesting selection of typos and crap phrasing:

As he crossed the embassy compound, he was always taken aback by the size and beauty of the embassy compound.

The EAP provided for procedures in a crisis situation with each foreseeable contingencies.

He should know and just say that he going there.

Nick want to avoid that scenario in Algiers.

Too many people were afraid of being caught in the crossfire between the terrorists and the government forces, least of all Bassam.

We must be poised to take advantage of this situation not matter what the cost.

And that’s just in the first half, but you get the picture. It’s what you get for going to an author mill like Publish America.

I’d say don’t bother reading it, but I guess nobody was planning on doing that anyway.

A few months ago, our day was illuminated by the news that the CIA’s chief of station in Algeria, Andrew Warren, was under investigation for a pair of date rapes. I did not pay the matter too much mind at the time, but have recently realized that Warren may have been involved in one of the defining events of the war on terror.

This event is the rendition of militant training camp commander Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi to Egypt in early 2002. It was important for two reasons: (1) under interrogation al-Libi made false claims of links between al-Qaeda and Iraq, helping build the case for the invasion of Iraq; and (2) although some theoretical work had already been done establishing the CIA’s black sites, al-Libi was in the FBI’s custody, but was taken away from the bureau by the CIA following an interagency battle that was decided at the White House. This was the initial trial of strength that determined the course of treatment of high-value detainees: instead of the FBI’s rapport-building, subsequent detainees–starting with Abu Zubaida in spring 2002–were tortured by the CIA.

Warren was only a junior officer at the time (he joined the agency in the mid-90s, but left to work in finance in Manhattan and only re-joined after witnessing the Twin Towers’ collapse), and the protest that led to al-Libi’s transfer came from his boss, Kabul station chief Richard Blee, not Warren.

However, there’s a story about the al-Libi rendition that’s appeared in several media outlets. This is the version from Jane Mayer’s Dark Side:

… several days into what the FBI regarded as winning al-Libi’s trust, a young Arabic-speaking CIA officer named “Albert,” who had previously worked for [FBI agent Jack] Cloonan at the FBI as a junior language specialist, burst into the cell where [FBI agent Russell] Fincher was questioning al-Libi and started shouting at the prisoner. “You’re going to Egypt!” he yelled. “And while you’re there, I’m going to find your mother, and fuck her!”

While there is no way to prove conclusively that this officer was Warren, there is certainly enough evidence to strongly consider the possibility.

First, Warren’s postings are listed by the media as Iraq/Kuwait, Afghanistan, New York, Egypt and Algeria. Algeria was in September 2007, Egypt before that and New York before that, around September 2003. Iraq/Kuwait was before he temporarily left the agency. That leaves Afghanistan, and the only time slot left is between his return to the agency after 9/11 and the posting in New York. In addition, in a September 2002 interview he stated he had just returned from Afghanistan after a stint of a couple of months. This puts Warren in the country around the time in question.

Second, “Albert” is described as being “young,” and Warren would have been around 33 at that time.

Third, both “Albert” and Warren are Arabic speakers.

Fourth, there are various systems for using aliases to refer to undercover agents applied by US government bodies. One system used by the Justice Department is to refer to officials by only a first name that starts with the first letter of the person’s real first name (but is different to his or her actual first name). For example, in the Justice Department inspector general’s report about the FBI’s pre-9/11 failings Dave Frasca is “Don,” Michael Maltbie is “Martin,” and Rita Flack is “Robin.” Therefore, “Albert” would be a natural choice by Cloonan for someone called Andrew.

Putting this altogether, we are looking for a young CIA officer who speaks Arabic and whose first name probably begins with the letter “A.” There were over 200 CIA officers in Afghanistan at that time, but we can rule most of them out of grounds of age and not speaking Arabic, leaving a fairly small pool.

Fifth is more complicated. According to Cloonan, “Albert” previously worked for the bureau. Warren has never admitted working for the FBI, but, when he published a fairly mediocre novel in 2002, he claimed to have worked first for the NSA, then for the State Department. The State Department claim was false—cover for his work at the CIA. Could the NSA claim also be false, cover for working for the bureau?

Finally, I can’t help but think that only a CIA station chief dumb enough to rape two locals in Algeria would also be dumb enough to provide posterity with the “find your mother and fuck her” quote.

As I said, this is by no means conclusive proof that “Albert” is Warren, but perhaps someone with inside knowledge would like to weigh in on the debate now that Warren has been outed?

The Real News Network recently carried an interview of former FBI lawyer Coleen Rowley by Paul Jay (part 1, part 2 and part 3), dealing with what it called the “unanswered questions about the lead up to 9/11.” Rowley was stationed at the bureau’s Minneapolis office during the Zacarias Moussaoui case in August and September 2001, but later became a whistleblower and left the organisation.

While many aspects of the interview are good and interesting, it leaves out what is probably the most important known fact about the Moussaoui case: the identity of the most senior FBI headquarters official involved fully involved in the case.

The official, a CIA officer named Tom Wilshire who was on loan to the bureau, is ubiquitous in the intelligence failures before 9/11. He was involved not just in the Moussaoui case, but also in the deliberate withholding from the FBI of visa information about one of the hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar, in January 2000, the failure to notify the FBI of Alhazmi and Almihdhar’s entry into the US after he reviewed the Malaysia cables in May 2001, the preparations for the 11 June 2001 “shouting match” meeting between CIA officers and the bureau’s Cole investigators, and the failed hunt for Almihdhar in the weeks before the attacks.

By late August 2001, Wilshire knew al-Qaeda was about to attack US interests, knew Almihdhar was likely to be involved and knew Almihdhar was in the US. However, despite being on loan to the FBI at that time, Wilshire told none of the agents searching for Almihdhar that he was likely to be part of a near-term attack. The bureau only sought Almihdhar as a witness to the Cole bombing, and the search was assigned to a single rookie agent who had other stuff to do. The agent failed to find him in bizarre circumstances that have never been fully explained. Had Wilshire mentioned that, by the way, this guy is about to blow something up, maybe the bureau would have devoted more resources to looking for him.

Wilshire’s involvement in the Moussaoui case was conclusively revealed in July 2006, when his substitution for testimony at the case was posted to the website of the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia. Attached to the testimony is an e-mail, sent on 24 August 2001 to the three officials in the bureau’s Radical Fundamentalist Unit handling the case. It reads:

Dave, Please advise when you get a chance this AM where we are re the Minneapolis Airplane IV crowd. Has the tasking gone out to try and obtain more bio info on the guys, (redacted). Do we have photos yet? Can the agency get the photos so they can get them on the wire to assets?

This may be only one e-mail, but in it he is asking for an update, which means he must have previously been aware of the case. It is also eminently possible that this was not his last involvement. In addition, the use of the phrase “Minneapolis Airplane IV crowd” (apparently a reference to the disaster movie parodies, of which only two were made) indicates both familiarity with the case and a certain, shall we say, dismissive attitude.

The Congressional Inquiry (presumably), Justice Department Inspector General and 9/11 Commission all knew of Wilshire’s involvement in the case, but both the inquiry and the commission declined to make any mention of it. The inquiry even had Wilshire testify publicly before it (albeit from behind a screen), but failed to ask him a single solitary question about the case. The writer of the Justice Department Inspector General’s report spends one hundred and twenty pages discussing Moussaoui (more in the classified version), but never once does she trouble herself to actually name the top guy fully involved in the case at FBI HQ (although he is the “consultant” who e-mails Dave Frasca on page 151). This despite him rating 80+ mentions (under the alias “John”) in the report in connection with his participation in the Almihdhar affair.

One of the major failures in the Moussaoui case was the failure to pass notice of the case on up the FBI chain of command. Famously, CIA Director George Tenet and other agency managers were repeatedly briefed on the case, whereas the bureau’s senior management had never heard of him before the attacks. This, together with the failure to find Amihdhar–also overseen by Wilshire–made the bureau a laughing stock after the attacks. Who should we blame for this failure to pass information on to senior management? Somebody in Minneapolis? Rita Flack, a lowly intelligence operations specialist at FBI HQ? Or the most senior official fully involved in the case at HQ–Wilshire?

At this point in time there is no evidence that conclusively proves intentional wrongdoing by Wilshire—or any of the other FBI officials at headquarters—in the Moussaoui matter. However, Wilshire clearly did deliberately withhold information about Almihdhar from the bureau for a period of more than twenty months. We need to ask the question whether his poor performance in the Moussaoui case was genuine–perhaps caused by the excessive time demands covering up for Almihdhar placed on him –or deliberate. And we won’t know that for sure until we get more information.