Posted on 06/20/2006 3:31:19 PM PDT by Republican Red
The FBI's mistakes in the investigation of Zacarias Moussaoui extended from headquarters officials who dismissed the threat posed by the al-Qaeda operative down to field agents and even a prominent FBI whistle-blower, according to a government report made public yesterday.
The report by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine said "numerous systemic problems" within the bureau prevented the FBI from unraveling Moussaoui's role in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror plot when he was arrested a month before the attacks. Moussaoui later became the only person charged in a U.S. courtroom in connection with the attacks. He was sentenced to life in prison last month.
Fine concluded that senior FBI managers failed to move aggressively to gain a warrant to search Moussaoui's belongings before Sept. 11. But unlike previous public criticisms of the FBI's bungling of the case -- which have focused on senior FBI managers in Washington -- Fine's analysis said there was plenty of blame to go around.
The inspector general said former FBI lawyer Colleen Rowley, who gained fame as a whistle-blower when she pointed out the errors by headquarters, had failed to properly guide agents on what type of search warrant to seek.
He said agents in Minneapolis, who have been hailed for warning supervisors about Moussaoui, rushed to open an intelligence investigation before realizing that they would need a criminal search warrant. The so-called "wall" that existed at the time between intelligence and criminal investigators has been blamed for the failure to examine Moussaoui's belongings until after Sept. 11.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I didn't see it reported anywhere else in the MSM that the Time Magazines Person of the Year and Democrat Congressional candidate Rowley is a screw up.
the slant will be they are out to "get her" because she was a whistle lower and these charges are fabricated....
In an AP report of 25 May 2002 John J. Lumpkin wrote that Rowley claimed in a letter to Congress that, "the warrant provision was flawed, particularly complaining that Minnesota was never consulted about the changes that were made before the warrant applications were forwarded to the office that rejected them." It now appears that Rowley was herself partly to blame for the foul-up.
This does not, however, get the FBI off the hook because the Phoenix FBI field office submitted a similar warning in July 2001 and the Bureau in Washington failed to connect the two large dots provided it.
t)
This won't help her campaign.
Large organizations that have a headquarters/field type structure (with various intervening levels depending on total organization size) have a bad habit of blaming the guys in the field any time there's a screwup.
Field people also regularly blame headquarters.
Here the third-party causing the problem is AlQaida.
All this sort of blame-sharing does is tend to get bad actors like Jaime Gorelick and her pals on the Islamofascist left off the hook.
The FBI Headquarters misdirection should be ignored in this case. Petty partisanship simply isn't a sufficient justification to join these yahoos in their game.
BTW, FBI Headquarters has been unable to find the anthrax attackers.
Jamie Gorelick, multi-millionaire, director of Unitied Technologies -- leaving devastation in her wake.
As they say in Washington D.C., the FBI couldn't find the Washington Monument in a rainstorm.
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