Terry Nichols met with terrorists in the Philippines, perhaps including Ramzi Yousef.
Jayna Davis exposed John Doe Number Two as an Iraqi Republican Guard veteran.
Laurie Mylroie presents a convincing case that Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed are Pakistani Baluch sheep-dipped by Iraqi intel with stolen Kuwaiti passports.
DCI Tenet (Clinton appointee, Deutch designate) rejects the meeting between Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intel chief Al-Ani--despite the Czechs up to the prime minister standing by it.
FBI special agent in New York for national security John P. O'Neill was pursuing the Osama-Iraq trail yet met bodacious resistance from U.S. Ambassador to Yemen Bodine, and his own colleagues.
Twenty-four-year CIA case officer Robert Baer, See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA's War on Terrorism, describes the destruction of the human intelligence capability of CIA by the likes of Church and Torricelli.
He confirms Mylroie's description of a "risk-averse culture"--Baer's superior was more concerned in keeping his shoes shined than helping Baer close in on the perp of the 1983 Beirut Embassy bombing.
Bill Gertz' Breakdown: How America's Intelligence Failures Led to September 11 describes the resistance to the point of retaliation special agent Coleen Rowley's efforts met.
Rowley's nine-page single-spaced letter to Mueller in Appendix A will pin your meter.
As for Lessons Learned--fuggedaboudit:
In scanning the first hundred references for John O'Neill, I find this from Gertz' Inside the Ring for March 21, 2003:
One of three regional rulers in post-Saddam Iraq has been designated. She is career Foreign Service Arabist Barbara Bodine, who last served as U.S. ambassador to Yemen. She will run civilian affairs in Baghdad and central Iraq, along with two other U.S. regional administrators.
Miss Bodine's appointment has angered some FBI and law enforcement officials because of her role in hampering the FBI's investigation of the October 2000 al Qaeda bombing of the destroyer USS Cole in Aden, Yemen.
She clashed with FBI counterterrorism official John O'Neill during the probe. She blocked Mr. O'Neill from returning to Yemen after a trip back to the United States, scuttling an aggressive investigation into the blast. Mr. O'Neill retired from the FBI and was killed in the September 11 World Trade Center attack.
You can't make this sh!t up.
Freeh goes to investigate the Khobar Towers blast in 1996 and the Saudis stonewall him. O'Neill goes to Yemen to investigate the Cole bombing in 2000 and Butch Bodine stonewalls him.
Now some oily mole at State annoints Baghdad Bodine.
I understand Baer explores this phenomenon in his new book:
