-Caveat Lector-
"FBI agents in Minneapolis weren't given approval to search terrorist
suspect's hard drive by the Justice Department. If 'two and two' were put
together could hijackings have been stopped, asks one investigator."
By Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE
Oct. 1 - Top Justice Department and FBI officials turned down a
request by Minneapolis FBI agents early last month for a special
counterintelligence surveillance warrant on a suspected Islamic
terrorist who officials now believe may have been part of the Sept.
11 plot to attack the World Trade Center and Pentagon, NEWSWEEK has
learned.
THE HANDLING OF the case of Zacarias Moussaoui-who is now
being held in detention in New York-has raised new questions about
how U.S. law enforcement officials handled critical intelligence
that, in retrospect, might have alerted them in advance to the
deadliest terrorist plot in U.S. history.
Sources familiar with the case tell NEWSWEEK that FBI
agents in Minneapolis seized Moussaoui's computer in mid-August
after officials at an Eagan, Minn., flight school tipped them off
that the 33-year-old French citizen was acting suspiciously.
Moussaoui had sought training only in making turns-not take-offs
and landings-and specifically asked about flying over New York air
space, officials said.
But, while Moussaoui himself was placed in detention on
minor immigration charges on August 17, agents in Minneapolis were
never given approval by Justice Department officials in Washington
to open up the hard drive on the suspect's computer. The
Minneapolis agents sought approval to do so-and to take other
investigative steps aimed at Moussaoui-in early September under the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), officials said. This
came after a FBI "trace"-a request for information from friendly
foreign governments-yielded a report from French intelligence that
Moussaoui had been associated with members of an Algerian terrorist
group and may have traveled to Afghanistan.
When agents finally cracked into the computer hard drive
after the Sept. 11 attack, officials found new information that
only made them more suspicious about Moussaoui. Among the contents,
sources said, was data on "wind patterns" relating to crop-dusters
as well as a wealth of other information he had pulled down from
the Internet involving crop-dusting aircraft.
The information was considered sufficiently alarming that
FBI officials requested the immediate downing of all crop-dusting
aircraft, fearing that terrorists might be plotting to use them for
a chemical or biological attack. (The planes have since been
allowed to fly-but not over urban areas.)
From the moment he was detained more than six weeks ago,
Moussaoui has consistently refused to cooperate with U.S. law
enforcement and many officials are now highly suspicious of his
conduct. One widely held theory among the law enforcement community
is that Moussaoui-who entered the country only last February after
living in London-was supposed to have been the fifth hijacker on
the United Airlines flight that crashed in southwest Pennsylvania,
the only one of the four seized that day that had only four,
instead of five, hijackers aboard.
But there is still no consensus on the matter. "The bottom
line is that nobody in the intelligence community has been able to
figure out what this guy was up to," said one official.
Nevertheless, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attack, the
rejection of the FISA warrant has produced tension between field
agents in Minneapolis and their Justice Department and FBI
superiors in Washington. Officials in Washington are adamant that
there was insufficient grounds to approve the warrant based on what
was produced by Minneapolis agents. "There does not seem to be any
disagreement that the legal standards [for a FISA warrant] weren't
met," said one top U.S. law enforcement official. The law requires
the bureau to show evidence that the suspect is an "agent" of a
foreign power or terrorist group, something the Minneapolis field
agents never had, the officials said.
But other law enforcement officials are equally insistent
that a more aggressive probe of Moussaoui-when combined with other
intelligence in the possession of U.S. agencies-might have yielded
sufficient clues about the impending plot. "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," said one investigator.
© 2001 Newsweek, Inc.
================================================================
Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF:
*Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
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