IP: Our man in Arizona

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

May 19, 2002

Our Man in Arizona

By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON — He hasn't been featured in any of the flinty-eyed, 
lantern-jawed photo shoots where the Bush team preened as war heroes. Annie 
Leibovitz has never laid eyes on him.

Even his name has been secret. He's the hidden 9/11 hero. With almost 
cinematic uncanniness, the G-man from Arizona got into the heads of 
America's mortal enemies.
Bush officials keep insisting that no one could have predicted 9/11. But 
the Phoenix F.B.I. agent predicted enough to perhaps pre-empt it, if he 
hadn't been blocked by superiors too lazy to pursue hot leads and too 
arrogant to share them.

The F.B.I. man figured out that Osama bin Laden might have dispatched 
followers to flight schools in Arizona and elsewhere to train them for a 
coordinated terrorist operation that would infiltrate our airlines.

Headquarters thought it was too much trouble to check out, even though his 
vivid, detailed memo landed in Washington only days after the terrorism 
czar Richard Clarke warned F.B.I., aviation and I.N.S. officials to be on 
the highest alert because "something really spectacular" would happen soon. 
The six-week superalert was still going on when W. began his four-week 
vacation.

The F.B.I. chief, Robert Mueller, said the Phoenix memo had been junked by 
midlevel analysts because it had seemed like "a monumental undertaking 
without any specificity." The C.I.A. wasn't even told about it until two 
weeks ago, when it discovered two Al Qaeda names on it.

I guess nothing short of a copy of Mohamed Atta's Travelocity itinerary 
would have stirred the F.B.I. from its stupor. It couldn't call a few 
flight schools? I always thought F.B.I. agents were paid to lose sleep over 
imprecise but alarming details and lucky hunches. Even a month later, when 
they got Moussaoui, who told flight instructors he didn't need to know how 
to land, they didn't connect those darned dots.

The F.B.I. has known for years that American flight schools were breeding 
grounds for Al Qaeda pilot-wannabes. And the idea of planes as weapons was 
nothing new. In 1994, an American crashed his Cessna 150 at the White House 
— and Islamic militants were thwarted trying to slam a plane into the 
Eiffel Tower.

The F.B.I. was warned in 1995 by Philippine police that Ramzi Yousef, who 
planned the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, had schemes to hijack and blow 
up a dozen U.S. airliners on the same day and to hijack a plane and dive it 
into the C.I.A.

A 1999 intelligence report for the C.I.A. warned that bin Laden's 
terrorists might hijack a plane and slam it into the C.I.A., the Pentagon 
or the White House. The Italians told U.S. authorities last summer at the 
Genoa summit meeting that Islamic terrorists might try to ram a plane into 
the summit headquarters.

After an Islamic fundamentalist shot Meir Kahane in 1990, the F.B.I. seized 
29 boxes of evidence from the killer, including bomb formulas and speeches 
by the blind sheik in the '93 bombing about "destroying the edifices of 
capitalism," with pictures of the Washington Monument, the Empire State 
Building and the World Trade Center. The F.B.I. did not bother to translate 
this stuff for three years — until after the '93 bombing.
Even if all President Bush learned at his Crawford briefing on Aug. 6 was 
that bin Laden was gearing up for hijackings here, why not order tougher 
airport security and fortified cockpit doors? After all, the 9/11 attacks 
started as old-fashioned hijackings.

The Bushies were still fixated on their Maginot line of missile defense in 
the sky when the threat was Al Qaeda freaks with box cutters. They cast 
themselves as the pros from Dover, the generals of the Gulf war with the 
right stuff.

They did not live up to their own billing. They were caught flat-footed and 
struck back, but not well enough to get the guy behind the attack. Now 
comes Mullah Omar spouting off that he and Osama will bring "fire and hell" 
on America. Even the unshakable Condi seems shaky.

Maybe the 9/11 indicators were general. But it's the job of government to 
interpret, develop and pool the info, to game out scenarios, to force the 
F.B.I. and C.I.A. to share.

Dick Cheney suggested that Democrats asking questions were unpatriotic. But 
that suggestion is anti-American. Maybe there has been too much 
bipartisanship lately. You can't get the truth that way.

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