FBI Informant Says Agents Missed Chance to Stop 9/11 Ringleader Mohammed Atta
Undercover Operative 'One Million Percent Positive' Attacks Could Have Been Prevented
This was just on the ABC World News, video report not yet up, but is one more of the Brian Ross Investigative Unit.
On the eve of the eight year anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, an FBI informant who infiltrated alleged terrorist cells in the U.S. tells ABC News the FBI missed a chance to stop the al Qaeda plot because they focused more on undercover stings than on the man who would later become known as 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta.
Snip
According to Assaad, Shukrujumah, whose father ran the mosque, invited the undercover FBI operative to meet him at his home, but the FBI told him to stay away. Instead, Assad says the agency assigned him to set up and sting what he calls wannabe terrorists, ending any hope of infiltrating the real al Qaeda terrorists.
Former national security official Richard Clarke, now an ABC News consultant, said the case is "yet another example of the way the system broke down prior to 9/11."
"If the system had worked," Clarke said, "we might have been able to identify these people before the attacks."
This all started going down in early 2001
former undercover operative Elie Assaad says he spotted and became suspicious of Atta in early 2001, when he was sent by the FBI to infiltrate a small mosque outside Miami. Atta was there with Adnan Shukrujuman, an al Qaeda fugitive who now has a $5 million U.S. reward on his head.
Which means to me that not only weren't they not paying attention, in the White House, to the intelligence reports they were given and getting, someone in the FBI Administration wasn't paying attention, or worse, to what was coming in from the field of operations by the informants and operatives.
"I was right, I was a hundred percent right," Assaad says of his suspicions. He says that when he learned that Atta was one of the 9/11 hijackers, when the FBI asked if he could identify any of the attackers, he was "very upset, angry" and cried.
"I curse on everybody," Assaad says. "I destroyed half of my furniture. Uh, I went crazy."
The FBI's focus on stings, which Assaad has worked in at least 10 states and overseas since becoming an operative in 1996, are being questioned by many counter-terrorism authorities, who wonder what the true value of the stings are. Since 9/11, the stings have largely targeted people that are more aspirational than operational.
Which if above is true, it seems to show they were being ordered to go after soft targets and not hard intelligence even after 9/11.
After a 2006 sting, then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez praised Assaad – who was still unnamed at the time – for disrupting a group preparing a violent attack, resulting in the indictments of seven men on terror charges.
Snip
Another video of a later meeting shows Assaad counting out $1000 for the leader of the Miami group.
After three trials, including two mistrials, five of the seven men were convicted.
With the increase of hatreds now, towards not only our countries policies but our countries people, and with the new administration, lets hope policies across the spectrum have changed and tightened to the reality. As we now have to work harder, with other countries, on the growth in the threat of criminal terrorism, while we still have two ongoing occupations, creating even more wide spread hatreds!
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