…I know that highly trained, independent investigators with the 9/11 Commission and with the Justice Department’s inspector general examined the record of this amazing series of breakdowns surrounding Midhar and Hamzi. The CIA inspector general, John Helgerson, also did an extensive investigation into this and other alleged lapses of the CIA’s performance related to al Qaeda. The Helgerson Report notes that not one or two, but sixty (60) CIA personnel knew about the presence in the United States of al-Hamzi and al-Midhar and did nothing to tell the FBI. Maybe they thought it was someone else’s job among the group of five dozen, but if they thought someone else had told FBI, did none of them ever think to ask what the FBI had done with the information, not once during a year and a half?
The Senate and House Intelligence Committees investigated 9/11-related intelligence in a rare joint committee. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham came to the conclusion that Omar al-Bayoumi, the nice man in the L.A. restaurant, was a Saudi intelligence agent.
The reason that there may be doubts about all of this is that there is an ordering explanation, a way of making these seemingly unbelievable facts fit a pattern. The 9/11 Commission’s own staff report and the Helgerson Report both unintentionally provide a beginning. What if, they ask, the U.S. government had not been a bumbling giant unaware of what it already knew? Well, then, the reports posit, we would have had the option of intentionally letting Hamzi and Midhar into the United States and trying to flip them to become our first real sources inside al Qaeda, or we might just have followed them around to see where they went, who they talked to. But, the Commission staff reports note, that was probably not something the pre-9/11 FBI was up to. Quite right. Had the FBI known about the location in the United States of two known al Qaeda terrorists, it would have arrested them before the coffee cooled. Unlike some other police intelligence agencies around the world, the FBI does not usually believe in giving people a chance to slip surveillance when they know that the people being surveilled are likely to go out and kill.
The CIA would not try such a dangerous ploy as trying to flip al Qaeda terrorists in the United States into becoming CIA sources because that would violate laws prohibiting CIA operations inside the United States. The CIA would not ask Saudi intelligence to approach al-Midhar and al-Hamzi in Los Angeles, because foreign intelligence agencies are legally barred from running intelligence missions in the United States. Right?
…The human mind rejects the randomness and chaos represented by the theory that the repeated mistakes made about al-Midhar and al-Hamzi were just routine, compounded incompetence. But incompetence happens. Often it is other people who pay for it.
So we prefer to think that repeated incompetence is what happened because we disdain conspiracy theories and would rather not confront the alternative….
