The case of a `20th hijacker'?
The feds stitch a quilt of evidence to bring the first 9/11 criminal charges
Moussaoui isn't talking, and one of his court-appointed lawyers, federal public defender Frank Dunham, is withholding comment until he's talked to his client. This has left investigators to speculate on his likely role in the hijackings, including the idea that he might have been selected because he became acquainted with one of the hijackers at a training camp in Afghanistan. Authorities believe that Moussaoui was to have been the second pilot on Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania. That doomed plane had only four hijackers, including one pilot (the other planes had five hijackers, including two pilots each).
The indictment also raises an important question about whether the FBI might have been able to prevent the attacks given that Moussaoui had been in custody for nearly a month before September 11. Agents at the bureau's field office in Minneapolis triggered a frantic 26-day investigation, convinced they had a terrorist on their hands. They traced Moussaoui's travels, his background, his friends and associates, and his activities in Minneapolis and in Oklahoma. But bureau lawyers in Washington rejected their request both for a criminal search warrant or a so-called FISA warrant (a warrant used in intelligence and counterterrorism operations) to search Moussaoui's computer. They felt they couldn't show probable cause that Moussaoui was a foreign agent. A search of Moussaoui's computer after the attacks found no information related to the plot, sources say. That's one more piece of information Moussaoui's lawyers could use to defend their client. But government officials say they are not worried. As one official puts it, "The Moussaoui case is a lead-pipe cinch case."
Even before Moussaoui was arrested, the feds got wind that something was up. U.S. News has learned that last July, an FBI agent in Phoenix sent an E-mail memo to headquarters saying several Arab nonresident men were learning to fly big jets at Arizona flight schools, without any previous flight training. This agent urged FBI officials to begin a canvass of flight schools nationwide to see if other Arab men were doing the same thing. But the Phoenix FBI mistakenly sent the memo to the Iran unit, rather than the Osama bin Laden/radical fundamentalist unit "until very late in the game," according to a knowedgeable source. Government officials say even if the memo had reached the right people, there still wasn't enough time to stop the attacks.
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