Unconnected dots: why the FBI failed to stop 9/11.

• Author: Taylor, Jeff
• Position: Federal Bureau of Investigation, terrorism acts

FOR YEARS FEDERAL authorities have argued that antiquated laws kept the cops from stopping 9/11. They said the failure to prevent the terrorist attacks demonstrated the need for the PATRIOTAct and every other proposed expansion of the government's surveillance powers. But in testimony before Congress in September, Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell changed tack, saying "9/11 should have and could have been prevented" after all; the authorities simply "didn't connect the dots."

McConnell did not draw the obvious conclusion: If greater federal power was not needed pre-9/11 to stop terrorists, then even more federal authority is not needed now. Instead, McConnell argued that the Protect America Act--which allows the attorney general and the director of national intelligence, without judicial oversight, to authorize surveillance of international phone calls and email involving people in the U.S.--made vitally needed changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

How does the supposed need for greater surveillance power square with McConnell's declaration that 9/II was preventable and his lament that "we didn't connect the dots"? How did we get the dots without the Protect America Act?

Via good old-fashioned police work that top officials in the Federal Bureau of Investigation ignored. Federal agents on the ground knew that hijackers Khalid al Mihdhar and Nawaf al Hazmi had sought pilot training. They knew Zacarias Moussaoui had sought the same sort of training; he was carrying 747 manuals when he was picked up on immigration charges. In the days leading up to 9/11, Minneapolis FBI agent Harry Samit repeatedly tried to obtain permission to search Moussaoui's laptop computer and belongings. Headquarters refused to seek a warrant.

New details on just how costly that denial proved to be were first published in a widely overlooked September 10 story by Greg Gordon, McClatchy Newspapers' Washington reporter. Gordon discovered that the FBI had enough information to arrest part ofAl Qaeda's financing network in the days before 9/11-information that could have stopped the hijackings. Cue McConnell's dots.

Moussaoui's fellow jihadists considered him a...