eots
no fly list
Secret tape recordings
After the bombing, the FBI quickly rehired Salem and promised to pay him a million dollars to develop evidence of additional terrorist plots. Because Salem did not trust the government to pay up, he secretly recorded his conversations with FBI agents. In August, as the case was heading for trial, news leaked that Salem had made tapes of more than a hundred hours of his conversations with FBI agents and handlers. The tape transcripts were not helpful to the prosecution.
In a call to an FBI agent shortly after the bombing, Salem complained,
We was start already building the bomb, which is went off in the World Trade Center. It was built, uh, uh, uh, supervising, supervision from the Bureau [FBI] and the DA [district attorney] and we was all informed about it. And we know that the bomb start to be built. By who? By your confidential informant. What a wonderful great case. And then he [the FBI supervisor] put his head in the sand and said, oh no, no, no thats not true, he is a son of a bitch, okay.
After the bombing, Salem anguished to one FBI agent, You were informed. Everything is ready. The day and the time. Boom. Lock them up and thats that. Thats why I feel so bad. On another tape, Salem asked an FBI agent, Do you deny your supervisor is the main reason of bombing the World Trade Center? The agent did not deny Salems charge. Shortly after the bombing FBI agent Nancy Floyd confided to Salem that her supervisors had botched the case:
I felt that the people on the squad, that they didnt have a clue of how to operate things. That the supervisors didnt know what was going on. That they hadnt taken the time to learn the history.
It was never clear to what extent Salem instigated the bombing, as opposed to simply reporting on the plot to his FBI controllers.
Before the bombing, he offered to do a switcheroo on the bombers, substituting a harmless powder for the deadly explosives and thereby preventing any potential catastrophe. The FBI spurned his offer. The New York Times October 28, 1993, article with this revelation was headlined, Tapes Depict Proposal to Thwart Bomb Used in Trade Center Blast. Salem complained to one FBI agent that an FBI supervisor requested to make me to testify [in public] and if he didnt push for that, well be going building the bomb with a phony powder and grabbing the people who was involved in it. But we didnt do that.
The FBI was also embarrassed by the contents of the 47 boxes it had seized from Nosair and left in storage for more than two years. The boxes were ignored in part because no one at the New York FBI office spoke or read Arabic. One note discovered in the boxes declared, We had to thoroughly demoralize the enemies of God. This is to be done by means of destroying and blowing up the towers that constitute the pillars of their civilization, such as the tourist attractions theyre so proud of and the high buildings theyre so proud of. One law enforcement official told the Los Angeles Times in 1993 that the material described major conspiracies and provided a road map to the bombing of the World Trade Center and the subsequent plot.
The FBI received far more credit for solving the first World Trade Center bombing than it received blame for the fact that its informant may have helped cause the bombing. In the wake of the FBIs debacle, there were no oversight hearings or investigations by Congress to find out where the feds went wrong. Instead, the FBI was riding high on the laurels of its new director, Louis Freeh, and was still collecting praise on Capitol Hill for its decisive solution to the Branch Davidian problem at Waco.
Despite the fact that Muslim terrorists came within a few feet of killing thousands of Americans, federal agencies subsequently failed to take seriously the risk of more such attacks. The 2002 congressional report into pre-9/11 failures observed,
The first attack on the World Trade Center was an unambiguous indication that a new form of terrorism motivated by religious fanaticism and seeking mass casualties was emerging and focused on America.... However, the strategic implications of this shift in lethality do not appear to have been fully recognized.
Because the FBI was not held responsible for its failures in the first World Trade Center bombing, the agencys incompetence actually mushroomed in the following years. As a result, the Bureau was inept at analyzing and pursuing terrorist threats at home. But at least the FBI got plenty of budget increases and new agents in the years between the first and second World Trade Center bombings.
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0408c.asp
After the bombing, the FBI quickly rehired Salem and promised to pay him a million dollars to develop evidence of additional terrorist plots. Because Salem did not trust the government to pay up, he secretly recorded his conversations with FBI agents. In August, as the case was heading for trial, news leaked that Salem had made tapes of more than a hundred hours of his conversations with FBI agents and handlers. The tape transcripts were not helpful to the prosecution.
In a call to an FBI agent shortly after the bombing, Salem complained,
We was start already building the bomb, which is went off in the World Trade Center. It was built, uh, uh, uh, supervising, supervision from the Bureau [FBI] and the DA [district attorney] and we was all informed about it. And we know that the bomb start to be built. By who? By your confidential informant. What a wonderful great case. And then he [the FBI supervisor] put his head in the sand and said, oh no, no, no thats not true, he is a son of a bitch, okay.
After the bombing, Salem anguished to one FBI agent, You were informed. Everything is ready. The day and the time. Boom. Lock them up and thats that. Thats why I feel so bad. On another tape, Salem asked an FBI agent, Do you deny your supervisor is the main reason of bombing the World Trade Center? The agent did not deny Salems charge. Shortly after the bombing FBI agent Nancy Floyd confided to Salem that her supervisors had botched the case:
I felt that the people on the squad, that they didnt have a clue of how to operate things. That the supervisors didnt know what was going on. That they hadnt taken the time to learn the history.
It was never clear to what extent Salem instigated the bombing, as opposed to simply reporting on the plot to his FBI controllers.
Before the bombing, he offered to do a switcheroo on the bombers, substituting a harmless powder for the deadly explosives and thereby preventing any potential catastrophe. The FBI spurned his offer. The New York Times October 28, 1993, article with this revelation was headlined, Tapes Depict Proposal to Thwart Bomb Used in Trade Center Blast. Salem complained to one FBI agent that an FBI supervisor requested to make me to testify [in public] and if he didnt push for that, well be going building the bomb with a phony powder and grabbing the people who was involved in it. But we didnt do that.
The FBI was also embarrassed by the contents of the 47 boxes it had seized from Nosair and left in storage for more than two years. The boxes were ignored in part because no one at the New York FBI office spoke or read Arabic. One note discovered in the boxes declared, We had to thoroughly demoralize the enemies of God. This is to be done by means of destroying and blowing up the towers that constitute the pillars of their civilization, such as the tourist attractions theyre so proud of and the high buildings theyre so proud of. One law enforcement official told the Los Angeles Times in 1993 that the material described major conspiracies and provided a road map to the bombing of the World Trade Center and the subsequent plot.
The FBI received far more credit for solving the first World Trade Center bombing than it received blame for the fact that its informant may have helped cause the bombing. In the wake of the FBIs debacle, there were no oversight hearings or investigations by Congress to find out where the feds went wrong. Instead, the FBI was riding high on the laurels of its new director, Louis Freeh, and was still collecting praise on Capitol Hill for its decisive solution to the Branch Davidian problem at Waco.
Despite the fact that Muslim terrorists came within a few feet of killing thousands of Americans, federal agencies subsequently failed to take seriously the risk of more such attacks. The 2002 congressional report into pre-9/11 failures observed,
The first attack on the World Trade Center was an unambiguous indication that a new form of terrorism motivated by religious fanaticism and seeking mass casualties was emerging and focused on America.... However, the strategic implications of this shift in lethality do not appear to have been fully recognized.
Because the FBI was not held responsible for its failures in the first World Trade Center bombing, the agencys incompetence actually mushroomed in the following years. As a result, the Bureau was inept at analyzing and pursuing terrorist threats at home. But at least the FBI got plenty of budget increases and new agents in the years between the first and second World Trade Center bombings.
http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0408c.asp
