Thwarted terrorist attack.

[Arrian]

Once again, Slaughter responds to a post on one issue by bringing up something else. And linking to his conspiracy theory website. Yay.

From Wiki, the same info w/o the hyperbole:

Allegations of FBI foreknowledge
In the course of the trial it was revealed that the FBI had an informant, a former Egyptian army officer named Emad A. Salem. Salem claims to have informed the FBI of the plot to bomb the towers as early as February 6, 1992. Salem's role as informant allowed the FBI to quickly pinpoint the conspirators out of the hundreds of possible suspects.

Salem, initially believing that this was to be a sting operation, claimed that the FBI's original plan was for Salem to supply the conspirators with a harmless powder instead of actual explosive to build their bomb, but that the FBI chose to use him for other purposes instead. [4] He secretly recorded hundreds of hours of telephone conversations with his FBI handlers; reported by Ralph Blumenthal in the New York Times, Oct. 28, 1993, secton A,Page 1.

"...the FBI chose to use him for other purposes..." what other purposes, is the question. Are we talking about:

a) a risk/reward decision that, while it didn't work out, is defensible;
b) bureacratic incompetance; or
c) a federal agency deliberately allowing a terror attack to proceed.

Clearly the informant disagreed with his FBI handlers about how to deal with the threat. He might have been right (assuming the powder he wanted to substitute would've tricked the terrorists). The question is what was the FBI trying to do, and unlike you I don't automatically assume that the answer is "evil scheme."

-Arrian

[Arrian]

Here's another link. I don't know about its validity:

http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0408c.asp

Shortly after the bombing, the New York Times reported that FBI agents had been monitoring two mosques in the New York City area, as well as Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman, though

federal guidelines had limited their ability to tail them or conduct other close surveillance. Nothing suggesting the purchase of explosives or the assembling of a bomb was detected, the officials said. Even close surveillance might not have picked up a surreptitious act, they said.
A few months after the attack, FBI director William Sessions declared,

Based on what was known to us at the time, we have no reason to believe we could have prevented the bombing of the World Trade Center.
The FBI initially appeared to have a strong case, buttressed largely by evidence provided by informant Emad Salem. In July 1993, the media learned that Salem had been inside the conspiracy a year before the attack.


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 that’s not true, he is a son of a *****, 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 that’s that. That’s 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 Salem’s 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 didn’t have a clue of how to operate things. That the supervisors didn’t know what was going on. That they hadn’t 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 didn’t push for that, we’ll be going building the bomb with a phony powder and grabbing the people who was involved in it. But … we didn’t 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 they’re so proud of and the high buildings they’re 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 FBI’s 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 agency’s 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

Sounds like stupidity to me.

-Arrian