Who else is paying for the incompetence?

The Moussaoui case has been fascinating.  It leaves me with the feeling that Moussaoui is a scapegoat and, once again, that the Administration's harshness with detainees of all types has served as a cover-up for its own incompetence.  So the testimony which emerged today in the penalty phase of Moussaoui's trial is both appalling and familiar.

The government wants him gone by proving that, had Moussaoui fessed up when the FBI had first examined him on immigration violations, 9/11 could have been prevented.

The government is trying to prove to a jury that Mr. Moussaoui should be executed because he bears some responsibility for the deaths from Sept. 11. Prosecutors have argued that if Mr. Moussaoui had told Mr. Samit and other investigators what he knew about Al Qaeda plots to fly planes into buildings, the attacks might have been foiled.   

Today the agent who was pursuing Moussaoui revealed that he had tried to tip off superiors at the FBI about Moussaoui and had been blown off.

Harry Samit, under intense cross-examination by Mr. Moussaoui's chief court-appointed lawyer, detailed his frustration over the days before the hijacking as he made numerous requests to look into what Mr. Moussaoui had been up to at the time of his arrest. Mr. Moussaoui was arrested on immigration violations in Minnesota, where he was learning to fly a jetliner.

"I accused the people in F.B.I. headquarters of criminal negligence" in an interview after Sept. 11, Mr. Samit acknowledged under questioning by Edward B. MacMahon Jr. He said that the senior agents in Washington "took a calculated risk not to advance the investigation" by refusing to seek search warrants for Mr. Moussaoui's belongings and computer. "The wager was a national tragedy," Mr. Samit testified.

Mr. Samit said that two senior agents declined to provide help in getting a search warrant, either through a special panel of judges that considers applications for foreign intelligence cases or through a normal application to any federal court for a criminal investigation.

Familiar?  This was not the only time that senior officials at the FBI blew off regional agents.

The F.B.I.'s handling of clues to the impending Sept. 11 attacks was sharply criticized in a report by the Justice Department's inspector general's office in 2004. Citing a memo from a Phoenix agent who had become suspicious of several students taking flying lessons in Arizona, the report said the agent's memo did not get the timely attention it deserved, not so much because of individual lapses within the F.B.I. but because of "critical systemic failings" that kept information from being effectively evaluated and shared. The slow and incomplete attention given the memo from Phoenix was illustrative of a system "in which important information could easily 'fall through the cracks' and not be brought to the attention of the people who needed it, the inspector general's office concluded.   

And it certainly not the first time a worker bee -- take FEMA, for example -- has tried to get the attention of the senior officials -- say the President, for example -- about, (for example) a disastrous storm.  Instead, people get fired, executed -- whatever it takes to "move on" with impunity.

Comments

[ken melvin]

In 'The General's Labyrinth' Marquez tells of an assassination attempt on Bolivar lead by a general that Bolivar is fond of, so Bolivar has another general arrested and tried, then executed for lack of evidence. I think his name was in spanish was Moussaoui.