Word: memos
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That experience counted for nothing. In all three offices, the memo was pretty much ignored, disappearing into the black hole of bureaucratic hell that is the FBI. That was the second key mistake. Sources tell TIME that the memo was never forwarded--not even to the level of Mike Rolince, chief of the international-terrorism section. "The thing fell into the laps of people who were grossly overtaxed," says a senior FBI official. The G-men claim to have been swamped by tips about coming al-Qaeda operations. But Williams was onto something. The flight students he was tracking were...
However fevered the analysis of the Williams memo is now, it didn't get much attention when it was written. Last July, FBI headquarters wasn't concentrating on an attack within the U.S. "Nobody was looking domestically," says a recently retired FBI official. "We didn't think they had the people to mount an operation here...
...sense, the spat over who got what version of which memo epitomizes Washington at its worst. The capital at its best would appreciate that the most important question isn't what Bush (or anyone else) knew before Sept. 11; it is what the Administration and Congress have and have not done to fix a broken system. But November and the midterm elections, you may have noticed, are only six months away. Washington is reverting to form...
When FBI agent Kenneth Williams wrote a memo last July warning that Osama bin Laden's foot soldiers might be training in American flight schools, no one listened. Now his memo is the hottest thing in Washington. On Saturday Arlen Specter, a veteran Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, called FBI director Robert Mueller and urged him to turn over the memo. When Mueller refused, Specter snapped, "Congress gave you a 10-year term and expects a response from you," according to a reliable account. "The people are entitled to an explanation." Specter then called committee chairman Patrick Leahy...
...person who isn't talking about Williams' memo is the man who wrote it. "I'm really sorry," Williams, 42, told a TIME reporter who approached him outside his North Phoenix, Ariz., home Saturday, "but I would get in trouble if I talked to you." He is a mild and graying man, but a transcript of his testimony from a terror-related trial in February provides a glimpse of his fierce work habits. After Sept. 11 proved him right, he didn't blow the whistle on the disturbing breakdown in the chain of intelligence that followed his memo. He didn...