Word: memos
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...disclose the August briefing, hoping that it would be discussed "in context"--and months later--when congressional investigations into the attacks eventually got under way. And that wasn't the only embarrassing paper kept under wraps. Earlier this month, the Associated Press reported new details from a July 2001 memo by an FBI agent in Phoenix, Ariz., who presciently noted a pattern of Arab men signing up at flight schools. The agent, Kenneth Williams, 42, has spent 11 years working in an FBI antiterrorism task force. He recommended an investigation to determine whether al-Qaeda operatives were training...
...high levels of government, the awful possibility is dawning that things could have been different. "If we'd had access to Moussaoui, if we'd had access to the Phoenix memo, could we have broken up the plot?" asks a White House official who works on counterterrorism. Then he answers his own question: "We would have taken action, and there's at least a distinct possibility that we may at the very least have delayed it." Bush was outraged at the suggestion that he might have been warned about impending strikes and failed to act. To ward off Democratic criticism...
There might have been more discussion of the risks of hijackings in the President's briefing if its writers had known about the Phoenix memo. But they hadn't seen it, nor had anyone in the CIA or the White House. Yet Senator Richard Shelby, the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, calls the memo, which is said to contain detailed descriptions of named suspects, "one of the most explosive documents I've seen in eight years." The memo, on which the Senate Intelligence Committee was briefed last November, has now become the focus of a huge political...
Agent Williams wrote the memo on July 5, detailing his suspicions about some Arabs he had been watching, who he thought were Islamic radicals. Several of the men had enrolled at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Prescott, Ariz. Williams posited that bin Laden's followers might be trying to infiltrate the civil-aviation system as pilots, security guards or other personnel, and he recommended a national program to track suspicious flight-school students. The memo was sent to the counterterrorism division at FBI headquarters in Washington and to two field offices, including the counterterrorism section in New York, which...
...Government A recently secured copy of Beijing's Chao Yang District internal memo titled On More Effectively Handling Events Involving Interviews with Foreign Journalists reveals striking similarities to another, equally officious government document, the Singapore Social Development Unit's pro-procreation pamphlet The Chemistry Guide. Both provide useful road maps through potentially fraught situations...