Among the signals that should have alerted the FBI well before September 11, 2001, that Islamic terrorists might be thinking of crashing airplanes into American buildings was the 1996 confession of a captured Pakistani terrorist named Abdul Hakim Murad. He and others had planned to blow up 12 U.S.-owned airliners over the Pacific Ocean-and he had taken flying lessons in the U.S. to prepare to crash a plane into CIA headquarters. The planned suicide flight was not included in the criminal charges against Murad, apparently because it had not ripened into a provable conspiracy. But surely a crack counter-terrorism agency would have gone on the lookout for any signs of similar plots by other jihadists.
What did the FBI do? It "effectively forgot all about it," asserted Sen. Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, who was the Senate Select Intelligence Committee’s senior Republican for the past six years, in an impressive 84-page brief last month calling for "radical reform" of the intelligence community. "Convinced that the only information that really matters was information directly related to the criminal investigation at hand, the FBI thus ignored this early warning sign that terrorists had begun planning to crash aircraft into symbols of U.S. power. Thus, rather than being stored [and] assessed and re-assessed in light of a much broader universe of information about terrorist plans and intentions over time, the Murad data-point. … slipped out of the FBI’s usable institutional memory." So it was that in the summer of 2001, it never crossed anyone’s mind at the FBI to see the accumulating evidence of possible Qaeda plans to crash planes into buildings as part of a pattern dating back for years.
