Senate Report on Pre-9/11 Failures Tells of Bungling at F.B.I.
In the Moussaoui case, the report found, F.B.I. counterterrorism specialists and the bureau's lawyers were so ignorant of federal surveillance laws that they did not understand that they had ample evidence to press for a warrant to search the belongings of Mr. Moussaoui, a French national who was arrested weeks before the attacks after arousing the suspicion of instructors at a Minnesota flight school.

Instead, the report found, the F.B.I. supervisors and lawyers aggressively blocked the search warrant sought by desperate field agents in Minnesota who believed last August that they might have a terrorist on their hands who might use a commercial airplane as a weapon.

The Minnesota agents had sought the warrant under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which sets a relatively low standard for the evidence required for searches of suspected spies or terrorists; standard criminal warrants require a much higher standard of evidence.

Officials said a search of Mr. Moussaoui's computer and other belongings after Sept. 11 turned up information on commercial airplanes, crop-dusting and a telephone number in Germany for a suspected member of the Qaeda terrorist network.

That evidence, coupled with other information in the hands of the same F.B.I. counterterrorism supervisors last summer, would have provided a "veritable blueprint for 9/11," said Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, who is a member of the Judiciary Committee and an author of the report.

…He said the decision by F.B.I. supervisors in Washington to rebuff the Minneapolis agents, and the supervisors' ignorance of the standards of evidence required for a search warrant, were "inexplicable."

The bureau officials, the report said, "impose a higher standard on themselves than that required by the Constitution before seeking to obtain a warrant," with the result that important searches of terrorism suspects are not carried out.

In Mr. Moussaoui's case, the report said, bureau supervisors rejected the search warrant request "despite their strong suspicions with respect to Moussaoui." It added, "Without going into the actual evidence in the Moussaoui case, there was ample evidence to confirm these suspicions."

Senate officials involved in the preparation of the Judiciary Committee report said they were eager for its findings to become public in light of last week's disclosure that the nation's secret intelligence court had harshly criticized the F.B.I.'s performance under FISA, and that the court had accused the Justice Department of overreaching in its recent request for broad new powers under the surveillance law.

The court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which was established under the 1978 law, weighs F.B.I. applications for wiretaps and other searches of people suspected of espionage or of terrorism. In an unclassified ruling that it provided last week to the Judiciary Committee, and that the panel subsequently released, the court identified more than 75 cases during the Clinton administration in which the bureau had provided misleading applications.

The ruling also rejected a Bush administration request to tear down the "wall" that for years has prevented criminal investigators from being actively involved in counterintelligence wiretaps. The administration had cited the new authority it received under a sweeping counterterrorism law passed after Sept. 11.

…Mr. Specter said the department appeared to have misread the intent of Congress when it passed the antiterrorism bill. He suggested that the F.B.I. and the Justice Department already had ample investigative power under the surveillance law, and that they had failed to use it properly.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/28/politics/28TERR.html