From: "Rich Gauszka" 

So says an FBI agent

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/21/national/nationalspecial3/21moussaoui.html?_r
=1&oref=slogin

ALEXANDRIA, Va., March 20 - The F.B.I. agent who arrested and interrogated
Zacarias Moussaoui just weeks before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks told a
jury on Monday how he had tried repeatedly to get his superiors in
Washington to help confirm his certainty that Mr. Moussaoui was involved in
an imminent terrorist airline hijacking plot.

But, said the agent, Harry Samit, he was regularly thwarted by senior
bureau officials whose obstructionism he later described to Justice
Department investigators as "criminally negligent" and who were,
he believed, motivated principally by a need to protect their careers.

Mr. Samit's testimony added a wealth of detail to the notion that officials
at the Federal Bureau of Investigation played down, ignored and purposely
mischaracterized the increasingly dire warnings from field agents in the
Minneapolis office that they had a terrorist on their hands in Mr.
Moussaoui.

"I accused the people in F.B.I. headquarters of criminal
negligence" in an interview after Sept. 11, Mr. Samit acknowledged
under intense questioning by Edward B. MacMahon Jr., Mr. Moussaoui's chief
court-appointed lawyer.

Mr. Samit confirmed that he had told Justice Department investigators 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. He testified that he had come to
believe that "the wager was a national tragedy."

--- BBBS/NT v4.01 Flag-5