The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda

摘要

A li soufan, an fbi agent and interrogator, was in Yemen investigating Al-Qaeda's attack on the USS Cole when the 9/11 attacks took place. Many of his friends and colleagues died in the twin towers, including John O'Neill, his mentor and former boss. The next day, his headquarters ordered him to reinterrogate Fahd al-Quso, a member of Al-Qaeda in Yemen. The CIA sent him a file explaining why. When Soufan read the file, his hands shook. He ran to the bathroom, fell to the floor next to a toilet and threw up, unable to comprehend why the CIA had withheld such key intelligence for more than a year. If this intelligence, which the FBI had repeatedly requested, had been shared with the FBI before 9/11, "at a minimum, Khalid al-Mihdhar [one of the hijackers] would not have been allowed to just walk into the United States on 4 July 2001, and Nawaf al-Hazmi, Atta's deputy [another hijacker], would have been arrested." The interrogation of either of these hijackers could have then led to more arrests, and perhaps, foiled the entire plot.