The Informant Who Lived With the 9/11 Hijackers

Newsweek is reporting that a top FBI informant "had a close relationship with two of the hijackers: he was their roommate." Apparently, this "belated discovery has unsettled some members of the joint House and Senate intelligence committees investigating the 9-11 attacks. The panel is tentatively due to begin public hearings as early as Sept. 18, racing to its end-of-the-year deadline. But some members are now worried that they won’t get to the bottom of what really happened by then. Support for legislation creating a special blue-ribbon investigative panel, similar to probes conducted after Pearl Harbor and the Kennedy assassination, is increasing. Only then, some members say, will the public learn whether more 9-11 secrets are buried in the government’s files."

After reading this, I have to say it's s a pretty remarkable story. Whether or not quicker action by the informant or the San Diego case agent could have enabled a "penetration" of the Al Qaeda plan seems questionable to me; the plan was probably not hatched until late and, considering that 11 of the 19 hijackers weren't even clued into the full details when they stepped onto their planes on 9/11/01, Almihdhar and Alhazmi were probably training without a mission. Anyway, my random (and generally uninformed) comment for the day...