[...] Basically, Zegart takes the 9/11 Commission’s no-fault thesis to the nth degree by claiming the whole thing was systemic failure and holding no individual accountable for his or her failures.
Here are a typical couple of paragraphs of dreck, about the FBI’s search for Almihdhar and Alhazmi:
Amy Zegart said:
Culture also played an important role. It turns out that the FBI analyst who requested the manhunt actually believed the matter had some urgency. She was so worried about finding Almihdhar, in fact that she called an agent in New York’s bin Laden squad to alert him even before finishing her formal request. This was something she had never done before.14 A few days later, she sent him an e-mail urging, “I… want to get this going as soon as possible.”15 In addition, when another counterterrorism agent pressed to have the manhunt opened as a full-scale, high priority criminal investigation, she explicitly considered the matter and sought legal advice. Yet she ultimately assigned the manhunt the lowest possible priority: a “routine” intelligence case. Why?
The answer lies in pervasive attitudes and beliefs, not individual errors. Like nearly all FBI officials, the analyst believed that criminal investigations—which are designed to solve past crimes—took precedence over intelligence investigations designed to gather information about future attacks. After September 11, the analyst told Justice Department officials that although she considered finding Almihdhar to be important, this investigation was “no bigger” than any other intelligence investigation at the time.16 Good instincts led the analyst to take unusual steps to expedite the search, but old attitudes prevailed: when pressed to prioritize the manhunt relative to the bureau’s traditional law enforcement work, she put down “routine.”
Those knowledgeable of the issues will have identified in this passage Dina Corsi (the FBI analyst), Craig Donnachie (the bin Laden squad agent) and Steve Bongardt (the other counterterrorism agent). Having read the relevant sources, Zegart knows who these people are, but, with the exception of a walk-on part for Bongardt in an end note late in the book, she doesn’t trouble her readers with them. This means that unless you have read all of Zegart’s sources five times yourself, you can’t tell that some of the same people are involved in multiple failures.
You can also only marvel at Zegart’s description of Corsi’s actions. Zegart has her charging hard to get the case started, but it took her a week to send the five-page lead to New York, so how much did she really want it? And your jaw can only drop in wonder at Zegart’s explanation for Corsi giving the lead routine precedence. As Zegart must know, Almihdhar and Alhazmi were being sought as material witnesses in the Cole bombing investigation, which was actually a past crime, having occurred the previous October. This, in Zegart’s world, should mean that the investigation gets a high priority, but Zegart keeps this from her readers, giving them the impression the two men were being sought for some other reason.
There are also three things startling by their absence here. One is the complete absence of Tom Wilshire, referred to variously and vaguely throughout the book, but never by name and never by an alias readers can keep track off. Zegart cites The Looming Tower repeatedly, so she must know who he is, but she isn’t telling her readers. Second, in the whole of the discussion of the failed hunt for Almihdhar the two things conspicuous by their entire absence from the book are the NSA’s permission to share its intelligence on Almihdhar and Alhazmi with Bongardt and other criminal agents and Sherry Sabol’s alleged (and probably fabricated) opinion that Bongardt could not be present at an interview of Almihdhar if the FBI did find him. Why does Zegart miss them out? We don’t know, but we do know that they are pretty powerful evidence of intentional wrongdoing by Corsi, and that if you wanted to write a book claiming systemic failure was the main cause of 9/11, you’d better leave them out. [...]
