frankenlies.com
#26: Misleading Minneapolis
On page 40 of The Truth, Franken writes,
"Could 9/11 have been prevented? We'll never really know ... Washington might have found out about ... the FBI agent who tried to warn HQ that Zacarias Moussaoui might 'take control of a plane and fly it into the World Trade Center'."
Franken implements some crafty semantics and quotation marks to leave his readers with the false impression that a Minneapolis FBI agent warned about a possible attack on the World Trade Center.
The truth is that the agent's remark reflected his grave concern that Moussaoui was a potential danger. Instead of "the World Trade Center," the agent could easily have said "The Washington Monument" or "Los Angeles airport." Quite simply, the agent had no foreknowledge of any impending attack.1 In addition, there is substantial evidence that even many of the hijackers were unaware of their actual mission on September 11.2
Franken has misled his readers.
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Notes:
1 The Report of the Joint Inquiry Into the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001 – By the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, released in full to the public in July 2003, addressed this episode (emphasis added):
"On August 27 [2001], the RFU [Radical Fundamentalist Unit] agent told the Minneapolis supervisor that the supervisor was getting people 'spun up' over Moussaoui. According to his notes and his statement to the Joint Inquiry, the supervisor replied that he was trying to get people at FBI Headquarters 'spun up' because he was trying to make sure that Moussaoui 'did not take control of a plane and fly it into the World Trade Center.' The Minneapolis agent said that the Headquarters agent told him:
[T]hat’s not going to happen. We don’t know he’s a terrorist. You don’t have enough to show he is a terrorist. You have a guy interested in this type of aircraft – that is it.
"[On August 28, the RFU agent edited, and returned to Minneapolis for comment, the request for a FISA Court order that Minneapolis had prepared. The RFU agent told the Joint Inquiry that it was not unusual for FBI Headquarters agents to make changes to field submissions. The major substantive change was removal of information that tried to make connections between the Chechen rebels and al-Qa’ida. After the edit was complete, the RFU agent briefed the FBI Deputy General Counsel, who told the Joint Inquiry that he agreed with the agent that there was insufficient information to show that Moussaoui was an agent of a foreign power]."
There is quite a difference is someone expressing a concern ("trying to make sure") and issuing a warning ("[trying] to warn").
See pages 322-323 at http://www.gpoaccess.gov/serialset/creports/pdf/part3.pdf.
2 For more on this, see the recommended book: Richard Miniter, Disinformation: 22 Media Myths That Undermine the War on Terror (Washington D.C.: Regnery, 2005), pp. 50-51.