Was the "temple plot" bogus?

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Honest, I'm not the sort of person who sees gummint conspiracies everywhere. But when even TPM offers a snarky account of the plot to blow up two synagogues in New York, you've got to wonder if -- and to what degree -- this terrorist scheme was manufactured.

According to AP, a band of hilariously amateurish bumblers formed this group. One member is borderline retarded. The leader got stoned a lot.

Muslims fueled by hatred of America and Jews, they spent months scouting targets and securing what they thought was a surface-to-air missile system and powerful explosives — all under the watch of an FBI informant.

Ah, but he wasn't the only one watching. Newsday:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Friday awarded certificates to more than 100 detectives, officers and agents from the FBI, NYPD and state police.

Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly says the amount of people involved shows the scope of the investigation.

I'll say. These terrorists might as well have been on pay-per-view. From the NYT:

A federal law enforcement official described the plot as “aspirational” — meaning that the suspects wanted to do something but had no weapons or explosives — and described the operation as a sting with a cooperator within the group.

“It was fully controlled at all times,” a law enforcement official said.

In other words, there was no real plot. There was a sting. 100 cops and feds got together and hatched up an elaborate plan to dupe a stoner and a moron.

(You may recall that the word "aspirational" was used in the case of the guys who supposedly wanted to off Obama at the convention. That incident still strikes me as being rather more mysterious than is the present one.)

And who was the FBI guy in charge? Robert Fuller. He has what must be the strangest history of any FBI employee this side of Fox Mulder.

Special Agent Robert Fuller, whose name appears at the top of the federal criminal complaint in the case, had a hand in the FBI's failure to nab two of the 9/11 hijackers, had one of his informants set himself on fire in front of the White House, and was involved in misidentifying a Canadian man as a terrorist leading to his secret arrest and torture -- a case that is now the subject of a major lawsuit.

Let's take a closer look at the 9/11 episode:

The New York Observer reported that after the CIA told the FBI that the two hijackers, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hamzi were in the United States, Fuller was assigned to bring them into custody on Aug. 23, 2001, 19 days prior to the attacks.

A fellow agent, the Observer reported, had labeled the lead "routine," meaning that Fuller had 30 days to catch them. Fuller went through local databases, checked Mihdhar's New York hotel and then let it drop. Standard procedure, the papers said, held that he also should have search commercial databases, but he did not.

He later claimed that he consulted ChoicePoint database on Sept. 4 or 5, but the 9/11 Commission later concluded that the FBI did not consult that database until after the attacks, the newspaper said.

Note: According to Wikipedia, the name is actually al-Hazmi. (We have other transliterations for the names of this pair, as is always the case with Arab nomenclature.)

Al-Hazmi and al-Mihdar had really interesting resumes as fighters in Bosnia, Chechnya and Yemen. They were genuine terrorists.

In 1998, the FBI acquired the telephone number of a safe house in Yemen owned by al-Mihdhar's father-in-law. Taps on the phone revealed details of the infamous Al Qaeda meeting in Kuala Lumpur, attended by the two. After the meeting, the CIA had compiled a full write-up on the pair.

Alas, their names were not put on a travel watch list for reasons which beggar understanding. The FBI later claimed that the CIA did not share information about the Kuala Lumpur meeting. However:

Eleanor Hill, Staff Director of the Congressional investigation into 9/11, reported: “A CIA communication in early January 2000 states that Almihdhar’s travel documents, including his multiple entry visa for the United States, were shared with the FBI for further investigation. No one at the FBI recalls having received such documents at the time. No confirmatory record of the transmittal of the travel documents has yet been located at either the CIA or the FBI.”

(Hey, do you recall that just a couple of days ago we were talking about the possibility that the CIA has "massaged" its records...?)

The pair also had the strange ability to bi-locate:

For the most part, the media has consistently reported that Alhazmi and Almihdhar first moved to the United States in early 2000, and the FBI Director has recently concurred. [San Diego Union-Tribune, 9/27/02]. However, numerous other reports suggest otherwise; that the two Saudis had been in the US before, and in the case of Alhazmi, long before. Soon after the attacks, the Wall Street Journal cited public records that put Alhazmi in San Diego as early as 1996. [Wall Street Journal, 9/17/01] Another story, reported by the Associated Press, placed Alhazmi in Cody, Wyoming in the fall of 1999. Witnesses said he was one of two men making a truck delivery from Canada to a high school there and had asked for directions to Florida. They left a very memorable impression. [AP, 10/23/01, Las Vegas Review Journal, 10/26/01]

Okay, I told you all of that to get to the really good part -- the part that tells us so very much about FBI guy Robert Fuller. Y'see, al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar lived quite openly in San Diego...

They used their real names on their rental agreement, [Congressional Intelligence Committee, 9/20/02] driver’s licenses, Social Security cards and credit cards. [Newsweek, 6/2/02] In February, the two paid $3,000 cash for a 1988 Toyota Corolla and registered it in Almihdhar’s name (the registration was later signed over to Alhazmi). [South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 9/28/01] Incredibly, they were even listed in the 2000-2001 San Diego phone book: “ALHAZMI Nawaf M 6401 Mount Ada Rd. 858-279-5919.” In September 2000, Alhazmi opened a bank account. As Newsweek pointed out, investigators “could have easily tracked them through bank records,” had they been looking. [Newsweek, 6/2/02]

Then they decided to live with a guy named Abdussattar Shaikh (well known in the southern California Islamic community), who happened to be -- a-hem! -- an FBI informant.

While the official account maintains that Shaikh never told the FBI the names of the two Saudis, Newsweek reported that one source recounted an incident in which “the case agent called up [Abdussattar Shaikh]… and was told he couldn’t talk because ‘Khalid’ a reference to Almihdhar was in the room.” [Newsweek, 9/9/02] Wouldn’t that imply that the FBI knew whom this Khalid being referred to was?

Interestingly, the FBI has refused to allow the 9/11 Congressional inquiry to interview either Shaikh or his FBI contact.

If that FBI contact turns out to be Fuller, I will just shit.

Let's presume it wasn't. One still must ask what the hell stopped Fuller from finding these two.

They clearly had dangerous histories. The FBI knew all about them from taps on the father-in-law's phone. Supposedly, the CIA gave the FBI a data dump on the two, although the documentation may or may not have gotten lost in the mail. They were allowed to fly in and out of the United States, meeting with all sorts of dubious characters, and living on nobody-knows-what source of income. Evidence suggests that they may have been in (and out of) the country since 1996.

They had a listed phone number, accessible to anyone with internet access. They had a California DMV record. They had a U.S. bank account.

And they were shacking up with a freaking FBI informant.

You probably could have found them in about ten minutes, even without FBI authority. They did everything short of sending Christmas cards to the Hoover building. Nevertheless, Bob Fuller of the Bureau couldn't find them.

Yet he -- and about a hundred other guys -- did manage to mount a sting against the stoner and the moron.

I think that this is a case where the bear joke applies.

Agent Fuller blew a simple task that could have prevented 9/11. He went on to screw up in another case involving a Canadian citizen, a screw-up so bad that the Bureau is now being sued over it. Another Fuller informant set himself on fire in front of the White House claiming (in a suicide note addressed to Fuller) that Fuller had mishandled his case in such a way as to place the informant's family in danger.

I cannot freaking believe that this shit-head still has a job. Yet he just got an award!