FBI agent testifies to 9-11 forewarning. (Insider Report).

Testifying behind a screen to protect his identity, an FBI special agent told a stunned House and Senate joint intelligence panel on September 20th that two weeks before the 9-11 attacks he had begged his superiors in Washington to begin intensively searching for one of the men who was among the hijackers who crashed a jetliner into the Pentagon. The hijacker, Khalid Almihdhar, was known by the FBI and CIA to be an al-Qaeda associate and to have attended a major terrorist planning conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 20 months before the attacks. He was also known to have a visa allowing him to enter and exit the U.S. at will. Yet nothing was done to alert U.S. Customs or the Immigration and Naturalization Service to be on the lookout for him or his frequent companion, fellow Flight 77 hijacker Nawaf Alhazmi.

The FBI agent choked back tears as he told how he unsuccessfully urged his superiors to find and arrest Almihdhar, known to have reentered the U.S. However, attorneys with the FBI's National Security Law Unit repeatedly told him that legal restrictions would not permit Almihdhar's arrest on the basis of the intelligence information.

The desperate and incredulous agent fired off an angry (and prophetic) e-mail to Washington. "Someday someone will die -- and [legal] wall or not -- the public will not understand why we were not more effective and throwing every resource we had at certain 'problems.' Let's hope the National Security Law Unit will stand behind their decisions then, especially since the biggest threat to us now, UBL [Usama bin Laden], is getting the most 'protection.'"

The agent's dramatic testimony echoed the testimony last spring of Minnesota FBI Special Agent Coleen Rowley. She told of repeated efforts by headquarters officials to stop the Minneapolis field office's investigation of alleged Sept. 11th conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui in the weeks before the attacks.