From WTC to OKC to 9-11. (The Last Word).

Were the tragic deaths of the thousands of victims of the 9-11 terrorist strikes preventable? What did federal authorities know about the coming attacks beforehand and when did they know it? More importantly, what did they do or fail to do in response to alarms and specific warnings?

The answers to these questions are falling victim to partisan politics and disinformation. It's an election year and nasty partisan bickering is to be expected, but the stakes are too high to allow this issue to be held hostage to political scheming. Our federal government's vital intelligence and internal security functions have been ravaged and neglected by both parties, as THE NEW AMERICAN has been showing for many years. The trail of bipartisan perfidy stretches back from the current Bush administration, through the Clinton reign to the earlier Bush team under George the Elder. It is illustrated in three of the most spectacular and deadly terrorist attacks on America: last year's September 11th attacks; the 1995 Oklahoma City (OKC) bombing; and the 1993 World Trade Center (WTC) bombing.

In her revealing memo to FBI Director Robert Mueller, Minnesota FBI Agent Coleen Rowley inadvertently spotlighted two monumental problems that go to the heart of America's massive failures in the face of terrorism: official sabotage of counter-terrorism efforts, and official cover-up after the fact.

Thanks to the dogged persistence of Agent Rowley and her fellow agents in Minneapolis, Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called "20th hijacker" in the 9-11 terror attacks, was arrested before the deadly assaults took place -- against the strenuous opposition of FBI higher-ups. Recounting the stunned amazement of her fellow agents at the incredible obstacles that FBI officials in Washington repeatedly put in their way, Rowley said that the question in the minds of all her team members was "why would [headquarters] deliberately sabotage a case?" Her team members joked that FBIHQ must be infested with moles "working for Osama bin Laden."

However, Rowley concluded that it was more likely that the efforts to quash Moussaoui's arrest were the result of cowardly decisions by risk-averse careerists in management. Likewise, in criticizing Director Mueller and other administration officials who have suppressed evidence and been disingenuous concerning facts of the case, she opined that the term" 'cover up' would be too strong a characterization."

Like most Americans, Agent Rowley finds it difficult to imagine actual subversion in high levels of our government. But it is an unpleasant fact that agents of foreign powers have repeatedly penetrated the highest reaches of our government over the past half century. The Rosenbergs, Theodore Hall, and other Soviet agents delivered our most sensitive atom bomb secrets to the enemy. Soviet agent Alger Hiss, Roosevelt's right hand at Yalta, helped deliver Eastern Europe and China to Stalin. More recently, traitors Aldrich Ames at the CIA and Robert Hannsen at the FBI have caused incalculable harm through their espionage. Ana Belen Montes, Castro's agent inside the Defense Intelligence Agency, has also caused untold damage.

There is a terribly disturbing pattern of sabotage and cover-up that was evident in the 1993 WTC case and the 1995 OKC case that has re-emerged in the 9-11 case. In addition to Agent Rowley and the Minnesota FBI agents, a steady cascade of credible sources has come forward to publicly provide evidence of prior warning that was ignored or sabotaged: Phoenix FBI agent Ken Williams; Chicago FBI Agent Robert G. Wright; Phoenix FBI undercover informant Harry J. Ellen; Phoenix FBI undercover informant Aukai Collins; and Fr. Jean-Marie Benjamin, a French priest who works among Iraqi refugees.

Readers who followed this magazine's investigation of the Oklahoma City bombing will see sickening parallels to that case. Team Clinton pointedly ignored warnings from undercover informants Carol Howe and Cary Gagan, as well as foreign intelligence sources. The cover-up after the fact was enormous, involving lies, intimidation of witnesses, destruction of evidence, and falsification of evidence.

The OKC and 9-11 cases are tied to the 1993 WTC attack through the person of Ramzi Yousef, the convicted mastermind of the 1993 Trade Center bombing. We have previously reported that, according to Edwin Angeles, one of Yousef's co-conspirators, Yousef met in the Philippines with OKC bombing coconspirator Terry Nichols. Oklahoma City attorney Michael Johnston, representing OKC survivors in a civil case against Iraq, has developed new information from the Philippines in the past several months strengthening the evidence of the Yousef-Nichols ties, and their ties to Iraq. Federal prosecutors in Chicago in the past few weeks have confirmed Yousef's longstanding ties to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. And the 9-11 hijacking scenario was taken right out of Yousef's "Bojinka" (big bang) play book.

How many more attacks will it take, how many more corpses will it take, before we hold officials accountable and fix what are obviously major problems with our intelligence and internal security efforts?