CIA Allowed Two 9/11 Hijackers To Enter US

Los Angeles Times, June 10, 2005:

A chilling new detail of U.S. intelligence failures emerged Thursday, when the Justice Department disclosed that about 20 months before the Sept. 11 attacks, a CIA official had blocked a memo intended to alert the FBI that two known Al Qaeda operatives [9/11 hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar] had entered the country. ...

If the FBI had received the official communique from the CIA's special Osama bin Laden unit when it was ready for transmittal in January 2000, its agents likely could have tracked down the men, according to U.S. intelligence officials familiar with a newly declassified report of the Justice Department's inspector general. ...

One of the well-known missed opportunities was the fact that Almihdhar and Alhazmi had rented a room in the Lemon Grove home of a well-established local FBI informant [Abdussattar Shaikh]. ...

Yup, two of the future terrorists had an FBI informant as a landlord!