Can this information and video clips from "The Man who Knew" be make an effective ad to prove Bush is not stronger on terrorism?
"No longer is it just the fear of being attacked by international terrorist organizations -- attacks against Americans and American interests overseas. A lot of these groups now have the capability and the support infrastructure in the United States to attack us here if they choose to do so."
-- John P. O'Neill, 1996
Until he resigned in August of 2001, John O'Neill was the director of counterterrorism for the FBI's New York office, not far from the WTC. O'Neill investigated the bombings of the World Trade Centre in 1993, a US base in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-Es-Salaam in 1998, and the USS Cole.
In the course of these investigations, he became one of the world's top experts on Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, determined to hunt Bin Laden and his followers down and bring them to justice. Those who worked with him said he lived, breathed and ate terrorism. A scrappy, stubborn Irishman with a quick temper, a fondness for the ladies, and a reputation for being brutally blunt on some occasions, and pushy on others, O'Neill was often frustrated by the button-down boundaries of the modern FBI. But he was one of the best sleuths the agency had as anyone who worked with him would be quick to acknowledge. U.S. attorney Mary Jo White says this of O'Neill: "John went at it comprehensively, yielding things from people in London or people in Yemen we never otherwise would have gotten." Another admirer, former FBI director Louis Freeh remembers O'Neill as the paramount, most knowledgeable agent we had in the FBI, probably in the government, with respect to counterintelligence matters."
After years of investigating OBL and Al Qaeda, O'Neill came to the conclusion that "All the answers, everything needed to dismantle Osama bin Laden's organization can be found in Saudi Arabia." That conviction went with him to his grave. Unfortunately for O'Neill and 3,000 other men and women, at every turn after January 2001, the Bush administration blocked the efforts of the most knowledgable agent it had to investigate Saudi ties to Bin Laden.
O'Neill saw through Bush from the start and by the summer of 2001 declared that the main obstacles to investigating Islamic terrorism were U.S. oil corporate interests and the role Saudi Arabia played in furthering those interests. Bush not only thwarted an FBI investigation of the bin Laden family, he kept the specific nature of his family's business ties to the Bin Ladens as secret as Cheney's energy task force list.
Read more of SMOKING GUN: The Evidence that May Hang G.W. Bush and The Man who knew