[url]http://www.msnbc.com/news/760647.asp?cp1=1#BODY[/url]
Its long but worth the read:
Kuala Lumpur is an easy choice if you’re looking to lie low. Clean and modern, with reliable telephones, banks and Internet service, the Malaysian city is a painless flight from most world capitals—and Muslim visitors don’t need visas to enter the Islamic country.WHY Al Qaeda chose the sprawling metropolis for a secret planning summit in early January 2000. Tucked away in a posh suburban condominium overlooking a Jack Nicklaus-designed golf course, nearly a dozen of Osama bin Laden’s trusted followers, posing as tourists, plotted future terrorist strikes against the United States.
At the time, the men had no idea that they were being closely watched—or that the CIA already knew some of their names. A few days earlier, U.S. intelligence had gotten wind of the Qaeda gathering. Special Branch, Malaysia’s security service, agreed to follow and photograph the suspected terrorists. They snapped pictures of the men sightseeing and ducking into cybercafes to check Arabic Web sites.
What happened next, some U.S. counterterrorism officials say, may be the most puzzling, and devastating, intelligence failure in the critical months before September 11. A few days after the Kuala Lumpur meeting, NEWSWEEK has learned, the CIA tracked one of the terrorists, Nawaf Alhazmi, as he flew from the meeting to Los Angeles. Agents discovered that another of the men, Khalid Almihdhar, had already obtained a multiple-entry visa that allowed him to enter and leave the United States as he pleased. (They later learned that he had in fact arrived in the United States on the same flight as Alhazmi.) Yet astonishingly, the CIA did nothing with this information. Agency officials didn’t tell the INS, which could have turned them away at the border, nor did they notify the FBI, which could have covertly tracked them to find out their mission. Instead, during the year and nine months after the CIA identified them as terrorists, Alhazmi and Almihdhar lived openly in the United States, using their real names, obtaining driver’s licenses, opening bank accounts and enrolling in flight schools—until the morning of September 11, when they walked aboard American Airlines Flight 77 and crashed it into the Pentagon.