May 27, 2002: FBI Still Has ‘No Breakthrough’ in Understanding 9/11 Plot

Journalist Seymour Hersh writes in the New Yorker, “In a recent conversation, a senior FBI official acknowledged that there had been ‘no breakthrough’ inside the government, in terms of establishing how the September 11th suicide teams were organized and how they operated.” The recent war in Afghanistan “has yet to produce significant information about the planning and execution of the attacks. US forces are known to have captured thousands of pages of documents and computer hard drives from al-Qaeda redoubts, but so far none of this material—which remains highly classified—has enabled the Justice Department to broaden its understanding of how the attack occurred, or even to bring an indictment of a conspirator.” [New Yorker, 5/27/2002] It has never been made clear if, how, and/or when the FBI subsequently made a breakthrough in understanding the 9/11 plot.