November 2004: Head of FBI’s 9/11 Investigation Says 9/11 Attacks Were Virtually Unstoppable

Mary Galligan, the head of the FBI’s 9/11 investigation, says that the 9/11 attacks were virtually unstoppable. Galligan was the head of the FBI’s domestic terror squad in the summer of 2001, and then headed PENTTBOM, the FBI’s 9/11 investigation from just after the 9/11 attacks until early 2004 (see June 14, 2004). [Federal Bureau of Investigation, 7/1/2010] She says: “If I had [9/11 hijacker Mohamed] Atta—say, we got a call from a next-door neighbor, and we sent a guy out there—he’s not gonna give us the plan, so the agent is gonna come back to me and say, ‘Mary, he’s nothing.’ And what could I do? Nothing. Or let’s assume we learned the hijackers’ names in 2000. We would have surveilled them and listened to their conversations. But we know now they didn’t even know the plan at that time. If we approached them, they would have left the country. Would bin Laden then have sent more people? Yes.” [Vanity Fair, 11/2004] Galligan’s comment that the hijackers didn’t know the plan for 9/11 is contradicted by much evidence. For instance, in March 2001, most of them recorded videos in which they pledged to die martyrs in the US, and some of these videos were made public in 2002 and 2003 (see (December 2000-March 2001)).