Moussaoui's greatest hits

From the 9-11 Commission report:

[Moussaoui] had begun flight lessons at Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma. He resumed his training at the Pan Am International Flight Academy in Eagan, Minnesota, starting on August 13. He had none of the usual qualifications for flight training on Pan Am's Boeing 747 flight simulators. He said he did not intend to become a commercial pilot but wanted the trainign as an 'ego boosting thing'. Moussaoui stood out because with little knowledge of flying he wanted to learn how to "take off and land" a Boeing 747

What an idiot. This hijacker could have reasonably thought he would be asked why he wanted to practice in a 747 simulator... & despite having had all that time to think of an excuse 'ego boosting' was the best he could come up with!

If Moussaou was an idiot he made an even bigger idiot out of US law before 9-11:

The agents in Minnesota were concerned that the U.S.Attorney’s Office in Minneapolis would find insufficient probable cause of a crime to obtain a criminal warrant to search Moussaoui’s laptop computer. Agents at FBI headquarters believed there was insufficient probable cause. Minneapolis therefore sought a special warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to conduct the search (we introduced FISA in chapter 3).

To do so, however, the FBI needed to demonstrate probable cause that Moussaoui was an agent of a foreign power, a demonstration that was not required to obtain a criminal warrant but was a statutory requirement for a FISA warrant. The case agent did not have sufficient information to connect Moussaoui to a “foreign power,”so he reached out for help,in the United States and overseas.

......

the French provided information that made a connection between Moussaoui and a rebel leader in Chechnya,Ibn al Khattab.This set off a spirited debate between the Minneapolis Field Office, FBI headquarters,and the CIA as to whether the Chechen rebels and Khattab were sufficiently associated with a terrorist organization to constitute a “foreign power”for purposes of the FISA statute.FBI headquarters did not believe this was good enough, and its National Security Law Unit declined to submit a FISA application

So basically, they knew he was a terrorist. There was a law (FISA) which allowed spying on foreign agents inside the US but, alas because Moussaoui was a freelance islamist terrorist he wasn't a spy for any particular foreign power and therefore couldn't be spied on.

If Moussaoui made an idiot out of himself, he surely made a bigger idiot out of the US Federal government.