FBI failed to alert Australia on terrorism

FBI failed to alert Australia on terrorism

The Australian government admitted on Tuesday the United States'
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had failed to pass on
information about a terrorist threat in Indonesia before the Bali
bombings, but said the information would have made no difference
to the outcome.

ABC television reported that the FBI said it had been told by
an al-Qaeda suspect about imminent attacks on Westerners in the
region a month before the Bali bombings claimed 202 lives in
October 2002.

ABC said that in a written statement to its Lateline program,
the FBI said the information was given only to countries deemed
to be at risk of attack and that there was no indication of a
specific threat to Australia.

In an FBI interrogation in August 2002, al-Qaeda suspect
Mohamed Mansour Jabarah said he had met Hambali, the terrorist
leader subsequently named as the mastermind of the Bali attacks.

Hambali told Jabarah he wanted to attack Westerners in soft
targets such as bars and nightclubs in several Southeast Asian
countries.

Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said the FBI's failure to
pass on information about terrorist threats was an oversight.

"I don't know why the FBI did not hand it over. They are
normally very reliable, as the CIA is, at handing over relevant
material to us.

"But as I say, it may have been an oversight -- and I am sure
it was nothing more than an oversight -- but it wouldn't have
added to the sum total of the knowledge we had because we did
know there was a possible threat to those sorts of targets."

Australian National University academic and terrorism expert
Clive Williams said the information could have been useful. "It
would have perhaps changed our travel advisories," he said. --
AFP