“In July [2001], when a CIA officer finally told an FBI analyst about the pair [future 9/11 hijackers Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf Alhazmi], he asked her to check on them ‘in her spare time.’ She concluded that if the two men were in the U.S., they were probably in New York, so she forwarded the information there on August 28 [2001], where an agent without any prior experience in counterterrorism was assigned the case. Since the lead was marked ‘routine,’ the agent had up to thirty days to open the case, by which time 9/11 intervened.”
– Gerald Posner, Why America Slept, Page xiv