When discussing lapses in the FBI’s capabilities in an interview with author Peter Lance on September 21, 2006, “Retired special agent James Whalen, a veteran of the NYO [New York Office], calls the Bureau’s failure to get the Virtual Case File system online five years after 9/11 ‘frightening.’ ‘Look at the number of times [WTC bombing conspirator Mahmud] Abouhalima, that red-headed Egyptian cab driver, showed up in the Bureau’s files in the years before he helped bomb the World Trade Center,’ says Whalen. ‘If a JTTF [Joint Terrorism Task Force] agent could have hit a button and gotten a print-out on that guy back in ’93, lives might have been saved. Well, guess what? They still can’t do that today thirteen years later.”
– Peter Lance, Triple Cross, Page 447