Federal Bureau of Investigation

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is presented in Chomsky’s discussion as an investigative agency whose role exposes a tension between intelligence failures and the difficulty of establishing responsibility for terrorism. The book cites its director’s careful account of what investigators believed about the September 11 plot, while also reporting that the FBI had sought the extradition of two suspects held by Sudan before the 1998 missile attack. Together, these episodes frame the bureau not simply as an investigator after the fact, but as part of a broader, contested history of information-sharing and counterterrorism policy.

Cooperation with Sudan

Before the 1998 missile attack, Sudan held two men suspected of involvement in the bombings of United States embassies in East Africa and had informed Washington. According to accounts cited in the book, the United States rejected Sudan’s offer of cooperation. The men were later released by Sudan in anger after the missile attack and were subsequently identified as agents of Osama bin Laden.

Reports later made public by the FBI added a specific institutional detail: the bureau had wanted the men extradited, but the State Department refused. The account therefore distinguishes the FBI’s position from the decision attributed to another government department. It also describes Sudanese offers of further information—including a database on Osama bin Laden and more than two hundred senior figures in his network, with photographs, biographies, and information on financial interests—which Washington declined.

A CIA source characterized the refusal of those offers as an exceptionally serious intelligence failure and argued that the information might have improved the chances of preventing the September 11 attacks. In this account, the bureau’s reported request for extradition sits within a wider dispute about rejected intelligence and interdepartmental decisions; it does not establish that the FBI possessed or acted on all the information Sudan offered.

The September 11 investigation

Eight months after the September 11 attacks, FBI Director Robert Mueller told Congress that United States intelligence agencies believed the plot had been conceived in Afghanistan, although it had been organized and carried out elsewhere. Chomsky emphasizes the qualified nature of this public assessment: even amid what he describes as an exceptionally extensive international investigation, the evidence about the perpetrators had proved difficult to establish.

The book places that uncertainty alongside the unresolved investigation into the source of anthrax mailings. It reports that the source had been traced to government laboratories associated with specialized military biological-weapons programs, but had not yet been identified. The contrast underscores the limits of attribution in high-profile investigations: identifying a broad origin did not necessarily identify the responsible person or group.

Institutional and political context

Chomsky uses these episodes to question how governments define and respond to terrorism. He argues that official definitions of terrorist violence should be applied consistently to state actions as well as to acts by non-state groups, and that counterterrorism should rely on evidence and lawful procedures rather than retaliation. His account of the FBI’s reported extradition request supplies a concrete instance of a proposed law-enforcement measure that, according to the material he cites, was blocked at the departmental level.

The FBI’s role in the entry is consequently specific but limited. It appears in the reported request to extradite suspects and in Mueller’s congressional statement about what intelligence agencies believed; the surrounding argument concerns broader government choices, the handling of Sudanese cooperation, and the evidentiary challenges of investigating terrorism. The book does not provide a complete institutional history of the bureau or attribute the wider policy decisions to the FBI.