http://mikesamerica.blogspot.com/2005/10/uss-cole-visible-symbol-of-american.html

We MUST remember the Cole. Those 17 sailors gave their lives for a lot of reasons, but if anything good can come of it, then it can only be the lesson learned, and that lesson is that people who fail MUST be held accountable-this includes people like George Tenet, and Paul Bremer who were rewarded by Pres Bush rather than held to account for their later fubars, but Bush isn’t alone. Clinton praised Tenet, Clarke, Albright, etc. In most other countries they’d be in jail or worse.

Bodine is the pinupgirl for “Not My Fault” magazine.

The FBI’s investigation into the attack on the USS Cole- which had cost the lives of seventeen sailors on October 12, 2000- had reached an impasse. The bull-headed John O’Neill, who ran the FBI’s famed counter-terrorism unit in New York, had feuded with the U.S. ambassador to Yemen, Barbara Bodine.

In June 2001, O’Neill tried to find a plausible cover story for essentially ending the investigation. As his team flew back to New York, O’Neill leaked to the press that his investigators faced death threats: a credible excuse to leave the desert republic with its history of civil war, fanaticism, and midnight bombings. Yemen is known for its throngs of unemployed men who listen to fundamentalist mullahs and ambush cars on major highways to take hostages.

But Ambassador Bodine wasn’t going to allow O’Neill to make a dignified exit. She told reporters that she knew nothing of any threats against the FBI. And if there had been, she insisted, she would have been told.

Amid the bureaucratic feuding, the FBI failed to fully explore al Qaeda’s role in the attack on the USS Cole. While the CIA insisted there was enough evidence to connect al Qaeda to the attack, the FBI insisted that there was not enough evidence to persuade a grand jury. Al Qaeda had taken credit for the bombing, and bin Laden had composed a poem in January 2001 celebrating it, but the FBI focused on local Yemeni terrorists.

Now the Justice Department’s largest ongoing terrorist investigation was stalled and Ashcroft would have to repair the damage done with the State Department. He was not aware that the al Qaeda connection to the bombing of the USS Cole was not being pursued.

Meanwhile, many of the problems of the Clinton years continued. The Immigration and Naturalization Service, which is part of the Justice Department, still had not implemented a terrorist tracking program that had been mandated by Congress in 1996.

-Shadow War, pg 52-53.