Was the US Government Alerted to September 11 Attack?
Part 1: Warnings in Advance
By Patrick Martin < editor@wsws.org
>
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/usgovtalertedtosepwtc17jan02.shtml
16 January 2002
Forward Courtesy of David McCowan <dave@davesweb.cnchost.com>
Center for an Informed America. http://davesweb.cnchost.com/
Part 1: Warnings in Advance
It is not necessary to postulate an all-embracing conspiracy, extending
from the White House to the airline security personnel who let the armed
hijackers board the planes, to believe that there is much more to the story
of the September 11 attacks than the American public has been told so far.
Certainly the least likely and least credible explanation of that day’s
events is that the vast US national security apparatus was entirely unaware
of the activities of the hijackers until the airliners slammed into the
World Trade Center and Pentagon.
According to this official version, voiced most crudely by FBI Director
Robert Mueller immediately after the event, no one in the US government
had the slightest idea of the identities of the September 11 hijackers,
the methods they would employ, or the targets they would choose. A careful
review of the information that has come to light, in bits and pieces, since
September 11, demonstrates that these claims are not merely tenuous, but
clearly, obviously and knowingly false.
The case of Zacarias Moussaoui [“The
strange case of Zacarias Moussaoui: FBI refused to investigate man charged
in September 11 attacks”] is only the most glaring evidence that the
September 11 terrorist attacks represent, not merely a colossal failure
on the part of the FBI and CIA, but a refusal to act that has no legitimate
explanation. Not only were there general warnings of the likelihood of
suicide hijackings, but several of the hijackers, including the man alleged
to be the principal organizer, Mohammed Atta, were under active surveillance
by US agents. It is not too much to say that the terrorists were only able
to accomplish their murderous and destructive mission because US intelligence
agencies ignored repeated warnings, refused to carry out elementary defensive
actions and manifested a seeming indifference to the prospect of a major
terrorist attack on American soil.
Added to that is the refusal of any branch of the US government to conduct
any probe into the circumstances of an attack which killed more American
civilians on a single day than any other act of violence in US history.
There has been no serious effort in the four months since September 11
to investigate, learn lessons and assign responsibility. This by itself
is a demonstration that there are highly placed people in Washington with
a great deal to hide.
Warnings from foreign governments
The governments of at least four countries—Germany, Egypt, Russia and
Israel—gave specific warnings to the US of an impending terrorist attack
in the months preceding September 11. These alerts, while fragmentary,
not only combined to foretell the scale of the attack and its main target,
but indicated that hijacked commercial aircraft would be the weapon of
choice.
According to an article in one of the major daily newspapers in Germany,
published just after the destruction of the World Trade Center, the German
intelligence service BND told both US and Israeli intelligence agencies
in June that Middle East terrorists were “planning to hijack commercial
aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and
Israeli culture.”
The newspaper cited unnamed German intelligence sources, who said that
the information came through Echelon, the US-controlled system of 120 satellites
which monitors all worldwide electronic communications. Echelon is operated
jointly by the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand,
although its existence is not officially admitted. (Source: Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, September 14, 2001)
The government of Egypt sent an urgent warning to the US June 13, based
on a video made by Osama bin Laden. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak told
the French newspaper Le Figaro that the warning was originally delivered
just before the G-8 summit in Genoa. It was taken seriously enough that
antiaircraft batteries were stationed around Christopher Columbus Airport
in the Italian city. According to Mubarak, bin Laden “spoke of assassinating
President Bush and other heads of state in Genoa. It was a question of
an airplane stuffed with explosives. These precautions then had been taken.”
(Source: New York Times, September 26, 2001, “2 Leaders Tell of Plot to
Kill Bush in Genoa,” by David Sanger)
According to Russian press reports, Russian intelligence notified the
CIA during the summer that 25 terrorist pilots had been specifically training
for suicide missions. In an interview September 15 with MSNBC, Russian
President Vladimir Putin confirmed that he had ordered Russian intelligence
in August to warn the US government “in the strongest possible terms” of
imminent attacks on airports and government buildings. (Source: From The
Wilderness web site; MSNBC).
The London-based Sunday Telegraph —an arch-conservative newspaper usually
highly supportive of the Bush administration—reported that the Israeli
intelligence service Mossad had delivered a warning to the FBI and CIA
in August that as many as 200 followers of Osama bin Laden were slipping
into the country to prepare “a major assault on the United States.” The
advisory spoke of a “large-scale target” in which Americans would be “very
vulnerable.” The Los Angeles Times cited unnamed US officials confirming
this Mossad warning had been received. (Source: Sunday Telegraph, September
16, 2001, “Israeli security issued urgent warning to CIA of large-scale
terror attacks,” by David Wastell and Philip Jacobson; Los Angeles Times,
September 20, 2001, “Officials Told of ‘Major Assault’ Plans,” by Richard
A. Serrano and John-Thor Dahlburg)
The Independent, a liberal daily in Great Britain, published an article
asserting the US government “was warned repeatedly that a devastating attack
on the United States was on its way.” The Independent cited an interview
given by Osama bin Laden to a London-based Arabic-language newspaper, al-Quds
al-Arabi, in late August. About the same time, tighter security measures
were ordered at the World Trade Center, for unexplained reasons. (Source:
Independent, September 17, 2001, “Bush did not heed several warnings of
attack,” by Andrew Gumbel)
Despite this series of alerts, no US intelligence agency issued any
warning of a possible attack on a target on US territory in the months
leading up to September 11. The CIA and FBI had issued warnings about likely
attacks on American military bases or embassies in the Middle East, Europe
and Asia. On September 7 the US Department of State issued a worldwide
alert about an impending attack by bin Laden followers, although it was
focused on US-related targets in east Asia, especially Japan, not within
the US itself. As the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee,
Senator Richard Shelby, admitted, “This obviously was a failure of great
dimension. We had no specific warning of the US being attacked.”
Moreover, the FBI’s decision to take no action on Zacarias Moussaoui
must be considered in the light of this continuous stream of warnings from
overseas. The US government was being repeatedly alerted to the danger
of devastating attacks using hijacked commercial aircraft, yet the FBI
decided to conduct no serious investigation into a man, believed by French
intelligence to be linked to Osama bin Laden, who wanted to learn how to
steer a 747 jumbo jet, but not to take off or land. Moussaoui was not even
turned over to the FBI by the Immigration and Naturalization Service until
after September 11.
US investigations and concerns
Despite claims that US intelligence agencies had not considered the
possibility of suicide attacks involving commercial airliners before September
11, there were many indications of such concerns on the part of the American
government over a period of eight years.
An expert panel commissioned by the Pentagon in 1993 discussed how an
airplane could be used to bomb national landmarks. “It was considered radical
thinking, a little too scary for the times,” said retired Air Force Col.
Doug Menarchik, who organized the $150,000 study for the Defense Department’s
Office of Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict. “After I left,
it met a quiet death.” The decision not to publish detailed scenarios was
made partly out of a fear that it could give terrorists ideas, participants
said. A draft was circulated through the Pentagon, the Justice Department
and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, but senior agency officials
ultimately decided against a public release. (Source: Washington Post,
October 2, 2001, “Before Attack, U.S. Expected Different Hit, Chemical,
Germ Agents Focus of Preparations,” by Jo Warrick and Joe Stephens)
Three incidents of attempted attacks on buildings using airplanes took
place during 1994. The first, in April of that year, involved a Federal
Express flight engineer who was facing dismissal. He boarded a DC-10 as
a passenger and invaded the cockpit, planning to crash the plane into a
company building in Memphis, but was overpowered by the crew. The second
came that September, when a lone pilot crashed a stolen single-engine Cessna
into a tree on the White House grounds just short of the president’s bedroom.
The third was the December hijacking of an Air France flight in Algiers
by the Armed Islamic Group. The hijackers had the plane land in Marseilles
and ordered it loaded with 27 tons of fuel, three times the amount required
to reach Paris. Their aim was to crash it into the Eiffel Tower. French
special forces stormed the plane on the ground. (Source: New York Times,
October 3, 2001, “Earlier Hijackings Offered Signals That Were Missed,”
by Matthew Wald)
In January 1995, Philippine police arrested and tortured Abdul Hakim
Murad in a Manila apartment where bomb-making equipment was found. He told
them of plans to plant timed explosive devices on 11 US airliners simultaneously,
and to crash-land an airplane into CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
The preparations were so far advanced that Murad detailed the specific
flights targeted, most of them trans-Pacific flights which would explode
over the ocean. Murad had attended flying schools in the United States,
earned a commercial pilot’s license, and told investigators he was to fly
the plane into CIA headquarters. Another Islamic fundamentalist was to
fly a second plane into the Pentagon. (Source: Washington Post, September
23, “Borderless Network of Terror, Bin Laden Followers Reach Across Globe,”
by Doug Struck, Howard Schneider, Karl Vick and Peter Baker)
Later that year, the alleged organizer of the first World Trade Center
bombing, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, was captured in Pakistan, turned over to US
agents and flown back to the United States for trial. On the flight, Yousef
reportedly boasted to FBI agent Brian Parr and the other agents guarding
him that he had narrowly missed several opportunities to blow up a dozen
airliners on a single day over the Pacific and to carry out a kamikaze-type
suicide attack on CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Yousef was referring
to the same plot for which Abdul Hakim Murad had been arrested in the Philippines.
Murad was extradited to the United States, where his testimony played a
major role in Yousef’s trial and conviction. (Source: John Cooley, Unholy
Wars, New York, NY, 2000, p. 247)
Early in 1996, US officials had identified crop-dusters and suicide
flights as potential terrorist weapons, and began taking elaborate steps
to prevent an attack from the air during the Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta.
Black Hawk helicopters and US Customs Service jets were deployed to intercept
suspicious aircraft in the skies over the Olympic venues. Agents monitored
crop-duster flights within hundreds of miles of downtown Atlanta. Law enforcement
agents also fanned out to regional airports throughout northern Georgia
“to make sure nobody hijacked a small aircraft and tried to attack one
of the venues,” said Woody Johnson, the FBI agent in charge of the Atlanta
office at the time. From July 6 through the end of the Games on August
11, the FAA banned all aviation within a one-mile radius of the Olympic
Village that housed the athletes. It also ordered aircraft to stay at least
three miles away from other sites beginning three hours before each event
until three hours after each event ended. (Source: Los Angeles Times, November
17, 2001, “Suicide Flights and Crop Dusters Considered Threats at ’96 Olympics,”
by Mark Fineman and Judy Pasternak)
As early as 1996 the FBI began investigating the activities of Arab
students at US flight schools. Government officials admitted that “law
enforcement officials were aware that fewer than a dozen people with links
to bin Laden had attended US flight schools.” FBI agents visited two flight
schools in 1996 to get information about several Arab pilots who received
training there. The two schools were among those attended by Abdul Hakim
Murad, who had told Philippine and US police about plans to fly a hijacked
plane into CIA headquarters. In 1998 FBI agents questioned officials from
Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma about a graduate identified in
court testimony as a pilot for Osama bin Laden. This was the school later
attended by Zacarias Moussaoui. A Washington Post article concludes: “Since
1996, the FBI had been developing evidence that international terrorists
were using US flight schools to learn to fly jumbo jets. A foiled plot
in Manila to blow up U.S. airliners and later court testimony by an associate
of bin Laden had touched off FBI inquiries at several schools, officials
say.” (Source: Washington Post, September 23, 2001, “FBI Knew Terrorists
Were Using Flight Schools,” by Steve Fainaru and James V. Grimaldi)
In the run-up to the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, there was active
consideration of the danger of “a fully loaded, fuelled airliner crashing
into the opening ceremony before a worldwide television audience,” according
to former Sydney police superintendent Paul McKinnon. Osama bin Laden was
considered the number threat, he said. IOC officials said plane-crash catastrophes
have been incorporated into security planning for every Olympics since
1972. “That was our nightmare scenario,” one IOC official said. There were
extensive IOC discussions with the FBI during 2001 in the course of the
security planning for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. (Source:
Sydney Morning Herald, September 20, 2001, “Jet crash on stadium was Olympics
nightmare,” by Jacquelin Magnay)
The 2000 edition of the Federal Aviation Administration’s annual report
on Criminal Acts Against Aviation, published early in 2001, said that although
bin Laden “is not known to have attacked civil aviation, he has both the
motivation and the wherewithal to do so,” adding, “Bin Laden’s anti-Western
and anti-American attitudes make him and his followers a significant threat
to civil aviation, particularly to US civil aviation.” (Source: FAA)
Beginning in early 2001 a trial was held in New York City of four defendants
charged with involvement in the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya
and Tanzania. The trial revealed that two bin Laden operatives had received
pilot training in Texas and Oklahoma and another had been asked to take
lessons. L’Houssaine Kherchtou, a bin Laden associate turned government
witness, told the court how he was asked to take flying lessons in 1993.
Another bin Laden aide, Essam al-Ridi, testified that he had bought a military
aircraft for bin Laden and flown it to Sudan. Al-Ridi became a government
witness in 1998, giving the FBI inside information about a pilot-training
scheme three years before the September 11 attack. While the proceedings
of the trial extended from February to July 2001, they did not produce
any heightened alert in relation to US commercial aviation. (Source: Court
transcript available at www.cryptome.org )
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