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any thoughts?
Nov. 5th, 2003 11:17 pmThe conclusion about Al-Qaeda, stated again and again for years by government analysts, was basically: "They're coming, by air. Get prepared. They're well-organized, determined, and technically adept. And they want to hit big targets, well-known symbols of America." (There was a 1999 U.S. government study, for example, that pointed out that Al-Qaeda suicide-bombers wanted to crash aircraft into a number of significant Washington targets; during the 1995 trial of Ramsi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, he revealed plans to dive-bomb a plane into CIA headquarters, and earlier he had told FBI agents that the list was expanded to include the Pentagon and other D.C. targets.)
Elements in the FBI, all over the country, who suspected what was coming, were clamoring, begging, for more agents to be used for counter-terrorism investigations, but were turned down by Attorney General Ashcroft; Ashcroft also gave counter-terrorism short shrift in his budget plans, not even placing anti-terrorism on his priority list; John O'Neill, the FBI's NYC antiterrorism director, resigned, asserting that his attempts at full-scale investigating were being thwarted by higher-ups; someone in the FBI, perhaps on orders of someone higher-up, made sure that the local FBI investigation in Minneapolis of Zacaria Moussauoi was compromised. All this while Ashcroft was shredding the Constitution in his martial law-like desire to amass information, and continues even now to further expand his police-state powers.
(Note: An FBI agent has filed official complaints over the bureau's interfering with antiterrorism investigations; his lawyers include David Schippers, who worked for the GOP side in the Clinton impeachment effort; Schippers says the agent knew in May 2001 that "an attack on lower Manhattan was imminent." A former FBI official said: "I don't buy the idea that we didn't know what was coming...Within 24 hours [of the attack], the Bureau had about 20 people identified, and photos were sent out to the news media. Obviously this information was available in the files and someone was sitting on it.")
Not only were there clear warnings from allies abroad, but the U.S., through its ECHELON and other electronic-intercept programs, may well have broken bin Laden's encryption code; for example, the U.S. knew that he told his mother on September 9: "In two days you're going to hear big news, and you're not going to hear from me for a while".
And, the word of an impending attack was getting out: put options (hedges that a stock's price is going to fall) in enormous quantities were being bought on United Airlines and American Airlines stock, the two carriers of the hijackers, as early as September 7; San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown was warned by "an airport security man" on September 10 to rethink his flight to New York for the next day; Newsweek reported that on September 10, "a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns"; many members of a Bronx mosque were also warned to stay out of lower Manhattan on September 11, etc. etc.
...They also knew, from innumerable intelligence reports from telecommunications intercepts, and from various commissions, CIA and foreign agents that Al-Qaeda liked to blow up symbolic icon structures of countries targeted, and that Al-Qaeda, and its affiliates, had an affinity for trying to use airplanes as psychological or actual weapons. (The French had foiled one such attack in 1994, where a hijacked commercial airliner would be flown into the Eiffel Tower.)
By early 2001 and into the Summer, warnings were pouring in to U.S. intelligence and military agencies from Jordan, Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, Israel, and other Middle East and South Asian intelligence sources, along with Russia and Britain and the Philippines, saying that a major attack on the U.S. Mainland was in the works, involving the use of airplanes as weapons of mass destruction.
Indeed, in June and July of 2001, the alerts started to be explicit that air attacks were about to go down in the U.S.; even local FBI offices in Phoenix and Minneapolis began passing warnings up the line about Middle Eastern men acting suspiciously at flight schools. In July, Ashcroft stopped flying on commercial airliners and traveled only by private plane, and Bush, after but a few months in office, announced he was going to ground, spending the month of August on his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Cheney disappeared from view, and our guess is that he was coordinating the overall, post-attack strategy.
from: http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0601-01.htm
Elements in the FBI, all over the country, who suspected what was coming, were clamoring, begging, for more agents to be used for counter-terrorism investigations, but were turned down by Attorney General Ashcroft; Ashcroft also gave counter-terrorism short shrift in his budget plans, not even placing anti-terrorism on his priority list; John O'Neill, the FBI's NYC antiterrorism director, resigned, asserting that his attempts at full-scale investigating were being thwarted by higher-ups; someone in the FBI, perhaps on orders of someone higher-up, made sure that the local FBI investigation in Minneapolis of Zacaria Moussauoi was compromised. All this while Ashcroft was shredding the Constitution in his martial law-like desire to amass information, and continues even now to further expand his police-state powers.
(Note: An FBI agent has filed official complaints over the bureau's interfering with antiterrorism investigations; his lawyers include David Schippers, who worked for the GOP side in the Clinton impeachment effort; Schippers says the agent knew in May 2001 that "an attack on lower Manhattan was imminent." A former FBI official said: "I don't buy the idea that we didn't know what was coming...Within 24 hours [of the attack], the Bureau had about 20 people identified, and photos were sent out to the news media. Obviously this information was available in the files and someone was sitting on it.")
Not only were there clear warnings from allies abroad, but the U.S., through its ECHELON and other electronic-intercept programs, may well have broken bin Laden's encryption code; for example, the U.S. knew that he told his mother on September 9: "In two days you're going to hear big news, and you're not going to hear from me for a while".
And, the word of an impending attack was getting out: put options (hedges that a stock's price is going to fall) in enormous quantities were being bought on United Airlines and American Airlines stock, the two carriers of the hijackers, as early as September 7; San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown was warned by "an airport security man" on September 10 to rethink his flight to New York for the next day; Newsweek reported that on September 10, "a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns"; many members of a Bronx mosque were also warned to stay out of lower Manhattan on September 11, etc. etc.
...They also knew, from innumerable intelligence reports from telecommunications intercepts, and from various commissions, CIA and foreign agents that Al-Qaeda liked to blow up symbolic icon structures of countries targeted, and that Al-Qaeda, and its affiliates, had an affinity for trying to use airplanes as psychological or actual weapons. (The French had foiled one such attack in 1994, where a hijacked commercial airliner would be flown into the Eiffel Tower.)
By early 2001 and into the Summer, warnings were pouring in to U.S. intelligence and military agencies from Jordan, Morocco, Egypt, Tunisia, Israel, and other Middle East and South Asian intelligence sources, along with Russia and Britain and the Philippines, saying that a major attack on the U.S. Mainland was in the works, involving the use of airplanes as weapons of mass destruction.
Indeed, in June and July of 2001, the alerts started to be explicit that air attacks were about to go down in the U.S.; even local FBI offices in Phoenix and Minneapolis began passing warnings up the line about Middle Eastern men acting suspiciously at flight schools. In July, Ashcroft stopped flying on commercial airliners and traveled only by private plane, and Bush, after but a few months in office, announced he was going to ground, spending the month of August on his ranch in Crawford, Texas. Cheney disappeared from view, and our guess is that he was coordinating the overall, post-attack strategy.
from: http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0601-01.htm
