More details emerge on reports of terrorist activity before 9-11 attacks... [Story is up]

Drudge Report ^ | 2-23-04

[Headfulofghosts]

Which hijacker was it? If, it is Nawaf Alhazmi and or Khalid Almihdhar, sorry, but I'm going to have to laugh then hit my head, on the computer.

[HRoarke]

Didn't you know, Haliburton and Enron now own the patent on them and they're hiding the motors from everyone but Dick Cheney. :)

[realpatriot]

"Who is John Galt?(!)"

[blam]

"Who is John Galt?(!)"

$$$$$$$

[Skywarner]

If this story pans out, don't expect to hear much about it on the mainstream news outlets for a while. They're all too busy giving free publicity to the many faces and personalities of John F'n Kerry. ["Stop talking about Vietnam." "Did you know I was in Vietnam?" "Stop attacking my service in Vietnam" "Hey, let me tell you about my tour of duty in Vietnam. I got a chest full of medals to prove it." "I'm the nominee, so debate me." "I'm not the nominee yet, so why are you campaigning against me?" Ad naseum.] Which Kerry will we see today? And how will he sping this latest info to be President Bush's fault? I'm sure he'll find a way...

[The Mayor]

bump to that !

[rintense]

They'll say Bush had the names the day he took office, and waited too long to do something. Of course, we all know that had Bubba refrained from cigars (*ahem*)... yeah, wishful thinking, I guess. Apparently, it was more important to get a puff and a blow than it was to capture terrorists.

[BluegrassScholar]

The story is now posted on the front page of the New York Times online edition.

[Beck_isright]

If Osama wasn't an intern, Bubba nor Kerry could care less.

[unixfox]

C.I.A. Was Given Data on Hijacker Long Before 9/11
By JAMES RISEN and ERIC LICHTBLAU

ASHINGTON, Feb. 23 — American investigators were given the first name and telephone number of one of the Sept. 11 hijackers two and a half years before the attacks on New York and Washington, but the United States appears to have failed to pursue the lead aggressively, American and German officials say.

The information — the earliest known signal that the United States received about any of the hijackers — has now become an important element of an independent commission's investigation into the events of Sept. 11, 2001, officials said Monday. It is considered particularly significant because it may have represented a missed opportunity for American officials to penetrate the Qaeda terror cell in Germany that was at the heart of the plot. And it came roughly 16 months before the hijacker showed up at flight schools in the United States.

In March 1999, German intelligence officials gave the Central Intelligence Agency the first name and telephone number of Marwan al-Shehhi, and asked the Americans to track him.

The name and phone number in the United Arab Emirates had been obtained by the Germans by monitoring the telephone of Mohamed Heidar Zammar, an Islamic extremist in Hamburg who was closely linked to the important Qaeda plotters who ultimately mastermined the Sept. 11 attacks, German officials said.

After the Germans passed the information on to the C.I.A., they did not hear from the Americans about the matter until after Sept. 11, a senior German intelligence official said. "There was no response" at the time, the official said. After receiving the tip, the C.I.A. decided that "Marwan" was probably an associate of Osama bin Laden, but never tracked him down, American officials say.

The Germans considered the information on Mr. Shehhi particularly valuable, and the commission is keenly interested in why it apparently did not lead to greater scrutiny of him.

The information concerning Mr. Shehhi, the man who took over the controls of United Airlines Flight 175, which flew into the south tower of the World Trade Center, came months earlier than well-documented tips about other hijackers, including two who were discovered to have attended a meeting of extremists in Malaysia in January 2000.

The independent commission investigating the attacks has received information on the 1999 Shehhi tip, and is actively investigating the issue, said Philip Zelikow, executive director of the commission.

American intelligence officials and others involved with the matter say they are uncertain whether Mr. Shehhi's phone was ever monitored.

An American official said: "The Germans did give us the name `Marwan' and a phone number, but we were unable to come up with anything. It was an unlisted phone number in the U.A.E., which he was known to use."

The incident is of particular importance because Mr. Shehhi was a crucial member of the Qaeda cell in Hamburg at the heart of the Sept. 11 plot. Close surveillance of Mr. Shehhi in 1999 might have led investigators to other plot leaders, including Mohammed Atta, who was Mr. Shehhi's roommate. A native of the United Arab Emirates, Mr. Shehhi moved to Germany in 1996 and was almost inseparable from Mr. Atta in their time there. Both men attended the wedding of a fellow Muslim at a radical mosque in Hamburg in October 1999 — an event considered an important gathering for the Sept. 11 hijacking teams just as the plotting was getting under way. American and European authorities say that Mr. Shehhi was actively involved in the planning and logistics of the Sept. 11 plot.

"The Hamburg cell is very important" to the investigation of the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Zelikow said. The intelligence on Mr. Shehhi "is an issue that's obviously of importance to us, and we're investigating it," he added.

Asked whether American intelligence officials gave sufficient attention to the information about Mr. Shehhi, Mr. Zelikow said, "We haven't reached any conclusions."

The joint Congressional inquiry that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks was told about the matter by the C.I.A., but only a small part of the information was declassified and made public in the panel's final report in December 2002, several officials said. The public report mentioned only that the C.I.A. had received Mr. Shehhi's first name, but made no mention that the agency had also obtained his telephone number.

Officials involved with the work of the joint Congressional investigation made it clear that the publication of a more complete version of the story was the subject of a declassification dispute with the C.I.A. A former official involved with the Congressional inquiry acknowledged that having a telephone number for one of the hijackers was far more significant than simply having a first name.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the C.I.A., F.B.I. and other government agencies have been heavily criticized for failing to put together fragmentary pieces of information they received from a wide array of sources in order to predict or prevent the terrorist plot. The joint Congressional panel that investigated the attacks concluded that American authorities "missed opportunities to disrupt the Sept. 11 plot by denying entry to or detaining would-be hijackers; to at least try to unravel the plot through surveillance and other investigative work within the United States; and finally, to generate a heightened state of alert and thus harden the homeland against attack."

Until now, the most highly scrutinized failure has related to the C.I.A.'s handling of information about a meeting of extremists in Malaysia in January 2000 that involved two of the men who would become hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhazmi. Although the C.I.A. identified the two men as suspected extremists, the agency did not request that they be placed on the government's watch lists to keep them out of the United States until late August 2001. By that time, they were both already in the country. In addition, while the two men lived in San Diego, their landlord was an F.B.I. informant, but the bureau did not learn of their terrorist links from the informant.

But unlike the leads to Mr. Midhar and Mr. Alhazmi in San Diego, the earlier information about Mr. Shehhi could have taken investigators to the core of the Qaeda cell at a time when the plot was probably in its formative stages. According to testimony in Germany in December in a criminal case related to the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Shehhi was one of only four members of the Hamburg cell who knew about the attacks beforehand.

Mr. Shehhi and Mr. Atta traveled to Afghanistan in 2000 to train at a Qaeda camp with several other Sept. 11 plotters. And after returning to Germany, Mr. Shehhi made an ominous reference to the World Trade Center to a Hamburg librarian, saying: "There will be thousands of dead. You will all think of me," German authorities said.

Soon after, Mr. Shehhi, Mr. Atta and another plotter, Ziad al-Jarrah, began e-mailing several dozen American flight schools from Germany to inquire about enrollment, and they arrived in the United States later in 2000 to begin flight training.

[unixfox]

Looks like an explanation er... make that a lie is in order for X42. But I'm not holding my breath.

[CalifornianConservative]

Yer forgettin' that Bubba scrambled to the second Situation Room like a scared puppy once news came through about TWA Flight 800 went down in summer of 1996, believing it was terrorism. (Probably was someone with a Stinger missile, but I won't go there because I don't really know enough about it)

George Stephanopolis foolishly spilled this news in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Oh, Bubba knew all too well about the rising threat of terrorism. He just knew that he wasn't going to admit he's lost the "peace" after the Cold War was over, and could not get his mind around the incredibly difficult military issues that plague George W. now.

Kinda sad for Clintoon. If you calculate that the very last gasp of the Cold War was the KGB uprising in 1992 to the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, he really didn't have all that long of a time to enjoy the "peace". But then again, if he had been smarter about foreign policy, he would have known that the KGB trained the PLO and Arab terrorists for years.

To liberals all this stuff is immaterial because they have a child's point of view that America is the big Daddy of countries, a Big Daddy that could never run out of money or lose its military edge.

[CalifornianConservative]

Forgot to add that like children, liberals have no idea how to make money or keep a strong military. That's "daddy's" job.

[SierraWasp]

Hey! I liked your analysis!!!

Welcome to FR, or is that just a new screen name?

[scarface367]

This is just one more reason to add as to why Tenet needs to be removed

[Excuse_My_Bellicosity]

You're the poster, the burden of proof is on you.

[Excuse_My_Bellicosity]

That's right, Bubba treated the first WTC bombing like a medium-severity vandalism incident.

[Mulder]

Many reports like this one were ignored by the bureacracy of both the Klinton and Bush admins prior to 9/11. James Bovard in "Terrorism and Tyranny" details many of them.

The Klinton adminstration had the FBI off chasing guys in Idaho with sawed-off shotguns, while ignoring the real threats.

And the Bush adminstration sought to cover up these stories because they love big gov't and *any* story that would cast doubt on the ability of Washington to "fight terrorism" was viewed as making it more difficult for them to expand the gov't under the guise of fighting terrorism.

[montag813]

[SierraWasp]

Is that an actual book? Terrific cover!!!

The instant I hear the attack happening while listening to the radio on my back porch, I came tearing into my computer to see what was on FR. The first thread I got onto I posted that Bill Clinton was responsible for a disaster that made Pearl Harbor pale by comparison!!!

That was just my gut reaction because I firmly believed there is a connection between Iraq, Saddam, John Doe II, Tim McVeigh and The OKC terrorist attack as well. I will never get over how fast that crime scene was bulldozed and how convenient it was to blame the burgeoning right wing, including Limbaugh and Congresswoman Helen Chenowith and other up-right conservatives!!!