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Posted on 04/08/2004 10:43:37 AM PDT by Ragtime Cowgirl
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Nor read some WWII history.
Al-Qaeda's secrets are a part of their intelligence training?
(They are 'bankers' and 'poppy' investors?)
/sarcasm
There are warnings about everything. If you dig, you can always find warning signs. The question is, were those warning signs significant enough to take action? Apparently not, or the warnings might have trickled up to a higher level. All the little pieces never got put together and stayed down at a low level. Hindsight is a great thing.
Hey, even the Columbine shooters had a website saying they were going to hijack an airliner and crash it into downtown Boulder. Face it, the 9/11 plot was planned and executed on a High School level, but the greatest minds in the US defense system couldn't figure it out.
Sorry, but heads gotta roll so that next time the Feds stamp it out before it happens or at least err on the side of caution. Hell with sensitivity training for people who blow the whistle on our islamic "guests".
Doomed!
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Cos hey, I'm not FBI but remember a pre 9/11 TV interview with bin laden where he said "America is going to get a big surprise."
Yeah its such a pity when supercriminals don't announce the precise time place and manner of their next attack.
Yeah... this is right. I never understood the claims that this was "a highly coordinated strategic attack" like it was difficult to accomplish.
The intelligence services knew about this threat. Whether the exec branch knew or not is unclear. We probably won't know for another 30-40 years.
"Hindsight is a great thing." We have a number of government agencies with huge budgets, influence and resources whose sole purpose is to protect Americans. They obviously failed.
The 'INS' and its 'State' NEVER fail!
/sarcasm
And you expect huge bureaucracies to succeed?
In 1999, British intelligence gave a secret report to the US embassy. The report stated that al-Qaeda had plans to use "commercial aircraft" in "unconventional ways", "possibly as flying bombs." [Sunday Times, 6/9/02] On July 16, 2001, British intelligence passed a message to the US that al-Qaeda was in "the final stages" of preparing a terrorist attack in Western countries. [London Times, 6/14/02] In early August, the British gave another warning, telling the US to expect multiple airline hijackings from al-Qaeda. This warning was included in Bush's briefing on August 6, 2001. [Sunday Herald, 5/19/02]
In June 2001, German intelligence warned the US, Britain, and Israel that Middle Eastern terrorists were planning to hijack commercial aircraft and use them as weapons to attack "American and Israeli symbols which stand out." Within the American intelligence community, "the warnings were taken seriously and surveillance intensified" but "there was disagreement on how such terrorist attacks could be prevented." This warning came from Echelon, a spy satellite network that is partly based in Germany. [Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 9/11/01, Washington Post, 9/14/01]
In late July 2001, Egyptian intelligence received a report from an undercover agent in Afghanistan that "20 al-Qaeda members had slipped into the US and four of them had received flight training on Cessnas." To the Egyptians, pilots of small planes didn't sound terribly alarming, but they passed on the message to the CIA anyway, fully expecting Washington to request information. "The request never came." [CBS, 10/9/02] Given that there were 19 hijackers and four pilots (who trained on Cessnas) in the 9/11 plot, one might think this would now be a big news item. But in fact, the information has only appeared as an aside in a CBS "60 Minutes" show about a different topic.
In late summer 2001, Jordan intelligence intercepted a message stating that a major attack was being planned inside the US and that aircraft would be used. The code name of the operation was Big Wedding, which did in fact turn out to be the codename of the 9/11 plot. The message was passed to US intelligence through several channels. [International Herald Tribune, 5/21/02, Christian Science Monitor, 5/23/02]
Russian President Vladimir Putin publicly stated that he ordered his intelligence agencies to alert the US in the summer of 2001 that suicide pilots were training for attacks on US targets. [Fox News, 5/17/02] The head of Russian intelligence also stated, "We had clearly warned them" on several occasions, but they "did not pay the necessary attention." [Agence France-Presse, 9/16/01] The Russian newspaper Izvestia claimed that Russian intelligence agents knew the participants in the attacks, and: "More than that, Moscow warned Washington about preparation for these actions a couple of weeks before they happened." [Izvestia, 9/12/02]
Five days before 9/11, the priest Jean-Marie Benjamin was told by a Muslim at an Italian wedding of a plot to attack the US and Britain using hijacked airplanes as weapons. He wasn't told time or place specifics. He immediately passed what he knew on to a judge and several politicians in Italy. Presumably this Muslim confided in him because Benjamin has done considerable charity work in Muslim countries and is considered "one of the West's most knowledgeable experts on the Muslim world." [Zenit, 9/16/01]
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Who, as an elected or appointed federal worker serving in DC between '98 and 9-11-01, wasn't familiar with the threat Al Qaeda posed to this nation (John Kerry, Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Robert Byrd, Dick Clarke, all charged with helping to defend our nation)?...Long before President Bush and Conde Rice rode into town to clean up after the Clintons....
(July, '99, almost a year after Clinton launched missiles at the Taliban on the eve of his testimony re. Monica Lewinski)
The Boston Globe, on the 25th, said, "The 6-year-old boy watched intently as his father dusted off his favorite possession, a leather-bound scrapbook of Osama bin Laden, pausing at a photo of the Saudi dissident with a semiautomatic rifle tucked in the folds of his trademark white robe. ''Osama!'' his son squealed excitedly. ''That's me!'' The boy, whose name was changed to Osama last year, is one of hundreds of Pakistani children named for bin Laden since Aug. 20, 1998 - the day the United States launched missile strikes against alleged terrorist camps run by the Saudi millionaire in eastern Afghanistan. The attack sparked outrage throughout the Muslim world. But the response was particularly heated in Pakistan, which sends thousands of Islamic guerrillas to similar training camps in Afghanistan. ''I love his bravery and gallantry,'' the boy's father, Niaz Ali Salar, said of bin Laden. ''He boosted the morale of Muslims throughout the world.'' The local leader of the radical Barelvi sect of Muslims, Salar said he hoped his son would ''live up to his name'' and lead the war against ''the enemies of Islam.'' In Mardan, a crumbling tobacco center 75 miles east of the Afghan border, Islamic priests deliver diatribes against ''evil America'' during Friday afternoon prayers.
In Pakistan, few buy Washington's vilification of bin Laden, whom it accuses of masterminding the Aug. 7, 1998, bombings of two US embassies in east Africa and several other terrorist attacks. ''He's a man on the run, whose only friends are the Taliban. How can he be a threat to the world's most powerful nation?'' said Sahib Zada Khalid Jan Binuri, head of Pakistan's most influential Islamic seminary. ''It's all spin control. If America tells me, `You are a terrorist,' what can I say?''
(character counts in a US President who's fighting evildoers!)
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