9/11 Documents Show Hijacking Warnings

U.S. government agencies issued repeated warnings in the summer of 2001 about potential terrorist plots against the United States masterminded by Osama bin Laden (news - web sites), including a possible plan to hijack commercial aircraft, documents show.

While there were no specific targets mentioned in the United States, there was intelligence indicating al-Qaida might attempt to crash a plane into the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi. And other reports said Islamic extremists might try to hijack a plane to gain release of comrades.

The escalating seriousness was reflected in a series of warnings issued by the State Department, Federal Aviation Administration (news - web sites), Defense Department and others detailing a heightened risk of terror attacks targeting Americans.

Whether the Bush administration had enough information to take more aggressive action is at the heart of the dispute over the contents of an Aug. 6, 2001, intelligence briefing the White House was working to declassify at the urging of the commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks. White House officials said the document would not come out Friday and probably would not be ready for release until early next week.

Several Democrats on the commission claim the memo, called a presidential daily brief, or PDB, included current intelligence indicating a high threat of hijackings. It was titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack Inside the United States."

"Something was going to happen very soon and be potentially catastrophic," said one of the Democrats, former Indiana Rep. Timothy Roemer. "I don't understand, given the big threat, why the big principals don't get together."

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice (news - web sites) repeatedly told the panel Thursday that the document was a history of al-Qaida threats and contained no new imminent threat information requiring different government action. The possibility of hijackings was being investigated by the FBI (news - web sites) and the Federal Aviation Administration, she said, adding that most of the summer 2001 threats concerned U.S. interests abroad.

"The country had taken the steps that it could given that there was no threat reporting about what might happen within the United States," Rice said.

Congress already has conducted an investigation into the attacks and its final report includes a detailed timeline of the increasing threats U.S. officials picked up during the summer of 2001. It also includes some of the material from the PDB.

The memo mentioned intelligence that bin Laden wanted to hijack aircraft to gain release of prisoners in the United States. The PDB also contains FBI information about "patterns of activity consistent with preparations for hijackings or other attacks," according to congressional investigators.

A key event occurred on June 21, 2001, when a federal grand jury in Alexandria, Va., returned a 46-count indictment charging 13 Saudis and one Lebanese with the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers complex in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 U.S. service personnel.

Rumors of the coming indictment had been circulating for weeks before that, according to officials familiar with the intelligence, leading to increased worries that terrorists might take some action in connection with the case.

The next day, June 22, the FAA issued a nationwide circular "referring to a possible hijacking plot by Islamic terrorists to secure release of 14 persons incarcerated in the United States" in the Khobar Towers case. In fact, the 14 were still at large, although the circular did not mention that. They remain fugitives to this day.

_ A worldwide caution issued June 22 by the State Department warning Americans abroad of increased risk of terror attacks.

_ Four Defense Department alerts between June 22 and July 20 alerting U.S. military personnel that "bin Laden's network was planning a near-term, anti-U.S. terrorist operation."

_ A July 2 bulletin from the FBI to federal, state and local law enforcement agencies describing "increased threat reporting" about bin Laden or groups allied with al-Qaida. The bulletin suggested the greatest risk of an attack was overseas "although the possibility could not be discounted" of an attack inside the United States.

_ Intelligence received by U.S. agencies in August about the plot to either bomb the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi from an airplane or crash an aircraft into the building. The report cited two unidentified people who met in October 2000 to discuss this plot on instructions from bin Laden.

A senior law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the FBI issued at least two other bulletins in 2001 about the terror threat intelligence but did not include directives for field offices to take specific actions because there was no imminent threat to the homeland.

There had been numerous earlier reports of bin Laden's interest in using aircraft for terror attacks, including a 1998 plot to fly an explosives-laden plane from a foreign country into the World Trade Center and an April 2000 plot to hijack a Boeing 747 and either fly it to Afghanistan (news - web sites) or blow up.

But in December 2000, the FBI and FAA issued a classified threat assessment that played down the possibility of a threat to domestic aviation from terror operatives known to be in the United States.

"Terrorist activity within the U.S. has focused primarily on fund-raising, recruiting new members and disseminating propaganda," that report says. "While international terrorists have conducted attacks on U.S. soil, these acts represent anomalies in their traditional targeting which focuses on U.S. interests overseas."

The congressional intelligence inquiry's report suggests that this mind-set, less than a year before the Sept. 11 attacks, may have contributed to an overall U.S. view that there was a low probability of attacks on American soil, particularly using aircraft as weapons.

a day after (FORMER) President Clinton told commissioners that intelligence wasn't strong enough to justify a retaliation against al-Qaida for the 2000 bombing of a Navy ship.

How much MORE intelligence did he need?!

September 02, 2003

Bill Clinton's failure on terrorism

By Richard Miniter

Part one of an exclusive four-part series of excerpts.

Clinton administration counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke attended a meeting with Secretary of Defense William Cohen, Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Attorney General Janet Reno, and others. Several others were in the room, including Leon Fuerth, Gore's national security advisor; Jim Steinberg, the deputy National Security Advisor; and Michael Sheehan, the State Department's coordinator for counterterrorism. An American warship had been attacked without warning in a "friendly" harbor — and, at the time, no one knew if the ship's pumps could keep it afloat for the night. Now they had to decide what to do about it.

Mr. Clarke had no doubts about whom to punish. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had compiled thick binders of bin Laden and Taliban targets in Afghanistan, complete with satellite photographs and GPS bomb coordinates — the Pentagon's "target decks." The detailed plan was "to level" every bin Laden training camp and compound in Afghanistan as well as key Taliban buildings in Kabul and Kandahar. "Let's blow them up," Clarke said. . . . Around the table, Clarke heard only objections — not a mandate for action.

This is how Clarke remembers the meeting, which has never before been described in the press. . . . Attorney General Janet Reno insisted that they had no clear idea who had actually carried out the attack. The "Justice [Department] also noted, as always, that any use of force had to be consistent with international law, i.e. not retaliation but self protection from future attack," Clarke told the author. Reno could not be reached for comment.

Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet joined Reno in insisting on an investigation before launching a retaliatory strike. Tenet "did not want a months-long investigation," CIA spokesman Bill Harlow said. "He simply believed that before the United States attacked, it ought to know for sure who was behind the Cole bombing." While Tenet noted that the CIA had not reached a conclusion about what terror group was behind the surprise attack on the USS Cole, "he said personally he thought that it would turn out to be al Qaeda," Clarke recalls.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was also against a counterstrike — but for diplomatic reasons. "We're desperately trying to halt the fighting that has broken out between Israel and the Palestinians," Albright said. Clarke recalls her saying, "Bombing Muslims wouldn't be helpful at this time." Some two weeks earlier, Ariel Sharon had visited the Temple Mount in Jerusalem, which touched off a wave of violence known as the "second Intifada" and threatened to completely destroy the Clinton Administration's hopes for Middle East peace settlement.

Mr. Clarke remembers other objections from the State Department. "State noted that we had been bombing Iraq and Serbia and were getting the reputation internationally as a mad bomber nation that could only address its problems that way." "It would be irresponsible," a spokeswoman for Albright told the author, for the Secretary of State, as America's chief diplomat, not to consider the diplomatic impact of a missile strike that might try but would quite likely fail to kill bin Laden.

Albright urged continued diplomatic efforts to persuade the Taliban to turn over bin Laden. Those efforts had been going on for more than two years and had gone nowhere. It was unlikely that the Taliban would ever voluntarily turn over its strongest internal ally. . . .

Secretary of Defense Cohen also did not favor a retaliatory strike, according to Mr. Clarke. The attack "was not sufficient provocation," Clarke remembers Cohen saying, or words to that effect. Cohen thought that any military strike needed a "clear and compelling justification," Clarke recalls. (Cohen, despite repeated phone calls over more than one week, failed to respond to interview requests.) Cohen also noted that General Anthony Zinni, then head of CENTCOM, was concerned that a major bombing campaign would cause domestic unrest in Pakistan (where bin Laden enjoyed strong support among extremists) and hurt the U.S. military's relationship with that nation.

Mr. Cohen's views were perfectly in accord with those of the top uniformed officers and Clinton's political appointees at the Pentagon, Sheehan told the author. "It was the entire Pentagon," he added. The chief lesson that the Defense Department seemed to draw from the assault on the USS Cole was the need for better security for its ships, what was invariably called "force protection." Listening to Cohen and later talking to top military officers, Sheehan, a former member of Special Forces before joining the State Department, told the author that he was "stunned" and "taken aback" by their views. "This phenomenon I cannot explain," he said. Why didn't they want to go hit back at those who had just murdered American servicemen without warning or provocation?

The issue was hotly debated. Some of the principals were concerned that bin Laden might somehow survive the cruise-missile attack and appear in another triumphant press conference. Clarke countered by saying that they could say that they were only targeting terrorist infrastructure. If they got bin Laden, they could take that as a bonus. Others worried about target information. At the time, Clarke said that he had very reliable and specific information about bin Laden's location. And so on. Each objection was countered and answered with a yet another objection.

In the end, for a variety of reasons, the principals were against Mr. Clarke's retaliation plan by a margin of seven to one against. Mr. Clarke was the sole one in favor. Bin Laden would get away — again.

Richard Miniter is the author of "Losing bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror." The excerpts are from that book.

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