Posted on 01/24/2005 1:22:17 AM PST by kattracks
WASHINGTON - Three decades before Al Qaeda destroyed the World Trade Center with planes, a secret presidential panel warned that Islamic terrorists might blow up U.S. jetliners or contaminate cities with radioactive "dirty bombs."The Cabinet Committee to Combat Terrorism, formed by President Richard Nixon, even asked the advice of a young prosecutor named Rudy Giuliani.
Giuliani testified in 1976 that the Justice Department, where he was a top official, "must take a more active position in combating terrorism," according to once-classified documents unearthed by The Associated Press and released yesterday.
Giuliani urged easing legal restrictions on domestic intelligence - an action not taken until the Patriot Act was signed into law weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, Al Qaeda attacks.
"Mr. Giuliani noted that ... there was difficulty in collecting domestic intelligence unless there was some indication that there had been a violation of law," the file states.
The panel found that another major problem involved a lack of communication between key agencies, said one ex-official.
"The FBI and CIA were not talking enough," Lewis Hoffacker, a committee chairman, told the Daily News. He invoked a complaint made decades later by the 9/11 commission.
The special panel was formed by Nixon after the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, where 11 Israeli athletes were killed by Palestinian terrorists. Members met for five years and developed scenarios involving attacks on Americans, but ultimately their influence waned and the panel dissolved.
Many of the documents from the panel, which continued into the Gerald Ford administration, were memos to Henry Kissinger, Nixon's national security adviser and secretary of state.
In 1972, Kissinger was warned that terrorists might acquire nuclear material for a crude dirty bomb to spread radioactive material throughout a city. "This is a real threat, not science fiction," National Security Council staffer Richard Kennedy wrote to Kissinger.
The involvement of Kissinger and Giuliani in the prescient secret think tank stunned some 9/11 victims' relatives, who have criticized the statesman and the ex-mayor for not doing enough to prevent terror attacks.
In 2002, Kissinger also was tapped by President Bush to lead the 9/11 commission before being forced to step down. Based on the new documents, his appointment then "raises new suspicions," said Kristen Breitweiser, a 9/11 widow and Bush critic.
Originally published on January 24, 2005
Nothing came of the recommendations. At the time no one heard of Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda was far into the future.
Someone's been doing some digging into his past
Hmmmmm .. wonder why?
"Among the most valuable materials are sensitive intelligence reporting won through a lawsuit by former AP reporter and hostage Terry A. Anderson, memos from Henry Kissinger to President Richard Nixon detailing terrorist incidents as they unfold" (Digital National Security Archive
Former AP reporter and hostage Terry Anderson was awarded $341 million in his suit against the Islamic Republic of Iran over his 1985 abduction in Beirut. (The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press)
Offline server
http://www.rcfp.org/news/2000/0330anders.html
Thank you for that info
However, international terrorism-especially air piracy-wasn't unheard of in the 1970s.
"Anyone at the beginning of the 1970s who forecast that terrorists would blow up jumbo jets in midair with all of their passengers on board, kidnap a head of state, run a boat filled with explosives aground on a crowded beach, set off a bomb weighing several tons in the heart of London's financial district, release nerve gas in a subway at rush hour, unleash biological weapons, hold a city hostage with a stolen or improvised nuclear weapon, or crash hijacked airliners into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center would have been dismissed as a novelist. Yet all of these events were perpetrated, attempted, or threatened."
RAND was the think tank that was commisioned by the Cabinet Committee to Combat Terrorism
http://www.rand.org/publications/randreview/issues/rr.08.02/thirtyyears.html
Since this article mentions it, one of my very Blue-State conservative hobbies is the fact that I am a HUGE film nut. I watch foreign films, independtent films, documentaries, etc. All kinds of stuff.
And one of the single best, most important films I have seen in the last few years is a documentary called 'One Day In September' by Kevin MacDonald. It isn't about 9/11, it was made about 2 years beforehand, but about the 1972 terrorist murder of the isreali athletes at the Olympics.
All I can say, is that it not only demonstrates the types of people we are fighting today, but it demonstrates why we should have been ready to deal with these types of people a LONG time ago. We should have known. Apparently, Rudy did.
Yeah, like when the Barbary States (Muslim terrorists) raided, kidnapped, confiscated and extorted from America in the late 1700's.
In the 1970s and 1980s FALN set off more than 100 bombs, most in New York and Chicago. That's what he was probably referencing.
The Caliphate-a radical group of Turkish exiles living in Germany-also planned to launch a 9/11-style attack against the mausoleum housing Kemal Ataturk's remains.
All of these plots, however, had an antecedent in the she-ming of a supposedly psychologically imbalanced, wannabe assassin, who was a domestic, non-Muslim, conspirator.
Right now, there's a major Hollywood release based upon his story.
The above should have read "scheming."
But LZ X-ray veteran turned corporate security VP Rick Rescorla was teaching his Morgan-Stanley coworkers to file out of the building rapidly. He knew.
Thirty years after Vietnam ended, who's looking out for their fellow Americans? Who's teaching their coworkers how to treat trauma and evacuate wounded? Who's warning their fellow Americans about communist and Arabist influence on our media? It's the Vietnam vet.
In the 21st century, we are going to recognize that the Vietnam veteran will have saved us twice. First it was by peppering the Russians and their VC minions with bloody hell in Vietnam. Then it was peppering the MSM from the refuge of blogs all over the Internet during the 2004 elections. What'll be next? I imagine a lot of it can't even be discussed. Vets are nudging us here, proding us there, always saying, "Be situationally aware. They're coming for us. Get ready."
We should listen. They've been telling us what to expect, but we didn't pay attention.
Hillary get his FBI file?
The vilification of Rudy has just begun. I suspect "they" are digging into every single case he ever prosecuted, and every single word he ever uttered.
The dims are terrified of him and rightly so. He is the main threat to them in 2008.
What movie?
Note the changes he suggested eventually came to be. Someone with this insight would be an asset in the WOT.
The involvement of Kissinger and Giuliani in the prescient secret think tank stunned some 9/11 victims' relatives, who have criticized the statesman and the ex-mayor for not doing enough to prevent terror attacks.
Of course they have absolutely no knowledge of what either of these men did or didn't do. And naturally, they ignore the fact that the clinton's administration did nothing.
Rudy is the only one, IMO, who could prosecute the WOT the way it needs to be. Nothing else is more important for the future of our country.
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To sign our U.S. 7th Cavalry's Petition for President BUSH to award lifetime lifesaving hero RICK RESCORLA the Presidential Medal of Freedom:
http://www.lzxray.com
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