Early Warnings: Pre-Sept. 11 Cautions Went Unheeded

ABCNEWS ^ | Tuesday, February 19, 2002

[JohnHuang2]

Feb. 18 — The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, the worst in U.S. history, came as a complete surprise to U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

There were no alerts, no increased security, no warnings. An ABCNEWS investigation of the failure of intelligence on Sept. 11 has found a trail of missed signals, missed opportunities, and warnings ignored.

There were warnings about the possibility of an airborne terrorist attack on U.S. targets as early as 1994, when terrorism expert Marvin Cetron underlined the threat in a report to the Pentagon.

"We saw Osama bin Laden. We spelled it out and we said the United States was very vulnerable," Cetron told ABCNEWS. "You could make a left turn at the Washington Monument and take out the White House. And you could make a right turn and take out the Pentagon."

Cetron said he warned the Pentagon that two events earlier that year — the crash-landing of a small airplane at the White House by an apparently unstable man, and French authorities' storming of a hijacked airliner that Algerian terrorists had planned to fly into the Eiffel Tower — made an airborne terrorist attack on the United States a very real possibility. "We knew that was going happen and we were scared," he told ABCNEWS.

But Cetron said Pentagon officials told him to delete the warning from the report. "I said, 'It's unclassified, everything is available,' and they said, 'We don't want it released because you can't handle a crisis before it becomes a crisis, and no one is going to believe it anyhow,' " Cetron said. Even with the warnings of an airborne attack deleted, the report was not released to the public.

Aversion to Risk

Four years later, in 1998, U.S. authorities faced a terrorist crisis with the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The United States accused bin Laden of involvement, and Congress and the Clinton administration commissioned two new reports on terrorism.

Both of the reports rang alarm bells, but little was done.

The reports noted that the United States had virtually no human intelligence sources inside groups like bin Laden's al Qaeda.

"We found that over the years both the overseas intelligence community, and at home the FBI had developed a risk aversion," said Paul Bremer, chairman of the National Commission on Terrorism, which released its report in 2000.

An aversion to risk meant that the CIA failed to penetrate al Qaeda with a single agent, according to U.S. intelligence sources.

The reports criticized Clinton administration guidelines restricting U.S. intelligence agencies from hiring informants with questionable human rights records.

"You don't get too many monks or nuns to get information for the CIA," said former Sen. Warren Rudman, who co-chaired the U.S. Commission on National Security, which submitted its report to Congress in three parts, beginning in June 2000. "There are some pretty rotten people, some of them with pretty bad records. But if they had the information that would protect our national security, we damn well should have used them."

Critics say the United States was too dependent on satellites and other high-tech means to gather intelligence on bin Laden's network, and that there was a shortage of people to translate and analyze the vast amounts of data.

For example, ABCNEWS has learned that shortly before Sept. 11, NSA intercepts detected multiple phone calls from Abu Zubaida, bin Laden's chief of operations, to the United States. The intercepts were never passed on.

"We do have a joint antiterrorism center, and that is a failure of information consolidation and analysis," said Rudman. "It obviously (a) wasn't consolidated and (b) wasn't analyzed. I mean, those are serious shortcomings."

After the Fact

All three reports recognized the shortcomings and made recommendations including closer monitoring of student visas, the creation of a homeland security office, the freezing of financial assets that supported terrorism, and more coordination between the CIA and the FBI on intelligence.

But, the reports' authors say, their recommendations went largely unheeded.

Bremer said that no action was taken on any of his commission's recommendations — until the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon: "Interestingly, since Sept. 11 almost every one of our recommendations has either been enacted by the executive branch or been put into law by Congress, which suggests that we probably had a pretty good menu of things to do before Sept. 11."

[JohnHuang2]

Quote of the Day by Mike Fieschko

[Registered]

There were warnings about the possibility of an airborne terrorist attack on U.S. targets as early as 1994, when terrorism expert Marvin Cetron underlined the threat in a report to the Pentagon.

Okay, we came to expect Clinton to ignore things like this, but who had the information when the Administrations changed? WHO? And what did they do with?!?!?!!?

[JohnHuang2]

Bump!

[kristinn]

They left out Bojinka.

[Registered]

Who the heck in the Pentagon had this information? Who was briefed?!?!?!? Why hasn't anyone been held accountable?!

[DoughtyOne]

Nobody will ever be able to convince me that we had no idea something like this might take place. We have tens of thousands of intelligence (love that term in light of what was allowed to happen) workers who are paid to predict scenarios and develop counter measures. With all the suicide acts taking place around the world, our boys never imagined that someone might do that here?

As important as our capital is, we didn't have any intercepters positioned at the closest military air base to Washington, D.C.

Sure hope those guys are getting minimum wage. As if...

[kristinn]

Someone wears the hat of National Security Advisor. Sandy Berger was Bill Clinton's last one. The current one is above questioning.

And then there is the ghost of Louie Freeh, whom noone wants to seek out for some reason.

[Registered]

This article has me fuming! This is unbelievable! John Walker didn't have any problem "infiltrating" al-Queda! THIS IS SIMPLY INEXCUSABLE!!!

[Registered]

Berger should be the first person called if these hearings ever get underway!!!

[kcvl]

Issue Date: March 11, 2002

Blinded VIGILANCE

By J. Michael Waller

While the terrorists and their sponsors were plotting to hijack airliners and crash them into Manhattan skyscrapers and the Pentagon, senior CIA officials were compelling analysts and operations officers to attend sensitivity-training classes and sew diversity quilts. That is a fact. More...

[Registered]

Can you see now that someone in the current Administration either had the information or had not been passed this information from the prior Administration?! We need to know what happened here!

[Registered]

BUMP!!!

[kcvl]

ANOTHER BLACK MARK FOR TENET

By Reed Irvine and Cliff Kincaid

December 21, 2001

George Tenet’s record as director of central intelligence was given another black mark by David Rose in the December issue of Vanity Fair. He charged that five years ago, Sudan’s intelligence agency offered to give us its files on Osama bin Laden, who made Sudan his headquarters from 1991 to 1996. Our government was not interested. Rose says the offer was repeated in later years and that senior FBI officials wanted to accept it, but they were prevented from doing so by the State Department and the CIA.

Rose quotes Timothy Carney, our ambassador to Sudan when the offer was first made, as saying, "The fact is they were opening the doors, and we weren’t taking them up on it. The U.S. failed to reciprocate Sudan’s willingness to engage us on some serious questions of terrorism. We can speculate that this failure had serious implications—at least for what happened to the U.S. embassies in 1998. In any case, the U.S. lost access to a mine of material on bin Laden and his organization."

Carney attributed our government’s refusal to accept the Sudanese files to the "politicization" of U.S. intelligence. Since Sudan’s information didn’t fit the conventional wisdom at the State Department and the CIA, it was not accepted. Rose says that conventional wisdom was influenced by CIA reports that were "wildly inaccurate." Amb. Carney said our refusal to accept the files was "worse than a crime." George Tenet, who became director of central intelligence in 1997, bears much of the responsibility for it. His "achievements" include introducing the sewing of "diversity quilts," and the celebration of "Gay Pride Day" at the agency. He also played a role in the naming of the CIA headquarters after the first President Bush.

The failure of George Tenet and Louis Freeh to insist that the CIA and the FBI get Sudan’s bin Laden files may have been a bigger error than their failure to take seriously the bin Laden plan to crash planes into buildings that was discovered in the Philippines in 1995. A request for the files was made and honored last summer after an FBI-CIA team conducted a lengthy investigation in Sudan and decided it was not harboring terrorists. Rose doesn’t say if there was time to analyze the files before September 11.

Rose says the files identified those who were involved in the 1998 bombing of our embassies in Africa. That would include Ali Mohamed, a U.S. Army sergeant from 1986 to 1989 who took leave to fight in Afghanistan. A colonel who knew him at Ft. Bragg tried unsuccessfully to have him investigated, court-martialed and deported, but he had a protector. The FBI thought he was working for them. He has confessed to his role in the embassy bombings.

We have heard a lot about how the CIA and the FBI had been hampered in their efforts to combat terrorism because legislation had made it hard for them to hire informants with unsavory records. Nothing was heard about the rejection of Sudan’s offer to provide detailed information about the al Qaeda network—who they were, where they were and what they were doing. Hat’s off to David Rose for getting the story.

[Registered]

I am going to bump this daily. This is simply unbelievable!

[Registered]

Still think that nobody "dropped the ball on 9/11"?

[DoughtyOne]

Yes you're right. And don't kid yourself. The NSA has a set of ears that would make a rabit blush. I refuse to believe that we haven't had a team assigned to Laden. We must have known pretty much what he was up to. He's been recognized as the number one terrorist for at least the last seven years. If we're not going to pin that guy down, who the heck would we?

I just don't buy this claim of ignorance. Our boys know who the players are. I just think that tipping our hand too soon would have avoided all the Patriot legislation etc that has been at the top of the wish list for some time.

I am convinced that legislation is not directed at terrorist at all.

[kcvl]

We have learned and paid a dreadful price for allowing our leaders--men like the late Senator Frank Church of Idaho, President Jimmy Carter, and President Bill Clinton--to destroy the CIA and its ability to do its job, not just, over the years, in monumental ways, but in minor ones too. Recently, for example, we have heard complaints from CIA employees that they spend endless amounts of time in sensitivity training seminars, some of which end with the stitching of "diversity quilts." In our dream world existence, of wars and rumors of war forever far removed from us, we have allowed the left to pervert the mission of our federal agencies:

In 1973, Congressman John Dingell of Michigan, urging passage of the Endangered Species Act, said that the problem with past such acts was that the Defense Department had asserted that it could not comply with them because its first duty was protecting the country. "Not any more," cried Dingell, "its number one job is protecting endangered species." I wonder if Dingell is saying that today, now that homo sapiens Americanus, in its habitat in New York City and Washington, D.C. is under assault.

In 1996, the Clinton Administration turned the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) into an international welcome wagon, ordering it to ignore the rules to rush through as many as half a million aliens, so they could vote in that year's presidential election.

And I wonder if any reporter will have the temerity to ask gubernatorial want-to-be Janet Reno if there might have been better things for the FBI to do than to lay siege to citizens at places like Waco, Texas. We have learned and paid a heartbreaking price for allowing our leaders to look the other way when terrorists kill Americans:

[Registered]

Grrrr, man this is just too much!!!

[kcvl]

In addition, the Global Village meant that our intelligence services would attend diversity and sensitivity classes instead of chasing terrorists, and spend “countless thousands of hours making politically correct diversity quilts,” according to one CIA official as quoted in the Washington Times. The Global Village also meant hampering the operations of the CIA with nonsensical restrictions based on faulty charges by lying leftist pressure groups. It was laws and regulations that protected red-legged frogs, sucker fish, and sharks over the rights, and maybe the lives, of US citizens.

[justshutupandtakeit]

Based on some vague-assed warning about possible doomsday scenarios we were supposed to do exactly what?

There are thousands of threats received and millions of pieces of information incepted that are totally incomprehensible until after something happens. That is a fact of life, get used to it. Hyperventilating over every tidbit of "information" will get you nowhere and prevent nothing.