Posted on 09/27/2001 3:52:39 AM PDT by JohnHuang2
`Red flags all over the place'
Warning signs look obvious now
BY LENNY SAVINO
Herald Washington Bureau
WASHINGTON -- In hindsight, the warning signals were obvious. Law enforcement officials knew that, in 1995, two associates of suspected terrorist Osama bin Laden had talked about crashing a plane into CIA headquarters outside Washington. Egypt and Italy had warned the CIA that bin Laden was plotting to fly an airplane into last June's economic summit in Genoa, Italy.
The FBI knew that bin Laden associates were taking flying lessons at U.S. schools. One school in Minnesota warned that one of its Arab students was interested only in learning to steer a commercial airliner, not in how to take off or land. French authorities identified the man, Zacarias Moussaoui, as a terrorist weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks.
Finally, bin Laden's al Qaeda organization had tried and failed to blow up the World Trade Center, and his associates have a pattern of learning from their mistakes and trying again, as they did after a failed attempt to blow up the U.S. Navy destroyer The Sullivans. Armed with better explosives and training, they hit another destroyer, the USS Cole.
Two weeks after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon killed more than 6,000 people, intelligence and law enforcement officials are asking themselves why no one connected the dots.
``Somehow, it fell between the cracks,'' said one U.S. intelligence official familiar with the Pentagon and World Trade Center investigations, who spoke on condition of anonymity. ``We had red flags all over the place.''
Officials say they never had enough intelligence information to predict or pre-empt the Sept. 11 attacks, but concede they had enough pieces of the puzzle to be more alarmed about whether bin Laden was planning to use some kind of airplane as a bomb.
``We've had indications this was coming for some years,'' said Rusty Capps, who retired after 21 years with the FBI, where he was the first manager of its national counterintelligence awareness program.
Analyzing and assessing terrorist threats is the responsibility of the government's Counter Terrorism Center, located at CIA headquarters but staffed by officials from the intelligence community, the FBI and other agencies.
The center was created in the mid-1980s, but since 1996 its top targets have been bin Laden and his al Qaeda network. In fact, after bin Laden issued an edict that year urging all Muslims to take arms against U.S. soldiers, the center has had a bin Laden task force.
The CIA and FBI declined to comment on events preceding the Sept. 11 attacks and what mistakes may have been made, but privately a number of intelligence officials conceded there was an intelligence and analytical failure of what one called ``Pearl Harbor proportions.''
Paul Moore, an FBI counterintelligence analyst for 21 years who's now retired, said there are several reasons that FBI and CIA analysts couldn't piece together what now seems obvious: ``Analysts look at probabilities, not possibilities. They don't look at the ways of attacking the Capitol. They look at ways of how it would most likely be attacked based on prior attacks.''
Thus, because no U.S. landmarks such as the Pentagon or the World Trade Center had been attacked by a commercial airliner hijacked by suicide bombers, analysts would not consider such scenarios.
Herald staff writer Nancy San Martin contributed to this report.
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Things don't fall between cracks, they fall through cracks. A minor point.
Sure the red flags were up, but so were so many others raised by the left, such as killer suvs, cigarettes, accusations of republicans wanting to poison the air and kill children and grandpeople, result-free soccer leagues, and all sorts of nonsense... We have/had several congressmen who are poll driven and unless the matter of terrorist action upon the US was on the vote-radar then little would have been done about it. The left deserves an amount of blame for this mess, supporting a president who put himself above all others among other things. It's no wonder we didn't see it coming.
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I do believe you have your history wrong, the Congress ran from both the Foster mystery, and flinched badly when presented with BillyJeffs peccadillos. They want(ed) no part of sex stories, it uncovered their own. On the other hand, we have the Clinton administration to thank for the lack of oversight of the dangers of terrorism, and the sorry shape of the military. When he came into office, our boys could fight two wars simultaneously, now they are struggling to get up to snuff, to fight one.
All the Clinton lies were there to see. Open your eyes sonny!
Fact is our intelligence organizations stop dozens of attacks a year. Some are bound to get through. Instead of second guessing try supporting them. These guys have a really tough job to do. They pick of bits and pieces of information from all over the world and have to try to figure out what's going on. There's hundred of various terrorist organizations they're monitoring, each of which is working on multiple plots. Our intel guys have to match the info with the group and the plot and try to figure out who wants to make what go boom, how and when. To understand intel analysis do this: buy 100 puzzles, make sure they are all the same type of scenes but different scenes, make sure they're all at least 500 pieces, now take a fist full of pieces out of each box throw them on the floor, burn the boxes and all the remaining pieces, now take that pile of random fist fulls and tell me what each puzzle is a picture of. That's what these guys get to work with, random bits of information where step one is figuring out which "picture" it goes to, then what the picture means, and they have brutal deadlines.
We should be thanking these guys, we should thank them for their miraculous success rate. It's truly amazing how many of these things they stop.
Good point to question, but do you really expect an answer ? Sorry to say, let's not hold our breath waiting for one.
I've heard a lot of stuff in the last two weeks about X telling the CIA or FBI this that or the other thing. And while, after the fact, they all plainly related to this plot I have yet to see anything that would have given enough info about this plot BEFORE the fact to allow anyone to stop it. It's the old "5 W's" of journalism (who, what, where, when, why and how), obviously the CTC could give a damn about why, but if you can't give them at least two of the other four (and again, who is the workers not the mastermind) you can't expect them to stop anything. And none of these supposed tips even included one of the W's.
I don't fault the CIA or FBI for what happenend PRIOR to 9/11, but I WOULD fault them if they haven't learned their lessons by now. Racial or ethnic profiling notwithstanding, we're going to have to be much more scrupulous about who we let into this country.
I read an article in our local paper yesterday about how student visas are being limited and that those who are here on them will be watched more closely. And if they drop out of school, they WILL be deported.
It is sad that it took an evil of such a magnitude to galvanize folks, but it is better late than never.
Just a question, of no particular relevance or importance. But what DOES God do with those who have spoke out against all the sins and the undermining of the country? It seems that all the protests, marches, Right-to-life, etc have amounted to nothing more than spinning our wheels.
Considering that the CIA already had a written outline of the attack, acquired when Ramsi Yussef and his partner were arrested, and already had under suspicion some of the bin Laden people involved, you would wonder why they didn't round up the "usual suspects" and sweat something out of them as to what was going to happen.
Do the Mossad and French intelligence have to come over here themselves and round up and question the known members of the bin Laden organization for us?
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