Free Republic

LONDON - More than a year before 9/11, a Pakistani-British man told the FBI an incredible tale: that he had been trained by bin Laden’s followers to hijack airplanes and was now in America to carry out an attack. The FBI questioned him for weeks, but then let him go home, and never followed up. Now, the former al-Qaida insider is talking.

HAMBURG, Germany (Reuters) - Iran's secret service had contacts with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network ahead of the September 11 attacks on the United States, a German court heard on Thursday. Two members of Germany's Federal Criminal Police told a court in Hamburg a former Iranian spy had informed them of the contacts and had also said he tried to warn Washington about the attacks in mid-2001, but that the CIA had not believed him. The police officers were speaking at the trial of a Moroccan accused of aiding the September 11 attacks. The Iranian, identified only by his...

Five days before Sept. 11, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice was warned that a terrorist attack inside the United States was imminent, a former U.S. Senator who headed up a blue ribbon commission on terrorism revealed late Tuesday. "I've known the national security advisor, Professor Rice, for about 20 some years," former Colorado Sen. Gary Hart told WABC Radio's John Batchelor and Paul Alexander. "She was a supporter of mine in my first presidential campaign as a graduate student in Denver." After giving a speech on the terrorist threat in Montreal on Sept. 5, Hart said he requested an urgent...

Democrats are drooling with delight at the prospect of having finally forged a lose-lose wedge to use against President Bush. This wedge, of course, exploits the controversy swirling around apparently leaked intelligence data that Bush and others in and out of his administration had warnings of possible terrorist hijackings prior to Sept. 11. The politics of this wedge are simple and bring the Democratic Party pretty much back to the strategy it undertook in the summer of 2000; to try and portray George W. Bush as a dim bulb. One side of this wedge is the premise that Bush knew...