Did Bush know?:Warning Signs of 9-11 and Intelligence Failures
This is an excerpt from Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed's book "The War on Freedom." I have not read it, but it seems very informative. Below is a summary of the book.
Using Planes as Bombs
The Pentagon commissioned an expert panel in 1993 to investigate the possibility of an airplane being used to bomb national landmarks. Retired Air Force Col. Doug Menarchik, who organised the $150,000 study for the Defense Department’s Office of Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict, recalled: “It was considered radical thinking, a little too scary for the times. After I left, it met a quiet death.” Other participants have noted that the decision not to publish detailed scenarios issued to some extent from fear that this may give terrorists ideas. Nevertheless, a draft document detailing the results of the investigation was circulated through the Pentagon, the Justice Department and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Senior agency officials decided against a public release.
Al-Qaeda’s Plans: Project Bojinka
Western intelligence had been aware of plans for such terrorist attacks on U.S. soil as early as 1995. Both the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had detailed information about the possible use of hijack/suicide attacks by terrorists connected to Osama bin Laden. The New York Times reported that:
“In 1994, two jetliners were hijacked by people who wanted to crash them into buildings, one of them by an Islamic militant group. And the 2000 edition of the FAA’s annual report on Criminal Acts Against Aviation, published this year, said that although Osama bin Laden ‘is not known to have attacked civil aviation, he has both the motivation and the wherewithal to do so,’ adding, ‘Bin Laden’s anti-Western and anti-American attitudes make him and his followers a significant threat to civil aviation, particularly to U.S. civil aviation.’”
I don't know if I believe all of the details of this particular topic because we happened to fund Bin Laden and al Qaeda. However, if al Qaeda really did attack the WTC then the CIA surely knew about it ahead of time.
After all, Bin Laden had been on the CIA's payroll for years.
This right here is the most striking part of this entire article by far. Read it and weep Bush/Cheney. I know you've set your dogs after me already.
High-Level Government Blocks on Intelligence Investigations
There is good reason to believe that the FBI’s failure to apprehend suspected terrorists, who were linked to bin Laden and operating within the U.S., was the result of high-level blocks from the FBI command and Justice Department. Evidence for this comes from the authoritative testimony of U.S. attorney David Philip Schippers, former Chief Investigative Counsel for the U.S. House Judiciary Committee, and head prosecutor responsible for conducting the impeachment against former President Bill Clinton. His long record of impeccable expertise and extensive experience makes him a highly credible source.
Two days after the attacks, Schippers went public in an interview with WRRK in Pittsburgh, PA., stating that he had attempted to warn U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, along with other federal officials, about the terrorist attacks weeks before they occurred. He stated that he had received information from U.S. intelligence sources, including FBI agents, that a massive attack was being planned by terrorists, targeting the financial arteries of lower Manhattan. Schippers had attempted to bring this information to the attention of John Ashcroft, six weeks before the tragedy of Black Tuesday. Schippers went public again in October 2001, reiterating that, several months prior to September, impeccable sources in the U.S. intelligence community, including agents of the U.S. government’s law enforcement agency, the FBI, had approached him with information about the impending attacks.
According to Schippers, these agents knew, months before the 11th September attacks, the names of the hijackers, the targets of their attacks, the proposed dates, and the sources of their funding, along with other information. At least two weeks prior to 11th September, the FBI agents again confirmed that an attack on lower Manhattan, orchestrated by Osama bin Laden, was imminent. However, the FBI command cut short their investigations into the impending terrorist attacks and those involved, threatening the agents with prosecution under the National Security Act if they publicised information pertaining to their investigations.
So what do you think? Its really too coincidental.
Massive intelligence failures....
No my friends, this was intelligence INVOLVEMENT!!!
Multiple Intelligence Warnings Converged on 11th September
As September neared, multiple authoritative intelligence warnings surfaced with increasing intensity, warning of a terrorist attack against the U.S. We should recall that in response to ECHELON’s warnings, U.S. intelligence agencies were already on alert for evidence of a very specific Project Bojinka-style operation, which would target key buildings in Washington and New York. The White House National Coordinator for Counterterrorism, based on CIA confirmation, had alerted all domestic security and intelligence agencies of an impending Al-Qaeda attack, to be implemented in several weeks time, at the beginning of July. According to Chief Investigative Counsel David Schippers, U.S. sources had informed him as early as May that the intelligence community had credible information of an imminent attack targeting the “financial district of lower Manhattan,” and that intelligence officers throughout the country were frustrated by high-level blocks on investigations and information. The FBI appears to have had specific information indicating that the World Trade Centre was thus the most probable target. Against this background, the multiple warnings of an impending attack by Osama bin Laden from a variety of credible authorities should have increasingly reinforced the overall intelligence confirmation of the attacks.
11th September Warnings Were Not Ignored by U.S. Authorities
Indeed, there is evidence that the threat was not ignored, at least not in certain selected respects. The San Francisco Chronicle reported one day after the attacks that Mayor Willie Brown received a phone call eight hours before the hijackings from what he described as his air security staff, warning him not to travel by air:
“For Mayor Willie Brown, the first signs that something was amiss came late Monday when he got a call from what he described as his airport security—a full eight hours before yesterday’s string of terrorist attacks—advising him that Americans should be cautious about their air travel… Exactly where the call came from is a bit of a mystery. The mayor would say only that it came from ‘my security people at the airport.’”
So not everyone was in A). denial or B). involved.
The U.S. Intelligence Community (involvement)
As early as 1995, the U.S. had information relating to the plans to launch air attacks on the World Trade Center—information that was repeatedly confirmed by the American intelligence community since then, all the way to the year 2001. Yet these agencies neglected almost entirely to do anything to prevent or prepare for these attacks as far as the general public was concerned. Indeed, all such possible measures were cut short. Such was the case with the investigations by FBI agents confirming the impending 11th September terrorist attacks, whose leads were severed by the FBI command without explanation—a situation apparently maintained with the complicity of the Attorney General, a Presidential appointee. The U.S. government’s leading law enforcement agency thus deliberately ignored its own findings, and blocked these findings from being publicised.
