TRACKS OF FOREKNOWLEDGE
Following the devastating attacks of 9/11, US leaders said we should avoid “finger pointing” to place blame, yet advance warnings were too numerous and specific to do otherwise.
During 2001, the United States spent $30 billion on intelligence gathering plus an additional $12 billion aimed specifically at counterterrorism. This total of $42 billion exceeds most nations’ total gross national product, yet Americans were told that none of its two-dozen alphabet intelligence agencies had any inkling that we were about to be attacked.
Information available today seriously disputes this claim. It was in fact disputed within days of the attacks by people both in and outside the government.
Questions as to why there had been no warning came quickly. The day after the attacks, Congressional Research Service antiterrorism expert
Kenneth Katzman was quoted as saying, “How nothing could have been picked up is beyond me.”
But something must have been picked up. How else to explain the fact that the State Department on September 7, 2001, issued a worldwide caution to Americans that they “may be the target of a terrorist threat from extremist groups with links to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization…Such individuals have not distinguished between official and civilian targets. As always, we take this information seriously. US government facilities worldwide remain on heightened alert.”
As months passed, more and more evidence accumulated until it became overwhelmingly clear that persons within the federal government were warned of terrorist attacks, including the use of airplanes against buildings. Even congressional researchers determined that US intelligence agencies had received at least twelve warnings of coming offensive action by terrorists. And, as will be seen, this is a low figure.
By April 2002, leaks in the news media damaging to the official explanation, plus public clamor for an investigation of the 9/11 attacks, prompted congressional leaders to agree to a joint investigation by both the Senate and House Intelligence committees. The charter of the Joint Inquiry into Intelligence Community Activities before and after September 11, 2001—known as the JICI—was to be limited in scope, with authorization only to review intelligence failures and recommend corrections.
The JICI got off to a rocky start when retired CIA Inspector General Britt Snider, the staff director for the JICI, resigned under pressure from committee members who believed his close connection to CIA director George Tenet might interfere with an impartial investigation.
Amid numerous difficulties and delays, the unusual joint hearings that were scheduled for June 2002 did not convene until late September. “Are we getting the cooperation we need? Absolutely not,” charged the senior Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama.
Florida Democratic Senator Bob Graham echoed Shelby's complaint, saying the Bush administration told them they can “only talk to the top of the pyramid.”
“Well, the problem is, the top of the pyramid has a general awareness of what's going on in the organization, but if you want to know why Malaysian
plotters were not put on a watch list…you've got to talk to somebody at the level where those kinds of decisions were made.” Graham referred to a preliminary report, which pointed out that two of the hijacking suspects, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, lived openly in San Diego even after being observed in a Malaysia meeting with known terrorists.
Bush and Cheney had long opposed any independent investigation of the 9/11 attacks, claiming it would impede the War on Terrorism by leading to leaks of security measures and tying up personnel needed in the war.
But with the revelations of irregularities in investigations by government agencies that came to light in the spring and summer of 2002, Congress was finally moved to get the JICI funded and operational. “The attacks of September 11…highlighted a failure of national policy to respond to the developments of a global terror network implacably hostile to American interests,” thundered Senator John McCain, who, along with Senator Joseph Lieberman, cosponsored the bill to fund the independent commission. Legislation authorizing the creation of the ten-person panel, armed with subpoena power and a $3 million budget, was approved by the Senate in a 90/8 vote late in September 2002.
The run-up to the actual hearings illustrated the need to strengthen the JICI’s charter, including the need for subpoena power.
According to a story in the Los Angeles Times in May 2002, “Small teams of investigators have been at the Justice Department and the CIA, gathering documents and conducting interviews. They have come back with a litany of complaints about tactics they say are designed to slow their progress and restrict their access to documents and potential informants, sources said.”
Research was quickly coming to light making it clear that from 1998 onward, both the CIA and FBI had received ever-increasing warnings concerning al Qaeda using hijacked aircraft to attack targets within the United States. Despite the serious nature of this evidence, the Bush administration continued to stonewall and hamper the congressional investigation, even launching an investigation of the investigators.
This occurred after word leaked to the public in June 2002 that communications in Arabic intercepted by the National Security Agency on
September 10, 2001 contained phrases such as “Tomorrow is zero hour” and “The match is about to begin.” As noted earlier, this made it seem likely that the hijackers were privy to the war game exercises scheduled for the following day, evidence of an inside job.
The FBI swung into action.
But instead of going after the authors of the notes indicating foreknowledge, they went after the persons on the joint committee who leaked the information.
Even as White House spokesman Ari Fleischer was calling the notes “alarmingly specific,” bureau agents were asking committee members to take lie detector tests regarding the leaks. The Washington Post reported that nearly all of the thirty-seven members of the joint committee were questioned. Some members declined to take the lie detector tests, citing constitutional separation of powers and the unreliability of such tests.
Eleanor Hill, the new staff director of the JICI, spoke out about advance notice of the attacks passed to ranking leaders. She noted that a briefing for “senior government officials” in July 2001 specifically warned that Osama bin Laden “will launch a significant terrorist attack against US and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks. The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against US facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning.” She said it was unknown if President Bush received specific information regarding the possibility of airliners being used as flying bombs because the director of the CIA would not declassify the information.
Hill, who wrote a report described as preliminary, said it was based on a review of 400,000 government documents and testimony taken during four months of closed-door hearings. Hill stated that while investigators found no specific warning of the 9/11 attacks, collectively the warnings “reiterated a consistent and critically important theme: Osama bin Laden's intent to launch terrorist attacks inside the United States.”
Even a survey of mainstream sources shows that warnings of a domestic attack had been coming in for some time—and with increasing frequency right up to 9/11.
For example, in December 2000, the Congressional Advisory Panel to Assess Domestic Response Capabilities for Terrorism Involving Weapons
of Mass Destruction issued a report stating, “We are impelled by the stark realization that a terrorist attack on some level within our borders is inevitable.”
One clear warning came as early as eight years before the 9/11 attacks in the form of a book written by Yossef Bodansky, director of the US House Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare.
In his book, Target America: Terrorism in the US Today, Bodansky detailed the airfields in Iran and North Korea where Muslim terrorists trained and noted, “According to a former trainee in Wakiland [Iran], one of the exercises included having an Islamic Jihad detachment seize (or hijack) a transport aircraft. Then, trained air crews from among the terrorists would crash the airliner with its passengers into a selected target.”
Wiretaps on suspected al Qaeda terrorists in Italy as far back as 2000 also gave indications of plans for a major attack on the United States involving airplanes and airports. “This will be one of those strikes that will never be forgotten…” was the comment recorded from Abdelkader Mahmoud Es Sayed, an Egyptian accused of being a ranking al Qaeda member in Italy and a man convicted of the 1997 massacre of fifty-eight tourists at Luxor, Egypt. Es Sayed also mentioned danger in airports and flying.
In another taped conversation on January 24, 2001, a Tunisian terrorist spoke about fake identification papers to Es Sayed and asked, “Will these work for the brothers who are going to the United States?” Es Sayed also stated the war against the enemies of Islam would be fought “with any means we can combat them, using…airplanes. They won't be able to stop us even with their heaviest weapons.”
According to the Los Angeles Times, several US officials said they were unfamiliar with the wiretap messages but “one Justice Department official noted that a small cadre of US intelligence agents might have been privy to them.” What is most enlightening about these Italian wiretaps is not that they evinced foreknowledge—they were too vague to be considered a precise warning—but that they gave indication of the many and varied alerts coming into the United States as well as the fact that many foreign intelligence services were monitoring al Qaeda cells.
Spain got in on the act. In August 2001, the voice of an unidentified
man in London was taped speaking with the head of a Madrid terrorist cell. The man said he had entered the field of aviation and was taking flying lessons.
Such warnings were not lost on the British. It was revealed in June, 2002, that British intelligence chiefs warned the Prime Minister less than two months before September 11 that Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda were in “the final stages” of preparing a terrorist attack in the West. It was stated that this prediction was based not only on reports from MI6 but also from the Cabinet Office Joint Intelligence Committee, which included representatives from the American CIA and NSA.
According to a report on MSNBC, just two weeks before the 9/11 attacks, a radio station in the Cayman Islands received an unsigned letter warning of a major attack against the United States involving airliners. It was reported that US government officials went to investigate but no further information was forthcoming. As will be seen, the Cayman Islands are an offshore banking haven to many factions, including the CIA and international bankers.
Even the much-disparaged Taliban apparently tried to give us warning. According to a story posted September 7, 2002, by Independent Digital, an aide to then Taliban foreign minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil tried to warn US authorities weeks prior to the 9/11 attacks. Muttawakil, unhappy with the glut of foreign Arab militants in Afghanistan, told his aide he was concerned over the prospect of US military action against his country. He was quoted as saying, “The guests are going to destroy the guesthouse.”
The aide, unidentified for his own safety by the British publication, said Muttawakil was shocked in the summer of 2001 to learn of a coming attack from fundamentalist Islamic leader Tahir Yildash. “At first, Muttawakil wouldn't say why he was so upset,” explained the aide. “Then it all came out. Yildash had revealed that Osama bin Laden was going to launch an attack on the United States. It would take place on American soil and it was imminent. Yildash said Osama hoped to kill thousands of Americans.”
The aide said he first traveled across the Pakistan border to meet with American consul general David Katz late in July 2001. “They met in a safe house belonging to an old Mujahideen leader who has confirmed to the
Independent that the meeting took place,” reported the news outlet. Katz declined to discuss the matter.
Next, Muttawakil sent the aide to the Kabul offices of the United Nations, where he again issued his warning.
Apparently, since the aide failed to make it clear that he was sent by Foreign Minister Muttawakil, both American and United Nations officials thought his warning more propaganda from the warring factions within Afghanistan and did nothing.
Similar warning signs came from the Far East. In 1995, when Manila authorities answered a fire call they discovered bomb-making materials in the apartment of Ramzi Yousef, later convicted for his role in the 1993 WTC bombing. Yousef escaped but another suspected al Qaeda member, Abdul Hakim Murad, was taken into custody.
Murad told his interrogators that Ramzi had a plan to hijack a commercial airliner in the United States and crash it into CIA Headquarters or the Pentagon. Philippine investigators also found evidence that Ramzi's plan, code-named “Project Bojinka,” also involved targeting the White House, the Sears Tower in Chicago, the Transamerica Tower in San Francisco, and the World Trade Center. The plans for Bojinka must have been known at the highest levels of government, which makes a mockery of later claims that no one could have imagined that hijacked airliners could be used as deadly missiles.
Apparently Muslim fanatics had already attempted to put Ramzi's plan into effect. On Christmas Eve 1994, four men thought to be connected to bin Laden's terrorist network hijacked Air France Flight 8969 bound from Algiers to Paris. The plane landed in Marseilles, where the hijackers demanded that it be loaded with explosives and extra fuel. Their plan, apparently to crash the craft into the Eiffel Tower, was derailed when commandos stormed the plane and killed all four hijackers.
Warnings had continued to pour in from the Philippines, a hotbed of terrorist activity. According to the Manila Times, Philippine defense and police intelligence officers warned American authorities of an alliance between Abu Sayyaf (ASG) terrorists there and the al Qaeda network. The paper said American officials ignored the warnings until September 11, 2001.
The report went on to describe a 1994 meeting between ASG co-founder
Edwin Angeles and WTC bombing mastermind Ramzi Yousef that included convicted Oklahoma City bombing accomplice Terry Nichols, who was married to a Philippine national. The topics of discussion were terrorist targets. The Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was mentioned as well as another attack on the World Trade Center.
It seemed everyone from the Chinese to our own FBI tried to warn Washington authorities that an attack was imminent, yet nothing was done.
Chinese military officers wrote about just such an attack as occurred on 9/11 three years before the fact. In a military manual entitled “Unrestricted Warfare,” People's Liberation Army colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui noted, “Whether it be the intrusions of [computer] hackers, a major explosion at the World Trade Center, or a bombing attack by bin Laden [emphasis added], all of these greatly exceed the frequency bandwidth understood by the American military...”
A CIA translation of this Chinese manual was published on September 11, 2002, the one-year anniversary of the attacks. The manual is a recipe book of unorthodox methods for weaker nations to humble America. It discusses multilevel attacks on America's social, political, and economic systems using strategies involving computer hackers, the infiltration of illegal immigrants, stock market manipulation, and even the use of weapons of mass destruction.
The Chinese leadership, and particularly its military chiefs, has long viewed the United States as their principal enemy, a fact that has been marginalized by both the US Congress and the corporate mass media due to the close business and trade relations between the nations.
Exactly one month following the 9/11 attacks, China was quietly approved as a member of the World Trade Organization after fifteen years of negotiation. It was a move that had previously prompted many and widespread protests due to that Asian nation's abysmal human rights record. This time, with Americans in shock over the 9/11 attacks, little notice was given to this action.
With the heightened security resulting from the attacks, there was no opportunity for demonstrations against this WTO action. According to CNN, WTO ministers meeting in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar were protected by a US helicopter gunship and naval vessels, and were inside a
cordon that included more than two thousand US Marines.
WTO director general Mike Moore declared China's entry into the trade organization “a major historic event,” yet there was minimal publicity in the United States.
Even the Russians seemed to be aware that something big was coming.
Dr. Tatyana Koryagina, a senior research fellow for the Institute of Macroeconomic Research under the Russian Ministry of Economic Development and reportedly close to President Putin's inner circle, predicted that an “unusual catastrophe” would strike the United States in late August 2001. Her prediction appeared in a Pravda story published on July 12, 2001.
“The US has been chosen as the object of financial attack because the financial center of the planet is located there. The effect will be maximal. The strike waves of economic crisis will spread over the planet instantly and will remind us of the blast of a huge nuclear bomb.”
Asked about the discrepancy of dates in a later interview, Dr. Koryagina explained, “I did not make a serious mistake. Indeed, between 15 and 20 August, the dollar started trembling under the pressure of multiple bad news about the US and economy. And within weeks, the Manhattan skyscrapers fell down.
“As a result, a significant part of the world financial network was paralyzed. This strike was aimed at destabilization and destruction of America and (in domino fashion) all the countries making countless billions of dollars.” She advised Russian citizens not to invest in American dollars.
She also said the 9/11 attacks were not the work of nineteen terrorists but a group of extremely powerful private persons seeking to reshape the world. This group, she added, has assets of about $300 trillion, which it will use to legitimize its power and create a new world government.
Many persons have taken Dr. Koryagina's comments very seriously when considering both her credentials and her knowledge of Russia's close contacts with nations identified with terrorism, such as Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, and North Korea.
As reported by the
Washington Times on September 28, 2001, “US intelligence agencies have uncovered information that Russian criminal groups have been supplying Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda
terrorist network with components for chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.”
Arabic sources too seemed to have been able to discern that bin Laden was preparing to launch a major attack.
In mid-2002, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak revealed that his intelligence service warned US officials about a week before the 9/11 attacks that bin Laden's organization was in the last stages of preparing a major operation against an American target.
Mubarak said Egyptian intelligence chiefs tried unsuccessfully to thwart the operation using an unnamed agent who had penetrated the al Qaeda network. They passed the information regarding this penetration to US intelligence between March and May 2001, he said, adding, “We informed them about everything.”
An American intelligence official told the New York Times that they had received no such warning but Mubarak said he was informed that security at the US embassy in Cairo was tightened just before the attacks. Mubarak's interview with the Times apparently was the first time that a foreign leader admitted that an intelligence service had penetrated the al Qaeda terrorist network.
The Times writers noted dryly, “At a minimum, Mr. Mubarak's account adds detail and drama to a list of warnings about potential terrorist attacks that American intelligence fielded in the days, weeks and months before September 11.”
Within hours of the attacks Abdel-Barri Atwan, editor of the London newspaper al-Quds al-Arabi, told Reuters News Service, “Osama bin Laden warned three weeks ago that he would attack American interests in an unprecedented attack, a big one… Personally we received information that he planned very, very big attacks against American interests. We received several warnings like this.”
Although Atwan said he did not notify the authorities of this warning because he did not take it seriously, it begs the question: if a London newspaper knew of impending attacks, why not the American intelligence services?
An article in the June 23, 2001, issue of Airjet Airline World News noted another Arabic source as claiming that “a big surprise” was expected in coming weeks.
A reporter from Arabic satellite television channel MBC who had recently met with bin Laden was quoted as saying, “A severe blow is expected against US and Israeli interests worldwide…There is a mobilization among the Osama bin Laden forces. It seems that there is a race of who will strike first. Will it be the United States or Osama bin Laden?”
Another source for a warning may have been an Iranian being held in Germany at the time of the 9/11 attacks. According to the German newspaper Neue Presse, prior to 9/11 the man asked to contact American authorities to warn them of an imminent attack. It was reported that when the man told the Secret Service that he was facing deportation from Germany, they hung up on him. On September 14, 2001 US agents finally interrogated the man.
Closer to home, in a 1993 letter to the
New York Times, the Middle Easterners who bombed the World Trade Center in that year made it plain that they would try again. Their letter read:
We, the fifth battalion in the LIBERATION ARMY, declare our responsibility for the explosion on the mentioned building. This action was done in response for the American political, economical, and military support to Israel the state of terrorism and to the rest of the dictator countries in the region.
Our demands are:
1. Stop all military, economical, and political aid to Israel.
2. All diplomatic relations with Israel must stop.
3. Not to interfere with any of the Middle East countries’ interior affairs.
If our demands are not met, all of our functional groups in the army will continue to execute our missions against the military and civilian targets in and out the United States. For your own information, our army has more than hundred and fifty suicidal soldiers ready to go ahead.
The terrorism that Israel practices (which is supported by America) must be faced with a similar one. The dictatorship and terrorism (also supported by America) that some countries are practicing against their own people must also be faced with terrorism.
The American people must know that their civilians who got killed are not better than those who are getting killed by the American weapons and support.
The American people are responsible for the actions of their government and they must question all of the crimes that their government is committing against other people. Or they—Americans—will be the targets of our operations that could diminish them.
The conspirators also drafted a second letter, which was later recovered from an erased file on a computer disc seized from Ayyad's office. This second letter, which the conspirators apparently did not send, proclaimed that the World Trade Center bomb did not do as much damage as had been intended, because their “calculations were not very accurate this time.” They warned, however, that they would be more precise in the future and would continue to target the World Trade Center if their demands were not met.
Following his 1995 arrest in Pakistan, Ramzi Yousef was more specific. He clearly stated that the conspirators had intended for the bomb to topple one of the towers and hoped that it would crash into the other, bringing them both down and killing one quarter of a million people.
One of the strangest items indicating foreknowledge of the attacks came in the form of registered Internet domain names.
Neil Livingston, who heads Global Options LLC, a Washington-based investigation and counterterrorism firm, said, “It's unbelievable that they [the registration company whose name was withheld] would register these domain names, probably without any comment to the FBI. If they did make a comment to the FBI, it's unbelievable that the FBI didn't react to it.”
Even from a cursory search of September 11 reports, it would appear as though many people had some inkling of what was to come.
As recounted by Russ Kick, author and columnist for the Village Voice, a veteran New York police investigator said that numerous Arab Americans in New York heard about the coming attacks. The officer said the number of leads were so overwhelming that it was difficult to tell who had heard about the attacks from a secondhand source and who had heard it from someone who may have been a participant. A Brooklyn detective was quoted as saying that “a serious and major priority” investigation was made into why so many Middle Easterners failed to show up for work at the World Trade Center on September 11. According to a former US military intelligence officer who arrived in New York on the morning of September 11, 2001, just prior to the attacks he had difficulty in getting a taxi. Once he found one, his driver told him that most of the Arab cab drivers had called in sick that day and that the taxi system was down to nearly half strength.
Even certain school kids seemed to have foreknowledge, according to Kick. A Dallas suburb fifth-grader told his teacher on September 10, “Tomorrow, World War III will begin. It will begin in the United States and the United States will lose.”
Another school kid in Jersey City, home of several of the accused hijackers, told friends to stay away from lower Manhattan on the morning of September 11. One week before the attacks, a Brooklyn high school freshman pointed at the WTC towers and told his class, “Do you see those two buildings? They won't be standing there next week.”
There are even telltale signs that some prominent politicians and government officials within the United States had some warning of the September atrocities.
San Francisco mayor Willie Brown was scheduled to fly to New York on the morning of September 11, 2001. But at about 10 pm the evening of September 10, he received a phone call at home advising him to be cautious about traveling by air. Brown would only say that the call came from “my security people at the airport,” but the warning was clear: don't travel by air. He said the call “didn't come in any alarming fashion, which is why I’m hesitant to make an alarming statement.” Brown was preparing to leave for the airport the next morning when instead he joined millions
of other Americans in viewing the destruction on TV.
One San Francisco official noted that the FAA routinely issues security notices but added that none had been received in the days before September 11. No one has yet discovered who sent the after-hours warning to Brown.
Newsweek reported on September 24, 2001, that on September 10 “a group of top Pentagon officials suddenly canceled travel plans for the next morning, apparently because of security concerns.”
On July 28, 2001, then Attorney General John Ashcroft left Washington on a fishing trip to Missouri but it was not on a commercial airliner. CBS news correspondent Jim Stewart reported that Ashcroft had suddenly begun flying only on government-chartered jets in response to what an FBI spokesman called a “threat assessment” by the bureau. Ashcroft was advised to travel only by private jet for the remainder of his term under FBI guidelines.
Former Attorney General Janet Reno and all but the Secretaries of Interior and Energy in the Bush administration had flown by commercial airliners. Asked about this sudden change in policy, Ashcroft said, “I don't do threat assessments myself and I rely on those whose responsibility it is in the law enforcement community, particularly the FBI. And I try to stay within the guidelines that they've suggested I should stay within for those purposes.”
But perhaps most extraordinary was a comment attributed to a member of Congress. During live coverage of the 9/11 attacks, National Public Radio congressional correspondent David Welna was describing the evacuation of the Capitol.
He reported, “I spoke with Congressman Ike Shelton—a Democrat from Missouri and a member of the Armed Services Committee—who said that just recently the director of the CIA warned that there could be an attack—an imminent attack—on the United States of this nature. So this is not entirely unexpected.”
All of the above information stands in sharp contrast to often-repeated Bush administration assertions that no one in government could have imagined an attack such as that on 9/11.
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld himself admitted, “there were lots of warnings” in an interview with
Parade magazine. A transcript of
his interview was released by the Department of Defense on October 12, 2001.
And even then-CIA Director George Tenet had testified to the JICI that by the end of summer, 2001, “the system was blinking red.”
As if all of this was not enough, it is now also clear that the Federal Bureau of Investigation itself had numerous advance warnings of what was to come.