U.S. Had 12 Warnings of Jet Attacks

U.S. Had 12 Warnings of Jet Attacks

Family members of those lost on Sept. 11 testified, angrily, that they hold the intelligence community responsible

by Jim Miklaszewski
MSNBC
September 18, 2002
http://www.msnbc.com/news/809484.asp

WASHINGTON — Intelligence agencies failed to anticipate terrorists flying planes into buildings despite a dozen clues in the years before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that Osama bin Laden or others might use aircraft as bombs, a congressional investigator told lawmakers Wednesday as they began public hearings into the attacks.

Just a month before the attacks, intelligence agencies were told of a possible bin Laden plot to hit the U.S. Embassy in Kenya or crash a plane into it.

The preliminary report by Eleanor Hill, staff director of the joint House and Senate intelligence committee investigation of the terrorist strike, showed that authorities had many more warnings — knowledge of at least 12 terrorist plots or purported plots — than were previously disclosed.

The reports were generally vague and uncorroborated. None specifically predicted the Sept. 11 attacks. But collectively the reports “reiterated a consistent and critically important theme: Osama bin Laden’s intent to launch terrorist attacks inside the United States,” Hill said.

Despite the drumbeat of warnings, intelligence experts never looked closely at the potential threat of hijacked airliners’ being flown into buildings, Hill told lawmakers.

Nor did authorities alert the public or take other actions to significantly “harden the homeland” against an assault, apparently acting on the belief that any attack was more likely to take place overseas, she said.

FINDINGS CALLED PRELIMINARY

Hill read the report, which was described as preliminary findings based on the staff’s review of 400,000 documents and testimony during four months of closed-door hearings, and then answered questions from lawmakers taking part in what is believed to be the first joint investigation by standing congressional committees. The committee is examining intelligence failures leading up to the attacks and seeking to determine how they can be corrected.

Hill’s testimony touched on a variety of threats. For example, she said, bin Laden also offered a $9 million bounty each for the assassination of the heads of the Defense and State departments, the CIA and the FBI.

But the revelations about possible prior awareness of threats from airplanes dominated lawmakers’ attention.

Pressed by Rep. Ray Lahood, R-Ill., about whether agencies had enough information to have prevented the Sept. 11 attacks, Hill said that it was possible but that there were no guarantees.

Hill outlined 12 examples of intelligence information on terrorists’ possible use of airplanes as weapons dating to 1994.

In August 1998, U.S. intelligence learned that a “group of unidentified Arabs planned to fly an explosive-laden plane from a foreign country into the World Trade Center,” the report says. The report was given to the Federal Aviation Administration and the FBI, which took little action on it. The group now may be linked to bin Laden, the report says.

Other intelligence suggested that bin Laden supporters might crash a plane into a U.S. airport or conduct a plot involving aircraft at New York and Washington, the report said.

While generally aware of the possibility of this method of attack, “the intelligence community did not produce any specific assessments of the likelihood that terrorists would use airplanes as weapons,” the report said.

POTENTIAL FOR EMBARRASSMENT

Details of intelligence about terrorist use of airplanes could embarrass the White House. After questions were raised in the spring about what President Bush knew about terrorist threats before Sept. 11, 2001, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said May 15 that the president was briefed on the intelligence last summer but received no information to suggest that bin Laden’s al-Qaida network planned to use airplanes as missiles.

“Until the attack took place, I think it’s fair to say that no one envisioned that as a possibility,” Fleischer said.

The report released Wednesday does not detail whether intelligence suggesting that terrorists might use airliners as flying bombs was provided to Bush because the director of the CIA refused to declassify that information, Hill’s report said.

In addition to knowing that terrorists had concocted plots using airliners, intelligence officials briefed “senior U.S. officials” two months before the attacks that bin Laden was planning something big, possibly inside the United States, the report said.

BIN LADEN WARNING

At the July 2001 briefing, intelligence officials said that based on a review of intelligence information over five months, “We believe that [bin Laden] will launch a significant terrorist attack against U.S. and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks.”

“The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against U.S. facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning,” the officials said.

The National Security Agency also reported at least 33 communications between May and July 2001 indicating a possible imminent terrorist attack.

But Hill also told lawmakers that the credibility of the sources of the information was sometimes questionable and that no specific details about the attacks were available.

“They generally did not contain specific information as to where, when and how a terrorist attack might occur and generally are not corroborated by further information,” she said in her report to the committee.

Before the hearing began, Bob Graham, D-Fla., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the public hearings “are part of our search for the truth — not to point fingers or pin blame, but with the goal of identifying and correcting whatever systemic problems might have prevented our government from detecting and disrupting al-Qaida’s plot.”

VICTIMS’ SPOUSES TESTIFY

The leaders of two groups of victims’ relatives, Stephen Push and Kristin Breitweiser, both of whom lost spouses in the attacks, were the first witnesses to testify.

“If the intelligence community had been doing its job, my wife, Lisa Raines, would be alive today,” said Push, citing the government’s failure to place Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi on a terrorist watch list until long after they were photographed meeting with alleged al-Qaida operatives in Malaysia.

Raines died aboard American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon on Sept. 11. Authorities believe that Almihdhar was at the controls of the plane.

Breitweiser, whose husband, Ronald, died at the World Trade Center, questioned how the FBI was so quickly able to assemble information on the hijackers, citing a Sept. 12, 2001, report in The New York Times stating that agents descended on flight schools within hours of the attacks and rapidly assembled biographies of the hijackers.

“How did the FBI know where to go a few hours after the attacks?” she asked. “… Were any of the hijackers already under surveillance?”

LACK OF COOPERATION CHARGED

Before the hearings opened, the senior Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee and joined Graham in criticizing the Bush administration for not allowing key officials to testify before lawmakers.

“Are we getting the cooperation we need? Absolutely not,” Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., said on NBC’s “Today” show.

Graham echoed the complaint. “What we are trying to do is get people who had hands on these issues,” Graham said, “... and what we’re being told is no, they don’t want to make those kinds of witnesses available.”

The administration says “we can only talk to the top of the pyramid,” Graham said. “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 to talk to somebody at the level where those kinds of decisions were made.”

SOME INFORMATION ALREADY PUBLICIZED

Shelby, vice chairman of the Intelligence Committee, said some of the most troubling information seen by the committees had already been made public: the so-called Phoenix memo, in which an FBI agent warned that U.S. flight schools may be training terrorist pilots, and the handling of the Zacarias Moussaoui case. Moussaoui was arrested in August 2001 after he raised suspicions when he sought training at a Minnesota flight school. He has since been charged with conspiring in the attacks.

An FBI spokesman told NBC News that the bureau did not intend to respond to the preliminary findings or to criticism leveled by lawmakers.

The spokesman said the bureau had offered “full cooperation” to the committee, producing top FBI agents and management to privately brief committee staff over the past few months and turning over tens of thousands of documents.

The spokesman also said FBI Director Robert Mueller was likely to comment on the alleged intelligence shortcomings during his testimony Thursday before the House Financial Services Committee, which is exploring the FBI’s use of the USA Patriot Act and the financial war on terrorists. Mueller also is expected to testify Oct. 10 before the joint congressional committee on intelligence failures.

A CIA official, who spoke with NBC News on condition of anonymity, disputed that the report was damning, saying, “The committee acknowledges the hard work done by intelligence community, the successes it achieved, the variety of intelligence obtained and the difficulty of obtaining it.”

With just weeks left in the congressional year, momentum has grown in Congress for a separate, independent commission to look into the attacks.

“I’m afraid if we try to publish at the end of this session a definitive paper on what we found that there will be some things that we don’t know because we hadn’t had time to probe them and we have not had enough cooperation,” Shelby said.

The White House has opposed an independent commission, saying it could lead to more leaks and tie up personnel needed to fight terrorism.

NBC’s Mike Viqueira and Jim Popkin, MSNBC.com’s Mike Brunker, The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.

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