Monitoring Policy Making at the United Nations |
| ||||||||||||
US Received Warnings of “Airplanes As Weapons” - Empire? - Global Policy Forum US Received Warnings of
“Airplanes As Weapons”By Dana Priest
Washington Post
September 19, 2002
Congress will be told Wednesday that the U.S. intelligence community had received a surprising number of credible reports of a coming attack before Sept. 11, including some threats to domestic targets, according to a congressional source familiar with a joint intelligence panel report.
Preliminary findings to be released Wednesday by the staff of the joint Senate-House intelligence panel investigating the Sept. 11 strikes will also show that some intelligence analysts had already focused on the possibility that terrorists might use "airplanes as weapons" in the attacks, the source said Tuesday.
Condoleezza Rice, the national security advisor, said late in June that before the attacks analysts did not seriously consider the use of planes as bombs and therefore had not seriously considered the kind of strike that occurred. "All this reporting about hijacking was about traditional hijacking," she said at that time.
The 30-page unclassified report also will "raise serious questions" about whether the U.S. government shared enough information with the public about what it knew to be a grave threat coming from Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network, the official said.
After reading and analyzing thousands of pages of documents from the CIA, National Security Agency, Defense Intelligence Agency and others, the official said, "You start thinking: Did any one really explain to the public how serious this stuff was? Did the American people really realize the strength of the threat out there?"
Although the staff found no definitive reporting on the exact date, time and place of the coming attack, the official said there were numerous credible reports of possible domestic attacks and suggested that some of them may have been played down because the intelligence agencies were too focused on threat overseas.
"There was reporting on domestic attacks, even though a lot of people were focused overseas," the official said.
The official said that even in the summer of 2001, when intelligence officials were describing a dangerous spike in threats against the United States, at least one agency had already adopted "a declaration of war against Osama bin Laden." But, the official suggested, the seriousness of the threat from bin Laden may not have been uniformly recognized throughout the government.
"At least some part of our intelligence community recognized what is out there," the official said. But, he added, "there are issues about information sharing with the intelligence community and between the intelligence community and the rest of the federal government."
The House and Senate formed the joint panel shortly after Sept. 11 and charged it with detailing the performance of the $35 billion intelligence community and with recommending ways to report and improve the system. The panel got off to a rocky start. Members could not agree on its scope and its first staff director was forced to resign. It repeatedly delayed holding open hearings. The first one, in fact, is set for Wednesday.
A second public hearing is still in question. The panel is having a hard time convincing intelligence officials to appear in open session while the U.S. war on terrorism continues. "There are people who don't want to do public hearings on this at all," the official said.
The meeting Wednesday will not delve into the extensive information that the panel has collected on the hijackers themselves: their background, their training, and to what extent U.S. intelligence agencies were monitoring any of them.
The members of the panel have met 10 times in closed hearings, and the staff has culled through 400,000 documents at the various intelligence agencies and found roughly 70,000 pages it considered relevant to the investigation.
A working group at the CIA was set up to streamline the normal declassification process.
While hundreds of documents have been declassified, the official said there continued to be active disagreements between the panel staff and intelligence agencies over declassifying more.
Bin Laden aides still plotting
U.S. counterterrorism officials have identified two key lieutenants of Osama bin Laden - including an alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks - as the most active plotters of several Al Qaeda attacks during the past year, The Associated Press reported from Washington.
While many top Al Qaeda leaders went into hiding after Sept. 11, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Abd Rahim Nashiri have taken the lead in arranging new attacks with cells in the field, U.S. officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.
More Information on Empire
FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Global Policy Forum distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C ß 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
