Negligence lead to September 11th

Was the U.S. government really too dumb to think of the idea of airliners being used as missiles to perform terrorist attacks? Not only did they know that this was possible, they knew the date it would happen.

"Had I known that the enemy was going to use airplanes to kill on that fateful morning," said President Bush, "I would have done everything in my power to protect the American people."1

National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice would say on May 16, 2002,

I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon, that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile.2

"The President did not -- not -- receive information about the use of airplanes as missiles by suicide bombers," Press Secretary Ari Fleischer would say that same day. "This was a new type of attack that had not been foreseen."3

Yet, according to CNN,

The FBI was warned six years ago of a terrorist plot to hijack commercial planes and slam them into the Pentagon, the CIA headquarters and other buildings, Philippine investigators told CNN. Philippine authorities learned of the plot after a small fire in a Manila apartment, which turned out to be the hideout of Ramzi Yousef, who was later convicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Yousef escaped at the time, but agents caught his right-hand man, Abdul Hakim Murad, who told them a chilling tale. "Murad narrated to us about a plan by the Ramzi cell in the continental U.S. to hijack a commercial plane and ram it into the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and also the Pentagon," said Rodolfo Mendoza, a Philippine intelligence investigator. Philippine investigators also found evidence targeting commercial towers in San Francisco, Chicago and New York City. They said they passed that information on to the FBI in 1995, but it's not clear what was done with it.4

And according to the L.A. Times,

U.S. and Italian officials were warned in July [of 2001] that Islamic terrorists might attempt to kill President Bush and other leaders by crashing an airliner into the Genoa summit of industrialized nations, officials said Wednesday. Italian officials took the reports seriously enough to prompt extraordinary precautions during the July summit of the Group of 8 nations, including closing the airspace over Genoa and stationing antiaircraft guns at the city's airport…the reports suggest that Western governments were aware that terrorists might one day use a hijacked airplane as a suicide weapon--as they did Sept. 11 in attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.5

The London Times also reported,

MI6 warned the American intelligence services about a plot to hijack aircraft and crash them into buildings two years before the September 11 attacks. Liaison staff at the American embassy in Grosvenor Square in London were passed a secret report by MI6 in 1999 after the intelligence service picked up indications from human intelligence sources (Humint) that Osama Bin Laden’s followers were planning attacks in which civilian aircraft could be used in “unconventional ways”.6

Three days after the attacks,

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III described reports that several of the hijackers had received flight training in the United States as "news, quite obviously," adding, "If we had understood that to be the case, we would have -- perhaps one could have averted this."7

Yet the Washington Post reported that "Federal authorities have been aware for years that suspected terrorists with ties to Osama bin Laden were receiving flight training at schools in the United States and abroad."8

A top secret German Intelligence "Background Report on 9/11/2001" obtained by TBRNews.org said that

On June 10, 2001, the BND warned the CIA office in the U.S. Embassy to the Federal Republic [of Germany] that certain Arab terrorists were planning to seize American commercial aircraft for use as weapons of destruction against ignificant American symbols.9

A month later on July 11, 2001, American officials discussed in a Berlin meeting, plans "to launch military strikes against Afghanistan in October of that year." The German report stated, "The purpose of these strikes was to topple the Afghanistan government and the Taliban in order to replace it with a government 'more sensitive to the needs of American oil interests.'"10

German Ambassador Ischinger also personally notified President Bush "that information developed by the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz [German domestic secret service] as well as the BND [Bundesnachrichtendienst, German foreign secret service] indicated clearly that an attack by a radical Arab group partially based in Germany was to occur on September 10-11, 2001."11

The German report also mentions Russia's warnings:

In mid-August, 2001, President of the Russian Federation Putin ordered that the American authorities be warned of pending attacks on government buildings inside the United States. This warning was conveyed to the U.S. Ambassador in Moscow and via the Russian Ambassador’s office directly to the U.S. President.

And France's warnings:

On August 20, the Government of France, through the American Embassy in Paris and their Embassy in Washington, issued a more specific warning. This warning specified the exact date, time and places of the attacks.12

It was known for many years that terrorists were planning to or at least capable of crashing airliners into buildings. The exact date of the attacks was known by the President for over a month before they occurred. Yet the military was supposedly to surprised to respond to the situation, and government officials claimed in the days following the attacks that they would have prevented such an attack if they could have imagined it was even possible.

Notes

1. “President Discusses Response to September 11 Attacks, Remarks by the President at Presentation of Commander-In-Chief's Trophy”, May 17 2002. See http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/05/20020517-1.html.
2. “For years, signs suggested that something was up”, Bill Gertz, Washington Times, May 17, 2002. See http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020517-70217917.htm.
3. Press Briefing by Ari Fleischer, May 16 2002. See http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/05/20020516-4.html.
4. “U.S. warned in 1995 of plot to hijack planes, attack buildings”, Maria Ressa, CNN, September 18, 2001. See http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/09/18/inv.hijacking.philippines/.
5. “Italy Tells of Threat at Genoa Summit”, L.A. Times, September 27, 2001. See http://propagandamatrix.com/Italy_Tells_of_Threat_at_Genoa_Summit.htm.
6. “MI6 Warned US of Al-Qaeda Attacks”, Nicholas Rufford, London Times, June 9, 2002. See http://www.propagandamatrix.com/mi6_warned_us_of_al_qaeda_attacks.htm.
7. “FBI Knew Terrorists Were Using Flight Schools”, Steve Fainaru and James V. Grimaldi, Washington Post, September 23, 2001. Retrieved 07/30/06 from http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A10840-2001Sep22.
8. Ibid.
9. "Background Report on 9/11/2001". Top Secret German report obtained by TBRNews.Org. pp. 5-6. Retrieved 08/22/06 from http://tbrnews.org/Archives/a652.htm. A copy of the report was sent to the German Embassy in Washington, which advised that "the German authorities would neither confirm nor deny the authenticity nor the authorship of" the document.
10. Ibid, p. 6.
11. Ibid, p. 2.
12. Ibid, p. 6.

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