CIA Warned of Attack 6 Years Before 9/11

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Registered: 03-26-2003
CIA Warned of Attack 6 Years Before 9/11
6
Fri, 04-16-2004 - 11:25am
This goes to more of what I have been saying all along about the massive problems within our intelligence community.

How can any administration make a well informed decision, if they are not getting all of the information?

http://breakingnews.nypost.com/dynamic/stories/S/SEPT_11_CIA_WARNINGS?SITE=NYNYP&SECTION=HOME

CIA Warned of Attack 6 Years Before 9/11

By JOHN SOLOMON

Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Six years before the Sept. 11 attacks, the CIA warned in a classified report that Islamic extremists likely would strike on U.S. soil at landmarks in Washington or New York, or through the airline industry, according to intelligence officials.

Though hauntingly prescient, the CIA's 1995 National Intelligence Estimate did not yet name Osama bin Laden as a terrorist threat.

But within months the intelligence agency developed enough concern about the wealthy, Saudi-born militant to create a specific unit to track him and his followers, the officials told The Associated Press.

And in 1997, the CIA updated its intelligence estimate to ensure bin Laden appeared on its very first page as an emerging threat, cautioning that his growing movement might translate into attacks on U.S. soil, the officials said, divulging new details about the CIA's 1990s response to the terrorist threat.

The officials took the rare step Thursday of disclosing information in the closely held National Intelligence Estimates and other secret briefings to counter criticisms in a staff report released this week by the independent commission examining pre-Sept. 11 intelligence failures.

That commission report accused the CIA of failing to recognize al-Qaida as a formal terrorist organization until 1999. It characterized the agency as regarding bin Laden mostly as a financier instead of a charismatic leader of the terrorist movement.

But one senior U.S. intelligence official, who spoke only on condition of anonymity, said the 1997 National Intelligence Estimate "identified bin Laden and his followers and threats they were making and said it might portend attacks inside the United States."

The National Intelligence Estimate is distributed to the president and senior intelligence officials in the executive branch and the Congress.

Philip Zelikow, executive director of the Sept. 11 commission, confirmed the 1997 warning about bin Laden, but said it was only two sentences long and lacked any strategic analysis on how to address the threat. "We were well aware of the information and the staff stands by exactly what it says" in its report, he said.

The intelligence official also said that while the 1995 intelligence assessment did not mention bin Laden or al-Qaida by name, it clearly warned that Islamic terrorists were intent on striking specific targets inside the United States like those hit on Sept. 11, 2001.

The report specifically warned that civil aviation, Washington landmarks such as the White House and Capitol and buildings on Wall Street were at the greatest risk of a domestic terror attack by Muslim extremists, the official said.

Deputy CIA Director John McLaughlin testified Wednesday that by early 1996 his agency had developed enough concern about bin Laden to create a special unit to focus on him.

"We were very focused on this issue," McLaughlin told the commission.

The commission's report did credit the CIA after 1997 with collecting vast amounts of intelligence on bin Laden and al-Qaida, which resulted in thousands of individual reports circulated at the highest levels of government. These carried titles such as "Bin Laden Threatening to Attack U.S. Aircraft" in June 1998 and "Bin Laden's Interest in Biological and Radiological Weapons" in February 2001.

Despite this intelligence, the CIA never produced an authoritative summary of al-Qaida's involvement in past terrorist attacks, didn't formally recognize al-Qaida as a group until 1999 and did not fully appreciate bin Laden's role as the leader of a growing extremist movement, the commission said.

"There was no comprehensive estimate of the enemy," the commission report alleged.

But the senior intelligence official said the commission report failed to mention that CIA had produced large numbers of analytical reports on the growth, capabilities, structure and threats posed by al-Qaida throughout the late 1990s and those detailed reports were distributed to the front lines of terror-fighting agencies.

The CIA most frequently provided these individual and highly detailed analyses to the White House Counterterrorism Security Group charged with formulating anti-terrorism policies and responses, the official said




Edited 4/16/2004 11:25 am ET ET by politicalbry

iVillage Member
Registered: 01-09-2004
Sat, 04-17-2004 - 2:54pm
Good.

So, now instead of blaming Mr. Bush for the 9/11 terrorist attacks, we can blame the Clinton administration, right??

So, when do the Clinton hearings start, anyway?

Oh, that's right...Ms. Lewinski was working at the White House then, I forgot. No wonder they let info slide through.

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Registered: 07-25-2003
Sun, 04-18-2004 - 12:14am
What We Knew…and Didn't Do

By Kenneth Timmerman

http://www.rd.com/common/nav/index.jhtml;sessionid=0MSMYBWTQAQMSCTENILSGWT5AAAACIY4?articleId=9527512

April 13, 2004

In 1997-1998, I became aware of clearly observable warnings of hostile terrorist intentions against America, by Osama bin Laden.

For over eighteen months -- as part of an investigation for Reader's Digest -- I had been learning from a variety of former U.S. intelligence officers and foreign sources about a vast, world wide network of Islamist radicals, who had emerged from the U.S.-backed war to drive the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. At their head was the shadowy Saudi renegade, Osama bin Laden, whom his followers referred to as the "Prince of Jihad."

What made bin Laden unusual was his background. Son of a fabulously wealthy Saudi businessman, he traded the family palaces and five-star hotels for an unheated cave in Afghanistan, renouncing catered banquets for a diet of moldy cheese and rancid eggs. The more the Digest looked at terrorist movements around the globe, the more we began to see his influence -- and especially his money. We determined to do a portrait of the man himself.

We weren't the first to report on bin Laden, who had given interviews to a handful of Arab and Pakistani reporters in previous years. But until the Digest investigation, published in July 1998, just weeks before the twin Africa embassy bombings, bin Laden had been presented as a relic of the U.S-backed mujahedin in Afghanistan, an exotic but safely distant product of "blowback" left over from the CIA's alliance with Pakistan's much-feared Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

As we surveyed an already impressive record of anti-American terrorist acts -- a failed 1992 effort to target U.S. troops staying at a hotel in Aden, Yemen; the 1993 assault on U.S. peacekeepers in Mogadishu, Somalia, that left 18 Americans dead; the spectacular attempt to collapse the World Trade Center towers in 1993 that left 6 people dead; and a November 1995 bombing in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia -- we saw something far more sinister. To us, looking at the evidence we could gather as journalists, bin Laden was an imminent threat to Americans everywhere.

From our preliminary investigation, we turned up evidence of bin Laden's tentacles from the Philippines to a Brooklyn mosque. We found fund-raising and political support offices operating in San Diego, California, and in the Washington, D.C., area. We traced a failed 1995 plot to hijack 12 commercial airliners in the Far East and crash them against targets on the ground -- clearly the precursor of the 9/11 attacks -- from the Philippines back to a bin Laden safe house in Peshawar, Pakistan.

We also turned up hard evidence that bin Laden was receiving financial assistance from some of the most prominent businessmen in Saudi Arabia and from key members of the Saudi royal family. One trusted source revealed that bin Laden maintained accounts with Merrill Lynch in London, and owned stock in major U.S. corporations. Others described a worldwide network of Muslim charities, including the International Islamic Relief Organization, that bin Laden was using as cover for worldwide recruiting and terrorist operations.

While known to the federal government, none of these linkages were receiving much attention from federal officials, as far as we could determine. Even the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, which had successfully prosecuted the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, refused to discuss ties between convicted bomber Ramzi Yousef and bin Laden, although glimpses of those connections were clear to me as I pored through thousands of pages of trial transcripts and interviewed lawyers for the defendants.

Nor could the prosecutors explain the whereabouts of bin Laden deputy Ali Mohammad, a former U.S. Special Forces operator who testified during the trial that he had been bin Laden's personal bodyguard while he was living in the Sudan in the early 1990s. If this was an administration that made terrorism its top priority, nobody in the Department of Justice or the FBI seemed to know it. Mohammad finally surfaced again during the Africa bombing trial in 2000. In the interim, according to his guilty plea, he had been conspiring to murder U.S. citizens and destroy U.S. buildings and property around the world.

Ultimately we were told by our Justice Department sources that something was afoot, but that it was too early for them to talk about it. When we pressed harder, they revealed that they were preparing to name bin Laden as a conspirator in a new indictment stemming from the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

I also managed to locate and interview a key bin Laden operative named Tarik Hamdi, who appeared later with Mohammad in the Africa embassy conspiracy plot for having carried a satellite phone battery to bin Laden in Afghanistan that was used to plot terrorist acts. Hamdi and I had lunch together in a suburban Washington, D.C., Olive Tree restaurant, where he offered for a fee to introduce me to bin Laden's "fixers" in Peshawar. (I am left wondering why our federal government wasn't pursuing Hamdi and Mohammad more vigorously, instead of allowing them to operate openly in the United States.)

In February 1998, as I was preparing to depart for Europe, the Middle East and Afghanistan in search of bin Laden and his associates, the Digest got word that the seemingly shadowy Saudi had just issued a religious edict, or "fatwa," calling on Muslims to kill Americans and their allies throughout the world. He called such attacks, on civilians and military alike, "an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it."

Bin Laden's fatwa sounded like a declaration of war. And yet, when I asked U.S. government officials for a copy of the fatwa, neither the CIA nor the State Department said they had seen it. I finally obtained a copy from an alert staffer on Capitol Hill.

Here was a man with a rap sheet a mile long, a virtual army of trained followers, and a seemingly colossal personal fortune he could use to indulge his murderous fantasies. Why did no one in the U.S. government appear to have their "hair on fire"?

True enough, the State Department had taken the unusual step in August 1996 of issuing a three-page "white paper" on bin Laden -- a product of what I learned was the CIA's "bin Laden station" in Frankfurt, Germany. Also, in the days following bin Laden's fatwa (February 1998), State Department officials told us that U.S. government facilities in Washington, D.C., had been put on "high alert."

What did "high alert" mean in practice? Hard to say. As far as I could tell, reporters, foreign dignitaries, and ordinary citizens could approach key government buildings with nominal searches.

In London, I spent hours interviewing Sheikh Omar Bakri Mohammad, an open bin Laden sympathizer, who boasted that he was recruiting jihadis to fight in a worldwide "Mohammad's Army" against America and the West. Sheikh Omar continues to preach out in the open today. I also met with Saudi dissidents who claimed to be working closely with bin Laden, who displayed evidence of a massive, sophisticated and well-funded public relations effort on behalf of bin Laden's anti-Western jihad.

In Egypt, government officials complained bitterly that the United States and Britain were not taking the war on terror seriously. But then, the Egyptians had just been hit hard by terrorists allied with al-Qaeda who murdered 58 foreign tourists in the 4,550-year-old temple of Queen Hatshepsut in Luxor in November 1997, virtually ending Egypt's lucrative tourist industry. Two years earlier, bin Laden allies had attempted to assassinate Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak while he was visiting Ethiopia.

In Pakistan, U.S. diplomats acknowledged in private that they were easy prey to bin Laden's assassins, and shared a tiny fleet of bullet-proof cars when they went out shopping in residential areas of the capital, Islamabad. Senior officials I interviewed in Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), openly revered bin Laden. A former ISI chief, General Hamid Gul, served as a semi-official spokesman for the renegade Saudi with visiting reporters.

I don't doubt for an instant that our government was fully aware of all of the activities I have just described. After all, it has immense resources to gather intelligence, while I was just a reporter. Clearly, going after terrorists was not a top priority.

In July 1998, Reader's Digest published Kenneth Timmerman's report, "This Man Wants You Dead." Three weeks later -- with more than 200 innocent civilians torn to bits by al-Qaeda bombs in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam -- bin Laden's face was plastered in newspapers around the world.


Renee

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Registered: 03-25-2004
Mon, 04-19-2004 - 12:24pm
I read that Mr. Clinton spent several hours privately with the panel, as did his former staff (publicly and under oath). The reports on Clinton's testimony I read said that it was very frank and open, and very helpful to the committee. (And Clinton didn't need Gore there with him to make sure he got his story straight. ;-) I hope that President Bush is as candid and helpful with the panel if/when he finally meets with them. So you should be asking, when do the Bush hearings start?

You seem unwilling to view the root of the problem as the major, cross-administration, cross-intelligence agency, bureaucratic, reactive-based strategy and policy that it is/was. Or did I read you wrong? Of course no single person, agency or missed warning is to blame. Anyone who says differently is simply uninformed, in my view.

Glassy

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Registered: 04-16-2004
Mon, 04-19-2004 - 12:32pm
I dont think that was the aim of the article.

I took it that there are severe faults within the intelligence sector, and this could be the reason that nothing was done during the Clinton years.

If you take it as an attack on the Clinton era, then perhaps you feel as though they truly have something to hide.

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2004
Mon, 04-19-2004 - 12:35pm
What I took from the article was that the CIA may have had information pointing to the specific attacks, it does not detail what was done with the information.

Who got it?

How was it handled?

Did the President ever see this intelligence?

Was there anything to corroberate the intelligence?

As you state, this goes to show the severe faults within the intelligence sectors, as well as the transitional problems between administrations.

If this information was there since 1996, why was it not made known to the new Administration. This may signify that the outgoing administration may not have known about it, and if that is the case, then the CIA truly failed on this one.

iVillage Member
Registered: 04-16-2004
Mon, 04-19-2004 - 2:21pm
Thanks for the link.

I had read that as well.

It does go to the story about the NSC report.

I would love to read that report, to see what happened with the information, and also if it makes any reference to the CIA's knowledge of these types of attacks as early as 1995.