9/11: Countdown to Terror – Warnings Ignored

Order Out of Chaos : 05

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Chapter 5
9/11: Countdown to Terror – Warnings Ignored

The subject of September 11 is so broad in its scope that it cannot be detailed from just one perspective. In the following three chapters I will cover the events before, during and after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. Initially we will document the overwhelming amount of evidence indicating that the US knew the attacks were about to take place. The question of why the attacks took place despite the fact that they could have been prevented runs parallel throughout this extended section of the book.

It is important to note that the official story of 9/11 can be dismantled from two or more different angles. If we are to believe that nineteen suicide hijackers carried out the attacks on behalf of Al-Qaeda then it can be proven that these men were trained, funded and allowed into the country by the U.S. establishment. They were tracked and traced and their intentions were well known by the authorities, many months and even years before that fateful day. I will present the evidence to verify these claims in this chapter.

In the following chapter I will switch to the second and more cutting edge angle of research, namely that the Al-Qaeda plot was merely a smokescreen to shadow who really carried out the attacks and what methods were used.

Alleged Hijackers Trained at U.S Air Bases

Common sense suggests that to prevent future acts of suicide hijacking, one needs to go to the source of the hijacker’s training and shut it down. At the very least, stern questions need to be asked concerning why three or more of the alleged September 11 perpetrators were trained at one of the USA’s foremost Naval complexes, and why this shocking notion received scant media attention and was subsequently subject to a complete press blackout.

September 14th, just three days after the attack on America, FBI director Robert S. Mueller stated, “perhaps one could have averted this.”1 This was in response to reports confirming that several of the suicide hijackers had received flight training within the United States. For the moment we will set aside the shocking revelation that seven or more of the named nineteen suicide hijackers are still alive, this evidence will appear later. For the sake of clarity, at this point we will work from the notion that the FBI’s nineteen named hijackers are actually the ones who carried out the September 11 atrocities, albeit operating under slightly changed birth dates and/or names with regard to the discrepancies between military training records and the official FBI list.

1 ‘FBI Knew Terrorists Were Using Flight Schools’ - Steve Fainaru and James V. Grimaldi – Washington Post –
September 23 2001 - http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac3/ContentServer?pagename=article&articleid=A10840-2001Sep22&node=nation/specials/attacked/archive

The Pensacola Naval Air Station is recognized as the premier naval installation in the Department of the Navy. The Complex in Escambia and Santa Rosa counties employs more than 16,000 military and 7,400 civilian personnel. It is also where as many as four of the FBI’s nineteen suspected suicide hijackers participated in the facility’s flight training program for foreign military trainees in the 1990’s.2 Three of these individuals listed their addresses on drivers’ licenses and car registrations as the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, Fla. according to a high-ranking U.S. Navy source.3

Namely, Saeed Alghamdi and Ahmad Alnami, who allegedly were two of the four men that hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 and subsequently crashed in Stony Creek Township, Pennsylvania, and Ahmed Alghamdi, alleged co-hijacker of United Airlines Flight 75, which hit the south tower of the World Trade Center. Military records also confirm that the three used their address as 10 Radford Boulevard, a base roadway on which residences for foreign military flight trainees are located.

The Florida link is clear. The FBI lists no less than eleven of the hijackers as having lived or living in Florida, including six in the Delray Beach area alone. It is also interesting to note that several of the hijackers, including the lead hijacker Mohamed Atta, lived in Hollywood, hardly a puritanical hotbed of Islamic fundamentalism.

With regard to the three Pensacola students, it is confirmed that their training was financed by Saudi Arabia, birthplace of the majority of the nineteen hijackers and a supposed ally of the United States. Days after Newsweek published this story, Florida Democratic Senator Bill Nelson angrily faxed a message to Attorney General John Ashcroft, demanding to know if it was correct. The response was a deafening silence.

A spokesman for Senator Nelson subsequently stated,

“In the wake of those reports we asked about the Pensacola Naval Air Station but we never got a definitive answer from the Justice Department. So we asked the FBI for an answer ‘if and when’ they could provide us one. Their response to date has been that they are trying to sort through something complicated and difficult.”4

The FBI never did provide an answer. The Pensacola-terrorist link has been buried. The story broke in a few mainstream publications in mid-September 2001 but has since vanished. Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee Bob Graham also requested information on the Pensacola tie-in. We must assume that he was also stonewalled or otherwise told to keep the information confidential, due to the fact that, once again, this story has not since appeared in the mainstream media.

2 ‘Pensacola NAS link faces more scrutiny’ – Larry Wheeler – Pensacola News Journal – September 17 2001 – available at http://www.propagandamatrix.com/pensacola_nas_link_scrutiny.html
3 ‘Alleged Hijackers May Have Trained at U.S. Bases’ - George Wehrfritz, Catharine Skipp and John Barry – Newsweek – September 15 2001 - http://www.msnbc.com/news/629529.asp?cp1=1
4 ‘Did Terrorist Pilots Train at U.S. Military Schools?’ – Daniel Hopsicker - http://www.madcowprod.com/index5.html

The Clinton Administration’s Protection of Terrorists The government terrorism paradigm is by no means divided down party lines. The Clinton administration provided the framework from which Al-Qaeda grew in stature. The September 11 plot could have been crushed in the last years of the 20th century.

It is accepted that the complex sequence of events we saw unfold on September 11th would have generated an excessive volume of communications - whether
by radio, cell phone, land line, fax or modem - among the terrorists, among their Middle-Eastern sponsors and among commercial contacts here and abroad. The
contention that the NSA purposefully avoided intercepting Al-Qaeda communication doesn’t even have to be debated when it is known that bin Laden’s network had the sophisticated communication equipment necessary to duck detection up until the late nineties. And who sold them that equipment?

As was the case with Iraq, the U.S. Government. The Clinton administration provided the terrorist supporting nation of Syria with spread-spectrum radios, fiber optics and highly advanced computer networks that are invulnerable to wiretap. Syria in turn passed this technology on to numerous terrorist cells around the world, including Al-Qaeda.

According to World Net Daily,

The dozen or so Islamic terrorists who pulled off the plot to strike at America’s nerve centers in New York and Washington spent at least five years researching, planning and coordinating the surprise attacks, U.S. security officials say. And they did it completely in secret, using the world’s most sophisticated telecommunications equipment, some secured by advanced encryption technology that most armies don’t have…the NSA wasn’t able to detect the Islamic terrorists’ plot because of the high quality of the communications gear that they’ve been acquiring over the last couple of years, thanks to the Clinton administration’s decontrols on advanced-telecommunications equipment.5

However, this was by no means the only way in which Clinton and his administration proliferated the activities of the international Al-Qaeda network. Clinton security chiefs repeatedly rejected vital intelligence that would have resulted in stifling numerous worldwide terror cells, primarily Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. The government of Sudan offered to both arrest bin Laden or at least closely monitor his activities within the country, and turn over files, some an inch and a half thick, a vast database on bin Laden and more than 200 leading members of his Al-Qaeda network.

They included photographs, and information on their families, backgrounds and contacts. Most were ‘Afghan Arabs’, Saudis, Yemenis and Egyptians who had fought with bin Laden against the Soviets in Afghanistan. These resources would, according to a former Clinton administration official, have entailed that “we probably would have never seen a September 11.”6

Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright responded to the offer by giving the order for US missiles to blast the al-Shifa medicine factory, which supplied 60 per cent of Sudan’s medicines, and had contracts to make vaccines with the UN.

5 ‘US equipped terror sponsors’ – Paul Sperry – World Net Daily – September 12 2001 - http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=24466

6 ‘Demagoguing September 11’ – Editorial – Washington Times – May 21 2002 –http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20020521-998991.htm

FIG 5.1

[CAPTION: The Clinton administration was instrumental in protecting the Al-Qaeda network.

The Monica Lewinsky scandal was released intentionally to distract the American public from this treasonous activity.]

I n the spring of 1996, Sudan, using a back channel direct from its president to the CIA, offered to arrest bin Laden and place him in custody in Saudi Arabia. The initial meeting took place at a hotel in Arlington, Virginia, on March 3 of that year.

One of the officials who oversaw this and subsequent engagements was Mansoor Ijaz, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and chairman of a New York-based investment company. He states,

“From 1996 to 1998, I opened unofficial channels between Sudan and the Clinton administration. I met with officials in both countries, including Clinton, U.S. National Security Advisor Samuel R. “Sandy” Berger and Sudan’s president and intelligence chief. President Omar Hassan Ahmed Bashir, who wanted terrorism sanctions against Sudan lifted, offered the arrest and extradition of Bin Laden and detailed intelligence data about the global networks constructed by Egypt’s Islamic Jihad, Iran’s Hezbollah and the Palestinian Hamas. Among those in the networks were the two hijackers who piloted commercial airliners into the World Trade Center. The silence of the Clinton administration in responding to these offers was deafening.”7

The Saudi Fahd Monarchy didn’t treat bin Laden’s proposed extradition to Saudi Arabia with enthusiasm. Geopolitical hesitation meant that the White House did not press the Saudis on this issue at all. This meant that, following intense pressure from Saudi Arabia and the U.S., Sudan agreed to expel bin Laden and up to 300 of his associates. They were now free to leave for Afghanistan, providing total anonymity and escaping the sophisticated tracking methods that the Sudanese were capable of and had offered.

Subsequent analysis by U.S. intelligence confirms bin Laden had full access to his Sudanese assets from his new position in Afghanistan, directly contradicting a previously held White House assumption that it was valuable in itself to force bin Laden out of Sudan, supposedly tearing him away from his extensive network of business, investments and training camps. This thinking was proven woefully inaccurate. Sudanese intelligence believed this to be a great mistake and indeed it had disastrous consequences, Sudan expelled Mr. bin Laden on May 18, 1996, to Afghanistan.

From there, he is thought to have planned and financed the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the near-destruction of the American destroyer Cole in Yemen last year and the devastation in New York and Washington on Sept. 11.8

7 ‘Clinton Let Bin Laden Slip Away and Metastasize’ – Mansoor Ijaz – L.A. Times – December 5 2001 – available at http://propagandamatrix.com/clinton_let_bin_laden_slip_and_metastasize.html

8 ‘In ‘96, Sudan Offered to Arrest bin Laden’ – Barton Gellman – International Herald Tribune – October 4 2001 –available at http://www.propagandamatrix.com/sudan_offered_to_arrest_bin_laden.html

On the surface, it would seem bitterness and paranoia towards Sudan was responsible for the outright refusal to take up their numerous offers. The US proclaimed the country as being a ‘terrorist state,’ and the subsequent Bush administration has made noises about making Sudan one of the next targets in their crusade. This, despite the fact that in May 2001, a joint CIA/FBI investigative team concluded that Africa’s largest country is in no way a sponsor of international terrorism. Sudan has its own internal problems. Over the past two decades, a civil war pitting black Christians and animists in the south against the Arab-Muslims of the north has cost at least 1.5 million lives in war and famine-related deaths, as well as the displacement of millions of others.

Since this story broke in late 2001, former members of the Clinton administration have trashed it as being a complete fabrication. Then perhaps they could explain why Clinton himself admitted the Sudan affair in a February 15 2002 Long Island Association speech, “Mr. bin Laden used to live in Sudan,” Clinton explained to a Feb. 15 Long Island Association luncheon.

“He was expelled from Saudi Arabia in 1991, then he went to Sudan. And we’d been hearing that the Sudanese wanted America to start meeting with them again.
“They released him,” the ex-president confirmed.
“At the time, 1996, he had committed no crime against America so I did not bring him here because we had no basis on which to hold him, though we knew he wanted to commit crimes against America.
“So I pleaded with the Saudis to take him, ‘cause they could have,” Clinton explained.

“But they thought it was a hot potato and they didn’t and that’s how he wound up in Afghanistan.”9

The Sudan-Clinton fiasco is just a drop in the ocean in the context of how Al-Qaeda could have been stopped at numerous different points in the build up to
September 11.

According to one senior CIA source,

“This represents the worst single intelligence failure in this whole terrible business. It is the key to the whole thing right now. It is reasonable to say that had we had this data we may have had a better chance of preventing the attacks.”10

9 ‘Clinton Admits: I Nixed Bin Laden Extradition Offer’ – Carl Limbacher – Newsmax – August 11 2002 - http://www.newsmax.com/showinsidecover.shtml?a=2002/8/10/230919

10 ‘Resentful west spurned Sudan’s key terror files’ - David Rose - London Observer - September 30 2001 – available at http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0%2C6903%2C560624%2C00.html

Planes as Weapons

When September 11 prior knowledge broke in the mainstream media in May of 2002 most of the ‘debate’ focused on the use of planes as bombs and whether or not intelligence agencies had considered this method of attack. Although the coverage was a whitewash in itself it can easily be proven that authorities knew terrorists were likely to use airliners as bombs.

Once this is known, those that gave press conferences denying the jetliners as bombs foreknowledge, such as Condoleeza Rice, George Tenet and George Bush, can be exposed as outright liars.

On May 16, National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, who was warned September 6 2001 “You must move more quickly on homeland security, an attack is going to happen” by Senator Gary Hart, stated,

“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.”11

Ari Fleischer, President Bush’s press secretary, again on May 16, stated,

“The President did not—not—receive information about the use of airplanes as missiles by suicide bombers. This was a new type of attack that had not been foreseen.”12

President Bush, in a May 17 speech commented,

“Had I known that the enemy was going to use airplanes to kill on that fateful morning, I would have done everything in my power to protect the American people.”13

All of the above statements are false. There were numerous indications that the method of a kamikaze attack using hijacked airliners was in the works.

In October 2000, the Pentagon conducted a series of simulations designed to test the response to a commercial airliner crashing into their headquarters, as took place on September 11th.

The fire and smoke from the downed passenger aircraft billows from the Pentagon courtyard. Defense Protective Services Police seal the crash sight. Army medics, nurses and doctors scramble to organize aid. An Arlington Fire Department chief dispatches his equipment to the affected areas. Don Abbott, of Command Emergency Response Training, walks over to the Pentagon and extinguishes the flames. The Pentagon was a model and the “plane crash” was a simulated one. The Pentagon Mass Casualty Exercise, as the crash was called, was just one of several scenarios that emergency response teams were exposed to Oct. 24-26 in the Office of the Secretaries of Defense conference room.14

The CIA on the very morning of September 11th was also conducting a mock exercise where a plane crashes into its headquarters. This exercise was obviously planned before the terrorist attacks.

11 ‘For years, signs suggested that something was up’ – Bill Gertz – Washington Times – May 17 2002 - http://www.washtimes.com/national/20020517-70217917.htm

12 Press Briefing by Ari Fleischer – May 16 2002 – http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/05/20020516-4.html

13 ‘President Discusses Response to September 11 Attacks - Remarks by the President at Presentation of Commander-In-Chief’s Trophy’ – May 17 2002 - http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/05/20020517-1.html

14 ‘Contingency planning Pentagon MASCAL exercise simulates scenarios in preparing for emergencies’ – The United States Army Military District of Washington – November 3 2000 – available at http://propagandamatrix.com/pentagon_preparing.htm

In what the government describes as a bizarre coincidence, one U.S. intelligence agency was planning an exercise last Sept. 11 in which an errant aircraft would crash into one of its buildings.15 Of course, every smoking gun you’ll read about in these pages is just one in a series of ‘bizarre coincidences’.

The US was warned in 1995 of a plot to hijack commercial planes and slam them into the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. The plan was named Project Bojinka and was uncovered by Philippine authorities. It originated with Ramzi Yousef, one of the masterminds of the first WTC bombing in 1993. The
information was passed on to the FBI who totally ignored it,

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.16

FIG 5.2

[CAPTION: The World Trade Center was known to have been a target of suicide hijackers since as far back as 1995.]

U.S. and Italian officials were warned in July that Islamic terrorists might attempt to kill President Bush and other leaders by crashing an airliner into the Genoa summit of industrialized nations. They went so far as to mount anti-aircraft guns at the city’s airport, U.S. and Italian officials were warned in July 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.17

15 ‘Agency planned exercise on Sept. 11 built around a plane crashing into a building’ – John J. Lumpkin – Associated Press – August 21 – available at http://www.propagandamatrix.com/agency_planned_exercise_on_sept_11_built_around_a_plane_crashing_into_a_building.htm

16 ‘U.S. warned in 1995 of plot to hijack planes, attack buildings’ – Maria Ressa – CNN – September 18 2001 - http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/09/18/inv.hijacking.philippines/

17 ‘Italy Tells of Threat at Genoa Summit’ – L.A. Times – September 27 2001 – available at http://propagandamatrix.com/Italy_Tells_of_Threat_at_Genoa_Summit.htm

"The BBC reported further, Islamic extremists were said to be trying to hit Bush in the air,” Mr Fini told the Panorama news magazine…”What I know is that intelligence (services) in Italy knew that an air attack was considered to be possible and that was the reason why we closed the airspace in Genoa during the G8 summit,” Mr Ruggiero said.

Air defenses were also established.18 The worldwide Echelon spy network also gave British and German intelligence clear information that terrorists were going to hijack commercial planes and use them to attack symbols of American and Israeli culture, U.S. and Israeli intelligence agencies received warning signals at least three months ago that Middle Eastern terrorists were planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture, according to a story in Germany’s daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ).

The FAZ, quoting unnamed German intelligence sources, said that the Echelon spy network was being used to collect information about the terrorist threats, and that U.K. intelligence services apparently also had advance warning. The FAZ, one of Germany’s most respected dailies, said that even as far back as six months ago western and near-east press services were receiving information that such attacks were being planned…The FAZ, in its news story, described the system as covering the whole world with 120 satellites.

The newspaper also said Israeli intelligence had collected information indicated that Arab terrorist groups planned to hijack planes in Europe to use as weapons to attack targets in Tel Aviv and other coastal cities in Israel.19 The National Intelligence Council, which advises the president and U.S. intelligence on emerging threats, issued a September 1999 report that again emphasized Al-Qaeda were planning to hijack planes and ram them into government and commercial buildings,

Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al Qaeda’s Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or the White House.20

18 ‘Extremists planned Genoa attack on Bush’ – BBC – September 27 2001 - http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/1566982.stm

19 ‘Echelon Gave Authorities Warning Of Attacks’ – Ned Stafford – Biz Report – September 13 2001 – available at http://propagandamatrix.com/echelon_gave_authorities_warning_of_attacks.html

20 ‘Report Warned Of Suicide Hijackings’ – CBS News – May 17 2002 - http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/05/18/attack/main509488.shtml

Now we know government officials were briefed on an imminent terrorist attacks using planes as bombs, it becomes clear why Attorney General John Ashcroft, who’s pre-9/11 budget requests didn’t include any money for anti-terrorism, was avoiding commercial airlines, In response to inquiries from CBS News over why Ashcroft was traveling exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial airlines, the Justice Department cited what it called a “threat assessment” by the FBI, and said Ashcroft has been advised to travel only by private jet for the remainder of his term.

“There was a threat assessment and there are guidelines. He is acting under the guidelines,” an FBI spokesman said.

Neither the FBI nor the Justice Department, however, would identify what the threat was, when it was detected or who made it.21 In April 2000, a man walked into the FBI field office in Newark and told agents face to face of the plan to hijack airliners,

He said he was involved in a plot by Osama bin Laden to hijack a Boeing 747. He told agents that he had learned hijacking techniques at a training camp in Pakistan and was meeting five or six other hijackers in the United States who planned to overpower the plane’s crew, according to the report released last week by the congressional panel investigating the Sept. 11 attacks.22

British Intelligence, MI6, warned the CIA in 1999 and then again a month before the attack that Al-Qaeda were about to hijack planes and use them as bombs, 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”.23 This was just one of several reports that British Prime Minister Tony Blair was briefed on by GCHQ, MI5 and MI6, including a July 16 memo which outlined the fact that Osama bin Laden was in the final planning stages of an attack on America. Since the CIA work jointly with British intelligence, the Americans were well aware of these reports.

Al-Qaeda members in Italy was discussing a plot to use planes as weapons in wiretaps heard by investigators thirteen months before September 11,

In one conversation, a suspected Yemeni terrorist tells an Egyptian based in Italy about a massive strike against the enemies of Islam involving aircraft and the sky, a blow that “will be written about in all the newspapers of the world.”…

“In the future, listen to the news and remember these words: ‘Above the head’ ... remember well, remember well.... The danger in the airports.... There are clouds in the sky there in international territory, in that country, the fire has been lit and is awaiting only the wind,” the Yemeni said…Later, according to the transcript, he said the fight against Islam’s enemies would be waged “with any means we can combat them, using ... airplanes: They won’t be able to stop us even with their heaviest weapons.”24

21 ‘Ashcroft Flying High’ – CBS News – July 26 2001 - http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/07/26/national/main303601.shtml
22 ‘FAA got alerts but no blame in attacks’ – Bill Adair – St. Petersburg Times – September 23 2002 – available at http://www.propagandamatrix.com/faa_got_alerts_but_no_blame_in_attacks.htm
23 ‘MI6 Warned US of Al-Qaeda Attacks’ – Nicholas Rufford – London Times – June 9 2002 – available at http://www.propagandamatrix.com/mi6_warned_us_of_al_qaeda_attacks.htm
24 ‘Wiretaps May Have Foretold Terror Attacks’ – Sebastian Rotella and Josh Meyer – L.A. Times – May 29 2002 – available at http://www.propagandamatrix.com/Wiretaps_May_Have_Foretold_Terror_Attacks.htm

An Al-Qaeda cell in Madrid, Spain was also taped by authorities discussing an airborne attack plot. At the same time, Jordan and Morocco passed on information to the US concerning a plot named ‘Great Wedding.’

Morocco had infiltrated an agent within Al-Qaeda who confirmed that ‘Great Wedding’ was the code name of an attack using aircraft. The Moroccan Secret Service agent successfully infiltrated Al-Qaeda for two months before the 9/11attacks.

Hassan Dabou broke cover in the summer of 2001 to warn his bosses that the terror group was plotting “something spectacular” in New York. The operation was to be large scale and would occur in the summer or autumn of 2001. Secret service chiefs are said to have taken seriously the tip from one of its veteran informants and immediately passed on the details to Washington.

As far back as eight years ago, reputable individuals were warning the American government that highly symbolic U.S. targets were under threat of being attacked by suicide hijackers using jetliners, Military adviser Dr Marvin Cetron says he prepared a 250-page report for the US intelligence agencies in 1993 which detailed his concerns - but it was ignored.

“I said ... aircraft could hit the White House or the Pentagon - making a left turn at the Washington Monument and running into the White House, or a right turn and going into the Pentagon,” Dr Cetron said. He added: “They understood and they ignored it.’’25

25 ‘Washington was warned of hijack risk’ – London Telegraph – September 13 2001 – available at http://www.propagandamatrix.com/washington_was_warned_of_hijack_risk.htm

The Pentagon was furious with Cetron for merely highlighting public reports of previous planes-as-bombs incidents. They immediately ordered him to delete warnings specific to these incidents from the report.

The 1999 edition of the FAA’s annual report on Criminal Acts Against Aviation stated that an exiled Islamic leader in Britain proclaimed in August 1998 that Mr. bin Laden would “bring down an airliner, or hijack an airliner to humiliate the United States.”

In an October 3 2001 report, the New York Times documented just some of the instances before September 11 where the motive of seizing control of a commercial airliner and driving it into a building or structure was apparent, …That was the December 1994 hijacking of an Air France flight in Algiers. The sponsor of the hijacking was an organization called the Armed Islamic Group, which said it was trying to rid Muslim Algeria of Western influence, specifically from France.

Four young Algerians, members of a subgroup called Phalange of the Signers in Blood, commandeered the plane at the airport and ordered it to fly to Marseille, from which they said they wanted to fly to Paris. But they demanded that it be loaded with 27 tons of fuel — about three times as much as required for the flight to Paris. The plane was an Airbus A300, which is nearly as large as the Boeing 767’s that struck the World Trade Center.

The French authorities determined from hostages who had been released and from other sources that the group planned to explode the plane over Paris or crash it into the Eiffel Tower… Eight months earlier, in April 1994, a flight engineer at Federal Express who was facing a disciplinary hearing that could have ended his career, boarded a DC-10 as a passenger and stormed into the cockpit with a hammer, hitting each of the three members of the cockpit crew in the head and severely injuring all of them. They wrestled him to the deck and regained control of the plane. Prosecutors said only that the man wanted to crash the plane, but company employees have said he was trying to hit the building in Memphis where the company sorts packages.

In between those two incidents, in September 1994, a lone pilot crashed a stolen single-engine Cessna into a tree on the White House grounds just short of the president’s bedroom.26

Congressional investigator Eleanor Hill headed a September 11 enquiry and published a 30-page report. Despite media commentators and even Hill herself labeling advance warning of a potential plot to fly planes into certain buildings as ‘vague’ – the report stated,

US agencies discovered that a group of unidentified Arabs planned to fly an explosive-laden plane from a foreign country into the World Trade Center - but did little about it.27

26 ‘Earlier Hijackings Offered Signals That Were Missed’ – Matthew L. Wald – New York Times – October 3 2001 –available at http://www.propagandamatrix.com/earlier_hijackings_offered_signals_that_were_missed.html
27 ‘US failed to heed terror warnings’ – BBC – September 18 2002 -http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/2267160.stm

Arabs - plane - fly - into - World Trade Center. Oh yes - very vague. The same report claimed that there were twelve indications that an attack was imminent from March 2001. Twelve? I list nearly a hundred in this chapter alone, and they’re all documented. The document also highlighted the fact that intelligence agencies received at least a dozen reports of plans to use aircraft as weapons since 1994.

In liberally quoting the mainstream sources above it can be established that the’ planes as bombs’ scenario was a distinct possibility and had been considered numerous times before September 11. The Japanese used planes as bombs when they attacked Pearl Harbor as far back as 1941.

I do not present this argument as evidence of prior knowledge of the attacks, although many would categorize it as that too, but I simply point to the evidence to prove that in stating this method of attack hadn’t been considered, Bush, Rice and Fleischer were all lying and they knew it. No matter how much emotional bile Condoleeza Rice was able to fake when she said, “I don’t think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center,” she was being overtly deceitful to the relatives of the dead victims.

If they lied about this, what else did they lie about?

The 20th Hijacker

The case of Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called ‘20th hijacker’, again underscores the planes as bombs issue. The repeated high-level blockades on his arrest and investigation also introduce us to the next 9/11 smoking gun – why were FBI agents obstructed from prosecuting Al-Qaeda members before September 11?

According to MSNBC,

The question being asked here is if they put two and two together, they could have gotten a lot more information about the guy - if not stopped the hijacking.28

An individual at a flight school makes it clear that he is only interested in flying a large passenger jet over New York City air space at cruising altitude, and has no concern about taking off or landing. French intelligence repeatedly warns that this individual is a member of Al-Qaeda. This alone you would suspect would mandate a cursory search of the individual’s computer hard drive. Not according to the Justice Department. The case of Zacarias Moussaoui highlights another disturbing example of how key intelligence that would have prevented September 11th was purposefully withheld from well-intentioned FBI agents.

It is now clear that Moussaoui was supposed to have been the fifth hijacker on board flight 93 that crashed in southwest Pennsylvania. He was absent from that role due to being placed in detention on minor immigration charges on August 17, 2001, and cheered from his Sherburne County jail cell as the attack unfolded on that fateful day.

Moussaoui, a 33-year-old French national, lived in London for 9 years, a follower of radical Islamic cleric and MI5 lovechild Abu Qatada, before receiving $15,000 in bank transfers from known associates of the September 11 suicide hijackers.

He then set off for the Pan Am International Flight Academy in Eagen, just outside Minneapolis. Once there, Moussaoui only sought training in making turns
- not take-offs and landings - and specifically asked about flying over New York air space. Moussaoui made it clear that he was there to learn how to pilot a 747-400, despite the fact that he had only been trained on a single-engine Cessna and was relatively incompetent as a student. His instructor, a former military pilot, urgently briefed Minnesota Congressman James L. Oberstar and other officials concerning his suspicions and directly warned the FBI,

“Do you realize that a 747 loaded with fuel can be used as a bomb?”29

The FBI officials in turn promptly warned the Federal Aviation Administration, who took no action and saw no reason to check scores of other flight schools where Middle Eastern men were seeking flight training. Local FBI agents were not so incompetent. They seized Moussaoui’s computer in mid-August. As Moussaoui, now under arrest and scrutiny, told FBI and INS agents that he “always wanted to fly a big plane,”30 Minnesota FBI officials begged the Justice Department in Washington for approval to open up the hard drive of his computer under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Concern about Moussaoui reached the top echelons of the FBI, prompting a flurry of unusual meetings between agents and bureau lawyers trying to secure a special intelligence warrant.

28 ‘Access Denied’ - Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman – Newsweek – October 1 2001 - http://www.msnbc.com/news/636610.asp?cp1=1

29 ‘Flight School Warned F.B.I. of Suspicions’ – Philip Shenon – New York Times – December 22 2001 - http://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/22/national/22PILO.html

30 ‘Moussaoui Probe Pushed U.S. Limits’ – Dan Eggen – Washington Post – January 31 2002 - http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A64701-2002Jan30&notFound=true

A French intelligence report clearly implicated Moussaoui with an Algerian terrorist group and a trip to Afghanistan (where he is believed to have attended one of bin Laden’s training camps). The French warned the US about his Al-Qaeda links on two occasions, September 1st and September 5th. According to an account of that meeting in Le Monde, U.S. participants said Moussaoui’s case was in the hands of the immigration authorities and was not a matter for the FBI.

The French also warned British MI5 intelligence about Moussasoui, highlighting the fact that the Abu Qatada meetings were also attended by Djamel Beghal, a 36-year-old Algerian who moved to London from France in 1997 and was arrested in Dubai in July 2001 for allegedly being part of a plot to blow up the American embassy in Paris. French requests to MI5 for Moussasoui to be placed under surveillance were completely ignored.

The Justice Department shut the lid on the case and refused the FISA request. Decent FBI agents who actually did their job correctly and wanted to stop terrorism were outraged. A last gasp effort to deport Moussaoui to Paris, where French authorities could hold him for as long as three days while they sought a legal way to search his laptop, was cut short by the events of September 11. After September 11, it emerged that Moussaoui had direct ties to Al-Qaeda operatives in Malaysia, home to the consulting firm where he claimed to work. The FBI now, albeit too late, had a search warrant for Moussaoui’s hard drive.

They discovered a flight simulation software program plus a multitude of information concerning wind currents, jetliners and crop-dusting airplanes. The information was considered sufficiently alarming that FBI officials requested the immediate downing of all crop-dusting aircraft, fearing that terrorists might be plotting to use them for a chemical or biological attack.31

31 ‘FBI imposes new restrictions on crop-dusters’ – CNN – September 23 2001 - http://www.cnn.com/2001/US/09/23/inv.crop.dusters/

In mid-December 2001, Moussaoui became the first person indicted for involvement in the events of Sept. 11, charged with conspiring with bin Laden and Al-Qaeda. Although the trial is still ongoing, Moussaoui faces the death penalty. Many law enforcement officials insist that a more aggressive probe of Moussaoui’s activities, when syndicated with intelligence already in their possession, would have yielded sufficient information concerning the impending plot, that it could have been prevented.

George W. Bush Prevents Investigation of Al-Qaeda

President George W. Bush threatened FBI agents with arrest if they didn’t cease investigation of Al-Qaeda two months prior to September 11. This was partly due to indirectly protecting a strategic interest in Saudi Arabian oil reserves, but serves to highlight the existence of an even darker agenda.

A secret FBI document, 199I WF213589, released from the Washington field office, was leaked by disgruntled FBI agents. It details how the FBI were ordered to discontinue investigation into members of the bin Laden family and WAMY (World Association of Muslim Youth) even though both networks had direct links to terrorism. Just weeks after the September 11 attacks, Pakistan and India expelled WAMY operatives with India stating that the Saudi-based WAMY was funding the militant Students Islamic Movement of India, which has provided support to Pakistani-backed terrorists linked to bombings in Kashmir.

The Philippines military has also accused WAMY of funding Muslim insurgency. It also emerged in a January 2002 BBC News-night feature that WAMY spoke glowingly of bin Laden in their own educational pamphlets and advocated his ideals. When confronted with this documentation, a WAMY representative became noticeably apprehensive and provided a poor defense of his organization’s link with terrorist cells such as Al-Qaeda. This was after Nouredine Miladi, the head of WAMY’s London office protested his organization’s innocence by stating, “we seek social change through education and cooperation.”32

It appears as if that education was fundamentalist in nature and the only cooperation was between WAMY and known terror outfits.

FIG 5.3

[CAPTION: The FBI was ordered to “back off” investigation of members of the bin Laden family and WAMY who they were linked with.

WAMY was known to be funding terrorist cells as far back as the early 1990’s.

This policy was enforced even more strictly after current President George W. Bush took office.]

Abdullah bin Laden and Omar bin Laden had helped run WAMY’s operation right up to 2000 and beyond, Abdullah was the U.S. director. They lived together in Falls Church, just outside Washington, conveniently close to WAMY’s basement offices. So why were the FBI, according to a high placed member of a US intelligence agency, told to “back off” investigating these groups?

“I received a phone call from a high-placed member of a US intelligence agency. He tells me that while there’s always been constraints on investigating Saudis, under George Bush it’s gotten much worse. After the elections, the agencies were told to “back off” investigating the Bin Ladens and Saudi royals, and that angered agents…FBI headquarters told us they could not comment on our findings. A spokesman said: “There are lots of things that only the intelligence community knows and that no-one else ought to know.”33

Saudi Arabia, the supposed ‘sworn enemy’ of Osama bin Laden, handed £200 million to bin Laden in ‘protection money,’ in exchange for a promise that bin Laden would not attack Saudi targets. The nerve center of the Al-Qaeda network and its financial resources are based in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, two staunch
allies of the US. Since it’s currently in vogue to support these two military dictatorships, their links to Al-Qaeda terrorism were and continue to be completely ignored.

32 ‘FBI claims Bin Laden inquiry was frustrated’ - Greg Palast and David Pallister – London Guardian – November 7 2001- http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4293682,00.html

Posted via email from Whistleblower