Massive 9/11 warnings ignored by Bush administration

[DrSmellThis]

9/11 Report Cites Many Warnings About Hijackings
By Eric Lichtblau /

The New

York Times

WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 - In the months before the Sept. 11 attacks, federal aviation

officials reviewed dozens of intelligence reports that warned about Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda, some of which

specifically discussed airline hijackings and suicide operations, according to a previously undisclosed report from

the 9/11 commission.

But aviation officials were "lulled into a false sense of security," and "intelligence

that indicated a real and growing threat leading up to 9/11 did not stimulate significant increases in security

procedures," the commission report concluded.

The report discloses that the Federal Aviation Administration,

despite being focused on risks of hijackings overseas, warned airports in the spring of 2001 that if "the intent of

the hijacker is not to exchange hostages for prisoners, but to commit suicide in a spectacular explosion, a domestic

hijacking would probably be preferable."

The report takes the F.A.A. to task for failing to pursue domestic

security measures that could conceivably have altered the events of Sept. 11, 2001, like toughening airport

screening procedures for weapons or expanding the use of on-flight air marshals. The report, completed last August,

said officials appeared more concerned with reducing airline congestion, lessening delays, and easing airlines'

financial woes than deterring a terrorist attack.

The Bush administration has blocked the public release of the

full, classified version of the report for more than five months, officials said, much to the frustration of former

commission members who say it provides a critical understanding of the failures of the civil aviation system. The

administration provided both the classified report and a declassified, 120-page version to the National Archives two

weeks ago and, even with heavy redactions in some areas, the declassified version provides the firmest evidence to

date about the warnings that aviation officials received concerning the threat of an attack on airliners and the

failure to take steps to deter it.

Among other things, the report says that leaders of the F.A.A. received 52

intelligence reports from their security branch that mentioned Mr. Bin Laden or Al Qaeda from April to Sept. 10,

2001. That represented half of all the intelligence summaries in that time.

Five of the intelligence reports

specifically mentioned Al Qaeda's training or capability to conduct hijackings, the report said. Two mentioned

suicide operations, although not connected to aviation, the report said.

A spokeswoman for the F.A.A., the

agency that bears the brunt of the commission's criticism, said Wednesday that the agency was well aware of the

threat posed by terrorists before Sept. 11 and took substantive steps to counter it, including the expanded use of

explosives detection units.

"We had a lot of information about threats," said the spokeswoman, Laura J. Brown.

"But we didn't have specific information about means or methods that would have enabled us to tailor any

countermeasures."

She added: "After 9/11, the F.A..A. and the entire aviation community took bold steps to

improve aviation security, such as fortifying cockpit doors on 6,000 airplanes, and those steps took hundreds of

millions of dollars to implement."

The report, like previous commission documents, finds no evidence that the

government had specific warning of a domestic attack and says that the aviation industry considered the hijacking

threat to be more worrisome overseas.

"The fact that the civil aviation system seems to have been lulled into a

false sense of security is striking not only because of what happened on 9/11 but also in light of the intelligence

assessments, including those conducted by the F.A.A.'s own security branch, that raised alarms about the growing

terrorist threat to civil aviation throughout the 1990's and into the new century," the report said.

In its

previous findings, including a final report last July that became a best-selling book, the 9/11 commission detailed

the harrowing events aboard the four hijacked flights that crashed on Sept. 11 and the communications problems

between civil aviation and military officials that hampered the response. But the new report goes further in

revealing the scope and depth of intelligence collected by federal aviation officials about the threat of a

terrorist attack.

The F.A.A. "had indeed considered the possibility that terrorists would hijack a plane and

use it as a weapon," and in 2001 it distributed a CD-ROM presentation to airlines and airports that cited the

possibility of a suicide hijacking, the report said. Previous commission documents have quoted the CD's reassurance

that "fortunately, we have no indication that any group is currently thinking in that direction."

Aviation

officials amassed so much information about the growing threat posed by terrorists that they conducted classified

briefings in mid-2001 for security officials at 19 of the nation's busiest airports to warn of the threat posed in

particular by Mr. bin Laden, the report said.

Still, the 9/11 commission concluded that aviation officials did

not direct adequate resources or attention to the problem.

"Throughout 2001, the senior leadership of the

F.A.A. was focused on congestion and delays within the system and the ever-present issue of safety, but they were

not as focused on security," the report said.

The F.A.A. did not see a need to increase the air marshal ranks

because hijackings were seen as an overseas threat, and one aviation official told the commission said that airlines

did not want to give up revenues by providing free seats to marshals.

The F.A.A. also made no concerted effort

to expand their list of terror suspects, which included a dozen names on Sept. 11, the report said. The former head

of the F.A.A.'s civil aviation security branch said he was not aware of the government's main watch list, called

Tipoff, which included the names of two hijackers who were living in the San Diego area, the report said.

Nor

was there evidence that a senior F.A.A. working group on security had ever met in 2001 to discuss "the high threat

period that summer," the report said.

Jane F. Garvey, the F.A.A. administrator at the time, told the commission

"that she was aware of the heightened threat during the summer of 2001," the report said. But several other senior

agency officials "were basically unaware of the threat," as were senior airline operations officials and veteran

pilots, the report said.

The classified version of the commission report quotes extensively from circulars

prepared by the F.A.A. about the threat of terrorism, but many of those references have been blacked out in the

declassified version, officials said.

Several former commissioners and staff members said they were upset and

disappointed by the administration's refusal to release the full report publicly.

"Our intention was to make

as much information available to the public as soon as possible," said Richard Ben-Veniste, a former Sept. 11

commission member.

[Biohazard]

[koolking1]

hilarious!!

[DrSmellThis]

That bipartisan 9/11

commission was just chock full of nutty conspiracy theorist freaks, wasn't it?

[DrSmellThis]

Memo to Rice Warned of al Qaeda and Offered a Plan
By Scott Shane /

New York Times

WASHINGTON, Feb. 11 - A

strategy document outlining proposals for eliminating the threat from Al Qaeda, given to Condoleezza Rice as she

assumed the post of national security adviser in January 2001, warned that the terror network had cells in the

United States and 40 other countries and sought unconventional weapons, according to a declassified version of the

document.

The 13-page proposal presented to Dr. Rice by her top counterterrorism adviser, Richard A. Clarke,

laid out ways to step up the fight against Al Qaeda, focusing on Osama bin Laden's headquarters in Afghanistan. The

ideas included giving "massive support" to anti-Taliban groups "to keep Islamic extremist fighters tied down";

destroying terrorist training camps "while classes are in session" and then sending in teams to gather intelligence

on terrorist cells; deploying armed drone aircraft against known terrorists; more aggressively tracking Qaeda money;

and accelerating the F.B.I.'s translation and analysis of material from surveillance of terrorism suspects in

American cities.

Mr. Clarke was seeking a high-level meeting to decide on a plan of action. Dr. Rice and other

administration officials have said that Mr. Clarke's ideas did not constitute an adequate plan, but they took them

into consideration as they worked toward a more effective strategy against the terrorist threat.

The proposal

and an accompanying three-page memorandum given to Dr. Rice by Mr. Clarke on Jan. 25, 2001, were discussed and

quoted in brief by the independent commission studying the Sept. 11 attacks and in news reports and books last year.

They were obtained by the private National Security Archive, which published the full versions, with minor deletions

at the request of the Central Intelligence Agency, on its Web site late Thursday.

Under the heading "the next

three to five years," Mr. Clarke spelled out a series of steps building on groundwork that he said had already been

laid, adding that "success can only be achieved if the pace and resource levels of the programs continue to grow as

planned."

He said the C.I.A. had "prepared a program" focused on eliminating Afghanistan as a haven for Al

Qaeda.

It would feature "massive support" to anti-Taliban groups like the Northern Alliance and the destruction

of training camps occupied by terrorists. "We would need to have special teams ready for covert entry into destroyed

camps to acquire intelligence for locating terrorist cells outside Afghanistan," he wrote, saying that this would

either require Special Operations troops or some other "liaison force capable of conducting activity on-the-ground

inside Afghanistan." Predator drones, some of which could be armed, would support those forces, he wrote.

Some

of what he proposed in the way of support for the Northern Alliance or for Uzbekistan, which borders Afghanistan to

the north, was deleted from the document before it was declassified. But some of the actions he proposed were not

intended to be kept secret, like "overt U.S. military action" aimed at the command and control of Al Qaeda and the

Taliban's military.

The previously secret documents were at the heart of a fiercely partisan debate over Mr.

Clarke's contention, in a book and in public statements, that the Bush administration had ignored his warnings of

the imminent danger posed by Mr. bin Laden and his terrorist organization.

The shorter memorandum was written

in response to a request for "major presidential policy reviews" worthy of a meeting of "principals," the

president's top foreign policy advisers. It began: "We urgently need such a Principals level review on the al Qida

network." The word "urgently" was italicized and underscored; the "al Qida" spelling was used in both documents.



"We would make a major error if we underestimated the challenge al Qida poses," the memorandum said.

The

principals' meeting on Al Qaeda took place, but not until Sept. 4, 2001, a week before the attacks on New York and

the Pentagon.

The longer document was titled "Strategy for Eliminating the Threat From the Jihadist Networks of

al Qida: Status and Prospects." It included a detailed description of the network, saying it was "well financed, has

trained tens of thousands of jihadists, and has a cell structure in over 40 nations. It also is actively seeking to

develop and acquire weapons of mass destruction."

The strategy paper recounted past Qaeda plots against

Americans abroad and at home and said an informant had reported "that an extensive network of al Qida 'sleeper'

agents currently exists in the U.S." After reviewing steps taken since 1996 to combat Al Qaeda, the document listed

further actions required to make the network "not a serious threat" within three to five years.

Dr. Rice, now

the secretary of state, and other administration officials have asserted that the documents did not amount to a full

plan for taking on the terrorist network.

"No Al Qaeda plan was turned over to the new administration," Dr.

Rice wrote in an op-ed article for The Washington Post last March. She wrote that Mr. Clarke and his team "suggested

several ideas, some of which had been around since 1998 but had not been adopted."

Mr. Clarke had served in

high-level government posts since the Reagan administration and stayed on from the Clinton administration. He

resigned in February 2003 and last year published a memoir, "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror."

(Mr. Clarke began writing a column on security matters for The New York Times Magazine this month.)

Nearly nine

months before the Sept. 11 attacks, the papers described the danger posed by the bin Laden network and sought to

focus the attention of the new administration on what to do about it. But the texts are unlikely to resolve the

debate over whether they should have led to more urgent action by the administration.

"I think Condi Rice has

at least an arguable case that it's short of a plan," said Michael E. O'Hanlon, a security analyst at the

Brookings Institution.

Mr. O'Hanlon called Mr. Clarke's memorandums a set of "very dry data points. There's

not a heightened sense of, 'Now our homeland is at risk.' "

But Matthew Levitt, who was an F.B.I.

counterterrorism analyst in 2001, disagreed. He called the 13-page strategy memorandum "a pretty disturbing

document."

Mr. Levitt, now director of terrorism studies at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said

that whether the document constitutes a "plan," as Mr. Clarke averred and Dr. Rice denied, is "a semantic debate."

But he said the experience of reading the original documents for the first time Friday left him with a strong

impression of the danger Al Qaeda posed.

"I think it makes the threat look pretty urgent," Mr. Levitt said. "I

look at this and I see something that to my mind requires immediate attention."

Asked about the documents at a

press briefing on Friday, Richard A. Boucher, the spokesman for the State Department, declined to expand on Dr.

Rice's previous comments on the administration's response to Mr. Clarke's warnings.

"The fact that now the

memo or letter has been released has - just provides you more information, but I think she's really already

discussed all these matters pretty thoroughly," Mr. Boucher said.

Mr. Clarke did not respond to a request for

comment.

The two papers were declassified by the National Security Council on April 7, one day before Dr. Rice

testified before the 9/11 commission, but were not released publicly until the National Security Archive filed a

Freedom of Information Act request.