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| Warnings were there... |
| 2001-09-26 |
| Lenny Savino Knight Ridder Newspapers Two weeks after the attacks on the Trade Center and the Pentagon killed more than 6,000 people, intelligence and law enforcement officials are asking themselves why no one connected the dots. "Somehow, it fell between the cracks," said one U.S. intelligence official familiar with the Pentagon and World Trade Center investigations, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "We had red flags all over the place." Officials say they never had enough intelligence to predict or pre-empt the Sept. 11 attacks, but concede they had enough pieces of the puzzle to be more alarmed about whether bin Laden was planning to use some kind of airplane as a bomb. "We've had indications this was coming for some years," said Rusty Capps, a retired FBI counterterrorism chief. There were other signs, Capps said. In 1994, a team of Algerian Islamic terrorists hijacked a commercial airliner, intending to attack the Eiffel Tower. Quick-thinking pilots convinced the terrorists, who lacked the flying skills of this month's hijackers, that the plane needed more fuel to reach Paris. After it landed in Marseilles, a SWAT team stormed the plane. Thirty-seven of the Sept. 11 hijackers and their associates, all affiliated with bin Laden, took flying lessons in the United States, according to Capps. The FBI had learned in the late 1990s that Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted of masterminding the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, had wanted to fly a private plane full of explosives into CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., according to court documents. Analyzing and assessing terrorist threats is the responsibility of the government's Counter Terrorism Center, located at CIA headquarters but staffed by officials from the intelligence community, the FBI and other agencies. The center was created in the mid-1980s, but since 1996 its top targets have been bin Laden and his al-Qaida (the Base) network of terrorist organizations. In fact, after bin Laden issued an edict that year urging all Muslims to take arms against American soldiers, the center has had a bin Laden task force. The CIA and FBI declined to comment on events preceding the Sept. 11 attacks and what mistakes may have been made, but privately a number of intelligence officials conceded there was an intelligence and analytical failure of what one called "Pearl Harbor proportions." |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |