"Out, out damn spot!"
William Rivers Pitt: They weren't paying attention to
the threat. Had they done so, the attack could have
been stopped. Final proof of this can be found in the
events of December 31, 1999. Al Qaeda planned, and put
into motion, simultaneous attacks against the national
airports in Washington DC and Los Angeles, the Amman
Raddison Hotel in Jordan, several holy sites in
Israel, and the USS The Sullivans at dock in Yemen. In
scope, scale and import, these attacks would have
matched the catastrophe of September 11. Each and every single one of these attacks, which ranged from one side of the planet to the other, were foiled by the efforts of the Clinton administration. They were able to stop these attacks because of one simple reason: They were paying attention to the threat.
Repudiate the 9/11 Cover-Up and the Iraq War Lies,
Show Up for Democracy in 2004: Defeat Bush (again!)
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/032504A.shtml
September 11 Should Have Been Stopped
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Thursday 25 March 2004
"No one anticipated the kinds of strikes that took
place in New York and at the Pentagon." - 'The 9/11
Debate,' Washington Post editorial, 03-24-04
That line from the Washington Post has been
repeated ad nauseam by other newspapers, and across
radio and television. It has achieved the status of
bedrock conventional wisdom, of something axiomatic.
These statements are a paraphrase of National Security
Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who said on May 17th, 2002,
"I don't think anybody could have predicted that these
people would take an airplane and slam it into the
World Trade Center, that they would try to use an
airplane as a missile - a hijacked airplane as a
missile."
This kind of thinking elevates the attacks to
something mythical, a magic trick, an act of God that
no mere mortal could possibly have interfered with or
anticipated. In fact, it was an operation planned for
years by men who left clear tracks. As such, it could
have been stopped. It should have been stopped. Saying
so, however, interferes with the cultivation of a
national attitude of vengeful victimhood, an attitude
the Bush administration is actively promoting for its
own benefit and political protection. Surely we were
victims of terrorism on September 11, but was this
unavoidable? Are the Washington Post, Condoleezza Rice
and others correct in stating that no one anticipated
these kinds of attacks?
The facts say no.
Ramzi Yousef was one of the planners and
participants in the first bombing of the World Trade
Center in 1993. Yousef's right-hand man, Abdul Hakim
Murad, was captured and interrogated in 1995. During
that interrogation, Murad described a detailed plot to
hijack airplanes and use them as weapons of terrorism.
The primary plan was to commandeer eleven commercial
planes and blow them up over the Pacific Ocean. The
secondary plan was to hijack several planes, which
would be flown into CIA headquarters, the World Trade
Center, the Sears Tower, the White House and a variety
of other targets.
Ramzi Yousef eluded capture until his final
apprehension in Pakistan. During his 1997 trial, the
plot described by Murad resurfaced. FBI agents
testified in the Yousef trial that, "The plan targeted
not only the CIA, but other U.S. government buildings
in Washington, including the Pentagon."
In 1993, the same year as the first World Trade
Center attack, a $150,000 study was undertaken by the
Pentagon to investigate the possibility of airplanes
being used as bombs. A draft document of this was
circulated throughout the Pentagon, the Justice
Department, and to the Federal Emergency Management
Agency. The circulation of the report was timely.
In 1994, a disgruntled Federal Express employee
invaded the cockpit of a DC10 with the intention of
crashing it into a company building. Again in 1994, a
pilot crashed a small airplane into a tree on the
White House grounds, narrowly missing the building
itself. Also in 1994, an Air France flight was
hijacked by members of a terrorist organization called
the Armed Islamic Group, who intended to crash the
plane into the Eiffel Tower.
The 1993 Pentagon report was followed up in
September 1999 by a report titled 'The Sociology and
Psychology of Terrorism.' This report was prepared for
the American intelligence community by the Federal
Research Division, an adjunct of the Library of
Congress. The report stated, "Suicide bombers
belonging to Al Qaida's martyrdom battalion could
crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives
into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA, or the
White House."
Abdul Hakim Murad described plans to use hijacked
commercial airplanes as weapons in 1995. Ramzi
Yousef's trial further exposed the existence of these
plans in 1997. Two reports prepared by the American
government, one from 1993 and another from 1999,
further detailed again the existence and danger of
these plots. The Federal Express employee's hijacking
attempt in 1994, the attempted airplane attack on the
White House in 1994, and the hijacking of the Air
France flight in 1994 by terrorists intending to fly
the plane into the Eiffel Tower, provided a glaring
underscore to the data.
No one anticipated the use of airplanes as weapons
before September 11? Given the facts, the claim from
Condoleezza Rice, carried forward to today by the
mainstream media, seems impossible to believe.
We come, next, to priorities.
A mission statement from the internal FBI
Strategic Plan, dated 5/8/98, describes the FBI's Tier
One priority as 'counterterrorism.' The FBI, under the
Clinton administration, was making counterterrorism
its highest priority. The official annual budget goals
memo from Attorney General Janet Reno to department
heads, dated 4/6/00, detailed how counterterrorism was
her top priority for the Department of Justice. In the
second paragraph, she states, "In the near term as
well as the future, cybercrime and counterterrrorism
are going to be the most challenging threats in the
criminal justice area. Nowhere is the need for an
up-to-date human and technical infrastructure more
critical."
Contrast this with the official annual budget
goals memo from Attorney General Ashcroft, dated
5/10/01, which directly compares to the 4/6/00 Reno
memo. Out of seven strategic goals described, not one
mentions counterterrorism. An internal draft of the
Department of Justice's plans to revamp the official
Department of Justice Strategic Plan, dated 8/9/01,
describes Ashcroft's new priorities for the Department
of Justice. The areas Ashcroft wished to focus on were
highlighted in yellow. Specifically highlighted by
Ashcroft were domestic violent crime and drug
trafficking prevention. Item 1.3, entitled "Combat
terrorist activities by developing maximum
intelligence and investigative capability," was not
highlighted.
There is the internal FBI budget request for 2003
to the Department of Justice, dated late August 2001.
This was not the FBI's total budget request, but was
instead restricted only to the areas where the FBI
specifically requested increases over the previous
year's budget. In this request, the FBI specifically
asked for, among other things, 54 translators to
translate backlog of intelligence gathered, 248
counterterrorism agents and support staff , and 200
professional intelligence researchers. The FBI had
repeatedly stated that it had a serious backlog of
intelligence data it has gathered, but could not
process the data because they did not have the staff
to analyze or translate it into usable information.
Again, this was August 2001.
The official Department of Justice budget request
from Attorney General Ashcroft to OMB Director Mitch
Daniels is dated September 10, 2001. This document
specifically highlights only the programs slated for
above-baseline increases or below-baseline cuts.
Ashcroft outlined the programs he was trying to cut.
Comparing this document to the FBI's request to the
Department of Justice request described above, it is
clear that Ashcroft ignored the FBI's anti-terrorism
requests. Specifically, Ashcroft was planning to
ignore the FBI's specific requests for more
translators, counterintelligence agents and
researchers. It additionally shows Ashcroft was trying
to cut funding for counterterrorism efforts, grants
and other homeland defense programs before the 9/11
attacks.
The difference in priorities is clear. The Clinton
administration was focusing on terrorism and al Qaeda
as its highest priority. This focus was dramatically
reversed by senior officials within the Bush
administration. The idea that no one could have
anticipated the kinds of attacks which came on
September 11 comes into sharper focus. It isn't that
"no one" could have anticipated the threat. It is the
Bush administration itself that could never have
anticipated the threat, because they were paying
little attention to the existence of these threats.
Then, of course, there were the warnings.
FBI agents in Phoenix issued warnings in the
summer of 2001 about suspicious Arab men receiving
aviation training in American flight schools. The
warning was never followed up. An agent in the Arizona
field office commented in his case notes that Zacarias
Moussaoui, arrested in August after suspicious
activity at one of these flight schools, seemed like a
man capable of flying airplanes into the World Trade
Center.
Newspapers in Germany, France, Russia and London
reported in the months before September 11th a
blizzard of warnings delivered to the Bush
administration from all points on the compass. The
German intelligence service, BND, warned American and
Israeli agencies that terrorists were planning to
hijack commercial aircraft and use them as weapons to
attack important American targets. Egypt warned of a
similar plot to use airplanes to attack Bush during
the G-8 summit in Genoa in June of 2001. This warning
was taken so seriously that anti-aircraft missiles
were deployed around Columbus Airport in Italy.
In August of 2001, Russian intelligence services
notified the CIA that 25 terrorist pilots had been
trained for suicide missions, and Putin himself
confirmed that this warning was delivered "in the
strongest possible terms" specifically regarding
threats to airports and government buildings. In that
same month, the Israeli security agency Mossad issued
a warning to both the FBI and CIA that up to 200 bin
Laden followers were planning a major assault on
America, aimed at vulnerable targets. The Los Angeles
Times later confirmed via unnamed U.S. officials that
the Mossad warnings had been received.
On August 6, 2001, George W. Bush received his
Presidential Daily Briefing. According to reports, the
briefing described active plots to attack the United
States by Osama bin Laden. The word "hijacking"
appeared in that briefing. Shortly after this
briefing, George W. Bush departed to Texas for a
month-long vacation.
Richard Clarke, former Director of
Counter-Terrorism for the National Security Council,
has worked on the terrorist threat for the Reagan,
Bush Sr., Clinton, and Bush Jr. administrations,
amassing a peerless resume in the field. He is now a
central figure in the commission investigating the
September 11 attacks. Clarke has laid bare an ugly
truth: The administration of George W. Bush did not
consider terrorism or the threat of al Qaeda to be a
priority prior to the attacks.
Clarke, along with former Treasury Secretary Paul
O'Neill, who as a member of the National Security
Council was privy to military strategy meetings,
indicate that the Bush administration was obsessed
with an invasion of Iraq from the day it arrived in
Washington. This obsession continued even after the
attacks, despite the fact that the entire intelligence
community flatly declared that Iraq was not involved.
The attacks of September 11 were not mythical, not
a magic trick, not an act of God that no mere mortal
could possibly have interfered with or anticipated.
The warnings, the data, stretch back all the way to
1993. The Bush administration came into power and
absorbed a barrage of warnings about Osama bin Laden
and al Qaeda. Former National Security Advisor Sandy
Berger told Condoleezza Rice that al Qaeda terrorism
would be the single most important problem the Bush
administration would deal with while in office, and
handed her a huge file on the matter. Rice has
admitted that she did not read that file until after
the attacks of September 11 had taken place.
Of course the Bush administration could never have
anticipated an attack like the one that took place on
September 11. They weren't paying attention to the
threat. Had they done so, the attack could have been
stopped. Final proof of this can be found in the
events of December 31, 1999. Al Qaeda planned, and put
into motion, simultaneous attacks against the national
airports in Washington DC and Los Angeles, the Amman
Raddison Hotel in Jordan, several holy sites in
Israel, and the USS The Sullivans at dock in Yemen. In
scope, scale and import, these attacks would have
matched the catastrophe of September 11. Each and
every single one of these attacks, which ranged from
one side of the planet to the other, were foiled by
the efforts of the Clinton administration. They were
able to stop these attacks because of one simple
reason: They were paying attention to the threat.
September 11 could have been stopped. September 11
should have been stopped. The "No one could have
anticipated this" excuse is dangerous nonsense.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
William Rivers Pitt is the senior editor and lead
writer for t r u t h o u t. He is a New York Times and
international bestselling author of two books - 'War
on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know' and
'The Greatest Sedition is Silence.'