Subject:  WHY BUSH SHOULD HAVE KNEW! |
Author:
Kathryn
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Date Posted: 20:04:11 05/17/02 Fri
Author Host/IP: 209.240.222.131
The Bush Administration is saying they had no idea of what could have happened on 9-11.
Tell me after reading the following articles and websites you can visit that if you had been president;-just hearing the words Bin Laden, Hyjacking and planes would have sent off alarm bells, sirens and lights?
If nothing else Rice whose job it is to correlate such information should have known - After all it is her job!
First Example:
Bush's people must have known about the threat of terrorists flying planes into buildings because there was talk about such activity in June of that year at the G8 summit.
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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-092701genoa.story
Italy Tells of Threat at Genoa Summit
Plot: Officials there took seriously a report that terrorists would try
to crash a plane to kill Bush and other leaders. From a Times Staff Writer
September 27 2001
WASHINGTON -- 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. But a U.S. official said that American counter-terrorism experts considered the warning "unsubstantiated." In either case, 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.
The Genoa warning was disclosed last week by Italian Deputy Prime Minister Gianfranco Fini. In remarks on a television talk show reported by the Italian news agency ANSA, Fini said: "Many people were ironic about the Italian secret services. But in fact they got the information that there was the possibility of an attack against the U.S. president using an airliner. That's why we closed the airspace and installed the missiles. Those who made cracks should now think a little." An attack on the summit would have endangered not only President Bush, but also British Prime Minister Tony Blair, French President Jacques Chirac, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin and others. In an interview published Sept. 21 in the French newspaper Le Figaro, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said his government provided information to the United States about possible attacks on the Genoa summit by Saudi-born terrorist Osama bin Laden. "There was a question of an airplane stuffed with explosives. As a result, precautions were taken."
White House aides refused to comment on the reports. "We just don't talk about security arrangements," spokeswoman Anna Perez said. But a U.S. official outside the White House said the Genoa reports were received and discounted.
"There were some press reports citing what we subsequently determined was unsubstantiated information," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
In any case, the possibility of suicide hijackings has been known to U.S. counter-terrorism officials for several years. On Christmas Eve 1994, Algerian terrorists hijacked an Air France Airbus and planned to blow it up over the Eiffel Tower in Paris. French troops stormed the plane as it was refueling in Marseilles and killed the hijackers.
The hijackers' organization, the Armed Islamic Group, is now believed to be part of Bin Laden's Al Qaeda network.
In 1996, a terrorist captured in Manila told Philippine police that Al Qaeda planned to hijack 11 U.S. airliners simultaneously and to fly a plane into CIA headquarters near Washington
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Now read this report made in 1999 just go to the website listed in the article.
Tell me should Bush have known?
Report for CIA Foresaw an Al Qaeda Plane Attack May 17, 2002
By Randall Mikkelsen
WASHINGTON - Despite White House avowals that it would have been impossible to conceive before Sept. 11 of a hijacked plane being used to attack U.S. targets, a 1999 report for the CIA envisioned a very similar threat.
It predicted Islamic militant Osama bin Laden would retaliate "in a spectacular way" against Washington for U.S. cruise missile strikes in 1998 against training facilities of his al Qaeda network in Afghanistan. "Suicide bombers belonging to al Qaeda's martyrdom battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives ... into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, or the White House," the report said.
The report was commissioned by The National Intelligence Council, which reports to CIA Director George Tenet. It was conducted by the research arm of the Library of Congress, well before Bush took office.
One work in a vast output of terrorism studies, the report has long been public and is available on the Internet.
(http://www.loc.gov/rr/frd/Sociology-Psychology%20of%20Terrorism.htm)
But its on-target prediction prompted new questions on Friday over how much the government knew about potential threats, in the wake of disclosures that President Bush was alerted in his daily CIA intelligence briefing last August to the possibility of a hijacking by al Qaeda. Four hijacked U.S. airliners slammed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field on Sept. 11, killing about 3,000 people. Washington has blamed al Qaeda for the attacks. "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," Bush's national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said Thursday.
White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said on Thursday the alert to Bush did not say there was a chance planes would be used by al Qaeda as suicide bombs.
"Traditional hijackings prior to Sept. 11 -- it might as well be a different word in a different language from what we have all unfortunately come to know about the post-9/11 world," he said. On Friday, Fleischer played down the significance of the report, saying it was primarily a study of the thinking of potential terrorists and not based on specific intelligence.
He said he had not learned of the report until Friday, but noted it had also long been available to Congress, some of whose members have called for an investigation into potential administration intelligence failures.
"I think what it shows is this information that was out there did not raise enough alarms with anybody ... because it was not intelligence information," Fleischer said.
An intelligence official said there was no indication CIA Director Tenet, who briefs Bush, had seen the report. The report was commissioned to be used in a larger study of global trends, he said. It is 125 pages long, plus notes.
The report said retaliation could also come in the form of a "building buster" bomb at a federal building or, more likely, a time bomb on an airliner. "A horrendous scenario consonant with al Qaeda's mindset would be its use of a nuclear suitcase bomb against any number of targets in the nation's capital," the report said.
It said other groups that could carry out terror attacks on the United States, including Lebanon's Hizbollah, Sri Lanka's Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam, and Japan's Aum Shinrikyo.
However, it said, "al Qaeda poses the most serious terrorist threat to U.S. security interests, for al Qaeda's well-trained terrorists are actively engaged in a terrorist jihad against U.S. interests worldwide."
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