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www.sltribune.com/2002/may/05182002/nation_w/738035.htm

 

 

Attack Foreseen In 1999

Saturday, May 18, 2002

BY JOHN SOLOMON
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

    WASHINGTON -- Two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, an analysis prepared for U.S. intelligence warned that Osama bin Laden's terrorists could hijack an airliner and fly it into government buildings such as the Pentagon.
    "Suicide bomber[s] belonging to al-Qaida'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," the September 1999 report said.
    The Bush administration has asserted that no one in government had envisioned a suicide hijacking before it happened.
    White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said the administration was aware of the report prepared by the Library of Congress for the National Intelligence Council, which advises the president and U.S. intelligence on emerging threats. He said the document did not contain direct intelligence pointing toward a specific plot but rather included assessments about how terrorists might strike.
    "What it shows is that this information that was out there did not raise enough alarm with anybody," Fleischer acknowledged.
    Former President Clinton, golfing in Hawaii, played down the intelligence value of the 1999 report.
    "That has nothing to do with intelligence," he said. "All that it says is they used public sources to speculate on what bin Laden might do. Let me remind you that's why I attacked his training camp and why I asked the Pakistanis to go get him, and why we contracted with some people in Afghanistan to go get him because we thought he was dangerous."
    Also Friday, new information emerged about a memo from the FBI's Phoenix office in July warning headquarters that a large number of Arabs were training at a U.S. flight school. The memo urged that all flight schools nationwide be checked, but the FBI failed to act on the idea before Sept. 11.
    Government officials said Friday that two of the more than half dozen names the FBI Phoenix office identified in the memo were determined by the CIA after Sept. 11 to have links to bin Laden's al-Qaida.
    Officials said the CIA was not shown the memo before Sept. 11 and even if it had, it did not have the intelligence linking the two men to al-Qaida until after the attacks. The FBI checked the names before Sept. 11 but found no bin Laden ties, the officials added.
    Former CIA Deputy Director John Gannon, who was chairman of the National Intelligence Council when the 1999 report was written, said officials long have known a suicide hijacking was a threat.
    "If you ask anybody could terrorists convert a plane into a missile, nobody would have ruled that out," he said.
    Democrats and some Republicans in Congress raised the volume of their calls to investigate what the government knew before Sept. 11.
    "We're going to learn a lot about what the government knew," Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y., said during an appearance in New York. She said she was unaware of the report created in 1999 during her husband's administration.
   Court transcripts reviewed by The Associated Press show the govern- ment had other warning signs between 1999 and 2001 that bin Laden was sending members of his network to be trained as pilots and was considering airlines as a possible target.
    The court records show the FBI has known since at least 1999 that Ihab Mohammed Ali, who was arrested in Orlando, Fla., and later named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa, had been sent for pilot training in Norman, Okla., before working as a pilot for bin Laden.
    He eventually crashed a plane owned by bin Laden in Sudan that prosecutors alleged was used to transport al-Qaida members and weapons. Ali remains in custody in New York.
    In February 2001, federal prosecutors told a court they gained information in September 2000 from an associate of Ali's, Moroccan citizen L'Houssaine Kherchtou, that Kherchtou was trained as an al-Qaida pilot in Kenya and attended a meeting in 1993 where an al-Qaida official was briefing Ali on Western air traffic control procedures.
    The September 1999 report, entitled "Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why?" described suicide hijacking as one of several retribution attacks the al-Qaida might seek for a 1998 U.S. airstrike against bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan.

 

 

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