Weblog
05/17/02 02:22 PM: Unforseen?
Bush claims that no one would have seen the September 11 attacks coming. No one considered hijackings in any other sense than the traditional one. Is he telling the truth? You decide:
Exhibit One: Bush’s Statement
WASHINGTON (CNN)—Weighing in on a furor over what the government knew about potential terrorist attacks before September 11, President Bush on Friday criticized the “second-guessing” and said he had no clear indication beforehand that terrorists would hijack jets and deliberately crash them.
“Had I known that the enemy was going to use airplanes to kill on that fateful morning, I would have done everything in my power to protect the American people,” he said during an event at the White House Rose Garden.
Exhibit Two: The Truth
WASHINGTON (AP) – Exactly two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, a federal report warned the executive branch that Osama bin Laden’s terrorists might hijack an airliner and dive bomb it into the Pentagon or other government building.
“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, or the White House,” the September 1999 report said.
The report, entitled the “Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why?,” described the suicide hijacking as one of several possible retribution attacks al-Qaida might seek for the 1998 U.S. airstrike against bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan.
The report noted that an al-Qaida-linked terrorist first arrested in the Philippines in 1995 and later convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing had suggested such a suicide jetliner mission.
“Ramzi Yousef had planned to do this against the CIA headquarters,” author Rex Hudson wrote in a report prepared for the National Intelligence Council and shared with other federal agencies.
The intelligence council is attached to the CIA and is made up of a dozen senior intelligence officers who assist the U.S. intelligence community in analysis of threats and priorities.
