99 memo foresaw mayhem Eerie warning: Intelligence analysis warned of possibility that terrorists could hijack airliner, crash it into Pentagon.
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 Ladens terrorists could hijack an
airliner and fly it into government buildings like the Pentagon.
Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al-Qaidas 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.
Also Friday, new information emerged about a memo from the FBIs Phoenix
office last 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 Ladens 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.
I think were 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 husbands
administration.
Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, a senior member of the Senate Judiciary and
Finance committees, demanded the CIA inspector general investigate the report,
which he called one of the most alarming indicators and warning signs of the
terrorist plot of Sept. 11.
Meanwhile, court transcripts reviewed by The Associated Press show the
government 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 coconspirator 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 Alis, Moroccan citizen LHoussaine
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.
He (Kherchtou) observed an Egyptian person who was not a pilot debriefing a
friend of his, Ihab Ali, about how air traffic control works and what people
say over the air traffic control system, then-Assistant U.S. Attorney Patrick
Fitzgerald told a New York court.
And it was his belief that there might have been a plan to send a pilot to
Saudi Arabia or someone familiar with that to monitor the air traffic
communications so they could possibly attack an airplane perhaps belonging to
an Egyptian president or something in Saudi Arabia.
That intelligence is in addition to information the FBI received in July 2001
from its Phoenix office that a large number of Arabs were training at U.S.
flight schools and a briefing President Bush received in August of that year
suggesting hijacking was one possible attack the al-Qaida might use against
the United States.
The September 1999 report, entitled Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism:
Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why? described suicide hijacking as one of
several possible retribution attacks the al-Qaida might seek for a 1998 U.S.
airstrike against bin Ladens camps in Afghanistan.
The report noted 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 mission.
Ramzi Yousef had planned to do this against the CIA headquarters, the report
said.
Bush administration officials have repeatedly said no one in government had
imagined such an attack.
I dont think anybody could have predicted that ... they would try to use an
airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile, National Security
Adviser Condoleezza Rice said Thursday.
The report was written by the Federal Research Division, an arm of the Library
of Congress that provides research for federal agencies.
This information was out there, certainly to those who study the in-depth
subject of terrorism and al-Qaida, said Robert L. Worden, the agencys chief.
We knew it was an insightful report, he said. Then after Sept. 11 we said,
My gosh, that was in there.
Gannon said the 1999 report was part of a broader effort by his council to
identify the full range of attack options of U.S. enemies.
It became such a rich threat environment that it was almost too much for
Congress and the administration to absorb, Gannon said. They couldnt
prioritize what was the most significant threat.
