(5)Suspects Caught Crashes on Camera (They Watched Crashes & Celebrated, Also Some Suspects Abro

Five men suspected of being involved in the attack on the World Trade Centre set up cameras to record the atrocity, it emerged today.

Five suspects allegedly involved in the atrocities are said to have set up cameras on the banks of the Hudson to record the crashes

The men set up cameras on the west bank of the Hudson River, trained them on the twin towers to capture the attacks and apparently congratulated each other when the crashes occurred, the New York Times reported.

The five were under investigation by police in Union City, New Jersey, but it was unclear if any of them were in custody today.

The allegation came as police in New Jersey told the New York Times the hijackers who left from Newark airport on the flight which crashed in Pennsylvania had received aid from associates in the area.

The paper reported law officials said the team was "aided by confederates in Newark who were responsible for logistical support, including money, rental cars, credit cards and lodging".

And it emerged that FBI investigators believe each team of hijackers acted independently from each other but under orders from a supreme commander.

The conclusion was reached after evidence from the flights' passenger lists, payphone records, evidence taken from the rental car seized in Boston and the frantic phone calls made from the hijacked planes.

It was the commander who selected the flights to be hijacked and orchestrated the attacks to occur at about the same time.

But the man has not been publicly identified by investigators, the New York Times reported. His whereabouts are currently unknown.

In an excerpt from TIME's forthcoming special issue, TIME's exclusive reporting on the terror in the sky and the plotting on the ground.

Only God knows what kind of heroic acts took place at 25,000 feet as passengers and crews contended with four teams of highly trained enemy terrorists. But it is clear that the hunt for the culprits began way up in the sky, by the doomed passengers and crews themselves, minutes before the attacks took place. The victims on board at least two of the four planes whispered the number and even some of the seat assignments of the terrorists along with their final goodbyes in their brief and haunting Tuesday morning cell phone calls. A flight attendant on board American Flight 11 called her airline's flight operations center in Dallas on a special airlink line and reported that passengers were being stabbed.

That gave investigators a head start Tuesday morning that something had gone terribly wrong, but there were plenty of other clues. Even before the smoke had cleared, it was obvious that the culprits knew their way around a Boeing cockpit — and all the security weaknesses in the U.S. civil aviation system. The enemy had chosen the quietest day of the week for the operation, when there would be fewer passengers to subdue; they had boarded westbound transcontinental flights — planes fully loaded with kerosene; armed with makeshift knives and retractable knives; they had gained access to the cockpits and herded everyone to the back of the plane. Once there, they turned off the aircraft's self-identifying beacons known as transponders, a move which renders the planes somewhat less visible to air traffic controllers. And each aircraft performed dramatic but carefully executed course corrections, including a stunning last maneuver by flight 77. The pilot of that plane came in low from the south of the Pentagon and pulled a 270-degree turn before slamming into the west wall of the building.

By Tuesday afternoon, the spooks were making progress. Eavesdroppers at the supersecret National Security Agency had picked up at least two electronic intercepts indicating the terrorists had ties to bin Laden. By nightfall, less than 12 hours after the attacks, US officials told TIME that their sense that he was involved had gotten closer to what one senior official said was 90 percent. The next morning, US officials told TIME they have evidence that each of the four terrorist teams had a certified pilot with them, some of whom had flown for Saudi Airlines. It’s not yet clear whether the pilots were trained in the US, or in Saudi Arabia or both. Intelligence officials believe each team had four to five persons. Some team members, it is thought by US intelligence, crossed the Canadian border to get into the U.S. TIME has learned that within the past few months, the FBI placed two men associated with an Islamic Jihad terror group on a border watch list, but through a screwup, the pair got into the U.S. anyway. The two men appear to have been on American Airlines Flight 77, the plane that crashed into the Pentagon, TIME has learned. Boston appears to have been a central hub for the operation; U.S. intelligence believes a bin Laden cell in Florida was a support group helping with the aviation aspects of the attack.

Intelligence officials pouring over old reports believe they got their first inkling of planning for the attack last June, although at the time the intelligence was too vague to indicate the scale of the operation. In the summer U.S. embassies, particularly those in the Middle East, were put on heightened alert. The U.S. military in the region moved to a higher level of alert. The CIA was getting vague reports "of some kind of spectacular happenings" by terrorists, said a U.S. intelligence official, but the reports were vague as to timing. "A lot of this reporting we had in the summer that gained our attention and had us concerned, but wasn't specific, could have been tied to this," said U.S. intelligence officials.

Even had they known more, could officials ever have contemplated the scale of this thing? The blasts were so powerful that counter-terrorism teams have begun asking the airlines for fuel loads on the plane; aviation experts have been asked to calculate the explosive yield of each blast —in kiloton terms. The reason? Washington wants to see if the planes amounted to weapons of mass destruction. "What we want people to realize is they’ve crossed a line here," said a U.S. intelligence official. In fact, some senior administration officials are considering drafting a declaration of war, although the State Department is leery since nobody knows precisely who the war would be against.

"Anyone who says this is not an intelligence failure is blowing smoke. This is an intelligence failure and a security failure," said Lt. Gen. (ret.) William Odom, former head of the National Security Agency (NSA) and the former head of US Army intelligence. "The security guys will blame it on the intelligence guys and the intelligence guys will tell us the great successes they had in the past."

They told the people they loved that they would die fighting. In a series of cellular telephone calls to their wives, two passengers aboard the plane that crashed into a Pennsylvania field instead of possibly toppling a national landmark learned about the horror of the World Trade Center. From 35,000 feet, they relayed harrowing details about the hijacking in progress to the police. And they vowed to try to thwart the enemy, to prevent others from dying even if they could not save themselves. Lyzbeth Glick, 31, of Hewitt, N.J., said her husband, Jeremy, told her that three or four 6-foot-plus passengers aboard United Airlines Flight 93 from Newark bound for San Francisco planned to take a vote about how to proceed, and joked about taking on the hijackers with the butter knives from the in-flight breakfast. In a telephone interview last night, Ms. Glick said her husband told her "three Arab-looking men with red headbands," carrying a knife and talking about a bomb, took control of the aircraft.

"He was a man who would not let things happen," she said of her high school sweetheart and husband of five years, the father of a 12-week-old daughter, Emerson. "He was a hero for what he did, but he was a hero for me because he told me not to be sad and to take care of our daughter and he said whatever happened he would be O.K. with any choices I make.

"He said, `I love you, stay on the line,' but I couldn't," added Ms. Glick, 31, a teacher at Berkeley College. "I gave the phone to my dad. I don't want to know what happened."

Another passenger, Thomas E. Burnett Jr., an executive at a San Francisco-area medical device company, told his wife, Deena, that one passenger had already been stabbed to death but that a group was "getting ready to do something."

"I pleaded with him to please sit down and not draw attention to himself," Ms. Burnett, the mother of three young daughters, told a San Francisco television station. "And he said: `No, no. If they're going to run this into the ground we're going to have to do something.' And he hung up and he never called back."

The accounts revealed a spirit of defiance amid the desperation. Relatives and friends and a congressman who represents the area around the crash site in Pennsylvania hailed the fallen passengers as patriots.

"Apparently they made enough of a difference that the plane did not complete its mission," said Lyzbeth Glick's uncle, Tom Crowley, of Atlanta. In an e-mail message forwarded far and wide, Mr. Crowley urged: "May we remember Jeremy and the other brave souls as heroes, soldiers and Americans on United Flight 93 who so gallantly gave their lives to save many others."

Like others on the doomed plane, Mr. Glick, 31, and Mr. Burnett, 38, had not originally planned to be aboard the 8 a.m. flight. Mr. Glick, who worked for an Internet company called Vividence, was heading to the West Coast on business, and Mr. Burnett, chief operating officer for Thoratec Corporation, was returning home from a visit to the company's Edison, N.J., office.

Lauren Grandcolas of San Rafael, Calif., left an early-morning message on her husband's answering machine saying she would be home earlier than expected from her grandmother's funeral. Mark Bingham, 31, who ran a public relations firm, had felt too sick to fly on Monday, but was racing to make an afternoon meeting with a client in San Francisco.

The plane was airborne by 8:44 a.m., according to radar logs, and headed west, flying apparently without incident until it reached Cleveland about 50 minutes later. At 9:37, it turned south and headed back the way it came. Mr. Bingham, a 6-foot-5 former rugby player who this summer ran with the bulls in Pamplona, Spain, called his mother, Alice Hoglan. "He said, `Three guys have taken over the plane and they say they have a bomb,' " said Ms. Hoglan, a United flight attendant.

CNN reported last night that it had obtained a partial transcript of cockpit chatter, and that a source who had listened to the air-traffic control tape said a man with an Arabic accent had said in broken English: "This is the captain speaking. Remain in your seat. There is a bomb on board. Stay quiet. We are meeting with their demands. We are returning to the airport."

Another passenger on the sparsely populated plane barricaded himself in the bathroom and dialed 911. Ms. Grandcolas tried to wake her husband, Jack, but got the answering machine. "We're having problems," she said, according to her neighbor, Dave Shapiro, who listened the message. "But I'm comfortable," she said, and then, after a pause, added, "for now."

Mr. Glick, a muscular 6-foot-4 water sportsman, and Mr. Burnett, a 6-1 former high school football player, called their wives over and over, from about 9:30 a.m. until the crash at about 10:10 a.m., chronicling what was happening, urging them to call the authorities, vowing to fight, saying goodbye.

"He sounded sad and scared, but calm at the same time," Ms. Glick said. "He said people weren't too panicked. They had moved everybody to the back of the plane. The three men were in the cockpit, but he didn't see the pilots and they made no contact with the passengers, so my feeling is they must have killed them."

In a radio interview with KCBS in San Francisco, Ms. Burnett said her husband of nine years called four times — first just reporting the hijacking, later asking her for information about the World Trade Center disaster, eventually suggesting the passengers were formulating a plan to respond.

"I could tell that he was alarmed and trying to piece together the puzzle, trying to figure out what was going on and what he could do about the situation," Ms. Burnett said. "He was not giving up. His adrenaline was going. And you could just tell that he had every intention of solving the problem and coming on home."

Ms. Glick said that at one point, she managed to create a conference call between her husband and 911 dispatchers. "Jeremy tracked the second-by-second details and relayed them to the police by phone," Mr. Crowley wrote in his e-mail account of the calls. "After several minutes describing the scene, Jeremy and several other passengers decided there was nothing to lose by rushing the hijackers."

At the crash site near Shanksville, Pa., a local politician and law enforcement officials said the wives' accounts made sense.

"I would conclude there was a struggle, and a heroic individual decided they were going to die anyway and, `Let's bring the plane down here,' " said Representative John P. Murtha, a Democrat who represents the area and serves on the Defense Appropriations Committee.

An F.B.I. official said of Mr. Murtha's theory, "It's reasonable what he said, but how could you know?"

While the women cherished their final words and their husbands' seeming heroism, other people's relatives and friends struggled to reconstruct their last conversations with their lost loved ones.

Between sobs, Doris Gronlund recalled how her daughter, Linda, an environmental lawyer from Long Island who was headed for a vacation in wine country with her boyfriend, Joseph DeLuca, called on Monday to relay her flight numbers, just in case anything happened.

David Markmann last saw his upstairs neighbor, Honor Elizabeth Wainio, on Sunday night, standing on her balcony in Plainfield, N.J. Ms. Wainio, 28, who was a regional manager of the Discovery Channel's retail stores.

When the Newark flight crashed, "things started clicking in my mind," Mr. Markmann said. He dialed Ms. Wainio's home number — no answer. The cell phone rang four times and went to voice mail. He called again, and again and again and again, 15 times or more, until 2 p.m. yesterday, when he saw the list of Flight 93's passengers on the United Airlines Web site.

Status of major U.S. airports

September 13, 2001 Posted: 1:46 p.m. EDT (1746 GMT)

The U.S. Department of Transportation Thursday announced that those U.S. airports which have complied with new heightened security restrictions will be allowed to reopen. Below is a list of 25 major U.S. airports and their certification status.

Atlanta Hartsfield International Airport - cleared to open http://www.atlanta-airport.com/

Boston - Logan International Airport - closed http://www.massport.com/logan/

Charlotte/Douglas International Airport - cleared to open http://www.charlotteairport.com/

Chicago - O'Hare International Airport - closed http://www.ci.chi.il.us/WorksMart/Aviation/OHare/

Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport - cleared to open http://www.cvgairport.com/

Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport - cleared to open http://www.dfwairport.com/home.asp

Denver International Airport - cleared to open http://www.flydenver.com/

Detroit Metropolitan Airport - cleared to open http://www.metroairport.com/

Honolulu International Airport - cleared to open http://www.state.hi.us/dot/airports/index.htm

Houston - George Bush Intercontinental Airport - cleared to open http://www.houstonairportsystem.org/

Las Vegas - McCarran International Airport - cleared to open http://www.mccarran.com/

Los Angeles International Airport - cleared to open http://www.lawa.org/lax/laxframe.html

Miami International Airport - cleared to open http://www.miami-airport.com/

Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport - cleared to open http://www.mspairport.com/

New York - John F. Kennedy International Airport - cleared to open http://www.panynj.gov/aviation/jfkframe.HTM

New York - LaGuardia Airport - cleared to open http://www.panynj.gov/aviation/lgaframe.HTM

Newark International Airport - cleared to open http://www.panynj.gov/aviation/ewrframe.HTM

Orlando International Airport - cleared to open http://www.state.fl.us/goaa/

Philadelphia International Airport - cleared to open http://www.phl.org/

Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport - cleared to open http://www.phxskyharbor.com/

San Francisco International Airport - cleared to open http://www.flysfo.com/

St. Louis Lambert International Airport - cleared to open http://www.lambert-stlouis.com/

Seattle-Tacoma International Airport - cleared to open http://www.portseattle.org/seatac/default.htm

Washington Dulles International Airport - airport facilities open, but airlines not ticketing passengers http://www.metwashairports.com/Dulles/

Washington - Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport - airport facilities open, but airlines not ticketing passengers

New York rescuers search slowly through the rubble

September 13, 2001 Posted: 1:59 AM EDT (0559 GMT)

CNN

By Gary Tuchman

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Hundreds of buildings are damaged in the area around what was the World Trade Center complex, some of them with huge holes that put them at risk of collapsing themselves.

The damaged buildings, along with some still-standing beams of the destroyed World Trade Center towers that could fall at any time, forced rescue workers to go slowly in their desperate search for more survivors.

On the 75-foot-high wreckage of those twin towers -- still smoking in places from smoldering fires -- more than 1,500 workers climb and dig, hoping to find more survivors. Above them loom 12 buildings with huge holes in them, threatening to collapse. One 20-story building seems as if it would tumble in a heavy wind.

As the rescue workers make their way through the rubble, they carry dishes. It is in those dishes they put the body parts they find.

Five people were pulled from the rubble Wednesday. A ballroom in a nearby building, set up to receive survivors, was empty Wednesday afternoon.

Another room -- part of a damaged Brooks Brothers store next to the World Trade Center wreckage -- is set up as a morgue. It has some bodies in it, but mostly it has only body parts.

Ellen Borakove, the spokeswoman for New York City's Medical Examiner, said it has about 5,000 body bags in stock and has ordered another 5,000, which will be delivered Thursday.

"That's something we do whenever we have a disaster," she said.

The scene in Lower Manhattan is much worse than it appears from outside the area.

For more than 10 blocks in every direction from the World Trade Center complex, debris clogs the streets, cars are overturned, and buildings are heavily damaged from the debris that came raining down when the center's towers fell.

A nine-story building, 5 World Trade Center, and the Millennium Hilton hotel were in danger of collapsing, fire officials said.

New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani said two people trapped in the WTC basement made cell phone calls to their relatives to give them their locations, and said others were down there with them.

"We're going to focus our efforts on recovering as many people as we can and on removing debris, which will take at least two or three weeks," said Giuliani at a Wednesday news conference.

Eighteen teams of rescue workers were using listening devices and dogs to locate survivors and bodies, the police commissioner said at a news conference Wednesday.

"The estimates that we're working with are in the thousands," Giuliani said, when asked about the death toll.

Giuliani said the latest confirmed citywide death toll was 82, and 370 police officers and firefighters are missing and feared dead.

New York Fire Chief Pete Ganci, who spent more than 30 years with the New York Fire Department, and First Deputy Commissioner of the Fire Department William Feehan are among those who perished.

The Greater New York Hospital Association -- an organization of some 200 hospitals in the New York metro area -- said emergency rooms treated more than 1,500 people after Tuesday's attack.

Knife-wielding hijackers took over four planes Tuesday, crashing two of them into the 110-story twin towers of the World Trade Center. Another hijacked airliner crashed into the Pentagon; a fourth crashed in a field in Pennsylvania.

A total of 266 people aboard those airplanes were killed.

Pentagon officials said they expected the number of fatalities there to be somewhere between 100 and 200.

Washington Hospital Center told the AP it is treating 15 people from the attack. Seven of those are in critical condition. Walter Reed Army Hospital has two patients, according to the AP.

Feds investigating possible Florida links to terrorist attacks

Posted: September 13, 2001 07:14 AM

MIAMI (AP) Federal agents had warrants to search the Florida homes of at least four men listed as passengers aboard a jetliner hijacked by terrorists and crashed into the World Trade Center, the Miami Herald reported Thursday.

The warrants are among several executed by federal investigators who have been probing possible Florida links to Tuesday's attacks in New York and Washington.

The Herald, citing federal authorities it did not identify, said the four men were listed on the manifest of American Airlines Flight 11, the first of the two planes that smashed into the trade towers just minutes apart. There were no survivors from any of the hijacked planes.

The Herald report identified one of the men as Mohamed Atta.

He came to Florida for flight training school a year ago and emerged Wednesday as one of at least two suspects in the FBI investigation into the terrorist attacks, witnesses interviewed by the FBI told The Associated Press.

Charlie Voss, a former employee at Huffman Aviation in Venice, Fla., said FBI agents told him Atta and another man identified only as Marwan were involved in the attack on the World Trade Center. The men had stayed briefly with Voss in July 2000 while attending flight school.

Azzan Ali, a student at Huffman Aviation, identified the second man as Marwan Alshehhi.

Voss said FBI agents told him authorities found a car at Boston's Logan Airport registered to two men who were once students at Huffman. Both jetliners that crashed into the World Trade Center towers had left Boston bound for Los Angeles.

Voss said the two men said they had just arrived from Germany and wanted to take flight training at Huffman, which offers training in light, single-engine aircraft but not commercial jetliners. Rudy Dekkers, Huffman's president and owner, said they attended the school for about five months beginning in July 2000, then left to take training elsewhere.

Ali said the friends referred to each other as "cousin," kept a low profile at the school and planned to fly corporate jets in the United Arab Emirates.

More than 400 agents in Florida were working on the investigation and leads were "coming in fast and furious," Miami FBI spokeswoman Judy Orihuela said Wednesday.

The investigation turned to homes in several parts of the state and included agents probing records in flight schools.

Several FBI agents removed student files from the Florida Flight Training Center, which is down the street from Huffman Aviation and offers the same type of pilot training. School owner Arne Kruithof would not give specific information about what the agents were seeking but said one of the files was related to a student from Tunisia.

In Coral Springs, witnesses said about 50 FBI agents and police officers on Tuesday night blanketed the apartment complex Atta had listed on his Florida driver's license. In Vero Beach, about 70 miles north of West Palm Beach, FBI agents searched four homes in three neighborhoods.

Agents asked Hank Habora about a neighbor, Amer Kamfar, 41. Kamfar was licensed as a flight engineer to fly turbojets and listed a Saudi Airlines post office box as his address in FAA records.

Habora said the family moved into the house in February but recently left abruptly.

"They threw out everything they had -- clothes, dishes," Habora said.

Habora said Kamfar told him his name was John and that he wore a pilot's uniform similar to those worn at Flight Safety Academy, which trains commercial jet crews.

In another neighborhood, agents searched two adjacent houses for 12 hours, leaving with several garbage bags of evidence. Officials towed away two cars. Neighbor Everett Tripp said a Middle Eastern family with four children moved out of one of the homes last weekend.

Landlord Paul Stimelind identified the tenant in the other home as Adnan Bukhari, who told Stimelind that he worked for Saudi Airlines and was training at Flight Safety Academy in Vero Beach.

Bukhari and his wife began renting a home from Stimelind in June 2000, Stimelind said. He said Bukhari's wife returned to Saudi Arabia on Aug. 30.

The couple's lease was up Aug. 31, but Bukhari asked for a two week lease extension, through Sept. 15.

"Then last weekend ... I received another call from him," Stimelind said. "He indicated that he would need another two or three days."

Stimelind said Bukhari told him he would be leaving by Sep. 17.

"He never gave a reason," Stimelind said. "He said he had a couple of things to clear up."'

No it's not over.

It seems Clinton gave them the equipment and perhaps the assistance of traitors within government they needed to pull it off, and in return they let him pick the day that would serve him best----Spetember 11, 2001--They The Day that Congress had ordered Ashcroft to turn over all the evidence on Clinton criminal investigations and some mafia criminal investigations. P>-------------------------------------------------------------

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

DAY OF INFAMY 2001

U.S. equipped terror sponsors

Clinton exported NSA-ducking phone, high-tech encryption devices to Syria

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

By Paul Sperry

WASHINGTON -- The dozen or so Islamic terrorists who pulled off the plot to strike at America's nerve centers in New York and Washington spent months, if not years, researching, planning and coordinating the surprise attacks, U.S. security officials say. And they did it completely in secret, using the world's most sophisticated telecommunications equipment, some secured by advanced encryption technology that most armies don't have.

Where did they get such state-of-the-art, military-related gear?

First, you have to appreciate the high degree of communications activity their mission required at each stage.

In researching their targets, the terrorists picked ones relatively easy to hit at high air speeds, yet ones that would produce big casualties and provide symbolic blows to American morale. They had to pick airports close by, with weak security. They had to find jets with enough heft and wingspan and fuel to cause major damage, yet not so large that they required extra crew.

The Boeing 757s and 767s they hijacked were big, but all had just two pilots and no flight engineers, making it easier for terrorists to take the cockpits. And the heisted jets were from the same family of aircraft, obviating additional cockpit training.

They also apparently studied passenger traffic patterns of airlines in order to pick flights with relatively few people aboard. All four flights had light passenger loads. The Boeing jets have roughly 160-seat capacities, yet American Flight 11 carried 81 passengers; American Flight 77, only 58; United Flight 175, 56; and United Flight 93, a skeletal 38.

Fewer passengers, fewer heroes to worry about.

More key, the terrorists needed to select transcontinental flights with big fuel loads to turn the planes into giant petro-bombs. All four flights were bound for California. They also had to know flight patterns, and how to blind air-traffic controllers to the hijackings by turning off the planes' transponders, which send such warning signals, among other aviation information.

In planning the attack, they had to fashion weapons that they could sneak past airport security. Transportation Department officials think that they may have hedged their bets and even planted security people on the inside at Logan and Dulles airports, so that guards would look the other way when they came through metal detectors at the terminals.

The kamikaze pilots also had to log many hours on computer flight simulators with high-level graphics capability, to practice hitting their targets at full throttle. A Continental Airlines captain, who's flown both 757s and 767s, told WorldNetDaily he thinks they may have even added the World Trade Center and Pentagon to the simulator's visual database.

"At the airspeed of those strikes, which hit their targets dead on, the hand-eye coordination demands would be too high for casual flying skill -- with, or without, an autopilot engaged," he said.

They had to practice, moreover, navigating the jets to abruptly change their course, by as much as 180 degrees in some cases, after take-off. Flying them at low altitudes was also something they had to work on.

Synchronized terrorists

Finally, in executing their murderous missions, the 12 or so terrorists had to coordinate their activities, flawlessly, within a roughly two-hour stretch. And, for the most part, they did. They all got to the airport on time, they all got through security, they all boarded their flights, they all hijacked their flights and, with the exception of one group, they all hit their targets.

Pulling off such a complex plot would have generated an inordinate volume of communications -- whether by radio, cell phone, land line, fax or modem -- among the terrorists, among their Middle-Eastern sponsors and among commercial contacts here and abroad.

But somehow eavesdroppers at the super-secret National Security Agency -- with their billion-dollar satellite "birds" and other surveillance technology -- were deaf, dumb and blind to the wicked plot.

"The real issue in this tragedy is how the hell were these people able to plan and coordinate such a strike over a period of months without the NSA intercepting their signals?" demanded Peter M. Leitner, a senior strategic trade adviser at the Defense Department.

Leitner, who reviews commercial license applications for exports of some of the most sophisticated military-related technology, thinks he knows the answer.

"The technology that would allow these terrorists to mask their communications was given away, hand over fist, by the Clinton administration," he said in an interview with WorldNetDaily.

Leitner says the previous administration rubber-stamped the shipment of top-end military-related telecommunications equipment to Syria, which is on the FBI's list of sensitive countries that pose a threat to U.S. security.

"Syria is a terrorist-supporting nation," he said. "They provide infrastructure to bastards like [Osama] bin Laden. They provide backup and support and communications abilities to these terrorist cells."

So what kind of gear has Syria -- and likely bin Laden, by way of Syria -- gotten from America?

Spread-spectrum radios

"We're giving them spread-spectrum radios, which are almost impossible to break into. We're giving them fiber optics. We're giving them a high level of encryption. We're giving them computer networks that can't be tapped," Leitner said.

Spread-spectrum radios, originally designed for military use only, change their frequency constantly.

"Bin Laden's cells aren't having any trouble communicating anymore," Leitner said.

Bin Laden, the world's No. 1 terrorist and the Pentagon's chief suspect in Tuesday's attacks, is known to use portable satellite telephones, advanced encryption cell phones and other encrypted telephony equipment, as well as secure computer networks -- all compliments of U.S. technology, Leitner says.

"If people are worried about how these people were able to coordinate and communicate something like this -- which had to be pretty extensively coordinated -- without it being intercepted, it's because of the crap we've been selling these people," he said.

"How can you penetrate their networks when you can't even eavesdrop on their conversations?" he said.

"You can't stop them when they're coming right at your building," he said. "But, damn it, you should be able to stop them months in advance by breaking up their networks."

Leitner posits that the NSA wasn't able to detect the Islamic terrorists' plot because of the "high quality of the communications gear that they've been acquiring over the last couple of years, thanks to the Clinton administration's decontrols on advanced telecommunications equipment."

Terrorists' secured telecom gear "makes it infinitely more difficult to get even early warning signs" about their activities, he said.

Tuesday's attacks took the entire U.S. government, including the intelligence community, by surprise.

"We had no specific warning of the U.S. attacks," said Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., ranking minority member of the Intelligence Committee.

Complete surprise

The Pentagon issued an alert of "Threat Con Alpha" the day before the attack, which meant that no threats were on the horizon. The same alert was issued the morning of the attack.

"We got no word of anything," Leitner said.

"We weren't warned of anything," another Pentagon official told WorldNetDaily.

Asked Tuesday if he had any inkling of the plot, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld dodged the question: "We don't discuss intelligence matters."

Three weeks ago, some overseas papers quoted bin Laden saying that a major strike against the U.S. was coming soon. But there were no specifics. And bin Laden reportedly sent an e-mail to unknown government sources three days ago warning holy hell would break out. But again, he didn't say how, when or where.

Still, it's baffling that the U.S. intelligence community didn't pick up, early on, any specifics of the complex and long-planned plot through electronic intercepts and signals intelligence.

But it's actually not that baffling, Leitner asserts, against the backdrop of loose government controls on dual-use telecom exports.

"I've testified to Congress that it will take serious numbers of body bags before we wake up to the need to tighten dual-use export controls," he said. "Unfortunately, we've got them now."

"This is so tragic and yet so preventable," he said. "Now we're going to have to knock out their [terrorist] camps, just like we had to bomb the Iraqi's several times now to try to take out the fiber-optics network that the Chinese are installing in Iraq's air-defense systems."

"Yet, it was the Clinton administration that gave the Chinese the technology to give to Iraq," he noted.

The Bush administration apparently hasn't woken up, either.

Wake-up call

In June, Leitner was asked by the Commerce Department to OK a new round of exports of dual-use telecom equipment to Syria. He denied the request, and was asked to reconsider. He denied it again, arguing in a letter to Karen Vogel, the Commerce export licensing officer who requested the approval, that:

"Doing so vastly upgrades the C3 and C41 systems of the Syrian military and Intelligence Services. My concerns are also obviously compounded by the fact that Syria is one of the foremost state sponsors of terrorism."

Leitner continued: "Since an 'upgraded telecom infrastructure' will also greatly facilitate Syrian planning, coordination, secrecy and execution of terrorist acts, as well as direct military communications, I see absolutely no basis for any position other than a denial."

Vogel argued in an earlier letter that her request came on the heels of eight previous approvals of licenses for similar exports to Syria.

"There's still a lot of things inside the government involving national security that have just got to be changed," Leitner said.

Another senior Pentagon official who specializes in counterterrorism says his own faith in the U.S. intelligence community has been shattered.

"This full-court press by terrorists blows the hell out of the line that we've been hearing for years from the intelligence community that if they try anything big, we'll know about it and warn you. Anything bigger than a couple of people, don't worry, we'll know about it," he said. "Well, I guess they didn't."

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Subpoena:

By Authority of the House of Representatives of the Congress of the United States of America

To United States Department of Justice Serve: Attorney General John Ashcroft

You are hereby commanded to produce the things identified on the attached schedule before the full committee on Government Reform

of the House of Representatives of the United States, of which the Hon.

Dan Burton is chairman, by producing such things in room 2157 of the

Rayburn Building, in the city of Washington, on

September 11, 2001, at the hour of 5:00 PM

To Danleigh Halfast or US Marshals Service

to serve and make return.

Witness by my hand and seal
of House of United States, at the city of Washington, this
6th day of September, 2001

(signed)Dan Burton
Chairman

----------------------------------------------------------------

To see actual subpoena:

http://www.house.gov/reform/letters/ashcroft_subpoena.pdf

Five firefighters rescued; another building may be in danger

September 13, 2001 Posted: 3:16 PM EDT (1916 GMT)

Firefighters tend to a colleague overcome by treacherous conditions at the World Trade Center devastation

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Search teams rescued five firefighters from the rubble of the World Trade Center towers even as Three World Financial Center -- across the street from the site of the collapsed towers -- appeared to be in danger of collapsing, authorities said Thursday.

Emergency workers have been pulled back from the 54-story building, home to American Express, and smoke was seen coming from the windows, said CNN Producer Adam Reiss, who was on the scene.

The building has been used as a morgue and as a headquarters for triage ever since Tuesday's attacks.

"You can clearly see the anxiety" on the faces of rescue workers, Reiss said.

In the search of the trade center wreckage, five firefighters, who had been trapped since the buildings collapsed, were found alive Thursday inside a sports utility vehicle, where they had taken refuge.

When rescuers pulled debris off the SUV, they were shocked to find the firefighters. Two of the firefighters were able to get out of the vehicle on their own power, rescuers said, and the other three are also "in good shape," a medical worker told CNN.

CNN’s Martin Savidge said that earlier, emergency officials had said they did not expect to find any more survivors above ground. He said news of the rescue has given new hope to searchers.

In a news conference Thursday morning, New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said 4,763 people were still unaccounted for. That was before these five firefighters were discovered.

The figure includes those who were aboard the two planes that crashed into the center's twin towers, rescuers and those reported by families and businesses as missing.

Giuliani said 94 bodies had been recovered, and 46 of them had been identified. He said 70 body parts had also been recovered, adding apologetically that officials "may not be able to recover everyone."

A spokesman for St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan said about 800 people with injuries related to the attacks were being treated at their hospitals. That includes 83 firefighters and police officers.

The city set up a center at the Armory, at 26th Street and Lexington Avenue, where families can report if any loved ones are missing.

"If you are looking for someone that you believe is missing," the spokesman said, "that's the place to come to, to register, to bring identifying data, and we'll do everything we can to help you."

A Toronto, Ontario, man said that he received a voice message Wednesday night from someone who claimed to be trapped in the rubble. Pat Probert played a tape of the message for CNN in which a man says "we are trapped but alive."

Probert said he did not think he knew the person.

Giuliani said more than 6,000 tons of debris have been removed from the scene so far. It was being transported to the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, where FBI and police officials plan to sort through and analyze it.

He said officials are hoping to reopen the city below 14th Street by midnight Thursday. He said the hope is to reopen Wall Street Friday.

Meanwhile at the Pentagon, officials say the death toll has reached an estimated 190, including an Army three-star general.

The figure includes the 64 people on the plane. The Defense Department is estimating that a total of 126 Pentagon workers are still unaccounted for and believed dead in the aftermath of the terrorist attack.

Arlington County emergency officials said they are assuming they would find no more survivors in the wreckage

"We are officially in a recovery mode at this particular time. The rescue workers obviously are still very hopeful. And we continue to want them to be hopeful. But in reality we're in the modes and operations that we're taking is more of a recovery phase," said Arlington County Fire Chief Ed Plaugher.

Nearly 24,000 military and civilian employees were back on the job Thursday at the Arlington, Virginia, building, damaged heavily in the attack, with Metro trains resuming regular service and buses continuing to operate from Pentagon City.

As employees returned to work, bomb-sniffing dogs were sweeping through the Pentagon.

Half the building remains closed because of smoke and structural damage, and many workers will have to double up in offices.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.