Spy Agencies Had Pre-9/11 Threats on U.S. Soil

Reuters ^

[RCW2001]

Sept. 17

— By Tabassum Zakaria

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. intelligence agencies had picked up reports of attacks planned for inside the United States and of using airplanes as weapons during the spring and summer before last year's Sept. 11 attacks, but were more focused on the possibility of an assault overseas, a congressional source said on Tuesday.

But there was no information that specified date, time, place or method that would have pointed to the attacks on New York and Washington, the source familiar with a congressional inquiry into intelligence failures told reporters.

"What you're going to find is that there was reporting on domestic attacks in the U.S. even though a lot of people were much more focused on overseas," the source said.

"You're going to see specific reporting about aircraft as weapons and what the intelligence community had on aircraft as weapons prior to 9/11," the source said referring to information that will be revealed on Wednesday at the first open hearing of the joint congressional inquiry.

U.S. officials have said in the past that intelligence agencies had picked up an increased level of "chatter," or reports of threats, the summer before the attacks, but that it had pointed to plans for a strike against U.S. interests overseas.

On Sept. 11, 2001, four hijacked planes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon outside Washington and a Pennsylvania field, killing more than 3,000 people.

"It is true that there was, and some people say, an unprecedented amount of reporting that ... peaked probably in June and then started to drop off," the source who spoke on condition of anonymity said.

Eleanor Hill, who heads the 9/11 investigation for the inquiry by the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives intelligence committees, will detail the threat reports that U.S. spy agencies had in the months before the attacks.

The information has been declassified "so that the American public can get some sort of official version of what was actually being received and heard in our intelligence community before 9/11," the congressional source said.

"There is a lot of reporting out there, you don't see reporting that says on September 11th there is going to be a plane crash into the World Trade Center," the source said.

"We have not found anything where some part of the government had the information as to when, where, how this attack was going to take place," the source said.

[JohnGalt]

These agencies could not stop the OKC bombing even with agents working alongside McVeigh et al so I am not sure how we can expect them to stop 19 bumbling Arabs.

[joeyman]

Just do a search on "prior knowledge" and see what comes up.

[AmericanVictory]

Their were alerts and warnings all over the place. The simple truth is that huge, centralized government is incapable of thinking outside the box, focusing data into information when it isn't already known, and acting decisively. We would point out that a single author, who was also consultant and advisor to a key House Committee on the question of security and terrorism, wrote a book laying out the whole Bin Laden, Al Qaeda story (forword by Congresswoman Bentley of the Committee), every word of which has been borne out, and yet the government itself, as a whole, was incompetent and incapable of dealing with the situation.