Before 9/11: it's now five years since the 9/11 attacks and serious questions remain unanswered. Among these is whether or not the U.S. government had prior warning of the attacks

New American, The, July 24, 2006 by Dennis Behreandt

The day after the attacks on 9/11, journalists Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair reported that both the World Trade Center and a nearby military base had been moved to high alert just weeks before. The Trade Center went on heightened alert just three weeks before the attack. The army base, the Arsenal at Picatinny in New Jersey, was put on high alert six weeks before the attack, "with some staff locked in their offices for a period," Cockburn and St. Clair reported. At about the same time that the World Trade Center went on heightened alert, the journalists noted, Osama bin Laden gave an interview to the editor of the al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper in London claiming that he planned "very, very big attacks against American interests."

Cockburn and St. Clair's report suggested that the United States knew the attacks were imminent. It is a conclusion reached by others since then, including Steve Elson, a former member of the FAA's secret "Red Team" airport security unit. In November 2005, in an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Elson explained that everyone knew an attack was imminent and that it could have been prevented. "I was positive we were gonna get hit," Elson explained on the news program The Fifth Estate. "[The attack] was absolutely preventable and the United States government knew it."

Word on the Street

Apparently even some New York City school kids knew something was coming down. In the October 2002 issue of Insight Magazine, journalist Jeffrey Scott Shapiro reported that a high school freshman at New Utrecht High School in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, may have known in advance that the World Trade Center would be attacked. When this claim came to Shapiro's attention, he followed up on the story by talking to the boy's teacher, Antoinette DiLorenzo. During a lesson a week before the attacks, DiLorenzo noticed the boy, a Palestinian, looking out a window. "What are you looking at?" she asked. The boy's response, in hindsight, was chilling: "Do you see those two buildings?" he asked while pointing at the World Trade Center. "They won't be standing there next week."

This was not the only incident like this that apparently occurred in the days before the attacks. Shapiro also reported that a 6th grade student at another school passed on a similar warning to his teacher on September 10, 2001. "Essentially, he warned her to stay away from lower Manhattan because something bad was going to happen," said Sgt. Edgar Martinez, deputy director of police services for the Jersey City Police Department, according to Shapiro. Yet another boy had heard of the impending attacks and warned his classmates. "He warned them not to ride any city buses because he had been told at his mosque the week before to stay off all public transportation for a while," said one NYPD officer quoted by Shapiro. "He said it wouldn't be safe."

If kids on the streets of New York knew something was about to happen, why didn't the feds know? The answer is that they did know, but bureaucratic incompetence, or worse, prevented them from taking action.

In the Open

The FBI and CIA knew in the months prior to 9/11 that at least two of the hijackers were not only in this country but were known terrorists. Yet nothing was done to impede the terrorists' operations despite the fact that the terrorists did nothing to conceal their identities.

The U.S. intelligence community knew that terrorists (and future 9/11 hijackers) Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi attended a terrorist meeting in Malaysia in January 2000 that was also attended by Khallad bin-Atash. They knew, too, that Khallad had been a key al-Qaeda player in planning attacks on the USS Cole and on embassies in Africa. Available information also indicated that al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi were in the United States beginning in 2000, not long after the meeting in Malaysia. Moreover, they didn't try to hide their presence.

For instance, in the Joint Committee report entitled The Intelligence Community's Knowledge of the September 11 Hijackers Prior to September 11, 2001, issued on September 20, 2002, Eleanor Hill, staff director of the Joint Intelligence Committee that conducted the inquiry, noted that in 2000 the pair "used their true names on a rental agreement, as al-Mihdhar also did in obtaining a California motor vehicle photo identification card." Moreover, though al-Mihdhar left the country on June 10, 2000, Hill noted that al-Hazmi "remained in the United States. On July 7, 2000, a week shy of the expiration of the six-month visa to stay in the United States that had been granted on January 15, 2000, al-Hazmi applied to the [Immigration and Naturalization Service] for an extension to his visa. He used on his INS application the Lemon Grove, California, address for the residence that he shared with al-Mihdhar before the latter's departure in early June 2000. The INS recorded receipt of the extension request on July 27, 2000." Consequently, it should have been fairly apparent that these two individuals were up to no good. Indeed, these connections were used by the United States after the fact, according to Hill: "Thus, the facts linking these two individuals to Khallad and therefore to Usama Bin Laden formed the crux of the case made by the State Department to governments around the world that Usama Bin Laden should be held accountable for the September 11 attacks."