What they knew; when they knew it: despite the hue and cry from partisan Democrats and the media, the Bush team did not act irresponsibly before the attacks on New York City and Washington

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 17, 2002 | by Kenneth R. Timmerman

A fountainhead of new clues to the Sept. 11 attacks and the far-flung international network that spawned them is becoming public, apparently fed by heavily partisan cries of a massive intelligence failure on the part of the Bush administration. Democrats on Capitol Hill, led by Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.), are demanding creation of a special investigation to determine possible Bush-administration misfeasance.

The alleged smoking gun was a July 10 memo from FBI Special Agent Kenneth Williams in Phoenix to FBI headquarters in Washington urging the bureau to launch a nationwide investigation after he had identified Middle Eastern men he believed might be tied to a terrorist group undergoing training at a local flight school. A congressional source who has seen the memo tells INSIGHT: "This was as actionable a memo as could have been written by anyone." It required action.

But the FBI admitted last week that the Williams memo never made it past midlevel managers, who claimed they lacked the resources to implement the agent's far-reaching recommendations. It was not passed on to the National Security Council, the CIA or even top FBI officials. Robert Mueller, President George W. Bush's pick to succeed outgoing FBI Director Louis Freeh, had only taken the reins of the bureau a week before the attacks.

In fact, the White House now has revealed that its Counterterrorism Security Group (CSG), which brought together White House officials with those from all relevant federal agencies, began meeting several times a week within months after Bush took office and issued no fewer than five separate Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Information Circulars to alert private air carriers to various potential terrorist threats:

* On June 22, 2001, the FAA alerted carriers to a possible hijacking aimed at pressuring the government to free terrorists then sitting in U.S. jails.

* On July 2, the FAA warned of a possible attempt to place a bomb at a major airport terminal, based on the testimony of millennium bomber Ahmed Ressam. His plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport was foiled in December 1999 by an alert U.S. Customs official who arrested Ressam at the Canadian border as he tried to enter the United States (see "Canadian Border Open to Terrorists" Dec. 17, 2001).

* On July 18, the FAA issued a "general alert" urging all carriers to maintain a high degree of alertness, but disclaiming knowledge of any specific threat. At that time, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice told reporters in a televised briefing, "Contingency planning was done on how to deal with multiple, simultaneous attacks around the world," because that's where the intelligence suggested the attacks would occur, not in the United States. Buttressing that impression, Rice revealed that "the CIA ... managed through these intelligence activities and liaison activities to disrupt attacks in Paris, Turkey and Rome."

* On July 31, the FAA warned that intelligence reports suggested that known (but unnamed) terrorist groups were actively training to conduct hijacking operations.

* On Aug. 16, the FAA warned air carriers to be on the alert for passengers attempting to board with disguised weapons in support of a hijacking attempt. The concern, Rice said, was "that the terrorists had made breakthroughs in cell phones, key chains and pens as weapons."

Furthermore, we now know that when the president was given a detailed intelligence briefing on potential terrorist threats on Aug. 6, the analysts mentioned that Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network was believed to be considering a possible hijacking operation. Rice and other White House officials say the analysts ran through the scenario of a hijacking in which passengers would be held hostage to force the release of terrorist operatives and their "spiritual leader" blind Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, who was convicted in 1994 of plotting to blow up the Lincoln and Holland tunnels in New York City. Intelligence on the blind sheik's ties to bin Laden also was becoming more solid, law-enforcement sources tell INSIGHT, making such a scenario all the more likely.

And yet, reporters and Democrats from House Minority. Leader Dick Gephardt of Missouri to Daschle and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York continued to claim there had been an intelligence failure and a lack of judgment on the part of the administration because "clear warnings" of suicide hijackings had gone unheeded.

Any such warnings, while fascinating in hindsight, were dismissed by U.S. and foreign-intelligence agencies as farfetched and improbable. As Rice put it, "There was no time, there was no place, there was no method of attack" contained in any of the specific recent intelligence. "It simply said, `These are people who train and seem to talk possibly about hijackings.' That you would have risked shutting down the American civil-aviation system with such generalized information--I think you would have had to think five, six, seven times about that very, very hard."