- Britain's spy chiefs warned the Prime Minister less than
two months before September 11 that Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda group was
in "the final stages" of preparing a terrorist attack in the
West, it was disclosed yesterday.
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- The heads of MI6, MI5 and GCHQ, the signals eavesdropping
centre, suggested that while the most likely targets were American or Israeli,
there could be British casualties. Their warning was included in a report
sent to Tony Blair and other senior Cabinet Ministers on July 16. But the
agency chiefs admitted the "timings, targets and methods of attack"
were not known.
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- The disclosure was made yesterday in the annual report
of the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee, which questioned
the intelligence chiefs after the attacks. The July 16 warning to ministers
was included in the weekly precis of intelligence assessments made by the
Cabinet Office Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), on which the heads of
the intelligence agencies sit.
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- The JIC prediction of an al-Qaeda attack was based on
intelligence gleaned not just from MI6 and GCHQ but also from US agencies,
including the CIA and the National Security Agency, which has staff working
jointly with GCHQ.
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- The CIA sometimes has a representative on the JIC. The
contents of the July 16 warning would have been passed to the Americans,
Whitehall sources confirmed.
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- The news is consistent with what is now known about warnings
given by American agencies before September 11. President Bush was given
a CIA briefing on August 6 about a possible terrorist hijacking but the
final pieces in the intelligence jigsaw - when, where and how - were missing.
Subsequently it has emerged that an FBI agent's warning of Arab suspects
taking flying lessons was ignored.
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- The Intelligence and Security Committee, headed by Ann
Taylor, the former Leader of the Commons, said that the JIC assessment
was "not a stark warning of immediate danger to the UK".
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- However, the July 2001 JIC assessment, warning that "organised
attacks were in their final stages of preparation", predicted that
"UK interests were at risk, including from collateral damage in attacks
on US targets". Seventy-eight Britons died in the attack on the World
Trade Centre.
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- Yesterday Richard Perle, the former US Assistant Defence
Secretary, said in London that Britain was exposed to terrorist attack
"more than anywhere else other than the US. Britain is a very open
place with a large population from which terrorists can be recruited".
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- In examining Britain's preparedness for an al-Qaeda attack
last year, the committee report said "the shortage of specific intelligence
and Osama bin Laden's record could have warned all concerned that more
urgent action was needed to counter this threat". The eight MPs and
one peer said it was a "matter of conjecture" whether this would
have forestalled bin Laden's actions. But they noted that all three agencies
had suffered cutbacks in funds and staffing in the 1990s and had been "operating
under financial pressures prior to the September 11 attacks".
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- Mrs Taylor said that there had been "intelligence
gaps", and one problem was that the agencies had not envisaged the
scale of the September 11 attack. The committee report concluded: "With
hindsight, the scale of the threat and the vulnerability of Western states
to terrorists with this degree of sophistication and a total disregard
for their own lives was not understood."
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- The committee, which oversees the work of MI6, MI5 and
GCHQ and always takes evidence in private, said: "The questions are
whether the threat posed by UBL (Osama bin Laden) was understood and whether
it was effectively brought to ministers' attention." Before September
11 the security and intelligence services had "identified the pressing
need" to gather intelligence about bin Laden and al-Qaeda - a "notably
hard target" to penetrate - and had informed ministers "that
action was in hand". The report, the first parliamentary assessment
of intelligence leads before September 11, said: "The agencies have
told us they had no intelligence forewarning them specifically about the
September 11 attacks on the US."
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- Sir Stephen Lander, Director-General of MI5, had told
the committee seven weeks after the attacks that a subsequent re-examination
of material did not find any that, with the wisdom of hindsight, could
have given warning of the attacks. John Scarlett, who took over as chairman
of the JIC a few days before the attacks in America, told the committee,
according to the report, that there was "an acute awareness in the
period before September 11" that bin Laden and his associates "represented
a very serious threat" and that there was "planning activity".
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- http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2-326412,00.html
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