- WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A
U.S. congressional hearing was told on Wednesday that three years before
the Sept. 11 attacks intelligence agencies had information about a group
that planned to fly an explosives-laden plane from a foreign country into
the World Trade Center.
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- The information obtained in August 1998 about the group
of "unidentified Arabs" was passed to the FBI and the Federal
Aviation Administration, but "the FAA found the plot highly unlikely
given the state of that foreign country's aviation program," said
Eleanor Hill, staff director of the joint Sept. 11 inquiry of the House
and Senate intelligence committees.
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- This was one of many details revealed at the first public
hearing into intelligence failures by America's spy agencies to detect
plans by Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda network to conduct the Sept.
11 strike.
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- While most of the rising volume of threat reports about
an impending attack during spring and summer of 2001 pointed to a strike
overseas, some of it suggested targets inside the United States, Hill told
the hearing.
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- But none of the threats provided a specific time, date,
and place of the attack. "My own view is ... no one will ever really
know whether 9/11 could have been prevented," she said.
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- On Sept. 11, four hijacked planes crashed into the World
Trade Center in New York, the Pentagon near Washington and a Pennsylvania
field, killing about 3,000 people. The United States blames bin Laden and
his al Qaeda network.
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- Despite concerns about bin Laden and al Qaeda, intelligence
agencies had not directed adequate resources to analyzing them, Hill said.
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- Before the Sept. 11 attacks, the CIA's Counterterrorist
Center had only five analysts assigned full-time to bin Laden's network
worldwide, and the FBI's terrorism analytic unit had only one analyst looking
at al Qaeda long-term, she said.
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- A senior CIA official said there were about 125 analysts
throughout the agency focused on tracking bin Laden and al Qaeda, not just
the ones in the Counterterrorist Center's small bin Laden unit.
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- THREAT REPORTS
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- In March 2001 an intelligence source claimed a group
of bin Laden's operatives were planning an attack in the United States
in April 2001. That April, information was obtained that "unspecified
terrorist operatives" in California and New York were planning terrorist
attacks in those states, Hill said.
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- In May 2001 intelligence agencies had information that
bin Laden supporters were planning to infiltrate the United States through
Canada to conduct an attack using explosives.
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- In that same month, the Defense Department acquired information
that it shared with other intelligence agencies indicating that seven bin
Laden associates had departed various locations for Canada, Britain and
the United States.
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- In June 2001, Hill said, CIA's counterterrorist center
had information that key operatives in bin Laden's organization "were
disappearing while others were preparing for martyrdom."
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- The National Security Agency, which eavesdrops on global
communications, reported at least 33 communications between May and July
2001 indicating a "possible, imminent terrorist attack," she
said.
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- "This is not an example of missed signals, this
is an example of how many signals there are out there," the CIA official
said. "It illustrates how much information is coming in, how difficult
it is to sort out, specifically when it's not specific," he said.
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- There were also threat reports that terrorists were considering
using airplanes as weapons as a method of attack.
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- In August 2001, a month before the attacks, intelligence
agencies had information about a plot to either bomb the U.S. Embassy in
Nairobi from an airplane or crash an airplane into it, Hill said.
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- In April 2001, a source said that bin laden would be
interested in commercial pilots as potential terrorists.
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- A year earlier, in April 2000, a source walked into the
FBI's Newark office and claimed he had been to an al Qaeda training camp
in Pakistan where he learned hijacking techniques and received arms training
and was supposed to meet five to six others in the United States to hijack
a jumbo jet.
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- "They were instructed to use all necessary force
to take over the plane because there would be pilots among the hijacking
team," Hill said. The source passed a polygraph but the FBI was not
able to verify his story, she said.
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- Before Sept. 11, the Counterterrorist Center had 40 analysts
to analyze terrorism issues worldwide, and the only terrorist tactic it
analyzed in-depth was the use of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons,
Hill said.
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- "We now know that our inability to detect and prevent
the Sept. 11 attacks was an intelligence failure of unprecedented magnitude,"
Sen. Richard Shelby of Alabama, the senior Republican on the Senate Intelligence
Committee, said. "Some people who couldn't seem to utter the words
'intelligence failure' are now convinced of it."
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- "In the days before Sept. 11, many were quick to
blame the success of the terrorists' diabolical plot on failures of intelligence
or preparedness," Sen. Bob Graham, a Florida Democrat and chairman
of the Senate intelligence committee, said. But he said there was no smoking
gun at this point.
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