Steve Quayle News Alerts

September 18, 2002

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The U.S. intelligence community had numerous warnings of terrorist attacks against the country before September 11, including information gathered one month earlier that warned of a hijacking "or an act of sabotage against a commercial airliner," a congressional committee revealed Wednesday.

Two months earlier, the intelligence community issued an advisory to government agencies warning of a "high probability of an imminent terrorist attack" by extremists associated with Osama bin Laden -- fingered as the mastermind of the September 11 attacks.

But that information and other warnings of terrorist attacks before September 11 did not specifically warn of what transpired that day, according to a report released by the House and Senate intelligence committees.
Joint Senate House Intelligence hearings
CNN plans coverage of the hearings which begin at 10 a.m.

Still, even prior to Wednesday's hearing, several lawmakers have said the CIA and FBI failed to adequately communicate with one another and failed to connect the dots between a series of clues and warnings that came before last year's devastating attacks.

The report released Wednesday appears to underscore that point.

"The (intelligence) community made mistakes prior to September 11 and the problems that led to those mistakes need to be addressed and to be fixed," said the report, delivered by Eleanor Hill, staff director for the joint inquiry.

Sen. Bob Graham, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the goal of hearing was "not to point finger or pin blame" but to correct "systemic problems (that) might have prevented our government from detecting and disrupting al Qaeda's plot."

The report -- a product of a joint inquiry by the two intelligence committees -- determined that in August 1998 the FBI and the Federal Aviation Administration had information that a group of unidentified Arabs planned to fly an "explosive-laden plane" from a foreign country into the World Trade Center.

However, the FAA found the plot "highly unlikely given the state of that foreign country's aviation program," the report said.

The report contains other revelations as well.

The committee found that the United States intelligence community had information by 1998 that bin Laden's terrorist network planned to strike within the United States. That same year intelligence officials also learned that al Qaeda was trying to establish an operative cell within the United States.

The intelligence community also had information that bin Laden was attempting to recruit a group of five to seven young men from the United States to travel to the Middle East for training in conjunction with his plans to strike U.S. domestic targets, according to the report.

Despite the fact that "the intelligence community faced increasing numbers of reports of imminent al Qaeda attacks against U.S. interests," the report said, in July and August 2001 intelligence reporting "began to decrease."

http://www.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/09/18/intelligence.hearings/index.html