From: ERRI DAILY INTELLIGENCE REPORT-Thursday, February 21, 2002-Vol. 8, No. 052

TODAY'S CENTRAL FOCUS:

U.S. Intelligence Didn't Catch 9/11 Clues?

By Paul Anderson, ERRI Analyst

WASHINGTON, DC: According to a recent report by ABC News, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 came as a complete surprise to U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies. There were no alerts, no increased security, no warnings. The an examination of intelligence efforts since 9/11 has reportedly found a trail of missed signals, missed opportunities, and warnings ignored.

Marvin Cetron, a terrorism expert, underlined the threat in a report to the Pentagon. He said as early as 1994 that there were warnings about the possibility of an airborne terrorist attack on U.S. targets. Cetron told ABC News: "We saw Osama bin Laden. We spelled it out and we said the United States was very vulnerable. You could make a left turn at the Washington Monument and take out the White House. And you could make a right turn and take out the Pentagon."

Cetron said he warned the Pentagon that two events earlier that year -- the crash-landing of a small airplane at the White House by an apparently unstable man, and French authorities' storming of a hijacked airliner that Algerian terrorists had planned to fly into the Eiffel Tower -- made an airborne terrorist attack on the United States a very real possibility. He added: "We knew that [something] was going happen and we were scared."

But Cetron said Pentagon officials told him to delete the warning from the report. "I said, 'It's unclassified, everything is available,' and officials said, 'We don't want it released because you can't handle a crisis before it becomes a crisis, and no one is going to believe it anyhow.'"

The Chicago-based Emergency Response and Research Institute (ERRI - parent of this website) also received similar responses to the multiple warnings it issued over several years. ERRI Risk Analyst Steve Macko explained: "Right after the bombings of the U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998 (within 72 hours), ERRI correctly identified the Bin Laden organization as responsible for the atrocities in Tanzania and Kenya and issued any number of  warnings about Usama bin Laden.

On 29 May 2001, we issued a threat advisory that said, "The current ERRI assessment would suggest that some sort of attack may be carried out by those associated with Usama Bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda organization, in retaliation for the conviction of Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, Mohamed al-'Owhali, Mohamed Sadeek Odeh, and Wadih el Hage, in a New York City federal courtroom..."

We said then, that the United States had to use all its resources to track down and eliminate bin Laden before he killed again. We predicted, then, the body count would be high. We know that our assessments were disseminated through the U.S. military/intelligence community. But, ERRI was criticized by some officials at the time. We were even told by a former State Department official, 'The United States doesn't do that sort of thing.' Well, we're doing it now... after bin Laden killed nearly 3,000 people in NYC and Washington."

In 1998, after the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the United States accused bin Laden of involvement, and Congress and the White House commissioned two new reports on terrorism. Both of the reports rang alarm bells, but little was done. The reports noted that the United States had virtually no human intelligence (HUMINT) sources inside groups like bin Laden's al-Qaeda. And, several CIA agents say that political operatives in Washington repeatedly prevented intervention in terrorist matters as they attempted to engage what they called "countries of concern" in diplomatic initiatives.

Paul Bremer, chairman of the National Commission on Terrorism, which released its report in 2000, said: "We found that over the years both the overseas intelligence community (the CIA), and at home the FBI had developed a risk aversion." This "aversion to risk" meant that the CIA failed to penetrate al-Qaeda with even a single agent.

Critics say the United States was too dependent on satellites, wire taps, and other high-tech means to gather intelligence on bin Laden's network, and that there was a shortage of people to translate and analyze the vast amounts of data being made available. According to retired CIA agent Robert Baer, in his new book "See No Evil (Crown Publishers)," many embassies and CIA stations in Europe and Asia had no Arabic speakers, and couldn't effectively translate suspect materials it was able to gather. Baer also spoke intensively about "political interference" from Washington and "risk aversion" as being detrimental to a CIA success in counter-terrorism operations.

A number of reports issued over the past few years (requires .pdf reader) recognized the shortcomings in U.S. intelligence (please also see http://www.emergency.com/stratknw.htm)  and made recommendations including closer monitoring of student visas, the creation of a homeland security office, the freezing of financial assets that supported terrorism, and more coordination between the CIA, FBI, and other law enforcement agencies on intelligence matters. But, the reports' authors say, their recommendations went largely unheeded by the previous administration in Washington.

© EmergencyNet News Service, 2002. All rights reserved. May not be redistributed or otherwise published without the expressed permission of ERRI/EmergencyNet News. Routine permission will be granted to U.S. emergency, military, and intelligence agencies for reproduction.

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