It's Time To Put An End To All This War, Criminality, And Ignorance

"The Iraq conflict has wreaked 'terrible damage' on the region - far more than has been acknowledged, the Archbishop of Canterbury has said.... A survey published in September 2007 suggested that up to 1.2m people might have died because of the Iraq conflict. Speaking following his visit, Dr Williams also said he regards any further 'deliberate destabilisation' of the region - such as action against Syria and Iran - as 'criminal, ignorant...and potentially murderous folly'. Referring to US political advisers, he added that 'we do hear talk from some quarters of action against Syria, or against Iran'."
Archbishop speaks of Iraq damage
BBC Online, 5 October 2007

'Go Find Me A Way To Do This'

"A year ago, Paul O'Neill was fired from his job as George Bush's Treasury Secretary for disagreeing too many times with the president's policy on tax cuts. Now, O'Neill - who is known for speaking his mind - talks for the first time about his two years inside the Bush administration. His story is the centerpiece of a new book being published this week about the way the Bush White House is run. Entitled 'The Price of Loyalty,' the book by a former Wall Street Journal reporter draws on interviews with high-level officials who gave the author their personal accounts of meetings with the president, their notes and documents. But the main source of the book was Paul O'Neill.... he is going public because he thinks the Bush Administration has been too secretive about how decisions have been made.... Not only did O'Neill give Suskind his time, he gave him 19,000 internal documents.... And what happened at President Bush's very first National Security Council meeting is one of O'Neill's most startling revelations. 'From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,' says O’Neill, who adds that going after Saddam was topic 'A' 10 days after the inauguration - eight months before Sept. 11.....'It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying ‘Go find me a way to do this,’' says O’Neill."
Bush Sought ‘Way’ To Invade Iraq?
CBS News, 11 January 2003

It's The Energy Crisis Stupid
'Access To Critical Areas Of Europe, The Middle East, And Asia'

"On the afternoon of January 30 [2001], ten days after his inauguration as the forty-third president, George W.Bush met with the principals of his National Security Council for the first time.... He turned to Rice. 'So Condi, what are we going to talk about today? What's on the agenda?' 'How Iraq is destabilising the region, Mr. President,' Rice, said in what several observers understood was a scripted exchange.... The hour almost up, Bush had assignments for everyone.... Rumsfeld and Shelton [Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff], he said, 'should examine military options.' That included rebuilding the military coalition from the 1991 Gulf War, examining 'how it might look' to use U.S. ground forces in the north and the south of Iraq and how the armed forces could support groups inside the country who could help challenge Saddam Hussein.... Meeting adjourned. Ten days in, and it was about Iraq.... Shortly after he returned to his office, O'Neill opened a memo from Donald Rumsfeld.... In describing why the military budget was due for a dramatic increase, Rumsfeld articulated, with a five-point illustration of a dire global landscape, the underlying ideas that were now guiding foreign policy...[including] 'The civil sector, not the defense sector, now creates the enabling technologies for advanced military capabilities. These universally available technologies can be used to create 'asymmetric' responses by small or medium sized states to our conventional military power that cannot defeat our forces, but can deny access to critical areas of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia.'.....'There was never any rigorous talk about this sweeping idea that seemed to be driving all the specific actions,' O'Neill said, echoing the comments of several other participants in NSC discussions. 'From the start, we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out and change Iraq into a new country. And, if we did that, it would solve everything. It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The President saying, 'Fine. Go find me a way to do this.'.... It was Powell and his moderates at the State Department versus hard-liners like Rumsfeld, Cheney, and Wolfowitz, who were already planning the next war in Iraq and the shape of a post-Saddam country. Documents were being prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency, Rumsfeld's intelligence arm, mapping Iraq's oil fields and exploration areas and listing companies that might be interested in leveraging the precious asset. One document, headed 'Foreign Suitors for Iraqi Oilfield Contracts,' lists companies from thirty countries - including France, Germany, Russia and the United Kingdom - their specialities, bidding histories, and in some cases their particular areas of interest. An attached document maps Iraq with markings for 'supergiant oilfield,' 'other oil-field,' and 'earmarked for production sharing,' while demarking the largely undeveloped southwest of the country into nine 'blocks' to designate areas for future exploration. The desire to 'dissuade' countries from engaging in 'asymmetrical challenges' to the United States - as Rumsfeld said in his January articulation of the demonstrative value of a preemptive attack - matched with plans for how the world's second largest oil reserve might be divided among the world's contractors made for an irresistible combination, O'Neill later said. Already by February, the talk was mostly about logistics. Not the why, but the how and how quickly. Rumsfeld, O'Neill recalled, was focused on how an incident might cause escalated tensions - like the shooting down of an American plane in the regular engagements between U.S. fighters and Iraqi antiaircraft batteries - and what U.S. responses to such an occurrence might be..... [On], March 19, O'Neill and members of the Vice President's National Energy Policy Development Group filed into the cabinet room to present their findings to the President about the state of energy production and consumption in the United States. This presentation marked the completion of the first two phases (the second would be creating policy recommendations) that had been decided on in late January, when the President officially empowered Dick Cheney to handle energy.... This task force, Cheney's, would operate in utmost privacy.... So, on March 19, at an hour-long meeting in the cabinet room, the President was hearing dark predictions about the economic effects of a looming energy crisis... The Imperial Hotel in Tokyo, one of the world's great hotels, offered an oasis of luxury and comfort for the U.S. delegation after an exhausting week of meetings in Beijing with Chinese leaders in early September.... [O'Neill] flipped on the television to CNN. And sat on the edge of the bed. .... Good God, O'Neill thought, this must be the worst FAA mistake in history - some air traffic controller guided a plane into the Twin Towers...Then, as he watched smoke billow into the Manhattan sky, the second plane hit... Military cars arrived at midmorning the next day to pick up the O'Neill delegation..... The next morning, September 13, at 9:45 a.m., the NSC met with Bush in the situation room..... At an NSC meeting the day before, just as O'Neill's C-17 was landing at Andrew's Air Force Base, Rumsfeld, had raised the question of Iraq. The Pentagon had been working for months on a military plan for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein."
The Price Of Loyalty
By Ron Suskind - Free Press 2004

"'It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying ‘Go find me a way to do this,’' says O’Neill."
Bush Sought ‘Way’ To Invade Iraq?
CBS News, 11 January 2003

"Tension Between FBI Chiefs Ex-FBI director Louis Freeh's new book, 'My FBI,' has kicked up controversy over its stinging attacks on Bill Clinton. But it has also frayed relations with current director Bob Mueller. Freeh takes a little-noticed shot at his successor in the book, describing a testy encounter in the early days of the Bush administration with an 'acting deputy attorney general' - a clear reference to Mueller who at the time held that post. In Freeh's account, the acting deputy A.G. tells him the department now has  new top priorities - guns, drugs and juvenile crime. Freeh replies that terrorism and 'just about everything else' are more important. 'Those are our marching orders,' Mueller says, according to Freeh's account. 'Those aren't my marching orders,' Freeh shoots back. Freeh then writes that 'lockstep, blind obedience' by an FBI director to 'potentially unlawful or even 'dumb orders' is a 'formula for disaster.'  Mueller declined an invitation to attend Freeh's book party last week after telling one bureau official that Freeh was 'too controversial,' according to a Freeh associate who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter.'"
Fabricated Links?
Newsweek, 26 October 2005

"Under the influence of U.S. oil companies, the government of George W. Bush initially blocked U.S. secret service investigations on terrorism ....In the book 'Bin Laden, la verite interdite ('Bin Laden, the forbidden truth), that appeared in Paris on Wednesday, the authors, Jean-Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquie, reveal that the Federal Bureau of Investigation's deputy director John O'Neill resigned in July [2001] in protest over the obstruction. Brisard claim O'Neill told them that 'the main obstacles to investigate Islamic terrorism were U.S. oil corporate interests and the role played by Saudi Arabia in it'... [Brisard] worked for French secret services, and wrote for them in 1997 a report on the now famous Al Qaeda network, headed by bin Laden. Dasquie is an investigative journalist and publisher of Intelligence Online, a respected newsletter on diplomacy, economic analysis and strategy, available through the Internet"
U.S. Policy Towards Taliban Influenced by Oil - Say Authors
Inter Press Service, 15 November 2001

"... in January 2001, Vice President Cheney allegedly reinstated the intelligence block and expanded it to effectively preclude any investigations whatsoever of Saudi-Taliban-Afghan oil connections. Former FBI counter-terrorism chief John O’Neil resigned from the FBI in disgust, stating that he was ordered not to investigate Saudi-Al Qaida connections because of the Enron pipeline deal. Loftus has confirmed that it was O’Neill who originally discovered the AL Qaida pipeline memo after the Embassy bombings in Africa. O’Neill gave an overview of the Enron block to two French authors who will soon be publishing in the United States..... The Enron cover-up confirms that 9/11 was not an intelligence failure or a law enforcement failure (at least not entirely). Instead, it was a foreign policy failure of the highest order. If Congress ever combines its Enron investigation with 9/11, Cheney’s whole house of cards will collapse".
What Congress Does Not Know about Enron and 9/11
Press Release, former federal prosecutor, John Loftus, 31 May 2002

"During the summer of 2001, the U.S. Intelligence Community was in a state of heightened alert, due to concern about an imminent al-Qa’ida attack. However, this concern was not reflected in the FBI’s National Law Enforcement Threat System (NLETS) reports, which are the means through which the FBI communicated terrorist threat information with state and local law enforcement entities."
REPORT OF THE JOINT INQUIRY INTO THE TERRORIST ATTACKS OF SEPTEMBER 11, 2001 –
BY THE HOUSE PERMANENT SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE AND THE
SENATE SELECT COMMITTEE ON INTELLIGENCE
10 December 2002

"This commission was formed about mid-December, the 9/11 Commission. We were supposed to use the joint inquiry report as a launching pad to get into this issue of not only fixing the intelligence community, but moving beyond, and getting into what is the al Qaeda all about? What is this terrorist global network that we're fighting? A new kind of war and all that. Well, the independent, bi-partisan commission, hello, didn't even get the stuff 'til a few weeks ago. I'm saying that's deliberate. I am saying that the delay in relating this information to the American public out of a hearing… series of hearings, that several members of Congress knew eight or ten months ago, including Bob Graham and others, that was deliberately slow walked… the 9/11 Commission was deliberately slow walked, because the Administration's policy was, and its priority was, we're gonna take Saddam Hussein out.... You can read between the lines and see that there were foreign governments that were much more involved in the 9/11 attack than just supporting Islamic fundamentalist teachings and schools. Now, that has been redacted. A whole 28 page section..... The Administration, the White House, has put several blocks in the road. One, they run all the information to the 9/11 Commission through a political coordinator in Ashcroft's Justice Department..... Secondly, they want to put minders — that's people who sit in the room when we have an interview with people in NSA, FBI, CIA, Department of… in DIA — in the Pentagon, and Immigration and Naturalization Services. They want to put minders in there. That's to shut down information. That's not to reveal information."
Former Senator Max Cleland and member of the 9/11 Commission who later resigned
PBS Interview, 25 July 2003

"FBI information since that time [1998] indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.... "
'Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US'
Presidential Daily Brief received by President George W. Bush on August 6, 2001
THE 9/11COMMISSION REPORT (p.262)

"During the spring as initial policy debates in the Administration began, I e-mailed Condi Rice and NSC Staff colleagues that al Qaeda was trying to kill Americans, to have hundreds of dead in the streets of America. During the first week in July I convened the CSG and asked each agency to consider itself on full alert. I asked the CSG agencies to cancel summer vacations and official travel for the counterterrorism response staffs. Each agency should report anything unusual, even if a sparrow should fall from a tree. I asked FBI to send another warning to the 18,000 police departments, State to alert the embassies, and the Defense Department to go to Threat Condition Delta. The Navy moved ships out of Bahrain.The next day I asked the senior security officials at FAA, Immigration, Secret Service, Coast Guard, Customs, and the Federal Protective Service to meet at the White House. I asked the FAA to send another security warning to the airlines and airports and requested special scrutiny at the ports of entry......   Somewhere in the CIA there was information that two al Qaeda terrorists had come to the United States.  Somewhere in the FBI there was information that strange things had been going on at flight schools in the United States.  I had asked to know if a sparrow fell from a tree that summer. What was buried in CIA and FBI was not a matter of one sparrow falling from a tree; red lights and bells should have been going off.  They had specific information about individual terrorists from which one could have deduced what was about to happen. None of that information got to me or the White House. It apparently did not even make it up the FBI chain to Dale Watson, the Executive Assistant Director in charge of counterterrorism."
Richard Clarke - White House Head Of Counterterrorism 1992 - 2003
'Against All Enemies'  - Edition first published in Great Britain by The Free Press in 2004

"....[there] was an article in the August 6 Presidential Daily Brief titled 'Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US.' It was the 36th PDB item briefed so far that year that related to Bin Ladin or al Qaeda, and the first devoted to the possibility of an attack in the United States..... [the briefing stated] 'FBI information since [1998]  indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.'....No CSG [Counterterrorism Security Group] or other NSC [National Security Council] meeting was held to discuss the possible threat of a strike in the United States as a result of this report.... We have found no indication of any further discussion before September 11 among the President and his top advisers of the possibility of a threat of an al Qaeda attack in the United States. DCI Tenet visited President Bush in Crawford Texas, on August 17 and participated in PDB briefings of the President between August 31 (after the President had returned to Washington) and September 10. But Tenet does not recall any discussions with the President of the domestic threat during this period. Most of the intelligence community recognized in the summer of 2001 that the number and severity of threat reports were unprecedented. Many officials told us that they knew something terrible was planned...."
THE 9/11COMMISSION REPORT (p.260 - 262)

"Reprising the scene in the White House on 9/11, [White House head of counterterrorism] Mr. [Richard] Clarke says Dale Watson, the F.B.I.'s counterterrorism chief, called him. 'We got the passenger manifests from the airlines,' Mr. Watson said. 'We recognize some names, Dick. They're Al Qaeda.' Mr. Clarke recalled: 'I was stunned, not that the attack was Al Qaeda but that there were Al Qaeda operatives on board aircraft using names that F.B.I. knew were Al Qaeda.' Mr. Watson told Mr. Clarke that  'C.I.A. forgot to tell us about them.'"
Truth as a Weapon
New York Times, 25 March 2004

"Israeli intelligence officials say that they warned their counterparts in the United States last month that large-scale terrorist attacks on highly visible targets on the American mainland were imminent. The Telegraph has learnt that two senior experts with Mossad, the Israeli military intelligence service, were sent to Washington in August to alert the CIA and FBI to the existence of a cell of as many of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation...."
Israeli security issued urgent warning to CIA of large-scale terror attacks
Daily Telegraph, 19 September 2001

"Mossad chiefs insist the Israeli spy agency was tracking Osama Bin-Laden's terrorists in America before September 11 and that that the information was passed on to the CIA on Five separate occasions before the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon. As late as August 24, less than two weeks before the attacks, a Mossad warning, confirmed by German intelligence, BND, said that 'terrorists plan to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture.' The warning alert was passed to the CIA. The warning was also passed to MI6. The agency made its own checks and also informed the CIA. Frustrated by its inability to alert the CIA to an impending attack, Mossad arranged on September 1, according to Tel Aviv sources last week, for Russian intelligence to warn Washington 'in the strongest possible terms of imminent assaults on airports and government buildings.'... According to similar documents shown to the Sunday Express, Mossad was running a round-the-clock surveillance operation on some of the September 11 hijackers. The details, contained in classified papers, reveal that a senior Mossad agent tipped off his counterpart in America's Central Intelligence Agency that a massive terrorist hit was being planned in the US. A handful of the spies had infiltrated the Al-Qaeda organisation while a staggering 120 others, posing as overseas art students, launched  massive undercover operations throughout America... The spying operations first came to the attention of the DEA in January 2001 according to a classified 90-page dossier which has been seen by the Sunday Express."
BUSH: THE IGNORED WARNING THAT WILL COME TO HAUNT HIM
GLOBE-INTEL - NUMBER :- 104 DATE :- 21/05/02
(Globe-Intel is run by Gordon Thomas who writes on intelligence matters for the UK's Sunday Express. Thomas
is an expert on Mossad, the Israel intelligence service. His book on the subject, 'Gideon's Spies', was made into a documentary for Channel 4)

"'We had clearly warned them,' said Mr. Patrushev, who is head of the FSB, the successor organization to the KGB. He added that their U.S. counterparts 'did not pay the necessary attention' to their warnings, the Interfax news agency reported."
Russia Gave 'Clear Warning'
Agence France-Presse, 16 September 2001

"Since Sept. 11, more than 60 Israelis have been arrested or detained, either under the new patriot anti-terrorism law, or for immigration violations. A handful of active Israeli military were among those detained, according to investigators, who say some of the detainees also failed polygraph questions when asked about alleged surveillance activities against and in the United States. There is no indication that the Israelis were involved in the 9/11 attacks, but investigators suspect that the Israelis may have gathered intelligence about the attacks in advance..... "
Carl Cameron Investigates
Fox News, 17 December 2001
(Note, that controversially this four part report was subsequently removed by Fox from its web site)

"It is rather strange that the US media, with one notable exception, seems to be ignoring what may well prove to be the most explosive story since the 11 September attacks - the alleged break-up of a major Israeli espionage operation in the United States.... US officials admitted to reporters that the entire investigation had become 'too hot to handle', but declined to give further details."
Allies and Espionage
Jane's Intelligence Digest, 15 March 2002

"New revelations are putting the CIA in a tight spot. Apparently the Israeli intelligence service Mossad gave early warnings to their American counterparts about the terrorist group around Mohamed Atta. Furthermore, German investigators found out after the attacks that their U.S. colleagues had already known a great deal about the Hamburg students two years in advance of Sept. 11, 2001. The latest discoveries were made by the Hamburg weekly newspaper DIE ZEIT, which on Thursday (Oct. 3) intends to publish an extensive dossier on the failures of the Central Intelligence Agency. Freelance author Oliver Schroem therein sums up the results of his research among various European and American agencies..... Apparently the CIA acquired very specific information on several of the later suicide pilots of Sept. 11. These clues were ignored, although the suspects were already in the United States. Two of the later pilots were on an FBI wanted list starting in August 2001. Nevertheless, they were able to move unrecognized around the country and get on to the death jets using their own real names. The hottest lead would have led the Americans straight to the Hamburg terrorists around Mohamed Atta - if they had listened to their colleagues from the Israeli Mossad. Israeli agents were observing several of the terror pilots in the United States. According to research by ZEIT, between December 2000 and April 2001 a whole horde of Israeli counter-terror investigators, posing as students, followed the trails of Arab terrorists and their cells in the United States. In their secret investigations, the Israelis came very close to the later perpetrators of Sept. 11. In the town of Hollywood, Florida, they identified the two former Hamburg students and later terror pilots Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi as possible terrorists. Agents lived in the vicinity of the apartment of the two seemingly normal flight school students, observing them around the clock. Not long after, however, the [Israeli] agents were discovered by the U.S. authorities and deported to Israel. As is usual in such cases, the discovery was not made public and caused much annoyance between the traditionally competitive intelligence services, Mossad and CIA. .... With the deportation of the agents, the observation of the later terrorists was terminated. The Israelis provided a list including the names of at least four out of the 19 hijackers of Sept. 11, but this was apparently not treated as sufficiently urgent by the CIA and also not passed on to the FBI. What is clear is that the U.S. agencies did not react quickly in following up on the tips from the Israeli agents. The ongoing congressional joint investigation has also found out about the Israeli angle. However, the Israelis also had not yet found out about the specific plan for the Sept. 11 attacks. At the same time, they believed that the 19 persons named in their list were potential terrorists who 'were planning attacks in the United States,' as DIE ZEIT writes. Only later did the American police search for Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi. Both were on the Israeli list, and both later sat in the airplane that crashed into the Pentagon in Washington. Although their names were on an FBI national watch list starting in the late summer of 2001, they traveled without trouble in the United States and also boarded the death jets on Sept. 11 with passports in their real names."
Mossad Agents Were On Atta's Tail
Der Spiegel (Germany), 1 October 2002
(original German click here)

"The federal government's 'no-fly' list had 16 names on it on Sept. 11, 2001.... The list...   identifies suspected terrorists seeking to board commercial airplanes...."
Faulty 'No-Fly' System Detailed
Washington Post, 9 October 2004

"If, as has been reported, some of the terrorists used the names by which intelligence agencies knew them, the attacks could have been disrupted, perhaps completely defeated, simply by requiring all airlines to deny them boarding and report their reservations to law enforcement agencies. "
Cathal Flynn, FAA Associate Administrator for Civil Aviation Security 1993 - 2000
9/11 Commission, Seventh Public Hearing

"Richard A. Clarke knows too much, and 'Against All Enemies' is too good to be ignored. The explosive details about President Bush's obsession with Iraq in the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks captured the headlines in the days after the book's release, but 'Against All Enemies' offers more.... By Sept. 11, 2001, Dick Clarke had become the ultimate White House insider; he was not only a Clinton holdover, he was a holdover from the first Bush administration and had served in the Reagan State Department. He had been working at the National Security Council for about a decade, and in 1998 had been named White House counterterrorism coordinator by President Clinton. He was asked to stay on in the same post by the second Bush administration. But he had quickly become frustrated by the new team's unwillingness to address the mounting threat from Osama bin Laden..... The most controversial incident in 'Against All Enemies' deals with the president's eagerness to link the Sept. 11 attacks to Iraq, and comes on the night of Sept. 12. Clarke writes that he saw Bush wandering alone through the Situation Room. The president then stopped and asked Clarke and a few aides to 'go back over everything, everything. See if Saddam did this.'... After the president left, one of Clarke's aides said, 'Wolfowitz got to him.'.... the key allegation in the book -- that the Bush team was obsessed with Iraq even when faced with overwhelming evidence that it was Al Qaeda that was attacking the United States -- can't be dismissed by assertions that he was out of the loop. During those early days, Richard Clarke was the loop."
What Clarke Knew and When He Knew It
New York Times, 11 April 2004

"On the eve of a Republican National Convention invoking 9/11 symbols, sound bytes and imagery, half (49.3%) of New York City residents and 41% of New York citizens overall say that some of our leaders 'knew in advance that attacks were planned on or around September 11, 2001, and that they consciously failed to act,' according to the poll conducted by Zogby International. The poll of New York residents was conducted from Tuesday August 24 through Thursday August 26, 2004.... The poll is the first of its kind conducted in America that surveys attitudes regarding U.S. government complicity in the 9/11 tragedy. Despite the acute legal and political implications of this accusation, nearly 30% of registered Republicans and over 38% of those who described themselves as 'very conservative' supported the claim...... Less than two in five (36%) believe that the 9/11 Commission had 'answered all the important questions about what actually happened on September 11th,' and two in three (66%) New Yorkers (and 56.2% overall) called for another full investigation of the 'still unanswered questions' by Congress or Elliot Spitzer, New York's Attorney General."
Zogby Poll: Half of New Yorkers Believe U.S. Had 9/11 Foreknowledge
NewsMax, 31 August 2004

From 9/11 To Iraq And Beyond
The Story Of Sir David Manning

A Visit To Washington
Manning And 9/10

Sir David Manning retired this month as British Ambassador to the United States, a post he has held since 2003.  From 2001 to 2003 Sir David had been chief foreign and security policy adviser to British Prime Minister Tony Blair.

It was in that capacity that Manning had been in Washington on the eve of 9/11, and there has long been speculation about the significance of his visit at that critical time. Did it represent anything more than a visit simply to introduce himself to the Bush administration following his new, at that time, Downing St appointment?

Until recently not too much has been known about the trip, other than that he was due to see Richard Armitage, Assistant Secretary of State, on 10 September.

However, on 14  September 2007 the London Times reported on its retirement interview with Sir David. It mentioned that "on the eve of the September 11, 2001, attacks on America, he had stayed so late in Washington discussing policy with Condoleezza Rice that he had to catch a flight to New York the next morning."

At that time Rice was President Bush's National Security Adviser. The apparent length of the meeting with Manning suggests there was a lot to talk about.

One possibility (the Times does not say what was discussed) is that Manning may have brought with him more information about warnings of terrorist attacks on the United States. The Times had earlier reported (14 June 2002) that Britain had received pre-9/11 intelligence that attacks on 'the west' were being planned by al Qaeda and that Britain had shared this intelligence with the US government.

As a former British Ambassador to NATO and Israel, as well having held a suite of other senior Foreign Office positions, Manning is unlikely to have been a stranger to intelligence briefings.

In the run up to the attacks that were to take place the following day, Rice had been a key recipient of threat warnings from other quarters. Her lack of response to those warnings has come under attack from her critics, the most forceful coming from George Tenet, who was Director of the CIA in 2001.

On 1 October 2006 the Washington Post reported that:

"... two months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, then-CIA Director George J. Tenet met with his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, at CIA headquarters to review the latest on Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist organization. Black laid out the case, consisting of communications intercepts and other top-secret intelligence showing the increasing likelihood that al-Qaeda would soon attack the United States. It was a mass of fragments and dots that nonetheless made a compelling case, so compelling to Tenet that he decided he and Black should go to the White House immediately. Tenet called Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, from the car and said he needed to see her right away. There was no practical way she could refuse such a request from the CIA director....

Two weeks earlier, he had told Richard A. Clarke, the National Security Council's counterterrorism director: 'It's my sixth sense, but I feel it coming. This is going to be the big one.' But Tenet had been having difficulty getting traction on an immediate bin Laden action plan, in part because Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had questioned all the National Security Agency intercepts and other intelligence....

On June 30, a top-secret senior executive intelligence brief contained an article headlined 'Bin Laden Threats Are Real.' Tenet hoped his abrupt request for an immediate meeting would shake Rice. He and Black, a veteran covert operator, had two main points when they met with her. First, al-Qaeda was going to attack American interests, possibly in the United States itself. Black emphasized that this amounted to a strategic warning, meaning the problem was so serious that it required an overall plan and strategy. Second, this was a major foreign policy problem that needed to be addressed immediately. They needed to take action that moment -- covert, military, whatever -- to thwart bin Laden. The United States had human and technical sources, and all the intelligence was consistent, the two men told Rice.... Tenet and Black felt they were not getting through to Rice. She was polite, but they felt the brush-off. President Bush had said he didn't want to swat at flies....

Rice seemed focused on other administration priorities, especially the ballistic missile defense system that Bush had campaigned on. She was in a different place. Tenet left the meeting feeling frustrated. Though Rice had given them a fair hearing, no immediate action meant great risk.... The July 10 meeting between Tenet, Black and Rice went unmentioned in the various reports of investigations into the Sept. 11 attacks, but it stood out in the minds of Tenet and Black as the starkest warning they had given the White House on bin Laden and al-Qaeda....

Afterward, Tenet looked back on the meeting with Rice as a tremendous lost opportunity to prevent or disrupt the Sept. 11 attacks. Rice could have gotten through to Bush on the threat, but she just didn't get it in time, Tenet thought. He felt that he had done his job and had been very direct about the threat, but that Rice had not moved quickly. He felt she was not organized and did not push people, as he tried to do at the CIA. Black later said, 'The only thing we didn't do was pull the trigger to the gun we were holding to her head.'"

What this account would have us consider (although Tenet himself is not a disinterested party, with a reputation to defend in his handling of the worst 'intelligence failure' in modern American history) is that Rumsfeld and Rice were obstacles to the United States taking up an appropriate defensive posture to a known domestic threat to the United States.

Wilful Neglect
'Counterterrorism' At The White House

Like Tenet, Richard Clarke was one of the few holdovers from the Clinton administration. He was to hold the post of head of counterterrorism at the White House from 1992 - 2003.

In the summer of 2001 he convened a special meeting at the White House, described by the Washington Post 17 May 2002 as follows:

"On July 5 of last year, a month and a day before President Bush first heard that al Qaeda might plan a hijacking, the White House summoned officials of a dozen federal agencies to the Situation Room. 'Something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it's going to happen soon,' the government's top counterterrorism official, Richard Clarke, told the assembled group, according to two of those present. The group included the Federal Aviation Administration, along with the Coast Guard, FBI, Secret Service and Immigration and Naturalization Service. Clarke directed every counterterrorist office to cancel vacations, defer nonvital travel, put off scheduled exercises and place domestic rapid-response teams on much shorter alert. For six weeks last summer, at home and overseas, the U.S. government was at its highest possible state of readiness -- and anxiety -- against imminent terrorist attack. That intensity -- defensive in nature -- did not last. By the time Bush received his briefing at his ranch in Crawford, Tex., on Aug. 6, the government had begun to stand down from the alert."

In July that summer Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz had tried to downplay the seriousness of the warnings. Two years later he was to find himself becoming the Jerusalem Post's Man of the Year for his role in precipitating the invasion of Iraq out of the aftermath of 9/11.

At the time of making the award the paper observed, "No question: This was Paul Wolfowitz's year. On September 15, 2001, at a meeting in Camp David, he advised President George W. Bush to skip Kabul and train American guns on Baghdad. In March 2003, he got his wish. In the process, Wolfowitz became the most influential US deputy defense secretary ever - can you so much as name anyone else who held the post?.... There's a downside. Earlier in the year, the notion took hold that the president was taking the country to war at the urgings of his Jewish advisers, themselves shills for Israel. 'Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Bill Kristol [are]... the clique of conservatives who are driving this war,' wrote New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd. She may as well have written 'the clique of Jews,' some felt. Other critics of the war were more explicit. 'If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war in Iraq,' said Democratic Congressman Jim Moran, 'we would not be doing this.' In this year when anti-Semitism is once again a fact of life, the name 'Wolfowitz has become its lightning rod'."

But, as we will see later, Wolfowitz was more likely to have been interested in securing the future of Persian Gulf oil production for the benefit of the American and world economy, than in doing any alternative bidding from Tel Aviv (Wolfowitz is indeed Jewish, but his partner is Arab - in the words of the Daily Telegraph in 2004, "Shaha Ali Riza is a senior World Bank official who was born in Tunis, grew up in Saudi Arabia and holds an international relations masters degree from St Anthony's College, Oxford. Close acquaintances of the couple have told The Telegraph that she is romantically linked with Mr Wolfowitz, 61, a fellow divorcee with whom she has been friends for several years. Even by the discreet standards of Washington's powerful inner circle, it is a remarkably closely guarded secret.").

Yet if there was any validity in the concerns of the Jerusalem Post, it seems Wolfowitz was more than happy to turn the issue to his advantage. For it transpires he was quick to use the 'anti-Semitic' card even in debate at the highest levels of Bush administration in order to get the focus of national security discussion switched away from al Qaeda and on to Iraq.

In 2004 Clark published a book about his counterterrorism experiences at the White House entitled  'Against All Enemies'. The following episode occurred at the meeting of Deputy Secretaries at the White House in April 2001, convened to discuss the al Qaeda threat, as described in Chapter 10:

"I could hardly believe it but Wolfowitz was actually spouting the totally discredited Laurie Mylroie theory that Iraq was behind the 1993 truck bomb at the World Trade Center, a theory that had been investigated for years and found to be totally untrue.

It was getting a little too heated for the kind of meeting Steve Hadley [Condoleezza Rice's deputy] liked to chair, but I thought it was important to get the extent of the disagreement out on the table: 'Al Qaeda plans major acts of terrorism against the U.S. It plans to overthrow Islamic governments and set up a radical multination Caliphate, and then go to war with non-Muslim states.' Then I said something I regretted as soon as I said it: 'They have published all of this and sometimes, as with Hitler in Mein Kampf, you have to believe that these people will actually do what they say they will do.'

Immediately Wolfowitz seized on the Hitler reference. 'I resent any comparison between the Holocaust and this little terrorist in Afghanistan.'

'I wasn't comparing the Holocaust to anything.' I spoke slowly. 'I was saying that like Hitler, bin Laden has told us in advance what he plans to do and we would make a big mistake to ignore it.'"

By July, Wolfowitz was still trying to change the subject.

The official 9/11 Commission report says, "Tenet told us that in his world 'the system was blinking red.' By late July, Tenet said, it could not 'get any worse.' Not everyone was convinced. Some asked whether all these threats might just be deception. On June 30, the SEIB [Senior Executive Intelligence Brief] contained an article titled 'Bin Ladin Threats Are Real.' Yet Hadley told Tenet in July that Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz questioned the reporting. Perhaps Bin Ladin was trying to study U.S. reactions. Tenet replied that he had already addressed the Defense Department’s questions on this point; the reporting was convincing.  To give a sense of his anxiety at the time, one senior official in the Counterterrorist Center told us that he and a colleague were considering resigning in order to go public with their concerns."

Meanwhile it was clear that Clarke was expecting an attack on the United States itself. "Something really spectacular is going to happen here, and it's going to happen soon," he said.

But it was not just in the US that alarm bells were ringing. The style of attack that the broader international intelligence community was anctipating was telling.

Later that month Bush attended the G8 Summit meeting in Genoa, Italy. Trouble from anti-globalisation protestors was only one of the anticipated security risks the Summit had to deal with. An al Qaeda air attack on the US President and other world leaders was feared.

The BBC reported 18 July 2001 that "The huge force of officers and equipment which has been assembled to deal with unrest has been spurred on by a warning that supporters of Saudi dissident Osama bin Laden might attempt an air attack on some of the world leaders present. Anti-aircraft missiles have been deployed at the airport, and naval vessels are patrolling the seas."

Bush seemed to be the key target. CNN reported the same day that "The head of Russia's Federal Bodyguard Service has warned of a plot by terrorist Osama bin Laden to assassinate George W. Bush at the summit."

The concerns were sufficiently acute that a no-fly zone was set up around the Summit and Bush slept on a US aircraft carrier in the Adriatic.  Shortly after 9/11 Italian Deputy Prime Minister Gianfranco Fini said on television that "Many people were ironic about the Italian secret services. But in fact they got the information that there was the possibility of an attack against the U.S. president using an airliner. That's why we closed the airspace and installed the missiles." Subsequently it was disclosed, so the 9/11 Commission hearings report, "that President Mubarak of Egypt had warned of a potential suicide flight using explosive-packed airplanes to fly into the summit meeting".

On 6 August the President, by now back home and on vacation at his ranch in Texas, received an intelligence briefing headed "Bin Laden Determined To Strike In US".  The brief says "Al Qaeda members - including some who are U.S. citizens - have resided in or traveled to the U.S. for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks". It refers to FBI information indicating "patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York."

The following month, on 11 September, four commercial aircraft were near simultaneously hijacked in the United States and three were flown into prominent American national landmark buildings.

In the first chapter of his book Clarke gives a particular account of a fundamental security hole left open in the period running up to 9/11. It was one which effectively gave the terrorists a clear run. He stumbled across the hole on the day of the attacks themselves.

After the first strike on the World Trade Center Clarke reports that "Bursting in on the Vice President and Condi - Condoleezza Rice, the President's National Security Advisor - alone in Cheney's office, I caught my breath.... In June I had given her a checklist of things to do after an attack, in part to underline my belief that something big was coming and we needed to go on the offensive."

After an exchange with Rice and Cheney Clark then set up and chaired a secure video teleconference from the White House Situation Room. The conference was of the 'CSG', the Counterterrorism Security Group, comprising the leaders ('principals') of each of the federal government's counterterrorism and security organisations. Clarke had chaired the group since 1992.

Clarke launched the conference saying, "Let's begin. Calmly. We will do this in crisis mode, which means keep your microphones off unless you are speaking. If you want to speak, wave at the Camera. If it's something you don't want everyone to hear, call me on the red phone."

And indeed later in the morning that proved to be necessary.

Clarke wrote that "Dale Watson, counterterrorism chief at the FBI, was waving at the Camera indicating he had an update. 'Go ahead, Dale'..... Dale had something he did not want to share with everyone in the conference.  Frank Miller took over the video conference and I stepped out and called Watson on a secure line. 'We got the passenger manifests from the airlines. We recognise some names, Dick. They're al Qaeda.' I was stunned, not that the attack was al Qaeda, but that there were al Qaeda operatives on board aircraft using names that FBI knew were al Qaeda. 'How the f*** did they get on board then?' I demanded. 'Hey, don't shoot the messenger, friend. CIA forgot to tell us about them.'"

The role of the CIA therefore deserves some closer scrutiny.

What the world was to learn in due course was that the CIA had known, firstly, the names of at least some of the hijackers in advance of 9/11; secondly, that they were members of al Qaeda; and thirdly, that they were in the US. CIA director George Tenet also knew that Zacarias Moussaoui, a known Islamist extremist, had been arrested by the FBI after behaving suspiciously at a flight school in Minnesota.

Moussaoui was held in custody for three weeks before 9/11.

According to whistleblower FBI agent Coleen Rowley, "George Tenet was briefed on the facts of the investigation surrounding Moussaoui's detention in August with a powerpoint entitled something like 'Fundamentalist Learns to Fly.' At the time, DCI Tenet inexplicably took no action and did not even seek to confer with the Acting FBI Director about the case. But Tenet IS reported to have immediately linked Moussaoui to the Al Qaeda attack on 9/11 as soon as he was informed at breakfast of planes flying into the World Trade Center. " 

Newsweek reported 20 May 2002 that "[Moussaoui] had been arrested in August on immigration charges after a Minnesota flight instructor reported that he showed a suspicious interest inlearning how to steer large airliners. When agents learned, from French intelligence, that he had radical Islamic ties, they sought a national-security warrant to search his computer—and got turned down.... The agents were 'in a frenzy,' 'absolutely convinced he was planning to do something with a plane,' said a senior official. One agent wrote that 'one possibility' was that Moussaoui might be planning to crash into the Twin Towers."

Local FBI agents were repeatedly denied permission to search Moussaoui's possessions. Yet when searched after 9/11 these were found to include valuable information that could have been used to unravel the 9/11 conspiracy.

In his book Richard Clarke states that "For years George Tenet had called me directly when he read a piece of raw intelligence about a threat ". But on this occasion, the one that turned out to be the most important of all, Tenet didn't.

TIME Magazine commented 4 Aug 2002 that "The extraordinary thing about Moussaoui's case - like the Phoenix memo - is that it was never brought to the attention of top officials in Washington who were, almost literally, sleepless with worry about an imminent terrorist attack. Nobody in the FBI or CIA ever informed anybody in the White House of Moussaoui's detention. That was unforgivable. 'Do you think,' says a White House antiterrorism official, 'that if Dick Clarke had known the FBI had in custody a foreigner who was learning to fly a plane in midair, he wouldn't have done something?' In blissless ignorance, Clarke and Tenet waited for the meeting of the Principals.'".

Except that in reality Tenet knew about Moussaoui, and Clarke didn't.

This is how Clarke described the emerging situation in his book:

"During the first week in July I convened the CSG and asked each agency to consider itself on full alert. I asked the CSG agencies to cancel summer vacations and official travel for the counterterrorism response staffs. Each agency should report anything unusual, even if a sparrow should fall from a tree. I asked FBI to send another warning to the 18,000 police departments, State to alert the embassies, and the Defense Department to go to Threat Condition Delta. The Navy moved ships out of Bahrain.

The next day I asked the senior security officials at FAA, Immigration, Secret Service, Coast Guard, Customs, and the Federal Protective Service to meet at the White House. I asked the FAA to send another security warning to the airlines and airports and requested special scrutiny at the ports of entry. We considered a broad public warning, but we had no proof or specificity.....

Somewhere in the CIA there was information that two al Qaeda terrorists had come to the United States.  Somewhere in the FBI there was information that strange things had been going on at flight schools in the United States.   I had asked to know if a sparrow fell from a tree that summer. What was buried in CIA and FBI was not a matter of one sparrow falling from a tree; red lights and bells should have been going off.  They had specific information about individual terrorists from which one could have deduced what was about to happen. None of that information got to me or the White House. It apparently did not even make it up the FBI chain to Dale Watson, the Executive Assistant Director in charge of counterterrorism."

The President's intelligence brief of 6 August referred to hijackings and potential bin Laden sponsored attacks within the United States. Despite this, it transpired that none those names of al Qaeda suspects already known to be in the United States were put on the national  'no-fly' list. So even if the hijackings been 'only' conventional ones, rather than suicide missions, they would still not have been stopped under these circumstances (the unconventional nature of the hijackings is often pleaded in mitigation by the Bush administration as having wrong footed it).

Yet Newsweek reported 27 May 2002 that that as many as 10 to 12 warnings "were issued to all U.S. airlines and major airports in the period between June 2001 and September 11" and that "more than two of the warnings specifically mentioned the possibility of hijackings."

Cathal Flynn was Associate Administrator for Civil Aviation Security at the Federal Aviation Administration from 1993 to 2000. He later told the 9/11 Commission Seventh Public Hearing that "If, as has been reported, some of the terrorists used the names by which intelligence agencies knew them, the attacks could have been disrupted, perhaps completely defeated, simply by requiring all airlines to deny them boarding and report their reservations to law enforcement agencies. "

Pre-Attack Warnings From
British, Russian, And Israeli Intelligence

With the names of potential attackers already in its hands before 9/11 it is clear that the Bush had administration failed to adopt the most basic of defensive measures at its disposal, despite the flood of warnings coming from foreign intelligence services at the time (at least eleven countries issued warnings). Russia and Israel were prominent among these.

According to Britain's Daily Telegraph 19 September 2001, "Israeli intelligence officials say that they warned their counterparts in the United States last month that large-scale terrorist attacks on highly visible targets on the American mainland were imminent. The Telegraph has learnt that two senior experts with Mossad, the Israeli military intelligence service, were sent to Washington in August to alert the CIA and FBI to the existence of a cell of as many of 200 terrorists said to be preparing a big operation...."

Only in 2007 did it become known that up to 60 officials within the CIA had been aware of at least two of the eventual nineteen 9/11 hijackers prior to the attacks, and it may well have been aware of more. Yet the information was not shared with the parts of the organisation able to do anything about it, according to the agency's own subsequent internal investigation.

Germany's Diet Zeit reported 1 October 2002 that as part of its August 2001 warnings Israel in fact gave the CIA four names who turned out to be part of the hijacking team (a related by Der Spiegel refers to "19 persons named" in the Israeli list, with "at least four out of the 19 hijackers").

Despite the CIA having been given the names of at least some the hijackers, all the individuals concerned boarded their scheduled flights unimpeded on 9/11. None of the names were added to the already existing federal government 'no-fly' list (which only had 16 names on it at the time, according to a later report by the Washington Post). .

The Telegraph's report of the Israeli tip-off was later supplemented by another from Gordon Thomas, an intelligence reporter for Britain's Sunday Express. Thomas is also the author of the book on Israeli intelligence 'Gideon's Spies', which was later turned into a TV documentary for Channel 4.

On 21 May 2002 Thomas wrote a piece for his online intelligence journal entitled 'Bush: The Ignored Warning That Will Come To Haunt Him', which ran as follows:

"Mossad chiefs insist the Israeli spy agency was tracking Osama Bin-Laden's terrorists in America before September 11 and that that the information was passed on to the CIA on Five separate occasions before the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon. As late as August 24, less than two weeks before the attacks, a Mossad warning, confirmed by German intelligence, BND, said that 'terrorists plan to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture.' The warning alert was passed to the CIA. The warning was also passed to MI6. The agency made its own checks and also informed the CIA. Frustrated by its inability to alert the CIA to an impending attack, Mossad arranged on September 1, according to Tel Aviv sources last week, for Russian intelligence to warn Washington 'in the strongest possible terms of imminent assaults on airports and government buildings.'... According to similar documents shown to the Sunday Express, Mossad was running a round-the-clock surveillance operation on some of the September 11 hijackers. The details, contained in classified papers, reveal that a senior Mossad agent tipped off his counterpart in America's Central Intelligence Agency that a massive terrorist hit was being planned in the US. A handful of the spies had infiltrated the Al-Qaeda organisation while a staggering 120 others, posing as overseas art students, launched  massive undercover operations throughout America... The spying operations first came to the attention of the DEA [Drug Enforcement Administration] in January 2001 according to a classified 90-page dossier which has been seen by the Sunday Express."

Although not disclosing any potential link up with Israel, the Russians have themselves confirmed that they warned the United States of the impending attacks.

A few days prior to Thomas's report, the conservative Fox TV network covered the matter in the US.  On 17 May 2002 Fox reported that "Russian President Vladimir Putin has said publicly that he ordered his intelligence agencies to alert the United States last summer that suicide pilots were training for attacks on U.S. targets."

In a domestic press interview the day after 9/11 the head of the Russian air force, Anatoli Kornukov, had previously expressed astonishment that the US air force had not intercepted the hijacked airliners, stating that "Generally it is impossible to carry out an act of terror on the scenario which was used in the USA yesterday. We had such facts too.  As soon as something like that happens here, I am reported about that right away and in a minute we are all up [in our fighter aircraft]."

Only later did it become apparent what facts Kornukov was referring to - namely, it can now be assumed, the intelligence that Russia had passed to Washington.

Certainly the Israeli arts-student spying operation within the US referred to by Thomas has been reported on by several other sources, including the highly respected intelligence journal 'Jane's Intelligence'. Even greater coverage was provided in a three part TV report run by Fox News, details of which Fox later removed from its web site (although these are still available on the internet having been downloaded and reposted elsewhere on the web by others, including video footage posted to YouTube).

However, especially interesting within Thomas's account of the advance warnings from Mossad is the claim that British intelligence's MI6 was in on the loop regarding the information held by the Israelis. If so, then this was information potentially available to Sir David Manning at the time of his meeting with Condoleezza Rice on 9/10.

The following account from the London Times 14 June 2002 is additionally relevant.

"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....Their warning was included in a report sent to Tony Blair and other senior Cabinet Ministers on July 16..... The JIC [Cabinet Office Joint Intelligence Committee] 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. 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. ... 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'..."

In addition Thomas's reference to the Israeli tip-off having been confirmed by the BND (German intelligence) may also give a clue as to where the German newspaper Die Zeit obtained its own story on the matter, as summarised here by the BBC 2 October 2002:

"The American intelligence agency, the CIA, could have prevented the 11 September attacks if it were not for systematic failures, according to the German newspaper Die Zeit. The paper has uncovered details of a major Israeli spy ring involving some a 120 agents for the intelligence service Mossad operating across America and some masquerading as arts students. The ring was reportedly hard on the heels of at least four members of the hijack gang, including its leader Mohammed Atta. But the Israeli agents were detected by their American counterparts and thrown out of the country, it says."

The Israeli spies (or at least some of them) may have been thrown out of the US earlier in the year, but what about the subsequent Mossad warnings of August 2001? George Tenet appears to have made no public comment on the matter. Neither does there appear to be any reference in the official 9/11 Commission report, despite all the above accounts having emerged into the public domain before the Commission had conducted its own inquiry.

In its report of 1 October 2002 Die Zeit claimed to have acquired testimonies and reports seen by the US House and Senate intelligence committees investigating the attacks. The paper says that:

"[On 23 August 2001] The Israeli intelligence service Mossad presents to its American counterpart a list of names of terrorists who are living in the United States and seem to be planning to carry out an attack in the near future. According to documents obtained by DIE ZEIT, Mossad agents in the United States were following at least four of the 19 hijackers, including Almihdhar. The CIA now finally does what it should have done 18 months earlier. It informs the State Department, the FBI and the INS about Almihdhar and Alhazmi.... The immigration service writes back that according to its documents, both of the wanted men are currently in the United States.... One of the New York FBI agents calls headquarters in Washington and asks for reinforcements. He wants to widen the dragnet cast for Almihdhar. The FBI agent knows how dangerous Almihdhar is, for he spent months working on the [USS] Cole case. As a result he met CIA agents who mentioned the name Almihdhar. When he reads the name again on the watch list, with the additional notation that Almihdhar is suspected of involvement in the Cole bombing, the FBI agent becomes annoyed at his CIA colleagues, for having previously kept this information from him. But he becomes even more annoyed when his own headquarters refuses any support.... ".

Put simply, it would appear from these various reports that the CIA only informed the FBI of known key suspects after being pressured by Mossad with its warning that "terrorists plan to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture".

Israel's concern was hardly surprising.

The New York City area is home to the word's largest Jewish Community outside Israel. Manhattan had already been established as a terrorist target with the earlier bombing attempt on the World Trade Center in 1993 (two hours before the World Trade Center was hit on the morning of 9/11, two employees at a Tel Aviv office of the Israeli telecoms and instant messaging company Odigo received a electronic message predicting that the attack would happen).

But what does remains surprising, given the nature and urgency of the threat warnings, is that it appears that at no point did the CIA or FBI pass over the names of the suspects provided by Israel for inclusion on the national no-fly list for US airports.

Tenet 'Forgets'
Intelligence Briefings To Bush

So by this stage in 2001 the picture was looking distinctly odd - or rather, distinctly odder.

The previous month, John O'Neill, the FBI's leading al Qaeda investigator, had decided to quit the FBI.

John Loftus is a former federal prosecutor who has represented a large number of whistleblowers in the intelligence community over the years, as well as working as an intelligence expert for a variety of governmental and media organisations, including major television networks.

After 9/11 Loftus claimed that O'Neill had resigned from the FBI because he was being obstructed by his superiors from investigating al Qaeda (a claim also made by two French intelligence journalists whom O'Neill had been in contact with).

Having made his decision in July, O'Neill left the FBI on 22 August. Almost immediately he took up a job as head of security at the Word Trade Center, where he was shortly to be killed in one of the collapsing twin towers on 9/11.

Also in July an FBI agent in Phoneix, Arizona, had issued a memorandum to his Washington headquarters warning about suspicious activities involving a group of Middle Eastern men taking flight training lessons in Arizona. The memo is sub-titled "Osama bin Laden and Al-Muhjiroun supporters attending civil aviation universities/colleges in Arizona.” The agent, Ken Williams, warns of a possible "effort by Usama bin Laden to send students to the U.S. to attend civil aviation universities and colleges."

Williams' memo recommended that “FBI should accumulate a listing of civil aviation universities and colleges around the country. FBI field offices with these types of schools in their area should establish appropriate liaison. FBI [headquarters] should discuss this matter with other elements of the US intelligence community and task the community for any information that supports Phoenix’s suspicions.” (after 9/11 it was found that at least one of the hijackers, Hani Hanjour, had attended a flight school in Phoenix in early 2001). The recommendations were not adopted. William's memorandum on the subject later became known as the 'Phoenix memo', infamous for the way the advice it contained had been rejected by his superiors.

The following month Zacarias Moussaoui (a Muslim French national, later known as the '20th hijacker') was arrested on immigration charges by other FBI agents. He had aroused suspicion at a Minnesota flight school, asking to learn to fly a Boeing 747 and paying in cash. The local FBI became concerned that he might be part of larger hijacking conspiracy. French intelligence warned the FBI that Moussaoui was connected to militant Islam. One local agent told FBI headquarters that Moussaoui might “fly something into the World Trade Center.”

On 26 May 2002 the Observer in Britain reported on a letter sent that had been sent (also in May 2002) to FBI director Robert Mueller by Coleen Rowley, the FBI agent in Minnesota who had warned her superiors during August 2001 about Moussaoui:

"In a scathing indictment, Rowley accused her supervisor of altering her application to investigate Moussaoui in order to play down the significance of information provided by French intelligence that Moussaoui was a suspected terrorist - not merely a radical Islamic fundamentalist. Rowley accused Mueller of making 'misleading' statements on how the FBI handled the Moussaoui case before and after 11 September, and claimed Mueller had covered up FBI mistakes.... Furthermore, Rowley disputes FBI claims that their failure to act last summer did not make a difference in preventing the attacks. After her application to investigate Moussaoui was turned down, Rowley took her suspicions to the CIA. She was later reprimanded for going to the rival agency.  The impression of incompetence at FBI headquarters in Washington is further underscored by new revelations that Rowley's 'Minnesota memo' was sent to the same counter-terrorism supervisor who received the now infamous 'Phoenix memo' that warned of Arab nationals enrolled in flight schools who should be urgently investigated. For unknown reasons, David Frasca, who heads the FBI's Radical Fundamentalist Unit, did not see Agent Kenneth Williams's 'Phoenix memo' until after 11 September, officials said yesterday."

Not everyone thinks this was necessarily down to mere incompetence, however.

In her letter to Mueller Rowley wrote that the FBI supervisory special agent concerned "seemed to have been consistently, almost deliberately thwarting the Minneapolis FBI agents' efforts" to push the Moussaoui investigation. Despite Moussaoui's detention neither a criminal search warrant nor a special national security warrant to search his computer and other possessions were authorised prior to the attacks.

Two other FBI personnel, Robert Wright and Sibel Edmonds, have since tried to speak out about the deliberate internal sabotage of FBI investigations into al Qaeda and 9/11. Both have had government gagging orders imposed upon them to ensure their silence.

The FBI is not an innocent party in all of these matters. There are strong indications that the Bureau is aware of who funded 9/11, and that this information is being suppressed (Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are the prime suspects, with the widow of murdered journalist Daniel Pearl most recently taking out a law suit against Pakistan's Habib Bank, an institution 49% owned by the Pakistani government, in order to try and gain the release more of information in this area. A particularly sensitive issue is the question of any governmental involvement).

In 2001 Senator Bob Graham was Chairman of the Senate Select Committee On Intelligence. He later co-chaired the joint congressional investigation into the 9/11 attacks.  On 11 December 2002 Graham told a PBS television programme in the US that:

"I was surprised at the evidence that there were foreign governments involved in facilitating the activities of at least some of the terrorists in the United States. I am stunned that we have not done a better job of pursuing that to determine if other terrorists received similar support and, even more important, if the infrastructure of a foreign government assisting terrorists still exists for the current generation of terrorists who are here planning the next plots. To me that is an extremely significant issue and most of that information is classified, I think overly-classified. I believe the American people should know the extent of the challenge that we face in terms of foreign government involvement. .... I think there is very compelling evidence that at least some of the terrorists were assisted not just in financing -- although that was part of it -- by a sovereign foreign government .....  It will become public at some point when it's turned over to the archives, but that's 20 or 30 years from now."

What is not known is why this information is being suppressed by the Bush administration, although many have offered educated guesses.

In the first chapter of  'Against All Enemies' (this simple title turns out to refer both to terrorists, and to those "who would use the terrorist threat to assault the liberties the Constitution enshrines.") Richard Clarke says that John O'Neill was his closest friend at the FBI, and that he was "a man determined to destroy al Qaeda until the Bureau had driven him out because he was too obsessed with al Qaeda and didn't mind breaking crockery in his drive to get USA bin Laden. O'Neill did not fit the narrow little mold that Director Louis Free wanted for his agents."

What Clarke does not mention is that Freeh's instructions for a narrow law-enforcement role for the FBI were coming from a higher authority. Newsweek gave this account 26 October 2005:

"Tension Between FBI Chiefs Ex-FBI director Louis Freeh's new book, 'My FBI,' has kicked up controversy over its stinging attacks on Bill Clinton. But it has also frayed relations with current director Bob Mueller. Freeh takes a little-noticed shot at his successor in the book, describing a testy encounter in the early days of the Bush administration with an 'acting deputy attorney general' - a clear reference to Mueller who at the time held that post. In Freeh's account, the acting deputy A.G. tells him the department now has new top priorities - guns, drugs and juvenile crime. Freeh replies that terrorism and 'just about everything else' are more important. 'Those are our marching orders,' Mueller says, according to Freeh's account. 'Those aren't my marching orders,' Freeh shoots back. Freeh then writes that 'lockstep, blind obedience' by an FBI director to 'potentially unlawful or even 'dumb orders' is a 'formula for disaster.'  Mueller declined an invitation to attend Freeh's book party last week after telling one bureau official that Freeh was 'too controversial,' according to a Freeh associate who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter.'"

Yet under the Clinton administration Freeh had made counterterrorism the Bureau's top priority announcing in May 1998 that “Some terrorism now comes from abroad. Some terrorism is home-grown. But whatever its origin, terrorism is deadly and the FBI has no higher priority than to combat terrorism, to prevent it where possible. Our goal is to prevent, detect and deter.”

The downgrading of counterterrorism efforts in 2001 appears to have been a conscious decision by the Bush administration, rather than the result of some more general bureaucratic decline within the FBI. Far from it.

In an article 27 May 2002 Newsweek indicated that similar pressure were being placed on the FBI by Attorney General John Ashcroft: "When FBI officials sought to add hundreds more counterintelligence agents, they got shot down even as Ashcroft began, quietly, to take a privately chartered jet for his own security reasons. The attorney general was hardly alone in seeming to de-emphasize terror in the young Bush administration."

Before And After 9/11
The Cheney And Mueller Effects

In the words of the BBC, Freeh later "surprised observers on 1 May [2001] by announcing his resignation well in advance of the end of his term in 2003. Mr Freeh did not give specific reasons for his decision to leave".

He departed  25 June. Freeh had been a supporter of John O'Neill, and the next month O'Neill was to make his decision to leave as well.

Subsequently Freeh told the tenth public hearing of the 9/11 Commission that in the years 2000 and 2001 the subject of  'planes as weapons' was "always one of the considerations in the planning" of security for 'National Security Special Events'  (e.g. major sporting events), and that "resources were actually designated to deal with that particular threat." He confirmed that the use of aeroplanes, either packed with explosives or otherwise, in suicide missions, was "part of the planning for those events".

Freeh also told a congressional hearing into 9/11 in October 2002 that “the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center by foreign terrorists clearly demonstrated the effort to target America and Americans. Osama bin Laden's 1998 fatwah, calling for the deaths of Americans anywhere, left no doubt that terrorist attacks within the United States were as likely as those in Saudi Arabia, East Africa, Yemen and elsewhere.... Before the end of 1999, the FBI and the intelligence community clearly understood the foreign-based al-Qaeda threat regarding targets within the United States. Congress and the Executive were fully briefed as to this threat analysis…The radical fundamentalist threat posed a clear and present danger here, and everyone knew it and understood it to be the same.... In several appearances before this committee, I used a chart to depict the locations around the United States where radical fundamentalists cells were active.”

After a temporary interregnum run by the FBI's Deputy Director Thomas Pickard, the vacancy left by Freeh was taken by Robert Mueller, an experienced insider at the Department of Justice (from where, in an earlier posting, he had overseen the Lockerbie Pan Am 103 bombing prosecution, a case now increasingly thought to have been used to frame Libya using false evidence).

Muller took over the FBI one week before 9/11. His performance since has been 'interesting'.

Under his watch the FBI has been 'pursuing' an investigation of the post-9/11 anthrax attacks. The attacks killed or infected 22 people, and further traumatised an already deeply shaken nation. The anthrax had been delivered through the simple expedient of letters in the post, which then released spores when opened.

On 18 August 2002 the BBC reported that the FBI had discovered that the anthrax case traced back to two suspects who had worked for the US Department of Defense and the CIA. From that point on little further has been heard of the investigation. Postal union workers are currently demanding that the FBI and Justice Department publicly disclose what they know about the unresolved case, which is now six years old.

It is easy to forget about the anthrax attacks which took place immediately after 9/11. But at the time they proved to be of great political importance to the Bush administration.

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