Bush had the warning ahead of time, they tell us Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit Bush Had the Warning Ahead of Time, They Tell Us [Y'know, an argument that seemed fairly persuasive - used around the Kennedy assassination and also around the TWA 800 splash - was that the more interesting conspiracy theories required too many people to be in on them to make any sort of logical sense. Any fool could see, so the argument went, that if (for instance) something involving a lot of guys at the CIA and a bunch of shooters had gone on at Dealy Plaza, well, there'd just have to have been someone who'd talk by now. Of course, a whole lot of folks with information about the Kennedy shooting managed to die early and spectacular. Enough that even the House Committee investigating the affair couldn't pretend that there weren't some rather peculiar deaths amongst those who'd otherwise have been on their witness list. And any fool could see, around TWA 800, that the theories involving an air-to-air or sea-to-air missile strike would mean that a lot of ordinary sailors would have had to have been in on it. Well, surely any fool could see that if there'd been warnings originating out in the sticks in Arizona FBI field offices that had gotten as far as the desk of the President of the United States, that a lot of people, some of them decent folks, would have happened to have read the warnings as they worked their way up the food chain to POTUS, right? So, surely, if there'd been a warning like that about an attack that killed (what's it down to now? A little under 3k?) lots of US Citizens - and in this case resulted, we are told, not from one bunch of intel boyos playing a mean game with another bunch, but from towelheaded criminal haters of the America that all good US Citizens just loooove - and it'd been floating for months and not acted on, well surely someone would have mentioned it early on, right? Well, wrong, it turns out. On the one hand, yes, we do now know about the warning, more than six months after Osama bin BadBoy became the Al Jazeera ratings leader. On the other hand, we've been fed a crafted master narrative for every day of the intervening months, in which our intel community doesn't look very good, but they hardly look treasonous - it's not treasonous, just derelict in duty, to not bother having enough people on hand to translate your intelligence. I mean, it's not like there are any linkages between the intel community and the short positions in airline and insurance stock held ahead of 911. Well, okay, there *are,* but that link between Deutsche Bank and the CIA muckity-mucks, that's all just crazy conspiracy talk. That's like thinking that there was more than one shooter at Dealy Plaza, that it sure looks like the kill shot was from up front, the way John's head snaps back in the wind, his brains spilling like the contents of a piņata onto Jackie's cute pink dress. Well, anyhow, any fool can see that ... well, that this story should make us all think about how long even arbitrarily large bunches of people can keep their mouths shut, and what kind of prep work has already been done to deliver all of the responsibility for 911 into a largely nameless bunch of guys in Afghanistan. And how little of the money has been traced, and how deeply in bed we are with a lot of the people who's money *has* been traced, like the ones in Saudi Arabia. --PB ] * BBC Online - May 16, 2002 http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/americas/newsid_1989000/1989864.stm Bush was warned of plane hijackings President George W Bush put US security agencies on alert last summer after receiving intelligence reports that Osama Bin Laden was planning to hijack American aircraft. The alert was revealed by White House spokesman Ari Fleischer, who said that the information was passed to the president during routine intelligence briefings and the "appropriate agencies" were notified. The US intelligence community has already been heavily criticised for its failure to detect warning signs of the 11 September suicide attacks on New York and Washington. The attacks, which saw hijacked aircraft flown into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, are believed to have been carried by Bin Laden's al-Qaeda terror group. However, Mr Fleischer said the information received by the president dealt with conventional hijackings - not the use of planes as missiles to attack buildings. "We had general threats involving Osama Bin Laden around the world and including in the United States," he said. BBC Washington correspondent Justin Webb says the timing of this admission is significant, as a congressional committee is about to start hearings into intelligence failings before 11 September. The White House did not want to be put on the defensive with leaks about what the president knew, our correspondent says. Flight school warning Meanwhile, the White House has denied that a memo last July from the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Arizona office could have prevented the attacks had it been acted on. The memo is reported to have warned that groups like al-Qaeda might have sent students to flight schools in the US, but none of the people identified in the document had any connection with the attacks. Even though the memo was reviewed, the FBI did not take any action on its central recommendation - that flight school records and visa applications by foreign students be cross-referenced. And the agency did not connect the memo with the case of Zacharias Moussaoui, a Frenchman of Moroccan descent who was arrested in August after seeking flight training in Minnesota - and saying he was not particularly interested in learning to land aeroplanes. Mr Moussaoui is now on trial in the US, accused of conspiring with Bin Laden, the hijackers and others to commit the 11 September attacks. The FBI Director, Robert Mueller, has repeatedly said he wished agents had acted more aggressively in putting the Arizona and Minnesota leads together. Following the attacks, the FBI is to create a special counter-terrorism unit to oversee all its terrorism investigations. A Washington-based "super-squad" will be made up of hundreds of agents and analysts, as well as an office of intelligence, headed by a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency. [Hm. Hundreds of agents.... Isn't that approximately the size of the Unabomber task force? The one that couldn't find Kaczynski, but did succeed in interviewing a huge cohort of U of Illinois students in the wrong age range who'd all happened to have taken math courses? Such a huge cohort that when news got out about the interviews, one interviewee arrived wearing clown wig, nose, and big shoes? The donut bill alone on this one's going to need a separate line item....] * NEWSWEEK - May 20, 2002 issue http://msnbc.com/news/751100.asp#BODY There are doubts concerning the FBI's insistence that it had no advance warning about the deadly 9-11 attack on the World Trade Center UNHEEDED WARNINGS FBI agent's notes pointed to possible World Trade Center attack by Michael Isikoff The FBI has insisted it had no advance warning about the 9-11 attacks. But internal documents suggest there were more concerns inside the bureau's field offices than Washington has acknowledged. One FBI memo, written by a Phoenix agent in July 2001, warned about suspicious activities by Middle Eastern men at an Arizona flight school. Last week, in little-noticed testimony before a Senate panel, FBI Director Robert Mueller referred to another internal document that may prove more explosive: notes by a Minneapolis agent worrying that French Moroccan flight student Zacarias Moussaoui might be planning to 'fly something into the World Trade Center.' The notes are especially eerie because Moussaoui faces charges that he was part of the 9-11 plot. Sources say the notes Mueller referred to were written in early September 2001 -- days before the attack. The author was part of a counterterrorism team desperately trying to figure out what Moussaoui was up to. He had been arrested in August on immigration charges after a Minnesota flight instructor reported that he showed a suspicious interest in learning 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. From his e-mail traffic they found he wanted to learn to fly a 747 from London's Heathrow to New York's JFK. The agents held 'brainstorming' sessions to try to figure out what targets might be en route. 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. But the official said the agents were only 'speculating' about possible scenarios. Congressional investigators believe there are more embarrassing documents to come. Another sensitive issue: the CIA's failure to aggressively follow up on information provided by Malaysian authorities in January 2000 about a meeting in Kuala Lumpur of Al Qaeda operatives -- including two men who turned out to be among the 9-11 hijackers. Malaysian officials passed along photos to the United States, but they never heard back and stopped monitoring the suspects, one Malaysian official told NEWSWEEK. CIA officials said the significance of the meeting didn't become clear until much later. But by the time the CIA alerted the FBI, it was too late. ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytnyc-05.16.02-04:44:42-32639