We’ve all known for some time that the French were warning the US about the threat in 2001 of an attack. Now details are emerging that nine months prior to the Trade Center bombing the US intelligence community was told a US airline might be involved. The article in the SFGate tries to emphasize how hard it was for American leaders to make sense of the information:
The warning was another example of how intelligence agents sensed al-Qaida was hard at work in the months leading up to Sept. 11 but were unable to piece together fragmented warnings into a coherent plot.
Le Monde first reported the story Monday as it published excerpts of 328 pages of classified documents from France’s main foreign intelligence agency, the DGSE. One note, dated Jan. 5, 2001, reported that al-Qaida was plotting a hijacking.
Perhaps what is most interesting is that the article leaves out crucial details about other pieces of the puzzle. For example, it does not mention that the French considered Chechen militants terrorists, while the US refused to make the same determination due to political posturing with Russia. It also does not tie in the fact that Greek intelligence (NIS-EYP) uncovered a cartoon depicting planes flying into the twin towers, and finally it does not mention the FBI agents’ attempts to communicate that some suspicious folks (who were considered terrorists by the French, back to my first point) were doing suspicious things and needed to be investigated.
The lesson here should be that the Bush administration failed to heed the information and manage the risk to protect the country with the tools it had available at the time. Anyone can see how bad Bush is at deciding what to do in the face of danger and how he relies on a cabal who refuse to listen to anyone outside their inner circle.
Nowhere does the evidence suggest that wiretap laws needed to be changed or more intelligence would have helped at the time. Wonder why you never hear about that Greek cartoon anymore or why Israeli intelligence was so favored at the time…