9-11: we knew.

For nearly two years, THE NEW AMERICAN has pointed out that Washington had detailed, specific advance warnings of the 9-11 attack--warnings that, if acted on, would have prevented the tragedy. (See our cover stories "Did We Know What Was Coming?" and "Foreknowledge and Failure" in our March 11, 2002 and June 17, 2002 issues, respectively.) Disclosures triggered by the bipartisan National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States have now confirmed our conclusions.

According to the GovExec.com news service's daily briefing of March 24: "The U.S. intelligence community received a flood of threat warnings in the summer of 2001 that 'spectacular' terrorist attacks were likely, but conflicts about how to react rose between new Bush administration officials and officials held over from the Clinton administration...."

"I don't understand why we didn't put an order out, get everything the FBI had in and try to determine whether or not it was possible an attack was going to occur in the United States of America," commented commission member Bob Kerry during the second day of hearings. CIA director George Tenet, in his testimony to the panel, admitted that warnings about a terrorist strike against the U.S. "lit up" the agency prior to September 11.

Former FBI wiretap translator Sibel Edmonds, who had top-secret security clearance, told the online journal Salon: "We should have had [an] orange or red-type of alert in June or July of 2001. There was that much information available." Regarding Bush administration National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's claim that no "specific" information had been available about the use of airplanes as terrorist bombs, Edmonds declares: "That's an outrageous lie. And documents can prove it's a lie.... [T]here was specific information about use of airplanes, that an attack was on the way two or three months beforehand and that several people were already in the country by May of 2001. They should've alerted the people to the threat [we were] facing."