Before 9/11: it's now five years since the 9/11 attacks and serious questions remain unanswered. Among these is whether or not the U.S. government had prior warning of the attacks.

The day after the attacks on 9/11, journalists Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair reported that both the World Trade Center and a nearby military base had been moved to high alert just weeks before. The Trade Center went on heightened alert just three weeks before the attack. The army base, the Arsenal at Picatinny in New Jersey, was put on high alert six weeks before the attack, "with some staff locked in their offices for a period," Cockburn and St. Clair reported. At about the same time that the World Trade Center went on heightened alert, the journalists noted, Osama bin Laden gave an interview to the editor of the al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper in London claiming that he planned "very, very big attacks against American interests."

Cockburn and St. Clair's report suggested that the United States knew the attacks were imminent. It is a conclusion reached by others since then, including Steve Elson, a former member of the FAA's secret "Red Team" airport security unit. In November 2005, in an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), Elson explained that everyone knew an attack was imminent and that it could have been prevented. "I was positive we were gonna get hit," Elson explained on the news program The Fifth Estate. "[The attack] was absolutely preventable and the United States government knew it."

Word on the Street

Apparently even some New York City school kids knew something was coming down. In the October 2002 issue of Insight Magazine, journalist Jeffrey Scott Shapiro reported that a high school freshman at New Utrecht High School in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, may have known in advance that the World Trade Center would be attacked. When this claim came to Shapiro's attention, he followed up on the story by talking to the boy's teacher, Antoinette DiLorenzo. During a lesson a week before the attacks, DiLorenzo noticed the boy, a Palestinian, looking out a window. "What are you looking at?" she asked. The boy's response, in hindsight, was chilling: "Do you see those two buildings?" he asked while pointing at the World Trade Center. "They won't be standing there next week."

This was not the only incident like this that apparently occurred in the days before the attacks. Shapiro also reported that a 6th grade student at another school passed on a similar warning to his teacher on September 10, 2001. "Essentially, he warned her to stay away from lower Manhattan because something bad was going to happen," said Sgt. Edgar Martinez, deputy director of police services for the Jersey City Police Department, according to Shapiro. Yet another boy had heard of the impending attacks and warned his classmates. "He warned them not to ride any city buses because he had been told at his mosque the week before to stay off all public transportation for a while," said one NYPD officer quoted by Shapiro. "He said it wouldn't be safe."

If kids on the streets of New York knew something was about to happen, why didn't the feds know? The answer is that they did know, but bureaucratic incompetence, or worse, prevented them from taking action.

In the Open

The FBI and CIA knew in the months prior to 9/11 that at least two of the hijackers were not only in this country but were known terrorists. Yet nothing was done to impede the terrorists' operations despite the fact that the terrorists did nothing to conceal their identities.

The U.S. intelligence community knew that terrorists (and future 9/11 hijackers) Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi attended a terrorist meeting in Malaysia in January 2000 that was also attended by Khallad bin-Atash. They knew, too, that Khallad had been a key al-Qaeda player in planning attacks on the USS Cole and on embassies in Africa. Available information also indicated that al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi were in the United States beginning in 2000, not long after the meeting in Malaysia. Moreover, they didn't try to hide their presence.

For instance, in the Joint Committee report entitled The Intelligence Community's Knowledge of the September 11 Hijackers Prior to September 11, 2001, issued on September 20, 2002, Eleanor Hill, staff director of the Joint Intelligence Committee that conducted the inquiry, noted that in 2000 the pair "used their true names on a rental agreement, as al-Mihdhar also did in obtaining a California motor vehicle photo identification card." Moreover, though al-Mihdhar left the country on June 10, 2000, Hill noted that al-Hazmi "remained in the United States. On July 7, 2000, a week shy of the expiration of the six-month visa to stay in the United States that had been granted on January 15, 2000, al-Hazmi applied to the [Immigration and Naturalization Service] for an extension to his visa. He used on his INS application the Lemon Grove, California, address for the residence that he shared with al-Mihdhar before the latter's departure in early June 2000. The INS recorded receipt of the extension request on July 27, 2000." Consequently, it should have been fairly apparent that these two individuals were up to no good. Indeed, these connections were used by the United States after the fact, according to Hill: "Thus, the facts linking these two individuals to Khallad and therefore to Usama Bin Laden formed the crux of the case made by the State Department to governments around the world that Usama Bin Laden should be held accountable for the September 11 attacks."

In addition, the U.S. intelligence community had access to a great deal of other relevant information:

* While living in San Diego, hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi rented from an FBI informant. The FBI admits "that a San Diego case agent appears to have been at least aware that Saudi visitors were renting rooms in the informant's house."

* The same informant had had some contact with a third hijacker, Hani Hanjour, in December 2000. The final report of the Joint Committee notes that "the informant's contacts with the hijackers, had they been capitalized on, would have given the San Diego FBI field office perhaps the Intelligence Community's best chance to unravel the September 11th plot"

* The activities of the architect of 9/11, Khalid Shaykh Mohammed, were well known to the intelligence community prior to September 11. According to Hill, "CIA documents in June 2001 indicated that KSM 'was recruiting persons to travel to the United States and engage in planning terrorist-related activity here.' [**********], these persons would be 'expected to establish contact with individuals already living there.' The documents also noted that KSM 'continued to travel frequently to the United States, including as recently as May 2001.'"

Despite this and much additional information, intelligence and law enforcement agencies took no aggressive action to interfere in the developing plans to attack New York and Washington.

Warnings Ignored

More disturbing still is that individual agents investigating the terrorists in the months leading up to the attacks were ignored and stonewalled by their superiors. On July 10, 2001, FBI Agent Kenneth Williams wrote what is now called the "Phoenix Memo" or the "Phoenix Electronic Communication" detailing his concerns about suspected terrorists undergoing flight training in Arizona. In the memo, Williams notes that an investigation into the activity started in 2000, describing a bin Laden plan "to send students to U.S. to attend civil aviation universities and colleges." The memo was distributed to FBI units working on issues related to radical fundamentalism and Osama bin Laden, but it was largely ignored at the time and its request for further investigation into possible terrorist flight-training efforts was denied.

Williams, who should be considered a hero for his attempt to uncover the 9/11 plot, is considered one of the best agents at the bureau. "He is one of the sharpest agents I have ever met," retired agent Ronald Myers told Time magazine. "Anyone in FBI management who wouldn't take what Ken Williams said seriously is a fool."

At the same time as Williams was desperately trying to get the attention of his superiors regarding the terrorist efforts to get flight training, FBI agents in Minneapolis were struggling to get the bureau to take its investigations seriously. They had uncovered disturbing efforts by Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker, to learn how to fly civilian airliners and had information from the French intelligence service linking Moussaoui to bin Laden. Based on this, the agents involved sought a warrant to search Moussaoui's computer, but the warrant request was not approved by FBI headquarters officials. In a letter to FBI director Robert Mueller, Special Agent Coleen Rowley described the stonewalling tactics of FBI headquarters:

   The Minneapolis agents' initial
   thought was to obtain a criminal
   search warrant, but in order to do so,
   they needed to get FBI Headquarters'
   (FBIHQ's) approval in order to
   ask for DOJ OIPR's [Department of
   Justice Office of Intelligence Policy
   and Review] approval to contact the
   United States Attorney's Office in
   Minnesota. Prior to and even after
   receipt of information provided by
   the French, FBIHQ personnel disputed
   with the Minneapolis agents
   the existence of probable
   cause to believe
   that a criminal violation
   had occurred/was
   occurring. As such,
   FBIHQ personnel refused
   to contact OIPR
   to attempt to get the
   authority.

Yet another whistleblower within the FBI is Sibel Edmonds. Hired as a translator after 9/11, Edmonds quickly discovered a strange network of irregularities and claimed to come across evidence that the government had foreknowledge of the September 11 attacks.

According to Edmonds, "more than four months prior to the September 11 terrorist attacks, in April 2001, a long-term FBI informant/asset who had been providing the bureau with information since 1990, provided two FBI agents.and a translator with specific information regarding a terrorist attack being planned by Osama Bin Laden." In an article on her website entitled "FBI & 9/11," Edmonds describes the informant as an Iranian intelligence officer in charge of intelligence from Afghanistan. "Through his contacts in Afghanistan," Edmonds wrote, "he received information that: 1) Osama Bin Laden was planning a major terrorist attack in the United States targeting 4-5 major cities, 2) the attack was going to involve airplanes, 3) some of the individuals in charge of carrying out this attack were already in place in the United States, 4) the attack was going to be carried out soon, in a few months."

When all the evidence is assembled, it is obvious that the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement communities had access to sufficient data concerning a potential terrorist attack in 2001 to take action to thwart that attack. Whether the failure to stop the attack was due to negligence or worse remains to be determined.