WASHINGTON (KRT) — President Bush was told weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks that Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network might try to hijack U.S. planes, and the administration passed the warning to federal agencies, White House officials confirmed Wednesday night.
White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer said the president was told in August that bin Laden was interested in hijacking an airplane.
“Concerns about hijackings have been around for decades,” Fleischer said, confirming a report by CBS News. “The president … received information that Osama bin Laden was interested in hijacking an airplane in the traditional pre-9-11 sense of hijacking an airplane. The president did not receive information that bin Laden wanted to use airplanes for suicide bombers or use airplanes as missiles.”
The information was then shared with the appropriate domestic agencies, he said. “Keep in mind that’s exactly why we have metal detectors at airports.”
Nevertheless, the revelation is the latest evidence that U.S. intelligence and law enforcement analysts failed to connect pieces of information that could have alerted them to the terrorists’ plans. Both the CIA and the FBI have tried to deflect the mounting criticism, but on Capitol Hill pressure is mounting for a thorough investigation of what both agencies knew, when they knew it and what, if anything, they did with it.
In hindsight, some warning signals were obvious.
It was reported earlier this month that FBI headquarters failed to act on a memo last July from its Arizona field office warning a number of Arabs seeking pilot, security and airport operations training from at least one U.S. flight school.
A section of that classified memo cited bin Laden by name, speculating that al-Qaida and other groups could organize such flight training.
In Minnesota, officials at another flight school alerted law enforcement officials last summer that Zacarias Moussaoui, a French man of Moroccan heritage, was taking flying lessons but didn’t want to learn how to take off or land. Officials believe Moussaoui was supposed to have been the fifth hijacker of United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed in Pennsylvania. He will go on trial Sept. 30 in Alexandria, Va., on six conspiracy counts, including committing acts of international terrorism.
U.S. intelligence officials, meanwhile, knew that in 1995, two associates of bin Laden had discussed crashing a plane into CIA headquarters outside Washington. A group affiliated with bin Laden tried and failed to crash a hijacked jetliner into the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and Egypt and Italy had warned the CIA that bin Laden was plotting to fly an airplane into last June’s economic summit in Genoa, Italy.
Other evidence pointed to the World Trade Center as a possible target. Bin Laden’s al-Qaida organization had already tried and failed to blow up the New York landmark with a truck bomb, and his associates had a pattern of learning from their mistakes and trying again.