If this doesn't say, "asleep at the wheel," I don't what does. Did Osama need to call George up directly and give him the names of the hijackers and the dates involved in order for anyone in the government to have taken action? I don't believe the fumble by the FAA was directly attributable to the White House, but I do attribute the White House blocking the information release for five months was purely political and further shows the lack of accountability by this administration.
Report: FAA Had 52 Pre-9/11 Warnings
WASHINGTON - The Federal Aviation Administration (news - web sites) received repeated warnings in the months prior to Sept. 11, 2001, about al-Qaida and its desire to attack airlines, according to a previously undisclosed report by the commission that investigated the terror attacks.
The report by the 9/11 commission that investigated the suicide airliner attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon (news - web sites) detailed 52 such warnings given to FAA (news - web sites) leaders from April to Sept. 10, 2001, about the radical Islamic terrorist group and its leader, Osama bin Laden (news - web sites).
The commission report, written last August, said five security warnings mentioned al-Qaida's training for hijackings and two reports concerned suicide operations not connected to aviation. However, none of the warnings pinpointed what would happen on Sept. 11.
FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown said the agency received intelligence from other agencies, which it passed on to airlines and airports.
But, she said, "We had no specific information about means or methods that would have enabled us to tailor any countermeasures."
Brown also said the FAA was in the process of tightening security at the time of the attacks.
"We were spending $100 million a year to deploy explosive detection equipment at the airports," she said. The agency was also close to issuing a regulation that would have set higher standards for screeners and, for the first time, give it direct control over the screening work force.
Al Felzenberg, former spokesman for the 9/11 commission, which went out of business last summer, said the government had not completed a review of the 120-page report for declassification purposes until recently.
The unclassified version, first reported by The New York Times, was made available by the National Archives Thursday.
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3 comments:
Barely, but that's just my speech impediment.
I suspect there are threats- thousands of them- every day. I also suspect they have been incoming for decades. Every President has had to deal with these type of issues- and every President has had successes and failures.
The real test will be to see if we can come up with a revamped Intelligence Network.
Still, in the end, one loner can do a lot of damge- and there is no way we can stop that.
I am sure that there are many threats, but the politics of when this released is just wrong. It would have stopped Bush from saying that there was NO indication of any sort that this could happen.
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