http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A34295-2002Sep18.html washingtonpost.com 9/11 Report Says Agencies Received Credible Clues By Dana Priest Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, September 19, 2002; 1:17 PM The U.S. intelligence community received a surprising number of credible reports of a likely terrorist attack prior to Sept. 11, including some threats to domestic targets, according to a congressional report unveiled Wednesday. The preliminary findings of the staff of the Senate-House intelligence panel investigating the Sept. 11 strikes also show that some intelligence analysts had focused on the possibility that terrorists might use "airplanes as weapons" in the attacks, a congressional official said yesterday. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice said in mid-May that prior to the attacks, analysts did not seriously consider the use of planes as bombs and therefore were surprised by the method of attack on Sept. 11. "All this reporting about hijacking was about traditional hijacking, " Rice said at a May briefing on what President Bush knew before the attacks. The 30-page unclassified report also raises "serious questions" about whether the U.S. government shared enough information with the public about what it knew to be a grave threat from Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda terrorist network, the official said. After reading and analyzing hundreds of thousands of pages of documents from the CIA, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency and other government agencies, "you start thinking: Did anyone really explain to the public how serious this stuff was? . . . Did the American people really realize the strength of the threat out there?" The committee report, the first official examination of how much intelligence agencies knew about the terror threat to the United States prior to Sept. 11, contains no single piece of information that could have been used to thwart the strikes that killed 3,000 people in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania, the official said. But while the committee staff found no information that revealed the exact date, time and place of the attack, the official said there were numerous credible reports of possible domestic attacks and suggested that some may have been played down because the intelligence agencies were too focused on threats to U.S. interests overseas. "There was reporting on [the possibility of] domestic attacks, even though a lot of people were focused overseas," the official said. The official said that even in the summer of 2001, when intelligence officials were describing a dangerous spike in threats against the United States, the seriousness of the threat from bin Laden may not have been uniformly recognized "At least some part of our intelligence community recognized what [was] out there," the official said. But "there are issues about information sharing with the intelligence community and between the intelligence community and the rest of the federal government." The official noted that it is not the intelligence community's responsibility to warn the public about threats. Asked if White House officials, who would make the call on a public warning, were cooperating with the panel, the official deferred. "We've had discussions and requests," the official said. "They've answered some questions and some, maybe not." The issue of warning the public came up in today's testimony which featured Kristin Breitweiser and Stephen Push, who lost spouses in the Sept. 11 attacks. "How many victims may have taken notice of these Middle Eastern men that were boarding their plane?" said Breitweiser, of Middletown, N.J. , if the public had been made aware of the possibility of a terrorist attack. * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * ** On Aug. 6, 2001, President Bush received a daily intelligence briefing that covered bin Laden's use of hijacking as a method of terror. * * * * * * * * * * * * Following disclosure of the briefing in the media this spring, Rice held a news conference in which she made it clear that the intelligence community had not seriously focused on the possibility that alQaeda would think to use planes as flying bombs. "I will say that, again, hijacking before 9/11 and hijacking after 9/11 do mean two very, very different things," she said.The House and Senate formed a joint intelligence panel shortly after Sept. 11 to assess the performance of the $35 billion intelligence community and to recommend ways to repair and improve it. But at today's hearing the Senate committee's top Republican, Richard Shelby of Alabama, focused on the failures of the past, saying "our inability to detect and prevent the Sept. 11th attacks was an intelligence failure of unprecedented magnitude." "Some people who couldn't seem to utter the words intelligence failure are now convinced of it," he said. The panel got off to a rocky start. Members could not agree on its scope and its first staff director was forced to resign. It delayed public hearings; the first one, in fact, is taking place today. A second public hearing is still in question. The panel is having a difficult time convincing intelligence officials to appear in open session while the U.S. war on terrorism continues. "There are people who don't want to do public hearings on this at all," the official said. Today's meeting will not delve into the extensive information the panel has collected on the hijackers and to what extent U.S. intelligence agencies were monitoring any of them. That will be the subject of a future hearing. The panel has met 10 times in closed sessions. The staff has culled through 400,000 documents from the various intelligence agencies and found roughly 70,000 pages it considered relevant to the investigation. A working group at the CIA was set up to streamline the normal declassification process. While hundreds of documents have been declassified, the official said there continue to be active disagreements between the panel staff and intelligence agencies over declassifying more. Many members of Congress, concerned that the panel would not meet its October deadline, have called for an independent and more thorough probe into what many of them have called the largest intelligence failure since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. © 2002 The Washington Post Company --->Cordially Yours, (Kirk) , Kirk Gregory Czuhai (last name pronounced "ChewHi") 11369 Caberfae Allendale, MI 49401 USA Phone: 616-895-5933 Email: lovekgc@altelco.net Click to send an email to Kirk! Have Albert Einstein Stick his tongue out at you or anyone you want, click here===> ~www.altelco.net/~money/AlEtongueAd.htm Democratic Home Page: ~www.altelco.net/~lovekgc Click for some hillarious Bush (w.) Bashing! A NICE & EASY way to MAKE some good money from a few hundred to well over a thousand dollars a year with little work can be found at above Home Page also !!! 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