Who could have seen 9-11 coming?

Now, a lot of the people criticizing pre-9-11 failures have probably been a little unfair against the administration. But the media coverage of post-9-11 failures has been amazingly unfair in the administrations favor. I've seen countless guests and interviewers pass of the idea 'nobody could have seen it coming' as a fact. Their simply repeat what the administration has beeen saying to save their butts. National security adviser Condoleeza Rice said on May 16, 2002, "I don't think anybody could have predicted that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile." This idea is just rediculous. It's the media folks trying to make sure people don't think their liberal, because there are plenty of books out there that will tell you that people like Richard Clarke and others who were trying to prepare for things like that. Let's look at people who thought that somebody might hijack a plane:

1. One of the Columbine kids had written in his log that he was thinking about hijacking a plane and flying it into a building, WTC was on the top of his list. Footage of a reporter discussing the details of the student's diary describing the idea can be seen in Bowling for Columbine.
2. Tom Clancy wrote about a scenario with terrorists hijacking a plane and flying it into a building one of his books.
3. There was a movie in production in 2001 about terrorists hijacking a plane and flying it into the Pentagon! The production of the movie was then postponed indefinitely. I heard about this the week after 9-11 on msnbc in a story about how the movie just mentioned was canceled and of course how Spiderman was delayed because a scene in which a helicopter crashes into the WTC needed to be taken out.
4. At the last G8 summit (meeting of the top 8 nuclear powers) there were fighter planes flying around the building in case someone hijacked a plane and flew it into the building. Al Franken's Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them discusses this.
5. A memo sent to the president (while we was on vacation in Texas (of course)) was titled "Bin Laden to Attack Within the United States". The memo mentioned New York TWICE!
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4710772/
6. Bill Clinton. Clinton "personally warned President-elect George W. Bush in a meeting during the transition that Osama bin Laden would be his No. 1 national-security problem". http://www.time.com/time/press_releases/article/0,8599,612324,00.html
7. Richard Clarke. Who devoted so much time to researching a building intelligence agaisnt Al Qaeda. But Bush was more interested in nation building from the get-go and ignored Clark's suggestings for continuing anti-terrorist efforts. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/03/19/60minutes/main607356.shtml
Or simply search google for Richard Clarke or read his book, Against All Enemies.
8. Jack Roche. A muslim convert from Australia knew the whereabouts of 9-11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and others. "He had their phone numbers. He had their e-mail addresses. He knew where they lived. He knew how they worked." "But at the time — 14 months before the Sept. 11 attacks — no one was interested."
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/latimests/20040607/ts_latimes/before911onewarningwentunheard
9. Gosh, I just keep adding stuff to this list. Here is another one. Mohammed Heikal is a highl repsected Egyptian journalist and foreign minister. He told the Guardian on October 10, 2001 "I know what is there. Bin Laden has been under surveillance for years: every telephone call was monitored and al Qa'eda has been penetrated by American Intelligence, Saudi Intelligence, Egyptian Intelligence. They could not have kept secret an operation that required such a degree of organization and sophistication."
10. Sibel Edmonds. Edmonds is a former FBI translator whose testimony before the 9-11 commission helped force Condalezza Rice to testify before Congress. "We had several specific information as early as April, 2001." "The FBI had information that an attack using airplanes was being planned before Sept. 11 and calls Condoleezza Rice's claim the White House had no specific information on a domestic threat or one involving planes an outrageous lie."
http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/06/04/1353259
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&q=Sibel+Edmonds&btnG=Google+Search
11. Kenneth Williams. An FBI agents that wrote the famous 'Phoenix Memo' warning that supporters of Osama bin Laden were "attending civil aviation universities/colleges in Arizona." The memo apparently never reached the highest levels of the FBI, the CIA or the Justice Department until after September 11.
http://www.cnn.com/2002/US/05/21/phoenix.memo/
12. According to the NY Times Sept 9, 2002 as early as 1996, Pakistani terrorist Abdul Hakim Murad confessed to federal agents that he was "learning to fly an aircraft in order to crash a plane into CIA HG"
13. A briefing in July of 2001 warned of "a significant terrorist attack against the U.S. and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks. The attacks with be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against US facilities and interests. Attacks will occur with little or no warning."
14. We also now know that at least 2 FBI agents warned their superiors that AlQa'eda was planning a "kamakazi strike against New York and Washington". They were told that if they were to come public with this information, they would be prosecuted under the National Security Act. (Dreaming War p.14)


In conclusion, I'll leave you with the conclusion that will be written in history which is the conclusion of the 9-11 commission which said "9/11 could have and should have been prevented."
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/12/17/eveningnews/main589137.shtml

I don't want anybody to be unfair and blame it all on Bush, let's just be honest about the American Neo-conservative agenda: they love nation-building and ignored terrorism.

-Rob