Mr. Gore also said Mr. Bush's Justice Department and the FBI had spent more time and resources investigating a suspected brothel in New Orleans than monitoring bin Laden and his terrorist network.
"Where is their sense of priorities?" Mr. Gore asked.
Indeed. And where were the FBI and CIA's priorities during the Clinton/Gore Administration? Not that they didn't have PLENTY of clues that flying hijacked planes into buildings. As Mr. Gore said, "The warnings were there". As far back as 1994 when an Algerian plot to fly a plane into the Eifel Tower was busted by France.
straitstimes.asia1.com.sg
HERE is some previously classified information which signalled that terrorists were considering using aircraft as weapons.
December 1994:
Algerian terrorists hijacked an Air France plane and threatened to fly it into the Eiffel Tower.
January 1995:
Police in the Philippines raided an apartment in Manila and found materials that suggested a plot to crash a hijacked plane into CIA headquarters outside Washington.
January 1996:
Reports of a planned suicide attack by associates of known terrorists, including an Al-Qaeda operative, that would consist of flying a plane into the White House.
August 1998:
A group of unidentified Arabs were said to be planning to fly an explosives-laden plane from a foreign country into the World Trade Center.
Autumn 1998:
Reports of an Osama bin Laden plot involving aircraft in the New York and Washington areas.
February 1999:
Reports that Iraq had formed a suicide pilot unit to use against US and British forces in the Gulf.
August 2001:
Reports of a possible plot to bomb the US Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, from an airplane.
In the same article, in 2000 the CIA had FIVE people dedicated to monitoring al Qaeda and the FBI had ONE person. Not exactly setting the right priorities given the fact that terrorists had exploded a truck bomb in the basement of the WTC, blew up the Khobar Towers in SA, blew up two embassies in Africa, and damn near sunk a US naval vessel in the Gulf of Aden. The FBI knew that individuals directly affiliated with known terrorists such as RAMZI YOUSEF were training at US flight schools. One Murad interviewed by the FBI admitted to a plot to fly a hijacked plane into the CIA headquarters. All that during the Clinton Administration. The "signs were all there."
restoringamerica.org
And that is just what I dug up in five minutes, Kumar. Some of the 911 hijackers were here in this country for training at US flight schools for nearly two years. I find it absolutely DISGUSTING that Al Gore, of all people, would DARE insinuate deriliction of duty on the part of the President when the threat posed by Al Qaeda and terrorist threats of flying bombs were known for the better part of a decade and IGNORED.
abcnews.go.com
There were warnings about the possibility of an airborne terrorist attack on U.S. targets as early as 1994, when terrorism expert Marvin Cetron underlined the threat in a report to the Pentagon.
"We saw Osama bin Laden. We spelled it out and we said the United States was very vulnerable," Cetron told ABCNEWS. "You could make a left turn at the Washington Monument and take out the White House. And you could make a right turn and take out the Pentagon."
Cetron said he warned the Pentagon that two events earlier that year — the crash-landing of a small airplane at the White House by an apparently unstable man, and French authorities' storming of a hijacked airliner that Algerian terrorists had planned to fly into the Eiffel Tower — made an airborne terrorist attack on the United States a very real possibility. "We knew that was going happen and we were scared," he told ABCNEWS.
But Cetron said Pentagon officials told him to delete the warning from the report. "I said, 'It's unclassified, everything is available,' and they said, 'We don't want it released because you can't handle a crisis before it becomes a crisis, and no one is going to believe it anyhow,' " Cetron said. Even with the warnings of an airborne attack deleted, the report was not released to the public.
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Four years later, in 1998, U.S. authorities faced a terrorist crisis with the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The United States accused bin Laden of involvement, and Congress and the Clinton administration commissioned two new reports on terrorism.
Both of the reports rang alarm bells, but little was done.
He better take a good long deep breath and realize he has a big piece of guilty pie waiting on his plate as well.
Derek |
