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| conspiracy theory or no conspiracy |
tropicalstorm |
04/04/07 |
For -various- reasons I believe "THEY" knew it was coming.
ignored warning )
“I saw papers that show US knew al-Qa’ida would attack cities with aeroplanes” Whistleblower the White House wants to silence speaks to The Independent By Andrew Buncombe in Washington
02 April 2004
A former translator for the FBI with top-secret security clearance says she has provided information to the panel investigating the 11 September attacks which prove senior officials knew of al-Qa’ida’s plans to attack the US with aircraft months before the strikes happened.
She said the claim by the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, that there was no such information was “an outrageous lie”.
Sibel Edmonds said she spent more than three hours in a closed session with the commission’s investigators providing information that was circulating within the FBI in the spring and summer of 2001 suggesting that an attack using aircraft was just months away and the terrorists were in place. The Bush administration, meanwhile, has sought to silence her and has obtained a gagging order from a court by citing the rarely used “state secrets privilege”.
She told The Independent yesterday: “I gave [the commission] details of specific investigation files, the specific dates, specific target information, specific managers in charge of the investigation. I gave them everything so that they could go back and follow up. This is not hearsay. These are things that are documented. These things can be established very easily.”
She added: “There was general information about the time-frame, about methods to be used but not specifically about how they would be used and about people being in place and who was ordering these sorts of terror attacks. There were other cities that were mentioned. Major cities with skyscrapers.”
The accusations from Mrs. Edmonds, 33, a Turkish-American who speaks Azerbaijani, Farsi, Turkish and English, will reignite the controversy over whether the administration ignored warnings about al-Qa’ida. That controversy was sparked most recently by Richard Clarke, a former counter-terrorism official, who has accused the administration of ignoring his warnings.
The issue what the administration knew and when is central to the investigation by the 9/11 Commission, which has been hearing testimony in public and private from government officials, intelligence officials and secret sources. Earlier this week, the White House made a U-turn when it said that Ms Rice would appear in public before the commission to answer questions. Mr. Bush and his deputy, Dick Cheney, will also be questioned in a closed-door session.
Mrs. Edmonds, 33, says she gave her evidence to the commission in a specially constructed “secure” room at its offices in Washington on 11 February. She was hired as a translator for the FBI’s Washington field office on 13 September 2001, just two days after the al-Qa’ida attacks. Her job was to translate documents and recordings from FBI wire-taps.
She said it was clear there was sufficient information during the spring and summer of 2001 to indicate terrorists were planning an attack. “Most of what I told the commission 90 per cent of it related to the investigations that I was involved in or just from working in the department. Two hundred translators side by side, you get to see and hear a lot of other things as well.”
“President Bush said they had no specific information about 11 September and that is accurate but only because he said 11 September,” she said. There was, however, general information about the use of airplanes and that an attack was just months away.
To try to refute Mr. Clarke’s accusations, Ms Rice said the administration did take steps to counter al-Qa’ida. But in an opinion piece in The Washington Post on 22 March, Ms Rice wrote: “Despite what some have suggested, we received no intelligence that terrorists were preparing to attack the homeland using airplanes as missiles, though some analysts speculated that terrorists might hijack planes to try and free US-held terrorists.”
Mrs. Edmonds said that by using the word “we”, Ms Rice told an “outrageous lie”. She said: “Rice says ‘we’ not ‘I’. That would include all people from the FBI, the CIA and DIA [Defence Intelligence Agency]. I am saying that is impossible.”
It is impossible at this stage to verify Mrs. Edmonds’ claims. However, some senior US senators testified to her credibility in 2002 when she went public with separate allegations relating to alleged incompetence and corruption within the FBI’s translation department.
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Clarification/Follow-up by tomder55 on 04/06/07 9:25 am:
Let's go with the conspiracy angle for a bit. Let's suppose that Bush had invaded Afghanistan as a preventive measure ;a war of choice to remove the Taliban and to hunt al-Qaeda . Then because of this action no terrorist attack had occured in the U.S. . Would the U.S. had been justified to take this action ? or would it be that Bush concocted the threat to justify invading a nation that doesn't pose a threat to us ?
I think this 9-11 theory is as plausable as the notion that Roosevelt let most of the fleet get destroyed to justify entering WWII. Yes ,with hindsight you can piece together the random bits of information together and say "it is obvious, given the evidence, that an attack was coming" ;but there is nothing that leads me to believe that it was in the President's interest for America to take such a devistating blow. Clarification/Follow-up by tropicalstorm on 04/06/07 11:33 am:
yeah the more I hear the conspiracy theories and the crazier they get the less I believe them but I do believe the government did have an idea something as big as 9/11 was going to happen someday
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