DAR AL HARB - U.S.A./FRANCE: "WE WARNED THEM" SO SAY THE CHEESE EATING SURRENDER MONKEY'S

French Warned U.S. of Muslim Hijack Scheme, Paper Says
By Carol Eisenberg

French foreign agents who infiltrated Osama bin Laden’s network notified the CIA as early as January 2001 that the group was planning to hijack U.S. airliners, the French newspaper Le Monde said Monday.

But the French spy agency never knew when al-Qaida might strike or anticipated that the group would use planes as weapons of mass destruction.

The newspaper report, purportedly based on 328 pages of classified documents from France’s spy agency, provides nuance but no new revelations about what the U.S. government knew of bin Laden’s intention to attack the U.S. in the months leading up to Sept. 11, 2001, when 19 hijackers commandeered planes and flew them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Based on the French warnings, U.S. intelligence officials “put out general warning information but were unable to do anything more with it because it was nonspecific,” recalled Rand Beers, a former counterterrorism adviser who served on the National Security Council at the time.

It has been well-documented that in the months before 911, U.S. intelligence agencies were deluged with reports, albeit fragmentary and nonspecific ones, that al-Qaida was planning a sensational assault on U.S. interests -- with some of those threat reports related to possible plans to hijack U.S. airliners.

“This corroborates and is consistent with our reports about al-Qaida activities leading up to September 11th,” said Timothy Roemer, a Democratic member of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission that wrote a book-length chronology of what agencies knew and when.

Former CIA Director “George Tenet claimed his hair was on fire going into the summer of 2001 because of all the reporting that was out there,” Roemer said. “It’s also pretty consistent with the problems we found in our intelligence services not sharing information even when they did get it.”

Roemer was referring to evidence of missed opportunities, including the CIA’s failure to share information with the FBI about two terrorists who turned out to be in the country; the FBI’s failure to follow up on a warning in July from a Phoenix agent that Qaida terrorists might be training at U.S. flight schools and the bureau’s failure to grasp the significance of Zacarias Moussaoui, the flight school student arrested in Minnesota and later linked to the 9/11 conspirators. While Roemer declined to talk about “sources and methods,” he said the U.S. “has, and continues to have a good relationship with foreign intelligence services, particularly the British and the French who have had good information coming out of Afghanistan.”

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Pertinent Links:

1) French Warned U.S. of Muslim Hijack Scheme, Paper Says