Before September 11

Signs of Trouble
The calm before the storm of September 11th was not as quiet as it seemed. A flood of reports came into various government agencies warning officials of threats coming over the horizon.

Soon all of the World Trade Center Towers will be laying in burning heap, as well as a side of the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania.

The first attack on the World Trade Center years earlier and the subsequent arrest of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahmem led to an increasing number of reports that Muslim extremists planned to attack American interests.

The threats targeted areas that were close, Canada and the United States, as well as places as far as Yemen, Italy and Israel.

By May 29, 2001 the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was brought in to prevent these overseas attacks. No formal meetings were planned to deal with the domestic threat.

Two days before the 4th of July, a massive operation involving 20 countries was launched to disrupt any attacks planned for the holiday. Counterterrorism Security Group (CSG) headed by Richard Clarke alleges that several U.S. embassy bombings were prevented.

On July 5th, the CSG and the CIA told Clarke that al Qaeda members spoke of “spectacular” attack that would be far different than any one expected or has seen before.

Throughout the rest of the summer more information kept coming in, some tracing back to Usama Bin Ladin, and other threats lead back to the Sheikh being held in New York.

Specific mentions of using aircrafts in hijackings were passed on to the Federal Aviation Administration but little was done to follow the threat.

At the time a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) witness stated that all that could be done was a simple surveillance of some of the hijackers. This contradicts the FBI’s role, along with Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), in the capture of Zacarias Moussaoui who took 747 flying lessons and was a witness in the USS Cole bombing case.

Mistakes that were made by al Qaeda were noted by each individual agency yet “no one looked at the big picture”, said a CIA supervisor. It was inter-agency cooperation that caught Moussaoui.

Still, when it came down to sharing information, unless ordered by top level officials, the agencies did not even volunteer it when the saw the opportunity to help on-going inquiries.

The Flight That Fought Back----Discovery Channel 9:00pm ET