'Skyscraper' Suicide-Hijack Warnings Came During Clinton Era

"Well before the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. intelligence officials warned that terrorists linked to Osama bin Laden planned a 'spectacular attack' that involved kamikaze pilots crashing U.S. airliners into targets that included the Pentagon, the U.S. Capitol and significant U.S. 'skyscrapers.'"

That could be the lead sentence from one of today's news reports touting the CIA's Aug. 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing as a warning President Bush should have heeded to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks.

But in fact, those warnings, which are actually far more specific than anything contained in the Bush PDB, were delivered during the Clinton administration - via intelligence that was so well known it was covered in newspaper reports at the time.

In a June 1997 report in the Dayton Daily News, for instance, CIA Director George Tenet warned that Islamic terrorists had already succeeded in "expanding their networks, improving their skills and sophistication, and [were] working to stage more spectacular attacks."

One-time FBI counterrorism chief John O'Neill, who was killed in the World Trade Center attacks, was quoted in the same pre-9/11 report as saying that terrorists already in our midst "have the capability and the support infrastructure in the United States to attack us here if they choose to."

What's more, by the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, U.S. intelligence had known for years that al-Qaida wanted to train kamikaze pilots to carry out 9/11-style attacks against buildings like the World Trade Center.

Reports published just two months after 9/11 explained that the blueprint for 9/11 attacks was uncovered during 1995 interrogations of Abdul Hakim Murad, partner of convicted 1993 World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef.

According to the Washington Post, Yousef's plot to plant bombs on 12 commercial U.S. airliners and blow them up over the Pacific "called for a second, perhaps even more ambitious phase, as interrogators discovered when they pressed Murad about his pilot's license.

"All those years in flight school, he confessed, had been in preparation for a suicide mission. He was to buy, rent, or steal – that part of the plan had not yet been worked out – a small plane, preferably a Cessna, fill it with explosives and crash it into CIA headquarters."

The Post continued:

"There were secondary targets the terrorist cell wanted hit: Congress, the White House, the Pentagon and possibly some skyscrapers. The only problem, Murad complained, was that they needed more trained pilots to carry out the plot."

What's clear is that under Osama bin Laden's direction, the two plots were merged, and Murad's Cessna suicide mission evolved into the hijacking of four commercial U.S. airliners. In fact, the 1997 Daily News report says that while Murad attended U.S. flight schools, he "studied 747s."

The above information is far more specific than anything reportedly revealed in the Aug. 6, 2001 briefing given to President Bush - and was available to President Clinton via published reports [if not through the intelligence briefings he routinely avoided] for most of his second term in office.

As the media point fingers at Bush, however, no one seems particularly interested in asking Mr. Clinton why he ignored for years relatively clear warnings that 9/11 was coming.

Editor's note: