As we will show, the feds knew no later than June that an attack from bin Laden was coming. By August it had identified several key co-conspirators, and had one in custody. And two days after the attack Chicago attorney David Schippers - a lifelong Democrat who was chief investigative counsel in the Clinton impeachment - disclosed that he had attempted to warn Attorney General John Ashcroft about the coming attack.

As previously reported in this magazine (*OKC Bombing: Precursor to 9-11?* in our January 28, 2002 issue), Schippers told a Pittsburgh radio audience on September 13th that he had learned from FBI agents in Minnesota and Chicago that a massive terrorist attack had been planned for lower Manhattan. He had developed this information six weeks before the Black Tuesday atrocity. However, Justice Department officials repeatedly spurned Schippers' attempts to provide the information to Ashcroft; one of them reportedly sneered, *We don't start our investigations at the top.* This is a curious objection, given Schippers' credentials and professional standing - and given that Ashcroft himself had warned in June that *Americans are a high-priority target for terrorists.*

Three veteran federal law enforcement agents confirmed to THE NEW AMERICAN that the information provided to Schippers was widely known within the Bureau before September 11th. Because these individuals face possible personal or professional retaliation, they agreed to speak with us on condition of anonymity. Two of them, however, have expressed a willingness to testify before Congress regarding the views they have shared with us.

*I don't buy the idea that we didn't know what was coming,* a former FBI official with extensive counter-terrorism experience commented to THE NEW AMERICAN. *Within 24 hours [of the attack] the Bureau had about 20 people identified, and photos were sent out to the news media. Obviously this information was available in the files and somebody was sitting on it.* This former FBI agent noted that before Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called *Twentieth Hijacker,* was detained in Minneapolis, he had undergone flight instruction in Oklahoma, *where we know that Arab terrorist networks have been established for many years.*

An active federal counter-terrorism investigator told THE NEW AMERICAN that it was well known *all over the Bureau, how these [warnings] were ignored by Washington.... All indications are that this information came from some of [the Bureau's] most experienced guys, people who have devoted their lives to this kind of work. But their warnings were placed in a pile in someone's office in Washington.... In some cases, these field agents predicted, almost precisely, what happened on September 11th. So we were all holding our breath … hoping that the situation would be remedied.*

According to the former FBI agent quoted above, the Bureau could have prevented the Black Tuesday massacre if it had adequately investigated the Middle East connection to the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.* This assessment is supported by another former FBI agent who spoke with this magazine.

*We knew that there were Arab terrorist groups working in Oklahoma during the mid-1990s, but nothing was done about it,* he recalls. *We were constantly getting information about terrorist groups working in the area, and it would be put in what was called a ‘zero file.' Once you sent it in, you were never told to act on it. And you were never told to follow up on it.* Nor were the agents allowed to share that intelligence with state and local police: *We had a dissemination form that we could use in sharing intelligence with local law enforcement. We'd have to get clearance to give the information out. And this led to a favorite saying of administrative people in the Bureau: ‘This is on a need to know basis, and the locals don't need to know.'*

*This is pretty appalling,* comments the first former agent. *The FBI has had access to this information since at least 1997. We're obviously not doing our job. I never expected to see something like this happen in our country, but in a way I wasn't shocked when it did. There's got to be more to this than we can see - high-level people whose careers are at stake, and don't want the truth coming out.... What agenda is someone following? Obviously, people had to know - there had to be people who knew this information was being circulated. People like [the Black Tuesday terrorists] don't just move in and out of the country undetected. If somebody in D.C. is taking this information and burying it - and it's very easy to control things from D.C. - then this problem goes much, much deeper.... It's terrible to think this, but this must have been allowed to happen as part of some other agenda.*

Negligence - or Worse?

When one talks of hidden agendas behind the official story of the Black Tuesday attack, he can expect to be denounced as a *conspiracy theorist.* In fact, President Bush himself condemned such supposedly irresponsible talk during his November 10th address to the UN General Assembly. *We must speak the truth about terror,* insisted the president. *Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th - malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists themselves, away from the guilty.*

The president's denunciation of *conspiracy theorists* was echoed in a January 14th *news analysis* by James Rosen, a Washington correspondent for the McClatchy News Service. *Even in the wake of unspeakable evil, some people can't leave bad enough alone,* groused Rosen. *While the vast majority of Americans accept their government's claim that Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network launched the attacks, a number of boisterous malcontents are peddling alternative explanations.*

It hardly detracts from the guilt of bin Laden and his henchmen to point out that there are plausible *alternative explanations* to the government's account of Black Tuesday - namely, that our conscientious federal law enforcement and security agencies were caught completely off-guard by an attack they could not prevent. There is evidence that the feds knew of bin Laden's impending terrorist strike no later than June. And we know for certain that by August, federal authorities had identified several key co-conspirators, and had one in custody.

On June 23rd, air industry officials received a remarkably detailed warning about a threat from Osama bin Laden's terrorist network to use airliners to attack Americans. Citing a report from the Arabic-language MBC satellite television channel, the AirlineBiz.com news service reported: *In recent years, U.S. citizens have found themselves the target of several attacks by the terror network of Osama bin Laden. One such attack involved a plot to destroy 12 U.S. airliners in Asia. A jury found Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the alleged mastermind of the scheme, and two other defendants, guilty on all counts. Yousef is also the alleged mastermind of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center....*

The scheme to use jetliners as terrorist weapons, called *Project Bojinka,* had been uncovered by police in the Philippines in 1995, and the details had been provided to American law enforcement officials. (See *Could We Have Prevented the Attacks?* in our November 5, 2001 issue.) The significance of bin Laden's threats was not lost upon Bob Monetti, president of the Victims of Pan Am Flight 103, which was destroyed by a terrorist bomb in 1988. *I hope the airlines are watching this situation closely,* declared Monetti. *The airlines are at risk. They need to take all appropriate measures and counter-measures to ensure the safety of their passengers.*

According to the June 23rd AirlineBiz.com report, the Arabic satellite television network MBC claimed that *the next two weeks will witness a big surprise.* An MBC reporter who had met with bin Laden in Afghanistan on June 21st predicted that *a severe blow is expected against U.S. and Israeli interests worldwide. There is a major state of mobilization among the Osama bin Laden forces. It seems that there is a race of who will strike first. Will it be the United States or Osama bin Laden?* Despite such detailed advance warnings, bin Laden won that *race.*