Report shatters conventional wisdom about 9/11 [View All]

[UpInArms]

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2004/07/25/MNG6S7SR421.DTL

Washington -- When the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States set to work early last year to prepare the definitive history of the events of Sept. 11, 2001, it seemed that much of the hard work of the so- called 9/11 commission was already done, because so much of the horrifying story seemed to be known.

<snip>

Immediately after Sept. 11 and in the months that followed, the FBI, the CIA and other counterterrorism agencies defended their failure to detect the plot by insisting that the hijackers had gone out of their way to enter the United States legally and to avoid detection in the months preceding the attacks.

<snip>

But in its final report, the commission found that as many as 13 of the hijackers had entered the United States with passports that had been fraudulently altered, using criminal methods previously associated with al Qaeda.

<snip>

"I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center," Condoleezza Rice, Bush's national security adviser, said in May 2002.

But in its investigation, the commission found that an attack described as unimaginable had in fact been imagined, repeatedly. The commission said that several threat reports circulated within the government in the late 1990s raised the explicit possibility of an attack using airliners as missiles.

...more...