Village Voice: Something Should Have Clicked (9/11 security failure) [View All]

[paulthompson]

This is great. First, James Ridgeway wrote an article in the Village Voice about my 9/11 timeline a couple of days ago:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x499237

Now, a couple of us 9/11 researchers alerted him to a New York Post article that was relevant to the recently declassified PDB for Bush, and voila, nearly instantly, this article appears today. Ridgeway seems to have caught the 9/11 bug, and seems really committed to do lots of reporting on it in the future.


Something Should Have Clicked

A "tourist" with a phony passport took photos of NYC federal building in the summer of 2001: Police let him go.

by James Ridgeway

http://www.villagevoice.com/issues/0416/mondo4.php

WASHINGTON, D.C.—When the 9-11 Commission convenes its two-day public hearing at the New School in Manhattan on May 18, it will be under pressure from the survivor families to find out why the FBI-NYPD Joint Terrorism Task Force was napping when a so-called tourist from the Middle East with a phony passport, phony visa, and non-existent address was breezing around Lower Manhattan, taking pics of cop posts, security cameras, and federal buildings. A federal property police officer got suspicious and detained the man, but the FBI let him go after determining—wrongly, as it turned out—that he was on the up and up.

The by-now-legendary President's Daily Brief of August 6, 2001, apparently refers to this incident, and it reportedly was discussed during that summer in the anti-terrorism law enforcement community on a hush-hush basis. The daily brief, which has been fobbed off as a mostly "historical" document, states in the next to last paragraph: "Nevertheless, FBI information since <1998> indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York."

But there was nothing hush-hush about it. The New York Post ran a story—"Feds Let Terror Spy Wriggle Free: Suspect Was Photographing Security Operations Around Town"—about the incident more than two months before 9-11. (You can see the Post's July 1, 2001 story here.)