But Guiliani the liar does not say 8 years either, he says "UNDER BUSH!"
Right, 9/11 hijackers were in the US training and preparing under Clinton and attacked shortly after with Clinton's airline security procedures. W hadn't had a chance to do anything about it yet. If you don't agree with that it's one thing. To claim that duh, dar, drool, you don't even know what he meant is just stupid
Bullshit!
US air traffic authority had multiple Bin Laden hijack warnings before 9/11
By Patrick Martin
11 February 2005
According to former officials of the 9/11 commission who spoke with the
Times, the Bush administration finally approved both the classified report on the FAA’s performance before September 11 and a declassified 120-page version two weeks ago, delivering them to the National Archives. The declassified version is heavily “redacted,” with significant passages entirely deleted. Nonetheless, the
Times reported, “the declassified version provides the firmest evidence to date about the warnings that aviation officials received concerning the threat of an attack on airliners and the failure to take steps to deter it.”
The declassified report says that the FAA officials were “lulled into a false sense of security,” and that “intelligence that indicated a real and growing threat leading up to 9/11 did not stimulate significant increases in security procedures,” according to the
Times.
Altogether,
FAA officials received 52 intelligence reports from their own security branch that named bin Laden or Al Qaeda, during the five months before September 11. Either the terrorist leader or his network was mentioned in half of all the intelligence summaries circulated through the agency leadership. Five of these reports discussed Al Qaeda’s ability to conduct hijackings, while two mentioned suicide operations.
It has been previously reported that the FAA issued general warnings to the airline industry in the spring and summer of 2001 about the possibility of hijackings by Islamic terrorists.
One such warning, cited in the 9/11 commission document, cautions US airport administrators that while the FAA still regarded an overseas hijacking as the greater likelihood, if “the intent of the hijacker is not to exchange hostages for prisoners, but to commit suicide in a spectacular explosion, a domestic hijacking would probably be preferable.” This quote refutes once again the statements by Bush administration representatives like Condoleezza Rice, who notoriously declared, in 2002, that no one could have imagined “that they would try to use an airplane as a missile.”
According to the 9/11 commission document, the FAA “had indeed considered the possibility that terrorists would hijack a plane and use it as a weapon.” In 2001 the FAA distributed a CD-ROM presentation to airlines and airports that cited the possibility of a suicide hijacking, the report said, and the FAA conducted briefings during the summer for security officials from 19 of the busiest US airports, specifically warning of the threat posed by bin Laden and his organization. This did not stop the hijackers from successfully boarding airplanes at Boston, Newark and Dulles Airports only months later.
A number of issues are raised by the
Times report on the 9/11 commission document. It vindicates the testimony of Mary Schiavo, former inspector general of the Department of Transportation, who has been a public critic of the FAA and an ally of the September 11 families, who sought to force an independent investigation of the role of the federal government before and during the attacks.
Schiavo said in her statement to the commission, “The notion that these hijackings and terrorism were an unforeseen and unforeseeable risk is an airline and FAA public-relations management myth.” She was opposed by Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta—the only Democrat in the Bush cabinet—who told the commission, “I don’t think we ever thought of an aircraft being used as a missile.”
The document also confirms the testimony of former Bush counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke, who charged that the administration had been grossly negligent about security preparations in relation to US air traffic in the period leading up to September 11. On July 5, 2001, Clarke, Rice, and Andrew Card, White House chief of staff, convened a meeting of domestic agency heads to discuss urgent counterterrorism preparations.
An e-mail message the following day from Clarke to Rice noted that the meeting had agreed on developing “detailed response plans in the event of three to five simultaneous attacks.” Yet neither FAA Administrator Jane Garvey nor Transportation Secretary Mineta were informed of the decisions of this meeting or tasked to carry them out.
The Bush administration initially opposed the formation of the 9/11 commission, only accepting it when the families began a public campaign against the refusal to hold an investigation more than a year after the bloodiest single event on US soil since the Civil War. Even after the formation of the commission, headed by trusted figures in the political establishment, the FAA in particular refused to cooperate. The agency had to be subpoenaed by the commission and directed by the White House to comply before it would deliver records on the responses of air traffic controllers and the radar record of the movement of air defense fighters on September 11.
The latest revelation about the circumstances leading up to the 9/11 attack also suggests the following obvious question, although the
Times does not ask it:
If the FAA had 52 warnings, how many did the CIA, FBI, NSA and Pentagon have?