|
|
|
On September 11, one year after the tragic terrorist attacks
on our nation, Evangelist Kenneth Copeland will be at the Jacob
Javits Convention Center in New York with a message of victory
for the Body of Christ By JAMES RISEN WASHINGTON, July 16 — Even as the Sept. 11 hijackers pumped hundreds of thousands of dollars into commercial banks to finance the terrorist operation, they never tripped any of the American banking system's alarms intended to warn federal regulators of the suspicious movement of cash, investigators have said. The hijackers, largely financed by a series of cash infusions sent by a suspected middleman for Al Qaeda in the Persian Gulf region, moved at least $325,000 into about 35 American accounts without any of the banks' issuing reports of suspicious activity to federal regulators. Without any such red flags from the banks, federal financial investigators never scrutinized any of the accounts before Sept. 11, officials said. Some federal investigators said they now believed that the hijackers were careful not to raise suspicions — and not to run afoul of American bank reporting requirements — by keeping many of their initial transactions less than $10,000. The terrorists also apparently avoided transactions that involved large amounts of cash. Banks have to report cash deposits of $10,000 or more to the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network of the Treasury Department. New details on the financing of the attacks became public as the House subcommittee on terrorism and homeland security prepared to release a report on intelligence lapses and abilities before Sept. 11. The panel conducted a separate inquiry from the broader investigation into lapses by intelligence and law enforcement that is being conducted by a joint Congressional committee. The House subcommittee is widely expected to find that the United States needed to focus more intensely on counterterrorism before Sept. 11 and to propose legislation to improve coordination among federal agencies. Financial safeguards also failed to detect the money trail behind the Sept. 11 plot. Even when the hijackers began to receive much larger amounts of money, their transactions did not prompt any of the banks that they were using to file federal reports of suspicious activity. In fact, because they received most of their money through wire transfers of funds directly into commercial bank accounts, the hijackers were able to avoid having to make large cash deposits, and so skirted several important bank reporting requirements, officials said. F.B.I. officials have said that in some cases the hijackers used fake Social Security numbers to open their accounts, but that bank officials never checked or questioned those numbers. If the banks had realized that accounts had been opened with bogus Social Security numbers, they would have been required to file reports of suspicious activity to federal regulators, officials said. The banks' failure to scrutinize the application forms for the accounts let the hijackers gain access to the commercial banking system. None of the banks used by the hijackers filed so-called currency transaction reports, routine filings that banks have to make to the federal government on any cash transaction of $10,000 or more. Banks have to file currency transaction reports even when they have no reason to believe that the transaction is suspicious. But even those reports do not necessarily raise red flags with government investigators. Instead, the government asks commercial banks to monitor patterns of transactions that appear suspicious and gives the banks broad guidelines, rather than fixed standards, on what to look for. None of the banks detected unusual patterns in the hijackers' accounts, and none filed suspicious activity reports with the Treasury Department, the officials said. Beginning in the summer of 2000, Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi, who investigators theorize were two leaders of the 19 hijackers, began to receive a series of wire transfers from the United Arab Emirates. F.B.I. officials said the bureau believed that the transfers were sent by Mustafa Ahmed al-Hisawi, who has been identified as a financial manager for Osama bin Laden. Mr. Hisawi is widely believed to have fled to Pakistan before Sept. 11, but only after receiving unused cash back from the hijackers. In June 2000, Mr. Shehhi received a $4,790 wire transfer in Manhattan from the United Arab Emirates. The next month, a second transfer, for $9,985, was wired from the emirates to a SunTrust bank account in Florida opened jointly by Mr. Atta and Mr. Shehhi. On Aug. 7, 2000, an additional $9,485 was wired from the emirates to that account, a transfer quickly followed by a wire transfer of $19,985 from the emirates to the account on Aug. 30 and a $69,985 wire transfer from the emirates on Sept. 18.
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS WASHINGTON (AP) -- The U.S. government was aware of the threat posed by Osama bin Laden before the Sept. 11 attacks, but didn't have enough specific intelligence to stop the attacks, a State Department official told a congressional panel Thursday. "Basically, we know that bin Laden had the means and the intent to attack Americans, both at home and abroad," Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said in written testimony to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. Armitage spoke on the second day of the committees' public hearings into the Sept. 11 attacks. The committees, who have been meeting together behind closed doors since June, are examining intelligence failures leading up to the attacks and will recommend changes. In a preliminary report presented Wednesday, staff director Eleanor Hill revealed that the government had many more warnings about terrorist threats before Sept. 11, 2001, than had been previously disclosed. A dozen warnings suggested airplanes could be used as weapons. None specifically predicted the Sept. 11 attacks. Armitage said the government was aware of the likelihood of attacks and demanded that Afghanistan's Taliban rulers stop supporting terrorists. The Taliban were harboring bin Laden and his al-Qaida organization. "What we didn't know was at a tactical level," Armitage said. "We did not know exactly what target al-Qaida intended to attack and how and when." Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said lessons from the attack show the need for the United States to take action against Iraq. "When people threaten openly to kill Americans, we should take them very seriously," he said. "That is true of Osama bin Laden and it is true of the regime in Baghdad." In her report and testimony Wednesday, Hill did not say whether the Sept. 11 attacks could have been prevented even if intelligence agencies had responded better to dozens of warnings of possible attacks. Some lawmakers do not have many doubts. "Given the events and signals of the preceding decade, the intelligence community could have and in my judgment should have anticipated an attack on U.S. soil on the scale of 9/11," said Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va. Pressed by Rep. Ray Lahood, R-Ill., about whether agencies had enough information to have prevented the attacks, Hill said it was possible, but there were no guarantees. There are too many questions, she said. Could the plot have been uncovered? What would happen if they had identified some of the hijackers? What if they were able to listen in their conversations? "It's one 'if' after another," Hill said. Her report also noted that during the Clinton administration in August 1999, the intelligence community received information indicating that bin Laden had decided to "target" then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, then-Defense Secretary William Cohen and CIA Director George Tenet. The intelligence community interpreted ``target'' to mean "assassinate," the report said. CIA and FBI officials are expected to appear before the committees Friday. On the Net: By Dana Priest and Dan Eggen U.S. intelligence agencies received many more indications than previously disclosed that Osama bin Laden's terrorist network was planning imminent "spectacular" attacks in the summer of 2001 aimed at inflicting mass casualties, according to the preliminary findings of a joint congressional intelligence panel report released yesterday. Although the panel's staff unearthed no single intelligence report foreshadowing the particulars of the Sept. 11 strikes, the investigators assert that U.S. agencies failed to commit adequate resources and analysis to understanding and apprehending al Qaeda terrorists. They also say that policymakers failed to alert the public to the gravity and immediacy of the threats they were receiving. The report suggests that al Qaeda's fascination with using airplanes as terror weapons was more widely known within intelligence circles than Bush administration officials have acknowledged. While administration officials have previously stressed that much of the intelligence in the months leading up to Sept. 11 was focused on threats overseas, the new report also documents repeated indications that bin Laden and his network were especially interested in carrying out attacks on U.S. soil. In July 2001, for instance, the CIA warned senior government officials that "based on a review of all-source reporting over the last five months, we believe that UBL [bin Laden] will launch a significant terrorist attack against U.S. and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks. The attack will be spectacular and designed to inflict mass casualties against U.S. facilities or interests. Attack preparations have been made. Attack will occur with little or no warning." The report was formally released at the first public hearing of a House-Senate intelligence panel that has been probing failures relating to the Sept. 11 attacks. It immediately revived the debate over whether the government did all that it could to detect and thwart the hijackings, which killed more than 3,000 people at the World Trade Center, at the Pentagon, and in a Pennsylvania field. It also brought new calls for a more in-depth, independent inquiry and for answers about President Bush's actions regarding al Qaeda threats in the months and days leading up to the attacks. The White House refused the panel's request to put on the public record what Bush had been told about bin Laden and possible attacks prior to Sept. 11, according to the committee staff. Bush receives a daily intelligence briefing which included some of the most serious threat reporting. White House spokesman Sean McCormick said last night that "in the interest of protecting the confidentiality of information and advice provided to the president and his senior advisers, White House lawyers asked that references to specific information that was provided to the president be removed from the report." While the staff report strove for a tone of detachment, the testimony of two family members killed in the attacks offered an emotional coda to the hearing. "September 11 was the devastating result of a catalogue of failures on behalf of our government and its agencies," said Kristen Brietweiser, whose husband perished on the 84th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. "Our intelligence agencies suffered an utter collapse in their duties and responsibilities leading up to and on September 11." Representatives of the CIA and the FBI did not testify at yesterday's hearing but afterward offered their standard defense from criticism of their performance, that the congressional report contained only a fraction of all the threat information that the agencies collected in the period before Sept. 11. They said that most of the intelligence was too vague to act on. "This was a small percent of what was coming in," said one CIA official. "What about the trains, cars, bombs, camels . . . there were a lot more dots out there that don't connect to anything." The congressional report covers a time period that includes actions taken during Bill Clinton's presidency as well as the Bush administration. It offers considerable new information about threat intelligence collected prior to Sept. 11, especially in the summer of 2001: • Thirty-three communications were collected by the National Security Agency between May and July indicating a "possible, imminent terrorist attack," the report said. • In May 2001, the CIA learned supporters of bin Laden were planning to infiltrate the United States; that seven were on their way to the United States, Canada and Britain; that his key operatives "were disappearing while others were preparing for martyrdom," and that bin Laden associates "were planning attacks in the United States with explosives." • Two months later, in July 2001, the CIA's counterterrorism center reported that an individual who had recently been in Afghanistan indicated, "Everyone is talking about an impending attack." • On Sept. 11, as the planes struck the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the FBI's Los Angeles field office received search requests for two suspected terrorists, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, known bin Laden associates who were believed to be involving in plotting an attack. At the time, both were on board one of the hijacked aircraft. The report portrays a dramatic concern at senior levels, and in particular at the CIA, that did not, in all cases, reach frontline field personnel. In a Dec. 4, 1998, memo to his deputies, for example, CIA Director George J. Tenet issued guidance "declaring, in effect, war" with bin Laden. "We must now enter a new phase in our effort against bin Laden," Tenet wrote. "We are at war. . . . I want no resources or people spared in this effort, either inside the CIA or the Community." But the panel's staff director, Eleanor Hill, said yesterday that Tenet's fervor did not "reach the level in the field that is critical so [FBI agents] know what their priorities are." Some FBI agents interviewed, in fact, "were not focused on al Qaeda," she said. Likewise, the FBI's analytic unit had been "gutted" by transfers to other units, she noted. FBI and CIA officers and analysts on the frontlines were frequently overwhelmed by the volume of intelligence information they were expected to assess. "There was no massive shift in budget or reassignment" of people to counterterrorism after Tenet's declaration of war, Hill said. Tenet's war memo came at a time of significant threat reporting, some of it quite specific and alarming, according to the report: • In November 1998, bin Laden and senior associates had agreed to allocate reward money for the assassination of four top intelligence agency officers. The bounty for each was $9 million. • In August 1999, the U.S. government learned al Qaeda had targeted for assassination the secretaries of state and defense and the CIA director. • In December 1998, an intelligence assessment concluded that bin Laden "is actively planning against U.S. targets . . . keenly interested in strike the U.S. on its own soil." On the question of whether the intelligence community should have been more alert to the possibility of al Qaeda hijacking planes and flying them into buildings, the report contradicts assertions by national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and others that this was not a tactic under active consideration. Beginning in 1994, the report said, the intelligence agencies received information, some of it from foiled plots or interrogations and court testimony from terrorists, that one tactic being employed by al Qaeda was to use airplanes as flying bombs. Among the new warnings related to airplanes: • The FAA and FBI were told in August 1998 that a group of unidentified Arabs planned to fly an airplane loaded with explosives into the World Trade Center from a foreign country. The FAA dismissed the report as unlikely, while the FBI's New York field office tucked it away in its "bombing repository file." An FBI spokesman said yesterday that the 1998 report "was not ignored, it was thoroughly investigated by numerous agencies" and found to be unrelated to al Qaeda. • A September 1998 report said that al Qaeda might be planning to detonate an explosives-laden aircraft at a U.S. airport. • Later that same year, officials received another report indicating "a bin Laden plot involving aircraft in the New York and Washington, D.C., areas." These specific reports came after authorities disrupted a series of other terrorist plots in the early- to mid-1990s involving airplanes, including a well-publicized 1995 plot in the Philippines to crash airplanes into CIA headquarters and other targets. "While this method of attack had clearly been discussed
in terrorist circles, there was apparently little, if any, effort
by Intelligence Community analysts to produce any strategic assessments
of terrorists using aircraft as weapons." Without this intense
focus, Hill suggested, that tactic was never elevated in importance
above all others. |