Al Queda info provided to US officials by conviceted terrorits in 6/01

[housewolf]

Another Lost Opportunity

A convicted terrorist was providing U.S. officials with very specific information about a terrorist attack three months before 9/11.

WEB EXCLUSIVE
By Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball
Newsweek
Updated: 7:30 p.m. ET April 27, 2005

April 27 - In the spring of 2001, one of the U.S. government’s most valuable terror informants gave the FBI a far more alarming account of Al Qaeda plans to attack inside the United States than has ever been publicly disclosed, according to newly available court documents.


Algerian expatriate Ahmed Ressam, whose sentencing for a Millennium-eve plot to blow up the Los Angeles airport was unexpectedly postponed today, told bureau interrogators nearly four years ago that Al Qaeda commander Abu Zubaydah had been discussing plans to smuggle terrorist operatives and explosives into the country for the purpose of launching a strike on U.S. soil, the documents show.

The fresh documents, released in federal court in Seattle in recent days, shed new light on an issue that dominated last year’s hearings by the September 11 commission: precisely how much did the U.S. government know about Al Qaeda plans to strike inside the country in the summer of 2001 when the attacks on the World Trade Towers and Pentagon were in their final stages?

<snip>

Either way, the multiple channels for Ressam’s warnings did little to change thinking within the FBI or CIA, according to the 9/11 Commission report. Indeed, the report stated that after the PDB : “We have found no indication of any further discussion before September 11 among the President and his top advisers of the possibility of a threat of an Al Qaeda attack in the United States.” The report went on to note that while the threat reporting that summer was unprecedented and alarming (“The System Was Blinking Red,” was the title of that chapter of the commission’s report) most of the reporting “suggested that attacks were planned against targets overseas”—not inside the United States.

<snip>


http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7658468/site/newsweek