One of the oft-repeated mantras of those trying to prop up the official story of 9/11 is that "no one could have foreseen it".
Is that true?
According to MSNBC, "There have been a slew of reports over the past decade of plots to use planes to strike American targets".
In 1994, the government received information that international terrorists "had seriously considered the use of airplanes as a means of carrying out terrorist attacks" (see also this article).
According to the New York Times, "The F.B.I. had been aware for several years that Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network were training pilots in the United States ...."
In 1998, U.S. officials received reports concerning a "Bin Laden plot involving aircraft in the New York and Washington, areas." Officials received reports that al Qaeda was trying to establish an operative cell in the United States and that bin Laden was attempting to recruit a group of five to seven young men from the United States to travel to the Middle East for training in conjunction with his plans to strike U.S. domestic targets. Indeed, the report concluded that "a group of unidentified Arabs planned to fly an explosive-laden plane . . . into the World Trade Center".
A 1999 report for the National Intelligence Council warned that fanatics loyal to bin Laden might try to hijack a jetliner and fly it into the Pentagon..
The Congressional Joint Inquiry into 9/11 discovered that an FBI informant had hosted and rented a room to two hijackers in 2000 and that, when the Inquiry sought to interview the informant, the FBI refused outright, and then hid him in an unknown location, and that a high-level FBI official stated these blocking maneuvers were undertaken under orders from the White House (confirmed here by the Co-Chair of the Joint Inquiry and former Head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Bob Graham).
The Pentagon tracked the hijackers before 9/11.
And the U.S. received warnings from numerous foreign intelligence services about planned attacks, many of them quite detailed.
Indeed, America's closest ally in the Middle East, Israel, apparently tracked the hijackers' every movement prior to the attacks, and may have sent agents to film the attack on the World Trade Centers.
And Saudi intelligence was "actively following" most of the September 11, 2001, plotters "with precision." Saudi Arabia, like Israel, is a very close ally of the U.S.
In January 2001 -- the French intelligence services gave a report to the CIA entitled "Plan to hijack an aircraft by Islamic radicals". Indeed, "foreign agents had infiltrated Osama bin Laden's network and were carefully tracking its moves" prior to 9/11. However, the original story from the leading French newspaper makes it clear that such infiltration went to the highest levels of Al-Qaeda's camps, and included listening to the hijackers' debates about which airlines' planes should be hijacked, and that allied intelligence services also listened into satellite phone conversations between the hijackers (more on phone calls below)
There were extraordinarily high terrorist attack threat levels in the summer of 2001, involving threats of attack within the U.S., and the U.S. government knew there were Al-Qaeda cells within the U.S. (or watch the video here).
The CIA allegedly met with Bin Laden in an American hospital in Dubai in July 2001
In July 2001, a briefing prepared for senior government officials warned of "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 ... (it) will occur with little or no warning.".
