U.S. was warned in 1999

Associated Press

WASHINGTON — Two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, an analysis prepared for U.S. intelligence warned that Osama bin Laden’s terrorists could hijack an airliner and fly it into government buildings like the Pentagon.

"Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al-Qaida’s Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency, or the White House," the September 1999 report said.

The Bush administration has asserted that no one in government had envisioned a suicide hijacking before it happened.

White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said the administration was aware of the report prepared by the Library of Congress for the National Intelligence Council, which advises the president and U.S. intelligence on emerging threats. He said the document did not contain direct intelligence pointing toward a specific plot but rather included assessments about how terrorists might strike.

Former CIA Deputy Director John Gannon, who was chairman of the National Intelligence Council when the report was written, said officials long have known a suicide hijacking was a threat.

"If you ask anybody could terrorists convert a plane into a missile, nobody would have ruled that out," he said.

Democrats and some Republicans in Congress raised the volume of their calls to investigate what the government knew before Sept. 11.

"I think we’re going to learn a lot about what the government knew," Sen Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., said during an appearance in New York. She said she was unaware of the report created in 1999 during her husband’s administration.

The September 1999 report, titled "Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why?" described suicide hijacking as one of several possible retribution attacks the al-Qaida might seek for a 1998 U.S. airstrike against bin Laden’s camps in Afghanistan.

The report noted an al-Qaida-linked terrorist first arrested in the Philippines in 1995 and later convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing had suggested such a mission.

"Ramzi Yousef had planned to do this against the CIA headquarters," the report said.

Bush administration officials have repeatedly said no one in government had imagined such an attack.

"I don’t think anybody could have predicted that … they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile," National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice said Thursday.