Some mainstream media reports have conflicted with these statements, claiming that the FBI, CIA and Executive Branch[5] knew of the threat of planes being used as missiles as early as 1995, following the foiling of the Bojinka plot.
In September 2002, one year after the 9/11 attacks, The Chicago Sun-Times reported that: The FBI had advance indications of plans to hijack U.S. airliners and use them as weapons, but neither acted on them nor distributed the intelligence to local police agencies.
The book The Terror Timeline includes numerous articles that are often cited to suggest that the method of flying planes into buildings was known by U.S. officials:[6] A 2004 USA Today article, "NORAD had drills of jets as weapons," describes pre-9/11 NORAD drills that suggest they were prepared for such an attack as happened on 9/11: In the two years before the September 11 attacks, the North American Aerospace Defense Command conducted exercises simulating what the White House says was unimaginable at the time: hijacked airliners used as weapons to crash into targets and cause mass casualties.
W. Powel and Lt. Col. Dwane Deskins have stated that when they first were informed about hijacked airliners they thought it was "part of the exercise"[12] (see Global Guardian and the September 11 Attacks).
Despite these reports, the Intelligence Community did not produce any assessments of the likelihood that terrorists would use planes as weapons, and U.S. policymakers apparently remained unaware of this kind of potential threat.
"[13] Former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger testified to the Joint Inquiry: We heard of the idea of planes as weapons, but I don't recall being presented with any specific threat information about an attack of this nature, or highlighting this threat, or indicating it was more likely than any other[14] By September 2001, a part of the Pentagon Renovation Program was completed: blast windows and wall reinforcing system, to significantly diminish the Defense Department headquarters' vulnerability to blast damage from a terrorist attack.
The Times reported on September 18 that investigations were underway into the unusually large numbers of shares in insurance companies and airlines sold off before the attack in the UK, Italy, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, France, and the US.
[15][16] News accounts in the weeks that followed reported a notable pattern of trading in the options of United and American Airlines,[17] as well as Morgan Stanley and other market activity.
[19]In a statement to the 9/11 Commission in 2003, Mindy Kleinberg, of the 9/11 Family Steering Committee, said: Never before on the Chicago Exchange were such large amounts of United and American Airlines options traded.
[23] The company's CEO, Peter Henschel, noting that the investigation was being conducted for a number of U.S.-based clients cooperating with the FBI, said that there was suspicion that criminals had used inside knowledge about the attacks to make and authorize financial transactions during the chaos.
According to Convar's data retrieval expert Richard Wagner, criminal transactions in excess of 100 million dollars could have been made in the hope that their trail would have disappeared as a result of the destruction of the WTC mainframe computers.
[24][25] As reported by the Heute Journal, a news programme by the German ZDF TV channel, by March 2002 Convar had been able to restore several hundred hard drives from the WTC.
[26] However, the 9/11 Commission, in a memorandum entitled "FBI Briefing on Trading" dated October 18, 2003, said that when asked about the media coverage of the hard drive restoration operation, the "assembled [FBI] agents expressed no knowledge of the reported hard-drive recovery effort", further noting that one New York agent argued that it was "extremely unlikely that any hard-drives survived to the extent that they data [sic] be recovered.
This peer-reviewed study, published by the University of Chicago Press, came to the conclusion that an indicator of long put volume was "unusually high which is consistent with informed investors having traded in the option market in advance of the attacks".
[28] In January 2010, a team of Swiss financial experts published evidence for at least thirteen informed trades in which the investors had apparent foreknowledge of the attacks.
"[32]The US administration, CIA and FBI received multiple prior warnings from foreign governments and intelligence services, including France, Germany, the UK, Israel, Jordan, Afghanistan, Egypt, Morocco and Russia.
Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer and Congressman Curt Weldon (R-PA) charged before the Senate Judiciary Committee that Able Danger had identified Mohamed Atta, and three of the other hijackers, prior to 9/11.
[48] Following coverage in the national media of Weldon's claims in August 2005, Thomas Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, former Chair and Vice Chair of the 9/11 Commission, issued a statement[49] in which they stated the Commission had been aware of the Able Danger program, and requested and obtained information about it from the Department of Defense (DoD), but none of the information provided had indicated the program had identified Atta or other 9/11 hijackers.
[53][54] Senator Chuck Grassley later wrote that "If the application for the FISA warrant had gone forward, agents would have found information in Moussaoui's belongings that linked him ... to a major financier of the hijacking plot".
[58] FBI agent Robert Wright accused the agency of shutting down his investigation into alleged terrorist-training camps in Chicago and Kansas City in 1998 and described them as "having failed to take seriously the threat of terrorism in the U.S.".
Abolghasem Mesbahi, who claimed he was a former Ministry of Intelligence operative in charge of Iran's espionage operations in Western Europe testified that he was part of a task force that designed contingency plans for unconventional warfare against the United States code-named Shaitan dar Atash/Satan in Flames which included crashing hijacked passenger airliners into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and the White House, and that in the summer of 2001 he received three coded messages telling him to activate the plan.
[69] In February 2012 President Obama's Director of National Intelligence James Clapper testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee that "Iran has harbored al-Qaida leaders, facilitators," and that they have been "under house arrest conditions.
[74] Police found the van and a search revealed $4,700 in cash hidden, along with foreign passports and a boxcutter which aroused suspicions and led to the detention of the occupants.
[76] On March 15, 2002, The Forward claimed that the FBI had concluded that the van's driver, Paul Kurzberg, and his brother Sivan, were indeed Mossad operatives, who were in America "spying on local Arabs".
[88] On December 5, 2007, French authorities filed preliminary charges against Guillaume Dasquié, a reporter for the daily Le Monde, for publishing state secrets related to the 9/11 hijackings.
Dasquié's April 16 article in Le Monde, titled "September 11: the French had long known" reported that the General Directorate of External Security (DGSE), had warned the U.S. of a possible terrorist plot that involved al-Qaeda hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings some eight months before 9/11.
[90] The BBC reports that Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, the Taliban's Foreign Minister, sent the US an advance warning of the attack following a tip-off he received from Tohir Yo'ldosh, the leader of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.
Tohir Yo'ldosh was reported to have been concerned, correctly, as it turned out, that if al-Qaeda was not stopped prior to launching the attacks, the US would retaliate against all of Afghanistan, which would have a negative effect on his movement's efforts.
On September 6, 2001, a freshman from a class of Pakistani immigrants at New Utrecht High School in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, was overheard by his English teacher, Antoinette DiLorenzo, to say that the two World Trade Center towers "won't be standing there next week."