[scandium]

Originally Posted by mapuc

It may sound weird, but lets say it's 25th of aug. 2001 and someone in here say to an another in here that Atta is a terrorist and he's gonna do something very terrible.

There is nothing hypothetical about this. This is more or less precisely what happened [and in fact this was what led Moussaoui, the 20th would be hijacker, to be arrested on immigration charges one month before 9/11] so you are dead wrong to presume the warnings were dismissed because people were afraid of the PC police. Here are the facts:

the 858-page report of the congressional inquiry is the fullest official accounting to date of what went wrong with the government’s handling of the 9/11 plot. The picture that emerges from its pages (and from information that didn’t make it between its covers) entirely contradicts the administration’s initial portrayal of how 9/11 happened: that a group of quietly efficient attackers slipped unnoticed into the United States and blended into an anonymous, open society, leaving the authorities no chance to pick up their trail—what Seymour Hersh, citing a former FBI counterintelligence official, has labeled “the superman scenario.” Bush himself encapsulated this view two weeks after the attacks when he said: “These terrorists had burrowed in our country for over two years. They were well organized. They were well planned. They struck in a way that was unimaginable.”

In reality, Hersh quotes a top CIA official as saying, the plotters “violated a fundamental rule of clandestine operations.” Instead of “working independently and maintaining rigid communications security, the terrorists, as late as last summer, apparently mingled openly and had not yet decided which flights to target. The planning for September 11th appears to have been far more ad hoc than was at first assumed.”

Moreover, the hijackers did not fly under the radar of the intelligence agencies. The agencies, it turns out, did in fact manage to spot—and even monitor—several several of the 9/11 hijackers before they carried out the attacks, in some cases long before. Yet for reasons that so far remain a mystery, counterterrorism officials at FBI headquarters and the CIA consistently dropped the ball when it came to apprehending them—sometimes acting in ways that ran counter to standard practice, at times to the bafflement and anger of their colleagues.

It’s a point that was underlined during a revealing exchange that took place at a recent meeting between senior FBI agents and relatives of 9/11 victims. At the meeting, Kristen Breitweiser, a widow of one of the dead, posed a question: “How is it that a few hours after the attacks, the nation is brought to its knees, and miraculously FBI agents showed up at Embry-Riddle flight school in Florida where some of the terrorists trained?”

“We got lucky,” was the reply, according to an account of the meeting by Gail Sheehy in the New York Observer.

Breitweiser then asked how the FBI had known exactly which Portland, Maine ATM machine would turn up a videotape of Mohammed Atta, the terrorist ringleader.

That's only a small teaser from an outstanding expose on the infamous 9/11 report: http://www.inthesetimes.com/comments.php?id=340_0_1_0_C