Feds Ignored Terror Plot Warnings

former translator for the FBI with top-secret security clearance said that senior intelligence officials knew of al Qaeda's plans to attack the U.S. with aircraft months before the 9-11 attacks occurred. She said the claim by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice that no such information existed is "an outrageous lie."

Sibel Edmonds, in an interview published in England's The Independent newspaper but not carried by the corporate media in the U.S., said she spent more than three hours in a closed session with the 9-11 commission and provided investigators with documents that were circulating within the FBI in the summer of 2001 that suggested an attack using aircraft was just months away and the terrorists were in place.

"I gave [the commission] details of specific investigation files, the specific dates, specific target information, specific managers in charge of the investigation. I gave them everything so that they could go back and follow up. This is not hearsay. These are things that are documented. These things can be established very easily," she told The Independent.

"There was general information about the time-frame, about methods to be used but not specifically about how they would be used, and about people being in place and who was ordering these sorts of terror attacks. There were other cities that were mentioned, major cities with skyscrapers."

Edmonds, 33, a Turkish-American who speaks Azerbaijani, Farsi, Turkish, and English, was hired as a translator for the FBI's Washington field office just days after the September 11 attacks. Her job was to translate documents and recording from FBI wire taps. She said it was clear from the documents she read that had already been obtained by the summer of 2001 that there was sufficient information to indicate terrorists were planning an attack with aircraft.

"Most of what I told the commission - 90 percent of it - related to the investigations that I was involved in or just from working in the department. Two hundred translators side by side, you get to see and hear a lot of other things as well," she said.

"President Bush said they had no specific information about 11 September and that is accurate, but only because he said 11 September. There was, however, general information about the use of airplanes and that an attack was just months away," she said.

Middle American News reported in July 2002 that testimony by FBI agents revealed that the agency's fear of being charged with racial profiling had prevented authorities from investigating intelligence information about young Arab men attending flight training schools.

When field agents discovered that Arabs with radical Muslim views and links to terror organizations were enrolled in flight training, they sought permission to conduct more extensive surveillance. But anti-terror officials in Washington turned them down fearing accusations of "racial profiling."