The United States received warnings about the imminent dangers of hijacked jetliners from a variety of foreign intelligence services, including Afghanistan, Argentina, Britain, Cayman Islands, Egypt, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Jordan, Morocco, and Russia. Additionally, FBI field agents in Minnesota and Arizona were waving red flags about the activities and suspicious behavior of foreign student pilots enrolled in domestic flight schools. Furthermore, wildly abnormal put options on United and American stocks between 6 and 10 September, 2001 should have been an ominous sign to alert analysts.

...specific warnings received by the U.S. government from both foreign intelligence services and, in one case, from Russian President Vladimir Putin, indicating commercial airliners were going to be used by terrorists to attack -- among other things -- the World Trade Center in the week of Sept. 9.

[...]

As reported in the German daily Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung (FAZ) on Sept. 14, the BND warned both the CIA and Israel in June that Middle Eastern terrorists were "planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture."

The Lie Won't Stand

Cetron said he warned the Pentagon that two events earlier that year — the crash-landing of a small airplane at the White House by an apparently unstable man, and French authorities' storming of a hijacked airliner that Algerian terrorists had planned to fly into the Eiffel Tower — made "an airborne terrorist attack on the United States a very real possibility. We knew that was going happen and we were scared," he told ABCNEWS.

But Cetron said Pentagon officials told him to delete the warning from the report. "I said, 'It's unclassified, everything is available,' and they said, 'We don't want it released because you can't handle a crisis before it becomes a crisis, and no one is going to believe it anyhow,' " Cetron said. Even with the warnings of an airborne attack deleted, the report was not released to the public.

Early Warnings Pre-Sept. 11 Cautions Went Unheeded

there were many warnings specifying the type of attack, a general timeframe, and the location as either New York City or the World Trade Center. And this list only includes warnings from foreign governments, and excludes warnings from the US itself: its own communications intercepts, individuals with foreknowledge, suggestions from similar attacks, and the knowledge of American intelligence agents on the track of al-Qaeda. We know that US intelligence was suffering "warning fatigue" from so many notifications of an upcoming al-Qaeda attack. One would think that, based on these warnings, the US would have dramatically increased its security. One would be wrong.

<a href=http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/timeline/main/essaytheytriedtowarnus.html">They tried to warn us

(all bold emphasis mine)

Given the wealth of urgent, credible warnings about the threats posed by hijacked commercial jetliners and their likely targets, how can NORAD and Bush adminstration officials claim that they were caught off-guard by these horrific attacks?

In plain language - they can't.

S