Multiple Pre-9/11 Attack Warnings

From Paul Thompson:

Sometimes the stuff I find amazes even me. For instance, this entry which I just wrote up today and haven't put on line yet:

Early September 2001
Phone Call Warning of Big Event in the US in Coming Days Is Just One of Many Such Warnings Recorded by CIA
A few days before 9/11, an Islamic radical named Mamdouh Habib is in Pakistan and calls his wife in Australia. Her phone is being monitored by Australian intelligence. In the conversation he says that something big is going to happen in the US in the next few days. He is later arrested after 9/11 and is held by the US in the Guantanamo prison before finally being released in 2005. He is released because his captors eventually decide that he didn't have any special foreknowledge or involvement in the 9/11 plot. He had been in Afghanistan training camps and had picked up the information there. The New York Times paraphrases an Australian official, "Just about everyone in Kandahar (Afghanistan) and the Qaeda camps knew that something big was coming, he said. 'There was a buzz.'" (York Times, 1/29/05) Furthermore, according to The Australian, this call "mirrored several other conversations between accused terrorists that were tapped around the same time by the Pakistani Internal Security Department on behalf of the CIA." This was part of what the CIA called a sharp increase in "chatter" intercepted from operatives in terror training camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan in the days just before the attacks, alluding to an imminent big event. (Australian, 2/2/05)

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How could US intelligence possibly not know there was going to be an attack in the US within a matter of days after warnings like that? It seems knowledge of the attack was practically as common as dirt in parts of Afghanistan. US intelligence was listening very closely at the time. I've got a comment elsewhere from a National Security Council staffer pointing out that every phone line in Afghanistan was being tapped, every hotel in Pakistan was being bugged. In examples of just a few other entries I already have up:
- They overheard bin Laden tell his mother in law on the phone on September 9 that something big would be happening in two days.
- They knew from satellite surveillance that the Afghan training camps were moving in the days before the attacks.
- They overheard a message telling al-Qaeda operatives to return to Afghanistan by Sept. 10.
- They overheard a phone call from bin Laden shortly before September 11 contacting an associate in Pakistan, referring to an incident that would take place in the US on, or around 9/11, and then discussing possible repercussions.

The list just goes on and on. Yet nothing was done. Absolutely no warnings were given to airports, airlines, NORAD, the military, or any other first response defenders at all. Security was not stepped up at any likely targets. Top leaders were not warned. The only clear warning that we're absolutely sure of was given to Salman Rushdie, of all people, who wasn't allowed to fly in the US that week because the FAA told his publisher they had "intelligence of something about to happen." The FAA confirmed to the press that Rushdie was in fact warned.

I'd really like to see the usual incompetence theory defenders here defend all this as just more incompetence.

The 9/11 Timeline: http://www.complete911timeline.org

I'm not at all surprised US intelligence had these warnings. But what surprises me is how many people STILL deny that there was no government complicity in the 9/11 attacks.