DaanSpeak wacht op een reactie van Thomas op enkele vragen: Kunnen we die 'sensitive documents' ergens zien en hoe kunnen we weten dat Sharon de opdracht tot het lekken van de documenten heeft gegeven? En nog iets wat niet helemaal duidelijk is: Het rollen van het balletje begon toch door het bekendworden van wat inmiddels bekend staat als The Bombshell Memo, een memo van FBI-agent Coleen Rowley? Zij 'chastises FBI bosses for obstructing the investigation of [de 'twintigste kaper'] Moussaoui, failing to share information and misleading the public about who knew what and when', schrijft Time. Het balletje rolt nog steeds en gleed vandaag over de voorpagina van de NRC. Die opent met de kop: 'CIA kende plegers aanslag 11 september. Zij baseren zich in hun artikel ondermeer op het interessante Newsweek-artikelThe Hijackers We Let Escape, dat gisteren verscheen.

Inmiddels heeft Thomas antwoord gegeven op enkele vragen. Hij schrijft in een email: 'The documents were originally seen by Yvonne Ridley, when she wrote the story for the Sunday Express. Both her sources, and mine, made it clear that Mossad, via French intelligence, had provided alerts prior to 9/11. When Sharon sensed there was a climate in Washington to dismiss original Mossad warnings, he agreed with his own intelligence chiefs that it was time the truth came out. [...] The source for this are intelligence sources. By the nature of who they are, you cannot expect for their names to be published.'

Thomas vervolgt in zijn artikel: 'According to [...] documents shown to the Sunday Express, Mossad was running a round-the-clock surveillance operation on some of the September 11 hijackers. [Auteur Thomas noemt het verder niet in zijn artikel, maar de Israëlische telecombedrijven Amdocs en Comverse moeten hierbij zeker niet over het hoofd worden gezien. We schreven al eerder over deze uitgebreide Israëlische voelsprieten]. The details, contained in classified papers, reveal that a senior Mossad agent tipped off his counterpart in America's Central Intelligence Agency that a massive terrorist hit was being planned in the US. A handful of the spies had infiltrated the Al-Qaeda organisation while a staggering 120 others, posing as overseas art students, launched  massive undercover operations throughout America.

Other documents leaked to the Sunday Express from several intelligence agencies including the Drugs Enforcement Agency show that two Mossad cells of six Egyptian and Yemeni born Jews, trained at a secret base in Israel's Negev Desert on how to penetrate Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network.

One team flew to Amsterdam and were under the control of Mossad's Europe Station. This is based at Schipol Airport within the El Al complex. They later made contact in Hamburg with Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker on September 11. The second group flew directly to New York. From there they travelled South to Florida and infiltrated the Bin laden organisation. In August last year, the Mossad team in Europe flew with some of the Hamburg terrorists into Boston, a month before the attack on the twin towers.

By then the Mossad team had established an attack on the US was "imminent". It reported this to its Tel Aviv controller through the Israeli Embassy in Washington using a system of secure communications. In early September Mossad Chief Efraim Halevy sent a warning to the CIA of the possibility of such an attack. The warning was noted and acknowledged. But CIA chief George Tenet is understood to have described it as "too non-specific." The FBI was also informed.  Halevy sent a second alert to the CIA that reached Washington on or around September 7.'

Nadeel aan het artikel van Thomas is dat hij vaag blijft over de documenten waarop hij alles baseert. Ook andere bronnen hebben in het artikel geen links. Hij verwacht van de lezer dat die alles ongefundeerd aanneemt. Dat DaanSpeak zijn informatie bij deze toch doorgeeft aan zijn lezers, is vanwege de respectabele staat van dienst van de auteur. Zie daarvoor deze pagina's: a, b en c.

Dan vervolgt zijn artikel met informatie die allang in DaanSpeak heeft gestaan: 'Mossad chiefs insist the Israeli spy agency was tracking Osama Bin-Laden's terrorists in America before September 11 and that that the information was passed on to the CIA on Five separate occasions before the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon. As late as August 24, less than two weeks before the attacks, a Mossad warning, confirmed by German intelligence, BND, said that "terrorists plan to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture." The warning alert was passed to the CIA.

The warning was also passed to MI6. The agency made its own checks and also informed the CIA. Frustrated by its inability to alert the CIA to an impending attack, Mossad arranged on September 1, according to Tel Aviv sources last week, for Russian intelligence to warn Washington "in the strongest possible terms of imminent assaults on airports and government buildings." Mossad's fury at the failure of the US intelligence community to act has been compounded by the revelation that the Bush administration had ordered the FBI Only a Week Before the September attacks to curtail investigations on two of Osama Bin-Laden's close relatives living in the US state of Virginia at the time.'

DaanSpeak
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