U.S. received 52 warnings before 9/11-New York Times

2/10/2005 7:10:00 PM GMT

The New York Times published a report on Thursday revealing that the Federal Aviation Administration, the FAA, received dozens of warnings, months prior to Sept. 11, about possible Al-Qaida attacks on the U.S. airlines, but failed to respond to them.

The New York Times Thursday reported that the information is contained in a previously undisclosed report from the September 11th Commission, which investigated Al Qaeda attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

According to the report, the Federal Aviation Administration received 52 intelligence reports during the period between April and September of 2001 saying that Al Qaeda network is planning to launch attacks on the United States.

The commission report, prepared last August, said that five of those warnings mentioned that Al-Qaida was training some of its members for airline hijacking.

Laura Brown, FAA spokeswoman, said that the agency received intelligence reports from other agencies, and that it passed them on to airlines and airports.

But "we had no specific information about means or methods that would have enabled us to tailor any countermeasures," she added.

She also said the FAA was preparing to tighten security at the time of the attacks.
"We were spending $100 million a year to deploy explosive detection equipment at the airports".

Aviation officials were "lulled into a false sense of security" and "intelligence that indicated a real and growing threat leading up to 9/ll did not stimulate significant increases in security procedures."

"Of the FAA's 105 daily intelligence summaries between April 1, 2001 and Sept. 10, 2001, 52 mentioned Osama bin Laden, al Qaida, or both, "mostly in regard to overseas threats", according to the report published by the New York Times.