Here is an interesting tidbit (H/T JammieWearingFool - an interesting up and coming blog site) on how the CIA was alerted by the French as early as January 2001 (that would be still under Clinton’s administration in essence) regarding Bin Laden’s plans to highjack airplanes in the US - something they French knew early in 2000:
France’s Le Monde newspaper said it had obtained 328 pages of classified documents on Osama bin Laden’s terror network that were drawn up by the French foreign intelligence service, the DGSE, between July 2000 and October 2001.
Emphasis mine. The way the government works is material is ‘drawn up’ after it has been analyzed and vetted. This puts the evidence coming out possibly early 2000. Now by coincidence this is the time frame the infamous Richard Clark document was being passed around the NSC for comment - the same document which Sandy Bergler stole from the National Archives and shredded in his office. It would make sense that whatever the French detected not only did they pass it on to Clinton’s CIA, but our CIA probably detected it too! So I would wager the smoking gun Sandy Bergler risked serious jail time to destroy was something having to do with early warnings of a Bin Laden plot to highjack airlines, sourced or confirmed by the French. I see a strong need for an investigation of how this information was processed and distributed within our government and between administrations.
Le Monde reported that the documents included a note dated Jan. 5, 2001, which said al-Qaida had been working on a hijacking plot for months. The intelligence note reported that bin Laden had attended a meeting in Afghanistan in October 2000, where a final decision to carry out the plot was taken, the newspaper said.
…
The newspaper said the DGSE report was passed on to the CIA chief in Paris, as was all information about possible threats to American interests.
Someone needs to ask Condi and Colin if they recall this little matter in their transition briefs.
Posted by AJStrata on Monday, April 16th, 2007 at 9:35
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