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9/11 Report ID's Security Failures

FAA Had 52 Warnings Before Attacks

POSTED: 6:56 am EST February 10, 2005
UPDATED: 12:13 pm EST February 10, 2005

New information has been released about the warnings that came to U.S. aviation officials before the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City.

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NewsCenter 5's Gail Huff reported that a New York Times story about a previously undisclosed 9/11 Commission Report detailed five months of warnings the Federal Aviation Administration received before the attacks.

According to the report, the FAA received 52 intelligence reports warning about al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden before the attacks. Some specificially discussed airline hijackings and suicide operations. In 2001, the FAA distributed a CD-ROM presentation to airlines and airports, citing the possibility of a suicide hijacking.

According to last August's 9/11 Commission report, "intelligence that indicated a real and growing threat leading up to 9/11 did not stimulate significant increases in security procedures."

Regarding the warnings as mainly an overseas threat, the FAA didn't see the need to increase the number of air marshals on planes. One aviation official told the 9/11 Commission that airlines didn't want to lose money by having to provide air marshals with free seats. The report also questioned why the FAA didn't toughen airport screening procedures for weapons.

"We had a lot of information about threats, but we didn't have specific information about means or methods that would have enabled us to tailor our counter-measures," FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown said Wednesday.

Brown said efforts were made to change bomb detection units, but it was the planes themselves that were used as explosives.

Certain declassified sections of the 9/11 report were recently made public when they were released to the National Archives.


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