Early Warnings
Last week, Democrats in Congress pounced on a disclosure that President Bush was cautioned last August — the month before the Sept. 11 terror attacks on New York and Washington — that Osama bin Laden might be planning a hijacking. The White House responded that the warnings weren't based on specific intelligence, and Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security adviser, said, "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon, that they would try to use an airplane as a missile."

Actually, somebody did predict something remarkably similar, and nearly two years earlier.

The warnings, drawn mostly from public sources, were included in a 131-page study prepared by the Federal Research Division of the Library of Congress for the National Intelligence Council, which reports to the Central Intelligence Agency. The report has been public for a while; the White House said it learned of it on Friday. With benefit of hindsight, the intelligence seems chillingly prescient. Excerpts follow.

The report, completed during the Clinton administration, was titled "The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why?"

The purpose . . . is to focus attention on the types of individuals and groups that are prone to terrorism in an effort to help improve U.S. counterterrorist methods and policies. The emergence of amorphous and largely unknown terrorist individuals and groups operating independently (freelancers) and the new recruitment patterns of some groups, such as recruiting suicide commandos, female and child terrorists, and scientists capable of developing weapons of mass destruction, provide a measure of urgency to increasing our understanding of the psychological and sociological dynamics of terrorist groups and individuals.

When the conventional terrorist groups and individuals of the early 1970's are compared with terrorists of the early 1990's, a trend can be seen: the emergence of religious fundamentalist and new religious groups espousing the rhetoric of mass-destruction terrorism. In the 1990's, groups motivated by religious imperatives, such as Aum Shinrikyo, Hezbollah and Al Qaeda, have grown and proliferated. These groups have a different attitude toward violence — one that is extra-normative and seeks to maximize violence against the perceived enemy, essentially anyone who is not a fundamentalist Muslim or an Aum Shinrikyo member. Their outlook is one that divides the world simplistically into "them" and "us."

Many of these fanatical groups were identified as being well financed, highly educated and exceptionally ruthless:

The new generation of Islamic terrorists . . . are well educated and motivated by their religious ideologies. The religiously motivated terrorists are more dangerous than the politically motivated terrorists because they are the ones most likely to develop and use weapons of mass destruction (W.M.D.) in pursuit of their messianic or apocalyptic visions. The level of intelligence of a terrorist group's leaders may determine the longevity of the group.

The study anticipated the tactics that these new terrorists might employ:

Al Qaeda was singled out as the most likely perpetrator of terrorism. And Mr. bin Laden was cited as "the prototype of a new breed of terrorist — the private entrepreneur who puts modern enterprise at the service of a global terrorist network."

If Iran's mullahs or Iraq's Saddam Hussein decide to use terrorists to attack the continental United States, they would likely turn to bin Laden's Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda is among the Islamic groups recruiting increasingly skilled professionals, such as computer and communications technicians, engineers, pharmacists and physicists, as well as Ukrainian chemists and biologists, Iraqi chemical weapons experts and others capable of helping to develop W.M.D.

Al Qaeda poses the most serious terrorist threat to U.S. security interests, for Al Qaeda's well-trained terrorists are actively engaged in a terrorist jihad against U.S. interests worldwide.

Suggesting that Al Qaeda would retaliate against an American counterterrorism strike the year before, the report listed a range of potential targets. Some of the detail was drawn from statements made by Ramzi Yousef, who was captured in 1995 and convicted for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Al Qaeda's expected retaliation for the U.S. cruise missile attack against Al Qaeda's training facilities in Afghanistan on Aug. 20, 1998, could take several forms of terrorist attack in the nation's capital. Al Qaeda could detonate a Chechen-type building-buster bomb at a federal building. Suicide bomber(s) belonging to Al Qaeda's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and Semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) or the White House. Ramzi Yousef had planned to do this against the C.I.A. headquarters. . . .

Following the August 1998 cruise missile attack, at least one Islamic religious leader called for Clinton's assassination, and another stated that "the time is not far off" for when the White House will be destroyed by a nuclear bomb. A horrendous scenario consonant with Al Qaeda's mind-set would be its use of a nuclear suitcase bomb against any number of targets in the nation's capital.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/19/weekinreview/19WORD.html