"This is not hearsay. These are things that are documented."

I'm doing some research, reading this diary about the french infiltration of Al Qaida pre-911 - and the subsequent warnings, and I read this:

"As Keith Olbermann has said:

"It appears now that the operative word in the phrase 'We could not have anticipated' was the word 'we.' "

Keith is wrong, of course. Not even "we" was operative.

From the April 2004 front page article about Sibel in The Independent:

But in an opinion piece in The Washington Post on 22 March, Ms Rice wrote: "Despite what some have suggested, we received no intelligence that terrorists were preparing to attack the homeland using airplanes as missiles, though some analysts speculated that terrorists might hijack planes to try and free US-held terrorists."

Mrs Edmonds said that by using the word "we", Ms Rice told an "outrageous lie". She said: "Rice says 'we' not 'I'. That would include all people from the FBI, the CIA and DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency]. I am saying that is impossible."

That aside, below is the relevant info from the article. This is the info that superscotthorton asked Michael Scheuer, head of the effing OBL unit at the CIA, about a few weeks ago, and Scheuer still says he'd never heard it - 6 effing years later - despite it being on the front page of the Indy, and in Sibel's August 04 letter to Kean and the commission, and of course, here at this blog, which he should read daily.

Sibel Edmonds said she spent more than three hours in a closed session with the commission's investigators providing information that was circulating within the FBI in the spring and summer of 2001 suggesting that an attack using aircraft was just months away and the terrorists were in place. The Bush administration, meanwhile, has sought to silence her and has obtained a gagging order from a court by citing the rarely used "state secrets privilege".

She told The Independent yesterday: "I gave [the commission] details of specific investigation files, the specific dates, specific target information, specific managers in charge of the investigation. I gave them everything so that they could go back and follow up. This is not hearsay. These are things that are documented. These things can be established very easily."

She added: "There was general information about the time-frame, about methods to be used but not specifically about how they would be used and about people being in place and who was ordering these sorts of terror attacks. There were other cities that were mentioned. Major cities with skyscrapers."

Here it is from Sibel's letter:

(We) received information that: 1) Osama bin Laden was planning a major terrorist attack in the United States targeting four or five major cities; 2) the attack was going to involve airplanes; 3) some of the individuals in charge of carrying out this attack were already in place in the United States; 4) the attack was going to be carried out soon, in a few months.