AP: U.S. Foresaw Terror Threats in 1970s

[queeg]

Jan 23, 9:14 PM (ET)
By FRANK BASS and RANDY HERSCHAFT



WASHINGTON (AP) - Nearly three decades before the Sept. 11 attacks, a high-level government panel developed plans to protect the nation against terrorist acts ranging from radiological "dirty bombs" to airline missile attacks, according to declassified documents obtained by The Associated Press.

"Unless governments take basic precautions, we will continue to stand at the edge of an awful abyss," Robert Kupperman, chief scientist for the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, wrote in a 1977 report that summarized nearly five years of work by the Cabinet Committee to Combat Terrorism.

The group was formed in September 1972 by President Nixon after Palestinian commandos slaughtered 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic Games. The committee involved people as diverse as Henry Kissinger to a young Rudolph Giuliani, the once-secret documents show.

-SNIP-

Thousands of pages of heavily blacked out records and memos obtained by the AP from government archives and under the Freedom of Information Act show the task force:

_discussed defending commercial aircraft against being shot down by portable missile systems;

_recommended improved vigilance at potential "soft" targets, such as major holiday events, municipal water supplies, nuclear power plants and electric power facilities;

_supported cracking down on foreigners living in and traveling through the United States, with particular attention to Middle Easterners and Arab-Americans;

_developed plans to protect U.S. diplomats and businessmen working abroad against kidnapping and attack.

Though the CIA routinely updated the committee on potential terrorist threats and plots, task force members learned quickly that intelligence gathering and coordination was a weak spot, just as Bush would discover three decades later.

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full article

[RaleighNCDUer]

1. Wasn't Giuliani one of those who said "We never thougt anyone

would attack us using aircraft as weapons"?

[queeg]

2. More imagination in the 1970's?

Seems to me when the current administration says that they really could not conceive of airplanes being used as bombs there was a disconnect with the rest of reality. At least 2 bestselling thrillers within the 2 years before 2001 had airplanes being flown into the capitol (Dale Brown and Tom Clancy) and now we are told that the Nixon Administration including Rudy Giuliani imagined attacks like these but that in an even more technological age than 1972, "We could never have imagined September 11..." (Condi Rice)

At what point do we just tell the president and his Neo-Con buddies that they just aren't smart enough to be in power.

Documents related to this story are available in PDF format at:

1972threats.pdf

airlines_memo.pdf

nuclear_threat.pdf

rogers_memo_1973.pdf

1975sams.pdf

1976minutes.pdf

1976briefing_memo.pdf

1976airlines.pdf

1977report_excerpt.pdf