A number of senior officials in the United States government and military gave warnings in the week before September 11, 2001, or early on the morning of September 11, that seem to have predicted the 9/11 attacks with chilling accuracy.
These men--as is described below--voiced concerns that Osama bin Laden would carry out an attack in the U.S. in the near future; warned that an al-Qaeda attack that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Americans could happen "at any time"; expressed concern that terrorists would attack the World Trade Center; warned about a "seminal event" occurring in the U.S. in which "hundreds, if not thousands" of Americans would be killed; said that "someone [is] going to attack us in a fashion we did not anticipate"; warned that "something big" was about to happen; and suggested the possibility of an attack taking place that would be equivalent to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, in which over 2,400 Americans died.
The six officials who issued these warnings were Charles Nemfakos, deputy under secretary of the Navy; Tommy Franks, head of the U.S. Central Command; John O'Neill, head of security at the World Trade Center who had previously been a senior FBI agent; Richard Clarke, the White House counterterrorism chief; Kirk Lippold, commander of the USS Cole when it was attacked by terrorists in October 2000; and Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense.
The accuracy of these men's warnings and the fact that the warnings were given so soon before 9/11 certainly appears suspicious. We need to consider, therefore, if the content and timing of the warnings, in relation to the 9/11 attacks, was just a coincidence or the result of something more sinister. Were the men who gave the warnings perhaps just very perceptive? Or did at least some of them know that a major attack was about to take place?
If any of these officials knew in advance that a terrorist attack was going to take place in the U.S. on September 11, the imminent catastrophe would surely have been on their minds in the days leading up to it. They may therefore have been inclined to--perhaps inadvertently--make indirect references to what they knew was about to happen and this could be why they gave warnings that appear to have been prescient of the 9/11 attacks.