Planes used as missiles? Who knew?
From the Asia Times

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation's own September 11 whistleblower has done it again, this time taking aim at the 9-11 Commission itself.

Sibel Edmonds, an FBI translator who has in effect been silenced by the bureau and the US Justice Department, said in an open letter to commission chairman Thomas Kean that the FBI had suffered from a litany of errors and cover-ups of those errors, which had been reported to the 9-11 Commission by Edmonds and others, yet the commission report "contains zero information regarding these systemic problems that led us to our failure in preventing the [September 11, 2001] terrorist attacks".

"In your report, there are no references to individuals responsible for hindering past and current investigations, or those who are willing to compromise our security and our lives for their career advancement and security," wrote Edmonds, a 33-year-old Turkish-American whose services as a translator were terminated by the FBI after she claimed vast wrongdoing within the bureau's translation unit.

Edmonds' open letter, while skirting around certain issues that she is prohibited by gag orders from revealing, is chilling in its revelations that, contrary to public claims by the administration of President George W Bush, the FBI was in possession months before September 2001 of intelligence that Osama bin Laden's terrorist organization was planning a major attack on the United States, using airplanes as a weapon...

But while Edmonds' letter delivered a cascade of specific allegations, perhaps the most explosive charge she makes concerns information the bureau was said to have received four months prior to September 2001, information warning of the September 11 plan. While both President Bush and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice have repeatedly denied that there was any indication that airplanes would be used as a terror weapon, Edmonds revealed that in April 2001 the bureau had information that bin Laden was "planning a major terrorist attack in the United States targeting four to five major cities"; "the attack was going to involve airplanes"; some of those involved were already "in the United States"; and the attack would be "in a few months". Edmonds states that the information came from "a long-term FBI informant/asset" and that it was sent to the "special agent in charge of counter-terrorism" in Washington. She also charges that after September 11 "the agents and translators were told to 'keep quiet' regarding this issue".