Was there any kind of signal that something big would happen in the months prior the 9/11 terrorist attacks?

by albertogw

Any credible threads or ultimatums? Any odd noticeable increase or decrease in islamic terrorist activity?

The only thing I've found into explaining the motivation for the attack before it happened, are the fatwas from Al-Qaeda from 1996 and 1998, but they are really just a denouncement of the US and a call to arms for muslims.

kelsnuggets

This requires a deep and in-depth analysis. The "short" answer is yes, but with a caveat.

Yes, because....

  • because there were most certainly signs beyond just the Fatwas that you mention issued by Al-Qaeda. In 1998, American journalist John Miller traveled to Afghanistan and interviewed Osama bin Laden in a secret bunker. You can read the entire interview here, but I will pull out a few quotes. It's a fascinating read in hindsight, when you know what will happen on 9/11. "We do not differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians; they are all targets in this fatwa." "Every day the Americans delay their departure (from Saudi Arabia), they will receive a new corpse." "The war has just started."
  • Two months after this interview, there were the bombings of the United States embassies on August 7, 1998 in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Two years after this was the bombing of the USS Cole off the coast of Aden, Yemen on October 12, 2000. Both of these attacks were linked to Al-Qaeda by the FBI after extensive investigations in the Middle East and indicated an increasing threat to American assets, at least overseas. It also indicated that Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda were continuing to up the ante on their threats.
  • In January of 2000, two people on a CIA watchlist attended a summit in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. They were Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, and through an airport checkpoint, the CIA managed to get copies of their passports and photographs of them at this summit from the Malaysian government. They discovered that Almidhar had been granted a multiple-entry visa into the US, but through what turned out to be one of many breakdowns in communication between the CIA and the FBI, they were never added to a terrorist watchlist and they were allowed to enter the United States at Los Angeles. These two were later hijakers on Flight 77, the second to hit the WTC.
  • President Bush received a confidential briefing on August 6, 2001 titled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US." This states with no uncertainty that the CIA believed that Al-Qaeda, and specifically Bin Laden, were a threat inside American borders during the summer of 2001. As the ex-head of the CIA George Tenet put it: "the system was blinking red."
  • During this same time frame, the US arrested Zacarias Moussaoui in Minnesota. Now known to be one of the potential 9/11 hijackers, his flight instructor reported him to the FBI because he had $9,000 cash for flying lessons, no prior aircraft experience, he had specific concerning questions regarding big jets, and he did not have a desire to learn to land an airplane. The FBI field office in Minnesota and FBI Headquarters went back and forth regarding his status from August 16, 2001 when he was arrested, until he was indicted on terrorism charges on December 11, 2001. His case and how it was handled is now a case study regarding terrorism arrests and processing for the FBI.

Most of my learnings on this topic came from Lawrence Wright's amazingly-well-researched book The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 which details all of the failings in communication between the CIA's special task force, Alec Station, which was dedicated solely to Al-Qaeda, and the FBI's liaisons within it. Lawrence Wright's research looks back as far as the 1950's in Egypt to the beginnings of the Muslim Brotherhood as the basis for 9/11.

Edited to add the caveat: that really no one imagined that they would use commercial jet liners as missiles inside the United States. While there were Fatwas, and warning signs, no one put them together to point to the plot that was truly being hatched.