Former U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz said yesterday that he was "startled" by a little-noticed State Department memo that was issued a week ago and warned that Americans "may be the target of a terrorist threat."
The memo, issued just four days before the attacks on New York and Washington, identified the threat as coming from "extremist groups with links to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization."
"I have no idea what intelligence lies behind the warning," Shultz said, "but they put this out because they had some sort of intelligence."
"I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon, that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile."
-- Condoleeza Rice, May 16, 2002 press conference
