Here's the 9/11 Timeline entry I have about his claim:
Late July 2001 (B): David Schippers, noted conservative Chicago lawyer and the House Judiciary Committee's chief investigator in the Clinton impeachment trial, claims two days after 9/11 that he had tried to warn federal authorities about plans to strike buildings in lower Manhattan. Schippers says, "I was trying to get people to listen to me because I had heard that the terrorists had set up a three-pronged attack:" an American airplane, the bombing of a federal building in the heartland and a massive attack in lower Manhattan, He tries contacting Attorney General John Ashcroft, the White House, and even the House managers with whom he had worked, but nobody returns his phone calls. "People thought I was crazy. What I was doing was I was calling everybody I knew telling them that this has happened," he says. "I'm telling you the more I see of the stuff that's coming out, if the FBI had even been awake they would have seen it." He also claims to know of ignored warnings about the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and evidence that Middle Easterners were connected with that attack. (Indianapolis Star, 5/18/02) Other mainstream sources have apparently shied away from Schipper's story, but he has added details in an interview on the partisan Alex Jones Show. He claims that it is FBI agents in Chicago and Minnesota who first contact him and tell him that a terrorist attack is going to occur in lower Manhattan. A group of these agents now want to testify about what they know, but want legal protection from government retribution. (Alex Jones Show, 10/10/01)
As you can see, about the only mainstream source for his claim is the Indianapolis Star, and I checked Lexis Nexus very thoroughly. Here's the link:
http://www.indystar.com/library/topics/opinion/patterson/columns/2002_0518.htmlI think no mainstream source wants to touch it because it's just way too controversial. He also simultaneously gets deep into the Oklahoma bombing and claims there was foreknowledge of that too, and that evidence of a larger conspiracy is being kept hidden.
Why one newspaper then, the Indianapolis Star? My guess is because a prominent Indiana politican, Dan Burton if memory recalls, has been trying to dredge up the Oklahoma bombing again and tie the Iraqis to it. So there has been a lot more in the local media about that there than anywhere else. The timing of the Star article is also key: May 18, 2002. May 15, 2002 was the date of the big "Bush Knew" headline and revelations, and for a few days after that there was a whole rash of interesting stories about 9/11, but the window closed again around May 20 when a slew of new terror alerts got everyone to tow the fearful line again. For instance, Time magazine writes about these new alerts from May 20-24: "Though uncorroborated and vague, the terror alerts were a political godsend for an Administration trying to fend off a bruising bipartisan inquiry into its handling of the terrorist chatter last summer. After the wave of warnings, the Democratic clamor for an investigation into the government's mistakes subsided."
When Schippers says Minnesota FBI agents, my guess is he's talking about the ones involved in the Moussaoui case. One such FBI agent wrote before 9/11 that Moussaoui might "fly something into the World Trade Center." So that fits in with Schippers' claim that they were worried about an attack on lower Manhattan.
When he says Chicago FBI agents, he's probably talking about Robert Wright, John Vincent and others on the Chicago FBI team investigating terrorism finances. Wright in particular has become a whistleblower in a number of cases since 9/11. For instance he claims that days after Bush became Pres, his group of agents were told to "let sleeping dogs lie" in their investigation of rich Saudis funding terrorism. But that's probably just the tip of the iceberg. He's been quoted as saying, "There's more, God there's so much more." Unfortunately, Wright is still an FBI agent and will only say publically as much as the FBI allows him to, which isn't much. He's written a book as well (which he mostly wrote before 9/11), and the FBI won't allow any of it to be published.
It sounds like he and other FBI agents are afraid of going to jail for a long time if they talk about what they know on 9/11.
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