Look at these headlines:

FRENCH INTELLIGENCE AGENCY HEARD
EARLY RUMBLINGS OF A QAEDA PLOT
April 16, 2007 (IHT/AP)

REPORT: FRANCE KNEW OF 9/11 PLOT
April 16, 2007 (JPost/AP)

FRANCE TOLD US BEFORE SEPTEMBER 11
OF AL-QAEDA PLANS: REPORT
April 16, 2007 (France24/AFP)

It looks like the French were on top of the game. But just what did France hear, know, and tell?

Well, actually nothing at all about the 09.11 plot.

International Herald Tribune:

The [Direction générale de la sécurité extérieure, DGSE, the French foreign intelligence service] documents included a Jan. 5, 2001, intelligence report warning that Al Qaeda was at work on a hijacking plot.

Pierre-Antoine Lorenzi, the former chief of staff for the agency's director at the time, said he remembered the note and that it mentioned only the vague outlines of a hijacking plot - nothing that foreshadowed the scale of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

"It wasn't about a specific airline or a specific day; it was not a precise plot," Lorenzi said. "It was a note that said, 'They are preparing a plot to hijack an airplane and they have cited several companies.' "

... He also stressed that officials could not say whether the plot they outlined in January 2001 was an early warning about the attacks to come in September.

At the time, Lorenzi said, officials had heard echoes only about a standard hijacking - they had no idea Al Qaeda planned to fly planes into buildings.

Jerusalem Post:

French intelligence officials apparently had no idea that al-Qaida was plotting to crash hijacked planes into buildings, as what happened in the September 11 attacks.

France24:

In a file dated January 5, 2001, also seen by AFP, the DGSE said it had learned of a plan to hijack a plane bound for the United States from Frankfurt in Germany and take it to Kandahar in Afghanistan.

... But there was no discussion then of flying the plane to the United States to smash it into a building there, which is what Al-Qaeda hijackers did when they seized four planes in September 2001 in attacks that left 3,000 people dead.

All these headlined stories were based on the same article in yesterday's Le Monde.

11 SEPTEMBRE 2001 : LES FRANÇAIS EN SAVAIENT LONG
[SEPTEMBER 11, 2001: THE FRENCH LONG KNEW]
April 16, 2007 (Le Monde)

It is overly imaginative to take "the vague outlines" of a conventional hijacking plot of a Frankfurt-to-America flight on an unspecified airline on an unspecified day and transform this into the unconventional 09.11 highjacking plot of California-bound flights departing from Logan, Newark, and Dulles airports. The above headlines are not simply sensationally imaginative, they deliberately suggest more than the DGSE report supports.

Why?

Well, it is common knowledge in the editorial offices of French newspapers that French intelligence services are prescient, that they possess advance knowledge of all major terrorist attacks, that their warnings go strangely unheeded.

FRANCE AND SAUDIS KNEW OF PLANS TO ATTACK UK

PARIS August 9, 2005 (Guardian) - In a classified report on the Pakistani community in France [parts of which were published in Le Figaro], presented to the French interior ministry in late June, the Renseignements Généraux, or DCRG, France's equivalent of the Special Branch, said Britain "remains threatened by plans decided at the highest level of al Qaida ... They will be put into action by operatives drawing on pro-jihad sympathies within the large Pakistani community in the UK."

There you go. Everything but the subway map mark-up.

Sadly for the victims of terror attacks, French prescience never comes out till after the fact.

PFFT (What is this?): Saw it coming after it came 4 | Rayonnement français 0