Yes, but I'm assuming the UK didn't draft a law in the mid 90s to prevent Islamic attacks on the US.
The fact that their plans would be written in a foreign language (never mind a foreign alphabet) would have been more than adequate to keep it secret from British intelligence.
ps. You do know that we have been having terrorist attacks for almost a century.
>The fact that their plans would be written in a foreign language (never mind a foreign alphabet) would have been more than adequate to keep it secret from British intelligence.
This is one of the stupidest statements I have ever seen.
Why? Given that in 2010, nearly a decade after 9/11 and almost 7 years after the invasion of Iraq, the US military, State Dept, domestic law enforcement agencies and presumably intelligence agencies still have a severe shortage of Arabic-speaking staff, why do you find the statement stupid? The UK before 9/11 was much less focused on terrorism than the US is now. Developing robust foreign language capability in large organizations is very hard. That's why we often fail at it.
Plus, in my experience, Arabic is a difficult language for people who grew up speaking romance languages to learn. Perhaps not as difficult as Japanese, but still much more difficult than German or French.
Of course most police forces and so on will not have speakers available, but the comment said "British intelligence". Every intelligence agency has translators for all major languages, and have for decades (Arabic was an important language in the Cold War almost from the start). And they have translators for minor languages on tap - I bet they could find a Basque, Lapp, or Chukchi speaker if they needed one quicker than most universities.
We may have a stifling bureaucracy and an overstretched military, but at least the British Foreign Office actually has local knowledge and people who speak the language.
You do know that 9/11 was not the first terrorist attack on the US by Islamic extremists, do you?