washingtonpost.com
Clues Pointed to Changing Terrorist Tactics
Foiled Plots, FBI Data Showed Al Qaeda Groups Might Use Airplanes as Missiles
By Steve Fainaru
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, May 19, 2002; Page A09


NEW YORK -- A broad array of signals -- from foiled plots to FBI field interviews -- suggested for years that al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist groups had considered employing airplanes as missiles and U.S. flight schools as pilot training grounds.

The clues included a 1995 plot to blow up 11 American jetliners over the Pacific Ocean, then crash a light plane into CIA headquarters -- a suicide mission to have been carried out by a Pakistani pilot who had trained at flight schools in North Carolina, Texas and New York.

FBI investigators visited two of the flight schools in 1996 after the plot was uncovered in the Philippines, school operators said. In 1998 and 1999, analysts warned federal officials that terrorists might crash hijacked aircraft into landmarks such as the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. Then, last July, the Italian government closed airspace over Genoa and mounted antiaircraft batteries based on information that Islamic extremists were planning to use an airplane to kill President Bush.

"There's a lot of stuff that was out there," said Stephen Gale, a terrorism specialist at the University of Pennsylvania who presented an analysis warning of airborne attacks to Federal Aviation Administration security officials in 1998. "The question is in what form it was out there, who was presenting and collating the information and what was the context in which the information was presented to the president."

The Bush administration, fending off questions about how it acted on intelligence about terrorism before the Sept. 11 attacks, has asserted that although officials received generalized warnings about hijackings, there was no information indicating terrorists affiliated with Osama bin Laden might use hijacked airplanes as manually guided weapons.

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice said Thursday that an intelligence briefing given to Bush on Aug. 6 mentioned hijacking only "in the traditional sense."

"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," she said.

White House spokesman Ari Fleischer described Sept. 11 as "a new type of attack that had not been foreseen."

Michael E. O'Hanlon, a national security specialist at the Brookings Institution, said he disagreed with the administration's analysis. The 1995 jetliner bombing plot, he said, signaled that "the traditional hijacking M.O. was not going to be repeated by al Qaeda."

The plot was uncovered when a Pakistani national, Abdul Hakim Murad, was discovered mixing a bomb in his Manila apartment. He later confessed to Philippine authorities that he was part of a conspiracy to deploy five-man teams to plant bombs on 11 planes operated by United, Delta and Northwest airlines. The plot had included a dry run in which a small bomb was exploded under a seat on a Philippine Airlines flight to Tokyo, killing a Japanese businessman. It was orchestrated by Ramzi Yousef, who was convicted later of plotting the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Project Bojinka


As part of "Project Bojinka" -- Serbo-Croatian for "loud bang" -- Murad was to crash a light aircraft loaded with explosives into CIA headquarters at Langley, he later told investigators. A U.S. government prosecutor described the entire plot as "one of the most hideous crimes anyone ever conceived" and said if executed to lethal perfection, it would have killed 4,000 people.

Murad's arrest came 13 days after four members of an Algerian terrorist group linked to al Qaeda hijacked an Air France flight as it prepared to leave Algeria for Paris. French authorities learned that the men planned to crash the plane into a Paris landmark such as the Eiffel Tower; commandos killed the hijackers during a refueling stop before the suicide plot could be carried out.

Asked whether the Aug. 6 intelligence briefing with the president had included references to the CIA plot or the Eiffel Tower, Rice said: "We knew that they had thought about hijackings in a number of places. But, again, the information . . . was not about those activities."

Two senior counterterrorism officials said U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies had more warning than Rice acknowledged that al Qaeda might use a hijacked aircraft as a weapon. One warning may have come as recently as last July during security precautions for the Genoa summit of the Group of Eight industrial powers, which Bush attended.

According to Italy's Deputy Prime Minister Gianfranco Fini, in remarks reported by the Italian news agency ANSA, Italy told the Americans "that there was the possibility of an attack against the U.S. president using an airliner. That's why we closed the airspace and installed the [antiaircraft] missiles" around the meeting site.

One knowledgeable U.S. official said there was strong intelligence suggesting al Qaeda's intention to attack Bush at the summit. There were ambiguous reports, the official said, suggesting the possibility of attack by air or sea.

Because of the threat from jetliners, it has been standard operating procedure since the Atlanta Olympics in 1996 to create "no-fly zones" for high-profile occasions designated "National Security Special Events." Others included the 50th anniversary summits of NATO and the United Nations. The no-fly zones are areas of restricted airspace defended by fighter jets and antiaircraft batteries.

Protection From Meteorites


In the spring of 1998, Gale, of the University of Pennsylvania, was part of a three-man group that presented a terrorism analysis to FAA security officials. The analysis, he said, described two scenarios: one in which terrorists crashed planes into nuclear power plants along the East Coast; another in which they commandeered Federal Express cargo planes and crashed them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the White House, the Capitol, the Sears Tower and the Golden Gate Bridge. Gale said the analysis was based in part on the Eiffel Tower threat and a small plane that had crashed onto the White House grounds in 1994.

"You can't protect yourself from meteorites," an FAA official responded, according to Gale. "He was saying it's too hard."

The next year, a report prepared for the National Intelligence Council, an interagency group, by the Federal Research Division, which is part of the Library of Congress, was titled "The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why?" In a section on new terrorist threats, the report noted the Philippines plot and warned: "Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al-Qaida's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or the White House."

Flight Schools Probed


The furor over the government's handling of intelligence before the Sept. 11 attacks was touched off by disclosure of a classified July memo in which a Phoenix FBI agent warned that bin Laden might be using U.S. aviation schools to train terrorists as pilots. Three days after the attacks, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III described reports that several of the hijackers had received flight training in the United States as "news, quite obviously." He added: "If we had understood that to be the case, we would have -- perhaps one could have averted this."

But after Murad's arrest in 1995, FBI agents seized records and conducted interviews at flight schools he attended in New Bern, N.C., and Schenectady, N.Y., instructors at both flight schools told The Washington Post last September.

In addition, in 1998, the FBI visited Airman Flight School of Norman, Okla., to inquire about another al Qaeda operative, Ihab Ali Nawawi. Dale Davis, the flight school's director of operations, told The Post last year that Nawawi received his commercial pilot's license in the early 1990s, then traveled to another school in Oklahoma City to qualify for a rating to fly small business aircraft.

During last year's trial on the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Africa, a witness testified that Nawawi later worked as bin Laden's personal pilot.

Two weeks before the Sept. 11 attacks, the FBI was back to interview Davis and his colleagues about another Airman student, Zacarias Moussaoui, who had taken more than 50 hours of flying lessons before flunking out. Moussaoui later traveled to a flight school in Minnesota, where he aroused suspicions and was arrested. He is being held on charges of conspiring with the 19 hijackers to destroy the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The Egyptian witness in the embassy bombing trial, Essam al Ridi, also attended flight school -- the now-defunct Ed Boardman Aviation School in Fort Worth. Al Ridi testified that in 1993 he bought a used Saber-40 aircraft for $210,000 for bin Laden, who wanted the plane to transport Stinger missiles, then flew it from Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport to Khartoum, Sudan.

Upon his arrival, al Ridi testified, bin Laden threw a dinner for him at one of his guest houses. Present were a number of bin Laden's bodyguards toting AK-47 assault rifles.

"We just had dinner and chatted and . . . I gave the keys of the airplane to Osama bin Laden," al Ridi testified.

Staff writer Barton Gellman and research editor Margot Williams contributed to this report.

Documentation of Plans to Crash Airplanes Into Buildings that Bush and Condi Claim They Knew Nothing About: They Lie, Assassinate People's Characters Instead of Refuting Their Evidence -- and They are, Most Dangerous to the Nation, Incompetent.

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL

First, Let Us Share Damning Evidence Provided by a BuzzFlash Reader:

Dear Buzz:

Thanks for a great website...in addition to your excellent editorial about Condi the liar [LINK], here's an excerpt from a January 2003 USA Today magazine article written by John L. Scherer, entitled "Is Terrorism's Threat Overblown?"

I disagree with his conclusions, however he does refer to several incidents I thought I remembered as well - that terrorists had already attempted to crash planes into buildings & monuments years before 9/11.

Don't the Bushwackers read this sort of thing in their security briefings, or as I did in the papers, or is it that they can't retain anything they don't see on Fox News?

Excerpt:

"Al Qaeda had planned attacks in London, Paris, Marseilles, Strasbourg, Singapore, and Rome, but most of the conspirators were arrested a short time after the Sept. 11 attacks. Meanwhile, no one had hijacked an aircraft in the U.S. using a "real" weapon in almost 15 years, although crashing planes into structures is not new. The Israelis shot down a Libyan jetliner they said was headed for a building in Tel Aviv in the 1980s. A Cessna 150 fell 50 yards short of the White House in September, 1994. French commandos prevented a jumbo jet, hijacked in Algeria by the Armed Islamic Group, from crashing into the Eiffel Tower the following December. In the mid 1990s, terrorist Ramzi Yousef plotted to have his friend Abdul Hakim Murad fly a light plane loaded with chemical weapons into CIA headquarters at Langley, Va., or to have him spray the area with poison gas. A Turkish hijacker attempted to crash an aircraft into the tomb of former Pres. Kemal Ataturk in Ankara in 1998. With enhanced security on at airports and passengers on commercial airliners who will react to any danger, this threat has diminished." [LINK]

BuzzFlash Note: But even more damaging is this 2002 CBS News Article, " Report Warned Of Suicide Hijackings" [LINK]

"(CBS) Two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, an analysis prepared for U.S. intelligence warned that Osama bin Laden's terrorists could hijack an airliner and fly it into government buildings like the Pentagon.

"Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al Qaeda's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or the White House," the September 1999 report said.

The Bush administration has asserted that no one in government had envisioned a suicide hijacking before it happened.

"Had I known that the enemy was going to use airplanes to kill on that fateful morning, I would have done everything in my power to protect the American people," Mr. Bush told U.S. Air Force Academy football team members who were visiting the White House on Friday. It was his first public comment on revelations this week that he was told Aug. 6 that bin Laden wanted to hijack planes.

CBS Senior White House Correspondent Bob Schieffer reports that other top officials were less forthcoming. The usually talkative Attorney General John Ashcroft just stared when reporters asked him about the terror warnings. FBI Chief Robert Mueller also refused to comment.

White House press secretary Ari Fleischer said the administration was aware of the 1999 report prepared by the Library of Congress for the National Intelligence Council, which advises the president and U.S. intelligence on emerging threats. He said the document did not contain direct intelligence pointing toward a specific plot but rather included assessments about how terrorists might strike.

"What it shows is that this information that was out there did not raise enough alarm with anybody," Fleischer acknowledged.

Bush, Powell and Rumsfeld have been using carefully crafted "legal" statements this week in which they say that had they known planes were to be hijacked and flown SPECIFICALLY into the World Trade Center Towers and the Pentagon, they would have taken steps to prevent the incidents. It takes an idiot not to see that they are "protecting" themselves from being charged with lying. Lying about what? Claiming that they were not warned about potential imminent hijackings and use of planes as assault weapons in general.

They knew and did nothing.

This is not speculation. This is fact.

They are condemned by their own words.

We don't need a 9/11 Commission.

The truth about the Bush Administration ignoring blatant warnings about an imminent Al-Qaeda attack are already on the record.

To boot, a phalanx of whistleblowers have outed their lies. The only response that the Bush administration has had to the truth is to attack the characters of the truth tellers. They can't refute what these patriots have to say. Because most of it, except for a few salacious details, is on the record. The Bush Cartel has revealed most of the condemning facts, inadvertently, by itself.

One more time then. In August of 2001, after putting the fight against terrorism on the back burner, after being warned by Clinton experts about the danger of Osama, after ignoring the Hart-Rudman report on the urgent need to combat terrorism[LINK], after delegating the formulation of a plan to fight terror to Dick Cheney (who was too busy conducting his secret energy meetings with energy company execs and lobbyists, meetings that included an examination of Iraq's oil fields), after receiving a briefing that alerted him to likely imminent Al-Qaeda hijackings, Bush did nothing: NOTHING! [LINK],

Now, the 9/11 Commission is poised to let Rice get off without testifying publicly under oath -- and the Chairman of the 9/11 Commission can only review the records of the infamous August 2001 warning to Bush while under guard at the White House -- and he must leave any notes about the meeting in a safe at the White House!

BuzzFlash prediction: The 9/11 Commission will end up concluding that BOTH Clinton and Bush could have done more, because the panel is split between Republicans and Democrats and that is the only "political" consensus that they will be able to reach. The ferociously partisan character assassination questioning of Richard Clarke by Republican panel members, including the former hack Illinois Governor Jim Thompson, indicates that even so-called "moderate" Republicans aren't going to let the truth and national security get in the way of protecting their boy-king incompetent, George W. Bush.

The first crime was Antonin Scalia leading a Supreme Court coup to steal the 2000 election for George W. Bush; the second crime was the Bush Administration's dereliction of duty in not even TRYING to protect the people of America from 9/11; the third crime is that the 9/11 Commission is going to come up with a "political compromise" in its findings.

BuzzFlash just interviewed John Dean about his new book, "Worse Than Watergate." He argues that the Bush administration is the worst presidency he has seen at stonewalling, lying, and vindictiveness.

John Dean should know. He was Nixon's legal counsel and informed Nixon that there "was a cancer" on his presidency in regards to what Dean was beginning to find out about Watergate at that time.

Now it is worse; the Bush administration is a cancer upon America.

And we are paying for it with our lives: first on 9/11 and now in Iraq.

The truth is before the eyes of the 9/11 Commission. They could stop now and call no further witnesses.

Bush and Dick Cheney failed America.

They failed us because of incompetence, because of their obsession with Iraq.

They failed us because they cannot govern a democracy.

They failed us because in the Bush Cartel, ideology and hubris trump common sense facts and information.

And now the 9/11 Commission is poised to fail us.

It will be another crime against the nation.

A BUZZFLASH EDITORIAL