Bush is floundering and waffeling about the 9-11 situation, only
due to the fact that the Bases in Islamic nations were built by
Osama and his family. If we were to connect the dots in this
whole 9-11 affair you would fing the Bush family right in the
middle of it, right along with Ronald Regan.
Following:>
FOR THE FIRST TIME SINCE SEPTEMBER 11, THE BUSH administration
is on the defensive about how it handled warnings of possible
hijackings by Osama bin Laden's network. The Bush team claims
the warnings were too vague to have thwarted the attacks on New
York and the Pentagon, but some intelligence experts aren't so
sure.
National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice says no one could
have predicted that hijackers would turn airliners into missiles
and crash them into the World Trade Center and Pentagon. But
Larry Johnson, who was deputy director of the U.S. State
Department's Office of Counter-Terrorism from 1989 to 1993,
calls Rice's statement "ridiculous."
The possibility that terrorists would use aircraft as missiles
is well-documented in court records and police interviews around
the world. "If George W. Bush didn't know enough to ask the
right questions, his advisers should have," said Johnson, now a
partner at BERG Associates, a Washington, D.C., consulting firm,
who does occasional work for the Department of Defense and the
CIA. "These warnings should have triggered hard questions about
the state of airline security, and his advisers should have
followed up to find the answers."
Now, as warnings of potential targets come out almost daily,
Johnson finds especially troubling the 1996 statements of Abdul
Hakim Murad, a Pakistani terrorist affiliated with al Qaeda, who
confessed to police in the Philippines that he intended to use
his American flight training to crash an explosives-laden plane
into CIA headquarters in Virginia. Johnson says he recently
examined Murad's confession, and it includes talk of plots to
blow up U.S. nuclear facilities. He says the parallels between
airline safety, pre September 11, and security at nuclear
facilities in 2002 is chilling.
"So here it is. We have known since 1995 that these are targets
of bin Laden's network. Now, what have we been doing about it?"
he asks. Johnson says the government should have been reviewing
safety and making improvements at nuclear plants.
"Do we know who is working at these plants, what their
backgrounds are? How is the guard force trained? What are their
security standards? Are these plants physically secure? Is the
security coordinated by the federal government or, as in the
case of utilities, is it left up to private industry, like it
was with the airlines?
"These are the questions we should be asking right now," he
adds. "So we don't have to say after an attack, 'Gee, we
couldn't imagine this ever happening.' Because there is no
imagination required." (Officials at the Department of Justice
declined to respond to the questions posed by Johnson.)
Johnson lays much of the blame for the nation's security lapses
on the FBI. "People have seen too many Tom Clancy movies," he
says. "That is not reality. The FBI is not equipped to analyze
intelligence. Their job is to gather information in support of
an ongoing prosecution or in preparation for one."
All this information that has been out there for years should
have been passed on to the CIA, he adds. "They have the people
and the expertise to handle it, but they didn't get it. That
needs to change now, if it already hasn't."
The record supports Johnson's contention. There are the well-
known tips, such as the CIA's briefing to Bush last August that
warned of possible hijackings by Osama bin Laden, and a memo
last July from FBI Special Agent Kenneth Williams documenting
his suspicions regarding numerous Middle Eastern men taking
flight lessons at a school in Arizona. But other, lesser-known
developments have been circulating for years. They include:
* October 2000: Former U.S. Special Forces Sergeant Ali
Mohammed, also known as Abu Mohammed ali Amriki, pleads guilty
to five counts of conspiracy to murder and kidnap U.S. nationals
and government employees in connection with the 1998 U.S.
Embassy bombings in Africa. The former bin Laden lieutenant
testifies that he provided security for a 1994 meeting between
bin Laden and Imad Mugniyah in Sudan. Mugniyah, the security
chief for the Lebanese Hezbollah, discussed upcoming operations
with the al Qaeda leader. Mugniyah is believed to have planned a
series of hijackings, including the 1999 pirating of an Air
India jet, in which the hijackers used knives to take over the
plane. Air India passengers were exchanged for five militants,
including Ahmad Omar Saeed, who is being tried for reporter
Daniel Pearl's kidnapping and murder. Israeli and U.S.
intelligence sources believe that Mugniyah, whose whereabouts
are unknown, may have conspired with Ayman Al-Zawahiri, bin
Laden's top commander, to plan the September 11 attacks.
* September 2000: A defecting Iraqi intelligence officer tells
Iraqi National Congress representatives about Islamists being
trained in hijacking techniques, including the use of one's
hands and knives to take over airliners. The training was
conducted aboard a Boeing 707 parked at Salman Pal, a secret
Iraqi camp. The information has been corroborated, post 9/11, by
Sabah Khalifa Khodada Alami, a former Iraqi captain who was a
military instructor at Salman Pak from 1994 to 1998. Post 9/11,
U.S. intelligence releases an aerial photo of a 707 parked at
Salman Pak.
* September 2000: FBI agents learn that L'Houssaine Kherchtou, a
Moroccan, had been sent to flight school by al Qaeda. His
mission, he tells them, was to learn how to fly crop-dusters. He
describes a meeting between an Egyptian member of the network
and a fellow pilot that took place in 1993 or 1994 in the Sudan.
The Egyptian was briefing the pilot on Western air-traffic-
control procedures.
* June 2000: Mohammed Atta, the alleged 9/11 ringleader, is in
Prague for
the first of two meetings with Colonel Muhammed Khalil Ibrahim
al-Ani. Al-Ani is one of Iraq's most highly decorated
intelligence officers and a reported senior official in the
Department for Special Operations, which specializes in
sabotage, terrorism and assassinations.
* September 1999: The National Intelligence Council prepares a
report for the CIA and the Clinton administration entitled "The
Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist
and Why." In addition to detailing the motives behind
religiously inspired terrorism, the council reported that
suicide bombers belonging to "al Qaeda's Martyrdom Battalion
could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into
the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA or the White House."
* 1999: Ihab Mahammed Ali, an al Qaeda member arrested in
Orlando, Florida, and later named as an unindicted co-
conspirator in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa, is
called before a grand jury. He denies participation in bin
Laden's network and is charged with perjury. The FBI learns that
Ali had obtained flight training at the Airman Flight School in
Norman, Oklahoma. Ali became al Qaeda's first pilot. Accused
September 11 terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui also took flight
lessons at the Airman school.
* 1996: Abdul Hakim Murad, a Pakistani terrorist affiliated with
al Qaeda and Ramzi Yousef, confesses to Filipino police that he
intended to use his American flight training to crash a plane
filled with explosives into the CIA's headquarters in Virginia.
Murad was arrested in Manila in 1995 after accidentally setting
his apartment on fire while making a bomb. He also told
investigators about Yousef's plot to blow up 12 airliners over
the ocean. Yousef was convicted of masterminding the 1993 World
Trade Center bombing. Murad was convicted in New York of
conspiring with Yousef to blow up the airliners.
* 1994: French intelligence thwarts a plan by Algerian Islamic
militants to hijack a plane and crash it into the Eiffel Tower
or blow it up over Paris.
* 1993: Yossef Bodansky, executive director of the U.S. House
Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, and the
author of six books, including Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared
War on America, publishes Target America. In it, Bodansky
details an alleged terror program devised by the Islamic
Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran, in which suicide pilots were
trained to fly small jets, loaded with explosives, into targets.
The program, started in the early 1980s, reportedly zeroed in on
Gulf state palaces and the U.S. Sixth Fleet. A number of
training accidents eventually stalled the program.