A little background on Bojinka is in order. This is a WAashington
Post Article on Bojinka by none other than Zbig's nephewL
Bust and Boom
Six years before the September 11 attacks, Philippine police took
down an al Qaeda cell that had been plotting, among other things, to
fly explosives-laden planes into the Pentagon
In 1995, Aida Fariscal, a senior inspector for the Philippine
police, took down an al Qaeda cell that had been plotting to fly
explosives-laden planes into the Pentagon -- and possibly some
skyscrapers. (Photo Illustration by Amy Guip)
By Matthew Brzezinski
Sunday, December 30, 2001; Page W09
It was already evening, here on the other side of the international
date line, when the first plane struck the North Tower of the World
Trade Center. Aida Fariscal had gone to bed early on September 11,
only to be awakened by a frantic colleague. "Quick," he
instructed, "turn on your television."
The footage of the hijacked airliner bursting into flame made
Fariscal bolt upright. "Oh my God," she gasped. "Bojinka."
For the retired Philippine policewoman, that word and the nightmare
scenario it evoked had receded into distant memory these past six
years. Sometimes weeks went by without her even thinking about the
terrorist plot she had foiled so long ago. But there it was, after
all this time, unfolding live on her small-screen television. "I
thought, at first," she tells me, "that I was having a bad dream, or
that I was watching a movie." But as the burning towers came
crashing down under their own weight, disbelief turned to anger. "I
still don't understand," she says over a club sandwich, "how it
could have been allowed to happen."
We are having lunch at a chicken rotisserie in a busy Manila
shopping center, not far from the Dona Josefa Apartments, where it
all started, where she -- and the CIA and the FBI -- first heard the
words "Operation Bojinka." Fariscal has insisted on a corner table,
so she can keep an eye on the other patrons and the shoppers beyond
the restaurant's greasy glass partition. Old habits, she explains,
die hard, and, after a life of fighting crime, she always takes
security precautions, especially now that she is off the force, a
widowed grandmother living off a police pension in a small one-
bedroom apartment. Her brother, in fact, is supposed to swing by the
rotisserie -- just to make sure I am who I say I am.
As we speak, she seems bitter, and surprisingly fragile in her hoop
earrings and bright pink lipstick. She is bitter that the generals
in the Philippine high command hogged all the credit for Bojinka,
while all she received was $700 and a free trip to Taiwan. She is
bitter that the Americans apparently didn't take the foiled plot
seriously enough. But most of all, she is angry that, in the end,
her hunch didn't save thousands of lives after all. "I can't get
those images," she says of the World Trade Center wreckage, "out of
my mind."
The call came in shortly after 11 on a Friday night back in January
1995: a routine fire alarm, some smoke spotted on the top floor of a
six-story building just down the street from Manila Police Station
No. 9. Fariscal, the watch commander, peered out of the precinct
house window, but couldn't see any sign of a blaze on Quirino
Avenue. Still, she dispatched Patrolman Ariel Fernandez to check it
out. "Nothing to worry about," he reported when he returned a few
minutes later. "Just some Pakistanis playing with firecrackers."
Fariscal wasn't so sure. She hadn't earned her senior inspector
stripes by sitting down on the job, and had risen in the male-
dominated ranks of the Manila police force by trusting her "female
intuition." And her instinct that night told her something was wrong.
"The pope was coming to the Philippines, we were worried about
security, and on top of that we had just had a big typhoon," she
recalls. The senior inspector decided to walk the 500 yards to the
Dona Josefa Apartments to see for herself. She barely had time to
change out of her civilian clothes, a flower-patterned dress and
sandals, and she didn't think she needed her gun. But just in case,
she ordered Patrolman Fernandez and another officer to tag along as
backup while she picked her way past the uprooted trunks of palm
trees.
The Dona Josefa apartment building was a well-kept but not luxurious
residence, with an open lobby and an airy feel. It was often used
for short-term rentals by Middle Eastern tourists, who came to
Manila's neon-lit Malate nightclub district to get away from the
strict mores back home. It was also a block away from the papal
nunciature, where John Paul II would be staying.
"What's happening here, boss?" Fariscal asked the Dona Josefa
doorman in Tagalog, a native tongue of the Philippines. Two men, he
said, had fled their sixth-floor apartment, pulling on their pants
as they ran in the smoky corridor. "They told me everything was
under control, just some fireworks that accidentally went off."
Fariscal faced a quandary. She couldn't legally enter the apartment
without a search warrant, now that there was no longer an imminent
danger of fire. But she couldn't simply walk away, either. She was
stubborn that way. It was one reason why in 1977, after 17 years as
a homemaker raising four children, she had decided to enroll in the
police academy. "Open it up," she instructed.
Suite 603 was a cluttered one-bedroom bachelor pad. The first thing
Fariscal noticed was four hot plates, still in their packing crates.
Bundles of cotton lay scattered around the room, soaked in some sort
of pungent beige solution, next to clear plastic containers of
various sizes and shapes bearing the stamp of German and Pakistani
chemical manufacturers. And loops of electrical wiring: green,
yellow, blue and red.
Just then, the phone rang, causing Fariscal to jump with
fright. "I'd just seen a movie with Sylvester Stallone where the
telephone was booby-trapped," she recalls now. "Everybody out," she
ordered. They scrambled back downstairs, where the doorman appeared
to be in a high state of agitation. "That's one of them," he
whispered. "He's coming back."
Patrolman Fernandez grabbed the suspect. He was young, in his mid-to-
late twenties, Fariscal guessed, and handsome in a rakish sort of
way. He said his name was Ahmed Saeed, that he was a commercial
pilot, and that he was just on his way to the precinct house to
explain any misunderstanding over the firecracker smoke.
"There's the other one," interrupted the doorman, pointing to a
thin, bearded individual standing outside. Fariscal set off in his
direction. He was calmly talking on his cell phone, smoking a pipe
and watching her. For a brief instant their eyes met. Fariscal had
no idea she was looking at Ramzi Yousef, the man who had tried to
bring down the World Trade Center in 1993.
The sound of gunfire froze Fariscal in her tracks. She had been
wounded a few years back when a bullet ripped through her left arm
and torso to lodge four centimeters from her spine, and the memory
left her skittish. But she whirled around just in time to see
Patrolman Fernandez aiming his service revolver at Saeed's fleeing
back. As the cops gave chase, the fugitive suddenly lurched forward,
sprawling on the pavement; he had tripped over the exposed roots of
a tree toppled by the typhoon. Saeed was back in custody. But his
accomplice had taken advantage of the confusion to melt into the
gathering crowd of street peddlers and gawkers.
Neither Fariscal nor the two officers with her had any handcuffs, so
they improvised with rope from a clothesline and hauled Saeed to his
feet. "I'll give you $2,000 to let me go," he pleaded. Most Manila
police officers don't make that in a year. But Fariscal refused.
Concerned that the suspect would try to bolt again, she radioed the
precinct for a squad car. As usual, none was available. One of the
cops tried to hail down a passing "jeepney," the converted World War
II-vintage U.S. Army Jeeps pressed into service as cheap -- if not
always reliable -- public transportation in Manila. Finally,
Fariscal commandeered a minivan taxi and conscripted two burly
pedestrians to help watch Saeed during the short ride to the
precinct station.
By now, the senior inspector had an inkling that she had stumbled
onto something big. She couldn't know, however, just how big her
discovery would turn out to be; that amid the clutter of the
chemicals and cotton at the Dona Josefa apartment, investigators
would unearth a plan that, with the benefit of hindsight, career CIA
officers today admit looks alarmingly like an early blueprint for
the September 11 attack on America.
All Fariscal knew for the moment was that she had just nabbed some
sort of a terrorist -- and, in the Philippines, that could mean
anything.
At the precinct Saeed signed a handwritten statement, in which --
according to police records -- he again proclaimed his innocence and
claimed to be a simple tourist visiting a friend in the chemicals
import-export business. But, perhaps sensing that the game was up,
he complained to Fariscal that there are "two Satans that must be
destroyed: the pope and America."
The senior inspector had already surmised that Pope John Paul II was
a target of assassination, a suspicion that was borne out when she
returned with the bomb squad to Suite 603 at 2:30 a.m. and found a
photograph of the pontiff tucked into the corner of a bedside
mirror, near a new crucifix, rosary and Bible. There were street
maps of Manila, plotting the papal motorcade's route; two remote-
control brass pipe bombs; and a phone message from a tailor saying
that the cassock Saeed had ordered was ready for a final fitting.
By 4 in the morning the situation was deemed serious enough that the
first generals had started showing up on the scene, and a judge was
soon rousted out of bed to sign a belated search warrant.
"It was obvious they had planned to dress someone up as a priest,
and smuggle the bomb past the Holy Father's security detail,"
Fariscal recalls. But the sheer magnitude of the chemical arsenal
Fariscal found in Suite 603 also made it clear that the conspirators
had other, possibly even more ambitious, targets. The four new hot
plates needed to cook the concoctions made it clear the extremists
were gearing up for mass production.
It took days for the bomb squad to draw up a complete inventory of
the apartment's contents, which included a cornucopia of explosive
ingredients -- sulfuric, picric and nitric acid, pure glycerin,
acetone, sodium trichlorate, nitrobenzoyl, ammonia, silver nitrates,
methanamine and ANFO binary explosive, among others. Funnels,
thermometers, graduated cylinders and beakers, mortars and pestles,
various electronic fusing systems, timers, circuit breakers,
batteries and a box of Rough Rider lubricated condoms rounded out
the home laboratory, which included chemistry reference manuals and
a recipe written in Arabic on how to build powerful liquid bombs.
The formula, part of more than 200 pages of classified Philippine
and U.S. intelligence documents obtained by The Washington Post
Magazine, was chilling in its simplicity. Step One: "Put 0.5g of
sodium hydroxide with 30 ml of warm water. Add to them 3g of picric
acid . . ." Step Six: "By using an eye dropper, very slowly add
sulfuric acid to the liquid until its color is changed to orange,
then to brown . . ." Step Eleven: "Leave the mixture for 12 to 14
hours to allow the acetone peroxide to precipitate, then wash on
filter paper until PH level=7 . . ." Final Step: "Put them in a dark
place to dry."
That dark place turned out to be the cupboard under the apartment's
kitchen sink, where technicians found a foot-long finished bomb with
a Casio wristwatch timer.
"The guys in the bomb squad had never seen an explosive like this
before," says Fariscal. Neither had many U.S. investigators. "The
particularly evil genius of this device was that it was virtually
undetectable by airport security measures," says Vincent
Cannistraro, the former head of the CIA's counterterrorism center.
But what were the targets? And who were the conspirators? A clue to
the identity of the suspects emerged when Fariscal found dozens of
passports in different names hidden in a wall divider. Saeed,
apparently, had many aliases, including Abdul Hakim, student, age
26, Pakistani passport No. C665334, issued in Kuwait. His real name,
investigators would eventually discover, was Abdul Hakim Murad.
According to transcripts from his interrogation, he was the
Pakistani-born son of a crane operator for a Kuwait petroleum
company. He had graduated from high school in Al-Jery, Kuwait,
before attending the Emirates Flying School in Dubai and moving on
to flight schools in Texas, Upstate New York and North Carolina,
where after completing the required 275 hours of flight time, he
received a commercial pilot's license from Coastal Aviation Inc. on
June 8, 1992.
Philippine investigators called in their American counterparts for
help. This was standard operating procedure. According to U.S. and
Philippine officials interviewed for this article, both the CIA
Manila station chief and the resident FBI legal attache were
notified. A team of intelligence agents flew in from Washington.
Murad, as Senior Inspector Fariscal now thought of Saeed, was a
suspect in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. So, it turned out,
was his accomplice at the Dona Josefa Apartments, the thin, bearded
man who had given Fariscal the slip. He had registered under the
name Najy Awaita Haddad, purporting to be a Moroccan national. But
the United States already had a thick file on him, and that was just
one of his 21 known aliases. Sometimes he passed himself off as Paul
Vijay, or Adam Sali or even Dr. Richard Smith. He was in fact Ramzi
Ahmed Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, a
fugitive with a $2 million bounty placed on his head by the U.S.
government.
Fingerprints lifted at the apartment helped give Yousef away; a life
spent assembling bombs had left his fingers burnt and distinctively
deformed from mishaps mixing tricky chemical concoctions. He had
learned his deadly skills, Philippine officials said, in
Afghanistan, at a training camp for Osama bin Laden's followers, and
in turn had taught Murad the art of bomb making in Lahore, Pakistan.
Apparently Murad had not learned his lessons well, for it was his
mistake that set off the fire in the kitchen sink that alerted
Manila police. In his haste to flee Suite 603, Yousef had left
behind many clues. Some, like contact lens solution and a receipt
from a pharmacy, seemed innocuous. But others would give the FBI and
the CIA a chilling preview of what the terrorists had in store for
the United States.
The most damning information was gleaned from Yousef's notebook
computer, and four accompanying diskettes. The data were encrypted
and in Arabic, but Philippine technicians eventually deciphered the
code and translated the texts. One of Yousef's translated documents -
- stamped SECRET by Philippine intelligence -- spells out the
terrorist cell's broad objectives. "All people who support the U.S.
government are our targets in our future plans and that is because
all those people are responsible for their government's actions and
they support the U.S. foreign policy and are satisfied with it," it
declared.
"We will hit all U.S. nuclear targets," the manifesto continued. "If
the U.S. government keeps supporting Israel, then we will continue
to carry out operations inside and outside the United States to
include -- " Here the text terminates ominously.
Already, intelligence officials had gleaned an almost unparalleled
treasure-trove of information on the inner workings of bin Laden's
international terrorist network. Cell members did not appear to even
know one another's real names. Duties were divided and
compartmentalized, and none of the conspirators stayed in the same
place for any length of time. But there were still more frightening
revelations to come.
Another file found on Yousef's computer consisted of a printout of
U.S. airline schedules, which initially baffled investigators. The
file, named Bojinka, listed the travel itineraries of 11 long-haul
flights between Asia and the United States, mostly on United and
American airlines. All the flights had several legs, and were
grouped under five headings bearing code names of accomplices such
as Zyed, Majbos or Obaid. Each accomplice would leave the bombs on
the first leg of the flight, and then eventually return to locations
like Lahore, Pakistan. Obaid, for instance, would fly from Singapore
to Hong Kong on United Flight 80, which continued as United Flight
806 to San Francisco. Under the flight plan, Yousef had
written: "SETTING: 9:30 PM to 10:30 PM. TIMER: 23HR. BOJINKA: 20:30-
21:30 NRT Date 5."
Zyed, on the other hand, would take Northwest Airlines Flight 30
from Manila to Seoul, with continued service to Los
Angeles. "SETTING: 8:30-9:00. TIMER: 10HR. BOJINKA: 19:30-20:00 NRT
Date 4," the accompanying instruction read.
The repeated use of the word "TIMER" concerned investigators, who by
then had made the connection between the dozens of Casio
wristwatches found in Suite 603 and one discovered a few weeks
earlier on a Philippine Airlines flight from the Philippine town of
Cebu to Tokyo's Narita International Airport. The watch had served
to detonate a blast that ripped through the Boeing 747, killing a
Japanese passenger and forcing the plane to make an emergency
landing.
Philippine intelligence put the screws to Murad. In Camp Crame, a
military installation on the outskirts of Manila, he was subjected
for 67 days to what Philippine intelligence reports delicately refer
to as TI, or tactical interrogation. By the time he was handed over
to the Americans, interrogators had extracted everything they
thought they needed to know.
Yousef, Murad confessed, had indeed been responsible for the blast
aboard the Philippine airliner, which was actually a dry run to test
the terrorists' new generation of nitroglycerin explosive, known as
a "Mark II" bomb. Yousef had deposited his device -- lethal liquid
concealed in a contact lens solution bottle with cotton-ball
stabilizing agents and a harmless-looking wristwatch wrapped around
it -- under seat 27F on the Manila-to-Cebu leg of the flight to
Tokyo. He had gotten off in Cebu after setting the watch's timer for
four hours later. The same plan, code-named Operation Bojinka (which
is pronounced Bo-GIN-ka and means "loud bang" in Serbo-Croatian),
was to be repeated on the 11 American commercial jetliners, with the
timing devices synchronized to go off as the planes reached mid-
ocean. U.S. federal prosecutors later estimated that 4,000
passengers would have died had the plot been successful. The
enormity of Bojinka also frightened U.S. officials. "We had never
seen anything that complicated or ambitious before. It was
unparalleled," recalls Vincent Cannistraro, the former CIA
counterterrorism head.
But, Philippine and U.S intelligence officials said, the Bojinka
operation called for a second, perhaps even more ambitious phase, as
interrogators discovered when they pressed Murad about his pilot's
license. All those years in flight school, he confessed, had been in
preparation for a suicide mission. He was to buy, rent, or steal --
that part of the plan had not yet been worked out -- a small plane,
preferably a Cessna, fill it with explosives and crash it into CIA
headquarters.
There were secondary targets the terrorist cell wanted hit:
Congress, the White House, the Pentagon and possibly some
skyscrapers. The only problem, Murad complained, was that they
needed more trained pilots to carry out the plot.
"It's so chilling," says Fariscal, as our meal at the chicken
rotisserie winds down. "Those kamikaze pilots trained in America,
just like Murad." We have talked for four hours and the food has
long grown cold. As she speaks, Fariscal often grows emotional, and
at times when her frustration reaches a fever pitch she lapses into
Tagalog, and I ask her to slow down and translate.
"The FBI knew all about Yousef's plans," she says. "They'd seen the
files, been inside 603. The CIA had access to everything, too.
Look," she adds, fishing in a plastic shopping bag for one of her
most prized possessions, a laminated certificate of merit bearing
the seal of the Central Intelligence Agency. "Awarded to Senior
Inspector Aida D. Fariscal," it reads. "In recognition of your
personal outstanding efforts and cooperation."
"This should have never, ever been allowed to happen," she repeats
angrily. "All those poor people dead."
In her outrage at the biggest U.S. intelligence failure since Pearl
Harbor, Fariscal is not alone in the Manila law enforcement
community. Gen. Avelino "Sonny" Razon, one of the lead investigators
in the Bojinka case, was so shocked at what he saw on September 11
that he jumped on a plane in Cebu, where he was now police chief,
and flew to Manila to convene a hasty press conference. "We told the
Americans about the plans to turn planes into flying bombs as far
back as 1995," he complained to reporters. "Why didn't they pay
attention?"
U.S. officials counter that they did pay attention. FBI spokesman
John E. Collingwood denies that the bureau had advance knowledge of
a plot to turn airliners into flying bombs. "The FBI had no warnings
about any hijack plots. There was a widely publicized 1995
conspiracy in Manila to remotely blow up 11 U.S. airliners over the
Pacific," Collingwood said in a letter to the editor to The Post in
October, "but that was disrupted. And, as is the practice, what was
learned in that investigation was widely disseminated, even
internationally, and thoroughly analyzed by multiple agencies. It
does not connect to the current case."
Not everyone in the American intelligence community, however, is of
the same mind. "There certainly were enough precursors that should
have led analysts to suspect that the U.S could come under domestic
attack," says Cannistraro, the 27-year intelligence veteran who ran
the CIA's counterterrorism division until 1990. "There's no question
about it. We knew about the pilots and suicide plots. Just didn't
put two and two together."
That failure to connect the dots -- or at the very least, monitor
Middle Eastern students at U.S. flight schools -- lies at the heart
of the intelligence breakdown, says Cannistraro. (One indication of
just how politically sensitive this issue has become occurred the
day after Gen. Razon's impromptu Manila press conference. His candid
remarks earned him an official rebuke from President Gloria
Macapagal Arroyo, who has been anxious not to embarrass Washington,
the Philippines' staunchest ally and patron. "I'm sorry," Razon
says, when I call him in Cebu. "I would like to talk to you, and
there is much to say. But the president has forbidden me to speak
publicly on the subject of Bojinka.")
To be fair, it's a big leap from stealing a Cessna to commandeering
a Boeing 767. "It's the imagination that failed us," says a former
senior CIA agent, "not the system." He dismissed the connection to
Bojinka as a "hindsight is cheap" theory.
Yet it is precisely the responsibility of the agency's thousands of
planners and analysts to dream up what may appear as crazy scenarios
in order to find ways to thwart them. And it is unclear what became
of the information gleaned from Operation Bojinka.
"We didn't file it and forget about it," a CIA spokeswoman assures
me. Indeed, shortly after Yousef's liquid bombs were discovered, the
Federal Aviation Administration did begin installing "sniffer"
devices, which can detect explosive chemicals, at major airports
throughout America. But beyond that, there is no evidence of any
other clear response by the intelligence community to the
information gleaned from the foiled plot in the Philippines.
The terrorists, on the other hand, appear to have drawn a number of
invaluable conclusions from their 1995 setback. "Under interrogation
Murad told us several things that should have been of interest to
analysts on the deterrence side," recalls retired Gen. Renato De
Villa, who served as Philippines defense minister at the time of the
raid on Suite 603. First, the extremists saw the 1993 World Trade
Center bombing as a failure and still considered the twin towers a
viable target. And more importantly, the cell seemed to be growing
frustrated with explosives. They were too expensive, unstable and
could give them away.
Though nothing in Murad's confession gave investigators any warning
of hijackings, somewhere along the line, his brothers at arms in al
Qaeda did make the intellectual leap from explosives to jet fuel and
box cutters.
One reason U.S counterterrorism officials may not have been able to
outwit the terrorists, critics charged, is because the entire
intelligence community has become too reliant on technology rather
than human resources. "Where the system breaks down," says a former
staff member of President Clinton's National Security Council who
regularly attended briefings on bin Laden at Langley, "is not at the
hunting and gathering stage" -- the ability to electronically
intercept information. "We are probably tapped into every hotel room
in Pakistan. We can listen in to just about every phone call in
Afghanistan," explains the former NSC staffer. "Where the rubber
hits the pavement is with the analysts. They are a bunch of 24-year-
old recent grads from Middlebury or Dartmouth who have never been to
Pakistan or Afghanistan, don't speak any of the relevant languages,
and seem more knowledgeable about the bar scene in Georgetown. They
just don't compare to the Soviet specialists we used to have. I'm
not surprised they missed it."
With the benefit of hindsight, Murad's confession today sounds
almost prophetic, and as U.S investigators backtrack, piecing
together bits of the puzzle left behind by the hijackers, the
specter of Bojinka looms large. As in the case of the September 11
attacks, authorities in Manila following Suite 603's money trail
found that the deeper they dug, the closer they came to Osama bin
Laden. The critical clue was in Ramzi Yousef's notebook computer. A
list of cell phone numbers on its hard drive led authorities to
stake out another apartment in Manila, this one on Singalong Street.
There they apprehended a third conspirator in Yousef's terrorist
cell, a stocky Afghan by the name of Wali Khan Amin Shah.
Like Yousef, Shah carried many passports under various aliases --
Norwegian, Saudi, Afghan and four Pakistani, all filled with travel
visas and entry stamps from Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Shah
also had mangled hands, and was missing two fingers. Both his legs
were heavily scarred with shrapnel, and he had a large surgical scar
on his stomach.
Shah turned out to be Bojinka's unlikely finance officer. To launder
incoming funds, Shah used bank accounts belonging to his live-in
Filipino girlfriend and a number of other Manila women, one of whom
was an employee at a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet, and others who
were described as bar hostesses. Most of the transfers were
surprisingly small -- $500 or $1,000 handed over at a Wendy's or a
karaoke bar late at night. Under "tactical interrogation" at Camp
Crame, Shah admitted that most of the funds were channeled to Adam
Sali, an alias used by Ramzi Yousef, through a Philippine bank
account belonging to Omar Abu Omar, a Syrian-born man working at a
local Islamic organization known as the International Relations and
Information Center -- run by one Mohammed Jalal Khalifa, Osama bin
Laden's brother-in-law.
Shah's and Murad's confessions led to Yousef's arrest in Pakistan,
and the three suspects were extradited to New York to stand trial.
All three were sentenced to life in prison at a maximum-security
facility in Colorado, and Bojinka was filed in the "win" column,
even as Mohamed Atta and fellow September 11 hijackers were hatching
plans to enroll in flight schools around the country.
That no one seemed to notice the connection, says Cannistraro, is
the great failure.
In 1998, on the eve of the fifth anniversary of the first World
Trade Center bombing, Dale Watson, the FBI's top expert on
international terror, reported to a Senate Judiciary subcommittee
that "although we should not allow ourselves to be lulled into a
false sense of security . . . I believe it is important to note that
in the five years since the Trade Center bombing, no significant act
of foreign-directed terrorism has occurred on American soil."
Three years later, September 11, 2001, the suicide attacks coincided
almost to the day, with another fifth anniversary: the 1996
conviction, in a Manhattan court, of Bojinka's original plotters.
Matthew Brzezinski is the author of Casino Moscow. He will be
fielding questions and comments about this article at 1 p.m.
Wednesday on www.washingtonpost.com/liveonline.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
considering that Bojinka material was --- In cia-
[EMAIL PROTECTED], "Jim Rarey" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/14/politics/14terror.html?
th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print
>
> They still will not admit they knew the full Bojinka plan
including the intended targets. Sandy Berger risked going to prison
to destroy the evidence that President Clinton, others and himself
had knowledge of the plan well before 9/11. JR
>
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------
-------------
>
> September 14, 2005
> F.A.A. Alerted on Qaeda in '98, 9/11 Panel Said
> By ERIC LICHTBLAU
> WASHINGTON, Sept. 13 - American aviation officials were warned as
early as 1998 that Al Qaeda could "seek to hijack a commercial jet
and slam it into a U.S. landmark," according to previously secret
portions of a report prepared last year by the Sept. 11 commission.
The officials also realized months before the Sept. 11 attacks that
two of the three airports used in the hijackings had suffered
repeated security lapses.
>
> Federal Aviation Administration officials were also warned in 2001
in a report prepared for the agency that airport screeners' ability
to detect possible weapons had "declined significantly" in recent
years, but little was done to remedy the problem, the Sept. 11
commission found.
>
> The White House and many members of the commission, which has
completed its official work, have been battling for more than a year
over the release of the commission's report on aviation failures,
which was completed in August 2004.
>
> A heavily redacted version was released by the Bush administration
in January, but commission members complained that the deleted
material contained information critical to the public's
understanding of what went wrong on Sept. 11. In response, the
administration prepared a new public version of the report, which
was posted Tuesday on the National Archives Web site.
>
> While the new version still blacks out numerous references to
particular shortcomings in aviation security, it restores dozens of
other portions of the report that the administration had considered
too sensitive for public release.
>
> The newly disclosed material follows the basic outline of what was
already known about aviation failings, namely that the F.A.A. had
ample reason to suspect that Al Qaeda might try to hijack a plane
yet did little to deter it. But it also adds significant details
about the nature and specificity of aviation warnings over the
years, security lapses by the government and the airlines, and turf
battles between federal agencies.
>
> Some of the details were in confidential bulletins circulated by
the agency to airports and airlines, and some were in its internal
reports.
>
> "While we still believe that the entire document could be made
available to the public without damaging national security, we
welcome this step forward," the former leaders of the commission,
Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, said in a joint statement. "The
additional detail provided in this version of the monograph will
make a further contribution to the public record of the facts and
circumstances of the 9/11 attacks established by the final report of
the 9/11 commission."
>
> Bush administration officials said they had worked at the
commission's request to restore much of the material that had been
blacked out in the original report. "Out of an abundance of caution,
there are a variety of reasons why the U.S. government would not
want to disclose certain security measures and not make them
available in the public domain for terrorists to exploit," said Russ
Knocke, spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security.
>
> Commission officials said they were perplexed by the
administration's original attempts to black out material they said
struck them as trivial or mundane.
>
> One previously deleted section showed, for instance, that flights
carrying the author Salman Rushdie were subjected to heightened
security in the summer of 2001 because of a fatwa of violence
against him, while a previously deleted footnote showed that "sewing
scissors" would be allowed in the hands of a woman with sewing
equipment, but prohibited "in the possession of a man who possessed
no other sewing equipment."
>
> Other deletions, however, highlighted more serious security
concerns. A footnote that was originally deleted from the report
showed that a quarter of the security screeners used in 2001 by
Argenbright Security for United Airlines flights at Dulles Airport
had not completed required criminal background checks, the
commission report said. Another previously deleted footnote, related
to the lack of security for cockpit doors, criticized American
Airlines for security lapses.
>
> Much of the material now restored in the public version of the
commission's report centered on the warnings the F.A.A. received
about the threat of hijackings, including 52 intelligence documents
in the months before the Sept. 11 attacks that mentioned Al Qaeda or
Osama bin Laden.
>
> A 1995 National Intelligence Estimate, a report prepared by
intelligence officials, "highlighted the growing domestic threat of
terrorist attack, including a risk to civil aviation," the
commission found in a blacked-out portion of the report.
>
> And in 1998 and 1999, the commission report said, the F.A.A.'s
intelligence unit produced reports about the hijacking threat posed
by Al Qaeda, "including the possibility that the terrorist group
might try to hijack a commercial jet and slam it into a U.S.
landmark."
>
> The unit considered this prospect "unlikely" and a "last resort,"
with a greater threat of a hijacking overseas, the commission found.
>
> Still, in 2000, the commission said, the F.A.A. warned carriers
and airports that while political conditions in the 1990's had made
a terrorist seizure of an airliner less likely, "we believe that the
situation has changed."
>
> "We assess that the prospect for terrorist hijacking has increased
and that U.S. airliners could be targeted in an attempt to obtain
the release of indicted or convicted terrorists imprisoned in the
United States."
>
> It concluded, however, that such a hijacking was more likely
outside the United States.
>
> By September 2001 the F.A.A. was receiving some 200 pieces a day
of intelligence from other agencies about possible threats, and it
had opened more than 1,200 files to track possible threats, the
commission found.
>
> The commission found that F.A.A. officials were repeatedly warned
about security lapses before Sept. 11 and, despite their increased
concerns about a hijacking, allowed screening performance to decline
significantly.
>
> While box cutters like those used by the hijackers were not
necessarily a banned item before Sept. 11, some security experts
have said that tougher screening and security could have detected
the threat the hijackers posed. But screening measures at two of the
three airports used by the hijackers - Logan in Boston and Dulles
near Washington - were known to be inadequate, the commission found.
Reviews at Newark airport also found some security violations, but
it was the only one of the three airports used on Sept. 11 that met
or exceeded national norms.
>
> Richard Ben-Veniste, a former member of the Sept. 11 commission,
said the release of the material more than a year after it was
completed underscored the over-classification of federal
material. "It's outrageous that it has taken the administration a
year since this monograph was submitted for it to be released," he
said. "There's no reason it could not have been released earlier."
>
>
>
> a.. Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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