Project Bojinka and Other Hijack High |
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Project Bojinka was exposed in January 1995 when Philippine police arrested
and tortured Abdul Hakim Murad in a Manila apartment where bomb-making equipment
was found. He told them of plans to plant timed explosive devices on 11 US
airliners simultaneously, and to crash-land an airplane into CIA headquarters in
Langley, Virginia. The preparations were so far advanced that Murad detailed the
specific flights targeted, most of them trans-Pacific flights that would explode
over the ocean. Murad had attended flying schools in the United States, earned a
commercial pilot's license, and told investigators he was to fly the plane into
CIA headquarters. Another Islamic fundamentalist was to fly a second plane into
the Pentagon. (Source: Washington Post, September 23, "Borderless Network of
Terror, Bin Laden Followers Reach Across Globe," by Doug Struck, Howard
Schneider, Karl Vick and Peter Baker)
Later that year, the alleged organizer of the first World Trade Center bombing, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, was captured in Pakistan, turned over to US agents and flown back to the United States for trial. On the flight, Yousef reportedly boasted to FBI agent Brian Parr and the other agents guarding him that he had narrowly missed several opportunities to blow up a dozen airliners on a single day over the Pacific and to carry out a kamikaze-type suicide attack on CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Yousef was referring to the same plot for which Abdul Hakim Murad had been arrested in the Philippines. Murad was extradited to the United States, where his testimony played a major role in Yousef's trial and conviction. (Source: John Cooley, Unholy Wars, New York, NY, 2000, p. 247) Early in 1996, US officials had identified crop-dusters and suicide flights as potential terrorist weapons, and began taking elaborate steps to prevent an attack from the air during the Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta. Black Hawk helicopters and US Customs Service jets were deployed to intercept suspicious aircraft in the skies over the Olympic venues. Agents monitored crop-duster flights within hundreds of miles of downtown Atlanta. Law enforcement agents also fanned out to regional airports throughout northern Georgia "to make sure nobody hijacked a small aircraft and tried to attack one of the venues," said Woody Johnson, the FBI agent in charge of the Atlanta office at the time. From July 6 through the end of the Games on August 11, the FAA banned all aviation within a one-mile radius of the Olympic Village that housed the athletes. It also ordered aircraft to stay at least three miles away from other sites beginning three hours before each event until three hours after each event ended. (Source: Los Angeles Times, November 17, 2001, "Suicide Flights and Crop Dusters Considered Threats at '96 Olympics," by Mark Fineman and Judy Pasternak) As early as 1996 the FBI began investigating the activities of Arab students at US flight schools. Government officials admitted that "law enforcement officials were aware that fewer than a dozen people with links to bin Laden had attended US flight schools." FBI agents visited two flight schools in 1996 to get information about several Arab pilots who received training there. The two schools were among those attended by Abdul Hakim Murad, who had told Philippine and US police about plans to fly a hijacked plane into CIA headquarters. In 1998 FBI agents questioned officials from Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma about a graduate identified in court testimony as a pilot for Osama bin Laden. This was the school later attended by Zacarias Moussaoui. A Washington Post article concludes: "Since 1996, the FBI had been developing evidence that international terrorists were using US flight schools to learn to fly jumbo jets. A foiled plot in Manila to blow up U.S. airliners and later court testimony by an associate of bin Laden had touched off FBI inquiries at several schools, officials say." (Source: Washington Post, September 23, 2001, "FBI Knew Terrorists Were Using Flight Schools," by Steve Fainaru and James V. Grimaldi) In the run-up to the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, there was active consideration of the danger of "a fully loaded, fuelled airliner crashing into the opening ceremony before a worldwide television audience," according to former Sydney police superintendent Paul McKinnon. Osama bin Laden was considered the number one threat, he said. IOC officials said plane-crash catastrophes have been incorporated into security planning for every Olympics since 1972. "That was our nightmare scenario," one IOC official said. There were extensive IOC discussions with the FBI during 2001 in the course of the security planning for the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. (Source: Sydney Morning Herald, September 20, 2001, "Jet crash on stadium was Olympics nightmare," by Jacquelin Magnay) The 2000 edition of the Federal Aviation Administration's annual report on Criminal Acts Against Aviation, published early in 2001, said that although bin Laden "is not known to have attacked civil aviation, he has both the motivation and the wherewithal to do so," adding, "Bin Laden's anti-Western and anti-American attitudes make him and his followers a significant threat to civil aviation, particularly to US civil aviation." (Source: FAA) Beginning in early 2001 a trial was held in New York City of four defendants charged with involvement in the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The trial revealed that two bin Laden operatives had received pilot training in Texas and Oklahoma and another had been asked to take lessons. L'Houssaine Kherchtou, a bin Laden associate turned government witness, told the court how he was asked to take flying lessons in 1993. Another bin Laden aide, Essam al-Ridi, testified that he had bought a military aircraft for bin Laden and flown it to Sudan. Al-Ridi became a government witness in 1998, giving the FBI inside information about a pilot-training scheme three years before the September 11 attack. While the proceedings of the trial extended from February to July 2001, they did not produce any heightened alert in relation to US commercial aviation. (Source: Court transcript available at www.cryptome.org )
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