PRE-9/11 PENTAGON PREPAREDNESS

OF FORESIGHT AND ANCHOR CHAINS
Adam Larson/Caustic Logic
The Frustrating Fraud, January 23 2007
reposted 4/23/07

Although most Pentagon workers in the area hit on 9/11 were still sitting at their desks doing their usual work as Flight 77 came crashing through their office doors, there were well-established and practiced procedures for “exactly” such an event. The Washington Post reported shortly after 9/11 the account of a Pentagon medic who was sitting and reading the just-printed emergency response manual for what to do in case the building was struck by a civilian airliner at the precise moment that happened. [1] But unfortunately these procedures don’t seem to have helped much, given no radar track of the incoming plane, no warning, and thus no time given to implement any such measures.

Dennis Ryan's photo of a mock-up used for MASCAL (slightly filtered for artsy effect)

Among the emergency drills they’d held was one in October 2000, less than a year prior as part of what the Military District of Washington News Service called at the time "several scenarios that emergency response teams were exposed to Oct. 24-26 in the Office of the Secretaries of Defense conference room." Author Dennis Ryan provided photographs as well for one of the scenarios, the "Pentagon Mass Casualty Exercise" (MASCAL) the mock passenger plane crashed into the mock Pentagon courtyard appears to be a big one but probably not a 757 as Loose Change claims. One participant explained as far-fetched as the MASCAL scenario may have seemed, “you have to plan for this. Look at all the air traffic around here.” [2] Navy Capt. Charles Burlingame was allegedly part of this drill, though the charge is unsubstantiated. If you don't know the significance of that already, check this post.

Whether the MASCAL crash was supposed to be an accident or an attack didn't seem to matter - it was all about the aftermath. But in the next noteworthy drill conducted eight months later, the preparations were getting more specifically 9/11-related. As US Medicine magazine, "the voice of Federal medicine," reported in October 2001:

"Though the Department of Defense had no capability in place to protect the Pentagon from an ersatz guided missile in the form of a hijacked 757 airliner, DoD medical personnel trained for exactly that scenario in May. In fact, the tri-Service DiLorenzo Health Care Clinic and the Air Force Flight Medicine Clinic here in the Pentagon trained jointly in May to fine-tune their emergency preparedness, afterward making simple equipment changes that would make a difference Sept. 11 when the hypothetical became reality." [3]

This is amazing; according to this article, they were looking at a hijacked 757 strike four months before that happened on 9/11, preparations that "made a difference." Of course the best difference would have been to simply evacuate the building well before the plane arrived (35 minutes after it became clear the nation was under attack), or to have worked out air defense plans, perhaps with NORAD, to stop any such weaponized aircraft short of the building.

A possible third drill may have been planned to that end in conjunction with a proposed mid-2001 NORAD exercise simulating suicide hijacking attacks. USA Today famously reported on April 18, 2004 that "in the two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, [NORAD] conducted exercises simulating what the White House says was unimaginable at the time: hijacked airliners used as weapons to crash into targets and cause mass casualties." While nearly all of these focused on threats coming from across the Atlantic, they had the 9/11 targets in mind. earlier drills had focused on such an attack against the WTC, in this case “the target was the Pentagon – but that drill was not run after defense officials said it was unrealistic.” [4] The original source for this is an e-mail from a former NORAD official obtained by the Project On Government Oversight, which explained that NORAD "wanted to develop a response in the event that a terrorist group would use an airliner as a missile to attack the Pentagon, but the Joint Chiefs of Staff rejected the scenario as "too unrealistic." [5] This was in April 2001 POGO reports, a month before they prepared for defense against an unobstructed hijacked plane/missile hitting their building, and five months before 9/11, when they had no capabilities in place "to protect the Pentagon," but at least they had the aftermath covered well enough.

Buth even with just the two drills plus whatever else went in to the process, the Pentagon's bureaucracy had just enough time to get the emergency procedures ironed out and printed before the precise "unrealistic" scenario envisioned four months earlier came crushingly true. But there was apparently not enough time to fully integrate the plan with things like useful warning procedures - a tragically stalled process that would help illustrate Rumsfeld's charges that pre-9/11, the Pentagon was "tangled in its own anchor chain." How conveniently illustrative of his and his colleagues' known desire for a 21st Century "process of transformation" there.

Sources:
[1] Oil Empire. http://www.oilempire.us/wargames.html
[2] Ryan, Dennis. "Contingency planning Pentagon MASCAL exercise simulates scenarios in preparing for emergencies." Military District of Washington News Service. November 3 2000. Accessed at: http://www.ratical.org/ratville/CAH/linkscopy/ContPlan.html
[3] Mientka, Matt. Pentagon Medics Trained For Strike. US Medicine. October 2001. http://www.usmedicine.com/article.cfm?articleID=272&issueID=31
[4] as passed on by US Rep. Jan Schakowski: http://www.house.gov/schakowsky/press2004a/pr4_20_2004mis.html
Also at 9-11 Research: http://911research.wtc7.net/cache/post911/commission/usatoday_noradx.htm
and the original still up at USA Today: http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-04-18-norad_x.htm
[5] Project on Government Oversight. "Joint Chiefs of Staff Rejected "Airplanes as Missiles" Scenario Five Months prior to 9/11." April 13 2004. http://www.pogo.org/p/homeland/ha-040401-homelandsecurity.html

DISARMING PILOTS

Safety or Disempowerment of the Cockpit?
Adam Larson
Caustic Logic/Guerillas Without Guns
April 9 2007

When looking at the failure of the world’s mightiest Air Force to shoot down four hijacked airliners during an attack that lasted nearly two hours, it is important to remember that the far better option would have been to prevent the hijackings in the first place. The situation didn’t have to get to the point where orders to shoot down a planeload of innocents was necessary. Of course, stopping the men at the airport or before, preventing them even boarding, was the best sort of outcome with no possibility of a 9/11 size disaster. But even if these lines of defense failed (as was, of course, the case), there was still a possible last line of defense short of an air-to-air missile - the passengers, crews, and pilots aboard the planes themselves. If the numerous warnings of suicide hijackings the government had received in the months before the attack had been passed on to the airlines or the public, they may have known what was at stake and fought back, as the passengers on Flight 93 are believed to have successfully done once they learned the stakes.

It was soon noted that against terrorists armed only with box cutters, and alerted to the possibility of suicide hijackings, an armed pilot who knew the stakes may have been able, with the speed of a single bullet, to prevent his plane being turned into a missile. After September 11th, many voices went up asking that pilots be armed to meet future threats. Captain Stephen Luckey, Chairman of the National Flight Security Committee of the Airline Pilots Association, addressed this issue in testimony before a House Subcommittee on May 2nd, 2002. Luckey maintained that this drive to arm pilots was actually a question of re-arming them, as airline pilots indeed had been, quietly, allowed to carry guns onboard until… right before 9/11.

Luckey put it in context; “in 1961, the FAA amended federal aviation regulations, with Congressional support, to permit pilots to be armed with the consent of their airline – the agency removed that regulatory language in July 2001.” [1] That was quick – now for an instant replay: “the agency removed that regulatory language in July, 2001.” In 1961, in response to the Cuban missile Crisis and a spate of Cuban hijackings, the FAA enacted a rule that allowed pilots to carry guns on commercial flights with the purpose of stopping hijackings early. For forty years the rule stood, but in July 2001, the FAA rescinded it.

According to the conservative WorldNet Daily, the gun ban was set to take effect on an unspecified date in September. [2] In another article, WorldNet also reported that this decision was made despite a specific warning to FAA and other government officials from the ubiquitous Richard Clarke. On July 5, the nation’s top counter-terrorism agent reportedly told FAA representatives and others at a meeting in the White House that “something really spectacular is going to happen here and it’s going to happen soon.” [3]

An FAA spokesman downplayed the impact of the gun ban, saying “in the past, FAA regulations permitted pilots to carry firearms in the cockpit” but that “that was never put into effect because no requests… were ever made.” [4] Apparently, in forty years, there was not one request from an airline pilot to be armed. There must have been no successful drives to increase awareness of the policy. Were the pilots ever even aware of the policy? This rule stood, allegedly unused, for decades; if it was never used, why bother rescinding it after it had sat for so long? What was suddenly so different that mandated the change? The only thing I see different is the hijacking threat – if ever there was a time pilots would start asking for permission to carry guns, the summer and fall of 2001 would have, should have, been it.

It’s not likely that any of the pilots involved had been disarmed by this decision, and so it likely had no effect on the attack. But once again, the timing of this decision is strange, perhaps indicating a better safe than sorry mentality, a fear that some pilots might try to use that old rule in light of the threat and thus spoil a perfectly useful attack. The reasoning has been explained as eliminating redundancy, but on the question of timing, FAA officials referred WorldNet to the Department of Transportation, who refused to return calls. [5] If no pilots had ever asked for guns, or, as I argue in other posts, there were to be no hijackers to shoot, then the FAA’s decision served no tactical purpose, and yet its timing still seems at the far edge of coincidence territory to say the least.

Back to Federal Attack Assistance Masterlist
Sources:
[1] Luckey, Stephen. “Arming Flight Crews Against Terrorist Acts. Statement before Subcommittee on Aviation, Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, U.S. House of Representatives. Washington, D.C. May 2, 2002. Accessed November 7, 2004 at: http://www.house.gov/transportation/aviation/05-02-02/luckey.html
[2], [5] Dougherty, John. “Homeland Insecurity: FAA began disarming pilots in ’87.” Worldnet Daily. May 29, 2002. Accessed November 7, 2004 at: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=27765
[3]Vulliami, Ed. “A Bad Call?” The Guardian. May 19, 2002. Accessed November 18, 2004 at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/september11/story/0,11209,718267,00.html
[4] Dougherty, John. “Armed-pilot rule nixed after hijack briefing.” Worldnet Daily. May 18, 2002. Accessed November 7, 2004 at: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=27672

BOJINKA part VI: BRZEZINKSI'S BOMBSHELL / WHAT WAS LEFT OUT

Much of the information I’ve drawn on so far in analyzing Bojinka is from an excellent article on the plot published in December 2001. It was by Matthew Brzezinski, ordinarily a writer of fiction known for his 2001 novel Casino Moscow: A Tale of Greed and Adventure on Capitalism's Wildest Frontier, which was praised by Foreign Affairs magazine as “a shake-your-head, laugh-out-loud book, but one with a good deal to say.” [1] Yet he has also written one of the most widely read factual accounts of Bojinka’s discovery, originally published as “Bust and Boom” in the Washington Post magazine, and published elsewhere as “Operation Bojinka’s Bombshell.” In the article, Brzezinski noted “the suicide attacks coincided, almost to the day, with another fifth anniversary: the 1996 conviction, in a Manhattan court, of Bojinka's original plotters.” [2] September 11 is hardly close enough to the 5th to constitute much of an anniversary, but it does help Brzezinski close his article on an ominous note that ties this fantastic plot yet closer to the far more fantastic 2001 attacks. He also took a hard line in the new “War on Terror.” He said of suspects captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere “the last thing we want is having these guys back in circulation.” But he advised patience in taking them out; “we would be better served interrogating the life out of them rather than carrying out any sort of ‘swift justice.’” [3]

Aida Fariscal, whom Brzezinski describes as “a disgruntled former cop,” and his primary source for the article, was cited by the CIA for her leading role in busting up Bojinka and saving perhaps thousands of lives. After 9/11 she said “this should have never, ever been allowed to happen. All those poor people dead.” [4] (Does she know of another way to get “useful casualty lists?”) In a Washington Post Q and A session with Brzezinski following release of his story, one question pitched was “how much of the evidence that was documented in the Philippines […] could have been fabricated? I'm not questioning the veracity of your reporting. I'm just wondering if the Philippine government is seeking for a handout to “combat terrorism” when in reality they might use it for other operations.” Brzezinski admitted money was a factor, but noted of Fariscal’s account “I tend to believe its authenticity since her interests and those of the Philippine [government] don't necessarily coincide. Besides U.S. intelligence sources have not disputed any of its validity, even though the material is clearly embarrassing to them.” [5]

While we might wonder what the Filipinos did with the money they were given (Clinton, the Pope, and eleven airliner bombings, all narrowly averted in one arrest! That’s gotta be worth some Benjamins), one could also wonder what American authorities would get out of the bargain. The embarrassment from Brzezinski’s “bombshell” may have seemed a small price to pay for such a coup of a cover story for Shadow 9-11. And it could’ve been more embarrassing, but Matt had damage control in mind. Despite Bojinka in both its phases, as he had just reported it, he said after his story was published, “no one imagined something like this [was] possible, and there was no US precedent to justify heightened security. Bojinka was about blowing planes up, not hijacking them.” [6]

As Matthew noted: “Bojinka was about blowing planes up, not hijacking them.” From Matt’s account were missing two key elements that might have made the connection unavoidable. Suicide attack from the air was there, but it was one guy in a small plane – the missing links to become 9/11 would be an increase in scale - hijacking an airliner - and multiplying that into synchronized suicide hijackings.

Peter Lance, a veteran investigative reporter with ABC News, TV writer (Miami Vice, Missing Persons, etc.), and a regular guest on Coast to Coast AM, is a respected expert the massive government “cover-up” over its incompetence and underestimation of al Qaeda. [7] Lance is not a subscriber to Shadow 9-11 by a long shot, but his analysis of the Bojinka plot is worthy of note. In his book 1,000 Years for Revenge (2003) he explained that Murad’s phase two was from the beginning centered not on crop dusters with bombs but on a suicide hijacking of an airliner. Lance cites as clear evidence a January 20, 1995 memo written by Col. Rodolfo Mendoza, Murad’s main interrogator:

”What the subject [has] in his mind is that he will board any American commercial aircraft pretending to be an ordinary passenger. Then he will hijack said aircraft, control its cockpit, and dive it at the CIA headquarters. He will use no bomb or explosives. It is simply a suicidal mission that he is very much willing to execute.” [8]

While Brzezinski’s two-phase Bojinka collectively hinted at 9/11, Mendoza’s account is of a plan that Lance accurately calls “a virtual blueprint of the 9/11 attacks,” if one simply multiplies by four - or divides by three. Lance also cites Murad mentioning ten other men receiving flight training at the time of his arrest, indicating that phase two was more ambitious even than what happened, planning eleven suicide hijackings to match the lofty number in the famous phase one. [9] Murad’s “more trained pilots” were already hitting the books and the simulators at the time of his arrest, and pending the provision of eleven teams of backup “muscle” hijackers, the plan was set. Philippine authorities say they passed all this information on to their U.S. counterparts. [10]

So why the earlier reports from U.S. and Philippine sources referring to a bomb-laden crop-duster or Cessna at the heart of Murad’s plot (when the plot is mentioned at all)? Was Mendoza’s memo, or the batch of terrorists earning their wings, suppressed from the record for some reason? Why didn’t Brzezinski’s investigation turn up this exaggerated 9-11 script written up in 1994, instead offering a muted, distanced version like a Muslim Frank Corder?

BOJINKA VII: PROFESSED IGNORANCE / MAINTAINING THE FOCUS

Bojinka’s second phase, when seen head-on, shows that the evolution to the full-on coordinated suicide airliner tactics of 9-11 was in fact complete as 1995 dawned. No wonder U.S. authorities and their allies and relatives have so distanced themselves from awareness of it, and hewn such a close line of quarantine around references to it. Immediately after September 11 was allowed to happen, the implications started dropping that they were never told about phase two at all. For example, FBI spokesman John Collingwood wrote a letter to the Washington Post in October 2001:

“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, 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.”[1]

Collingwood makes no reference at all to the part of the plot that clearly “connects.” By Peter Lance’s account, Murad was turned over to the FBI in April 1995. After a few weeks with the flight student, the Bureau produced a final memo on May 11. For whatever reason, with access to Philippine interrogators’ reports and to Murad himself, the memo contained not a word about any suicide plot. [2] Thus what was widely available for analysis was indeed void of phase two references.

And at the 1996 trial it went completely unmentioned. Even Colonel Mendoza, who had headed the interrogation and discovered phase two, was never called to testify, and himself went totally unmentioned in the trial, even by his assistant when he testified. Lance noted that by these omissions, “the FBI seemed to be going out of its way to avoid even a hint of the plot that was ultimately carried out on 9/11.” [3]

In all the detail in Richard Clarke’s account of Bojinka, he made no mention at all of Murad nor of his phase two and its suicide plane attacks, even in its tamer Brzezinski version. The 9-11 Commission described the Bojinka plot, by name, as “the intended bombing of twelve U.S. commercial jumbo jets over the Pacific during a two-day span.” [4] They did not mention Murad’s second phase either, but their reference to 12 jets is interesting. At least one CNN report from 1996 said 12 planes were to be involved, perhaps including Murad’s solo hijacking, as mentioned in Mendoza’s memo, meaning the Commission indirectly verified this early awareness.

And officials can’t come right out and say they’ve never heard of phase two; Rex Hudson noted it in his 1999 report. Vincent Cannistrano, former CIA counter-terrorism director, said “no question about it. We knew about the pilots and suicide plots.” As for why this did not lead to any workable prediction of 9-11, he explained, they “just didn't put two and two together.” [5]

After the alleged costs of that bad math became clear, the official U.S. mantra indeed remained “unprepared, unforeseen, unimagined.” A flood of revelations of advance warnings hit the news in the spring of 2002 to curious effect; on the one hand, these revelations eclipsed earlier allegations of direct government execution and kept the terrorists center stage. But on the other hand, they demonstrated that no imagination or foresight was required to prevent the hijacking attacks.



An embarrassed Bush administration responded by repeating the same mantra even louder. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer and National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice went on the defensive, claiming repeatedly on May 16th the government had no idea that an airborne terrorist attack was even a possibility. Rice said “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 […] a hijacked airplane as a missile” [6] Fleischer told reporters “never did we imagine what would take place on September 11th, where people used those airplanes as missiles and as weapons.” He also took some heat off the President, stating that Bush “did not… not… receive information about the use of airplanes as missiles by suicide bombers. This was a new type of attack that had not been foreseen.” [7]

Even in 2004 the story held; Bush himself stated on April 13 “there was nobody in our government, and I don’t think the previous government, that could envision flying airplanes into buildings on such a massive scale.” [8] There’s a certain desperate evasiveness in these confused and clearly false assertions. The obvious explanation for this is that, as they’ve argued, they couldn’t have prepared to meet the threat because they’d never even imagined it. But they had to know people would see right through this position as stories about warning flooded out, with no sign of stopping.

While Bojinka phase two was a great idea, one must wonder, after Murad’s disastrous arrest and interrogation, would al Qaeda be dumb enough to have expected to succeed? If Philippine investigators and American report-writers are any indication, the element of surprise should have been blown years before a scaled-down Bojinka was realized on September 11th. In fact, the reason that the administration can claim they’ve never heard of the tactic is because it has never before happened. Numerous attempts have been made, but world governments and simple bad luck had thwarted all such plots up to that point. But somehow Bojinka finally came true in one place and at one time only - at the very military and financial heart of the world’s sole Superpower on September 11, 2001. They insist they simply hadn’t realized there was such a threat there to defend against.

And this is, curiously, a long-term silence. Throughout this chapter we’ve seen evidence of a see-no-evil strategy towards this tactic, from the FBI to the Pentagon to the Bush White House, from 1994 until the 9-11 attacks, with continued affirmations of ignorance to the present time. It almost smells like a long-held Pentagon proprietary concept, a rainy day project that can never be talked about, neither confirmed or denied, a top-secret Scenario 12-E. It first appeared, we are told, in the wake of the Corder crash and the failed Eiffel Tower attack as the silenced Cetron report. Within weeks of being handed to the Pentagon, it became tangled with al Qaeda via the prescient Bojinka phase two, extracted from Abdul Murad, that we hardly heard a peep about until after 9/11.

While Sonny Razon saw the occurrence of the first successful suicide hijacking attack as proof the U.S. had ignored his warnings, perhaps they actually did listen very closely, and the success of Shadow 9/11 is the proof.

BOJINKA III: CORDER/GIA/CETRON

Some claim to have predicted the threat of Muslim terrorists with hijacked airliners even before Bojinka was discovered, and here is where we enter the possible cross-over of think tank and real world. First the real world, in the second half of 1994, provided some concerns for air security. These started with Frank Eugene Corder, a 38-year-old unemployed truck driver, Army veteran, and depressions-plagued alcoholic and cocaine user whose estranged wife had just died of cancer. For what it’s worth, one anagrams of his name is “DRUNK GONE CAREFREE.”

Another anagram of Corder’s name, for what it’s worth, is “NRO RENEGADE FUCKER.” The CIA-connected National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) runs the nation’s spy satellites and aircraft reconnaissance. They dabble at least in automated flight and drones, and are closely connected with the Air Force. In yet another inexplicable curiosity, on the seven year anniversary of Corder’s little escapade, the NRO was running a simulation of a small plane-related accident on their own headquarters near both the Pentagon and Dulles Airport, from which American Airlines 77 had just taken off. The drill was reportedly cancelled once the attacks in New York became known. [1]

Late on the night of September 11, Corder apparently decided to say “goodbye, cruel world,” in a big way. He allegedly stole a Cessna airplane from a Maryland airport, drunk as a skunk, and flew out towards Washington D.C. At about 2:00 am on the 12th, his plane finally came into the restricted, supposedly well-defended airspace around the White House. No defenses showed themselves, and the plane crashed into the South Lawn unopposed, taking out part of a porch and an old tree, killing only Corder. President Clinton and his family were staying elsewhere while the executive mansion was being renovated. [2]

And then a few months later, another event on a much larger scale cast the danger from the sky in a more ominous light. On Christmas Eve, an Air France jetliner was hijacked on the ground in Algiers. After killing three passengers, the hijackers were cleared to take off, and flew their missile towards Paris. Investigators later found that the men, part of the al Qaeda-linked Armed Islamic Group of Algeria (GIA), planned to crash the plane into the Eiffel Tower in protest of French control in Algeria. The hijackers were killed during a re-fueling stop in Marseilles and their plot was stopped before it could make the front page with grisly Christmas fireworks over Paris. [3]

But it was not ignored by those whose job it is to scour the news for new ideas and new dangers. In early 2002, ABC News interviewed Marvin Cetron, a “terrorism expert” with military and engineering credentials who had written a report for the Pentagon in 1994. Cetron is a noted “futurist” thinker, President of Forecasting International, and a regular guest on CNN talk shows predicting trends in everything from education to science and engineering to business and global economics. Along with Robert McNamara, (who has also served as World Bank President since his Defense Secretary days), Cetron is a Director at the World Future Society, a Bethesda-based “neutral clearinghouse for ideas about the future,” including “forecasts, recommendations, and alternative scenarios.” The website explains “when people can visualize a better future, then they can begin to create it.” [4]

So what alternative scenario did he help the Pentagon visualize with his 1994 report? Cetron was concerned with the danger of an airborne suicide attack on the Capital, including such a warning in his report. Cetron told ABC:

“We saw Osama bin Laden. We spelled it out and we said the United States was very vulnerable. You could make a left turn at the Washington Monument and take out the White House. And you could make a right turn and take out the Pentagon.” [5]

ABC reported that the Pentagon brass wanted that particular warning deleted from his report. “It's unclassified, everything is available,” Cetron recalled his response. But they told him, as he summed up, “we don't want it released because you can't handle a crisis before it becomes a crisis, and no one is going to believe it anyhow.” Even after he deleted the kamikaze warning, the report was scrapped and not released to the public. [6]

ABC explained that the 1994 report had cited two events “earlier that year” as precedents to ponder: “the crash-landing of a small airplane at the White House by an apparently unstable man” (Corder, September 11-12), and “French authorities’ storming of a hijacked airliner that Algerian terrorists had planned to fly into the Eiffel Tower” Thus he was aware these attack planes could be airliners. But the timeline here is odd; the GIA’s failed attack was on Christmas Eve. Is it normal for Cetron to compose an entire report in less than a week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve?

This felt like a seam to me, so I though about it a minute. At that very time but half a world away, Yousef and Murad were just days away from getting busted for Bojinka on January 6. Within a couple of weeks, interrogators in the Philippines would be extracting from Murad, via torture, something remarkably like Cetron’s double-deleted warning. Was there a mix-up somewhere? And just as Cetron’s Corder/GIA-inspired scenario was cut from the wider report before it too was deleted, Murad’s similar phase two has been largely erased from the wider Bojinka story. This alleged prediction perhaps helped the Pentagon visualize the world they wanted and now have, but Cetron apparently wasn’t allowed to talk about it until after it came true.

Sources:
[1] “Agency planned drill for plane crash last Sept. 11” Associated Press. August 22, 2002. Accessed December 8, 2005 at: http://www.thememoryhole.org/911/cia-simulation.htm
[2] CNN. “Past security incidents at the White House.” February 7, 2001. Accessed May 4, 2003 at: http://www.cnn.com/2001/ALLPOLITICS/stories/02/07/whitehouse.incidents.02/index.html
[3] Gunaratna, Rohan. “Terror from the Sky.” Jane’s Intelligence Review. September 24, 2001. Accessed at: http://www.janes.com/security/international_security/news/jir/jir010924_1_n.shtml
[4] World Future Society. Frequently Asked Questions. 2005. Accessed November 16, 2005 at: http://www.wfs.org/faq.htm
[5] “Early Warnings: Pre Sept. 11 Cautions Went Unheeded.” ABC News. February 18 2002.http://abcnews.go.com/sections/wnt/DailyNews/wnt_missedsignals_1_020218.html
[6] See [5].

BOJINKA IV: A REAL AND REPEATED THREAT

Even without phase two or its predecessor report, Al Qaeda’s and others’ shift to suicide hijackings was not a theoretical – it actually happened and manifested itself in the real world. Numerous reminders of the tactic had popped up since 1995 in the form of foiled attempts, intercepted plots, and ominous warnings from various quarters. In November 1996, for example, Ethiopian terrorists hijacked an airliner and tried to crash it into a beach resort in the Comoros Islands for unclear reasons. Reports from the time explained that the pilots were able though to dive the plane into the sea, saving the resort by a bare 500 yards, but killing all but 52 of the 175 souls on board. [1]

Suicide hijacking was a fear at both the 1996 and 2000 Olympics (in Atlanta, GA and Sydney, Australia, respectively). In the 1996 case, Richard Clarke personally toured Atlanta looking for security breaches. He was horrified. Among his concerns was air security; ”mindful of Ramzi Yousef’s plot to blow up 747s and the images of Pan Am 103, I asked about aircraft. “What if somebody blows up a 747 over the Olympic Stadium. Or even flies one into the stadium?”” [2] Clarke could see in 1996 someone hijacking an airliner and crashing it into the stadium, and he was thinking Bojinka. In fact, this was not just a thought in Clarke’s head – security for the ’96 Olympics was actually beefed-up to meet the threat. The Chicago Tribune reported in November 2001:

”In an extraordinary aerial dragnet, launched quietly that summer and kept largely under wraps ever since, Black Hawk helicopters and U.S. 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 […] 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.”[3]

A handful of government-commissioned reports highlighted the threat of aircraft as weapons in the hands of terrorists, or at least tried to. One was a September 1999 report called “Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why?” It was prepared for the CIA-connected National Intelligence Council and shared with other federal agencies. CBS News cited it in May 2002: “Suicide bomber(s) 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.” Author Rex Hudson explained at the time “Ramzi Yousef had planned to do this against the CIA headquarters.” [4] This is one of the very few pre-9-11 admissions of phase two that I’ve seen.

The Bojinka fears that should have been closest on president Bush’s mind on the morning of 9-11 had come less than two months earlier, in Late July. As reported in the Los Angeles Times, Italian authorities felt that there was a serious possibility of an attack against Bush and other world leaders attending the G8 Summit in Genoa by “crashing an airliner” into the venue. The threat was considered unsubstantiated by U.S. officials, but Italian authorities closed the airspace over Genoa and placed antiaircraft guns around the summit complex to enforce the order. For added security, the Secret Service had Bush sleep every night on an aircraft carrier just off the coast. [6] He had to have been told why he was drifting in the steel belly of that big boat instead of lying on fine linens in a posh Genoese resort.

Sources:
[1] Thompson, Paul and the center for Cooperative Research. “The Terror Timeline.” 2004. Page 18.
[2] Clarke, Richard. “Against All Enemies.” Page 106.
[3] Fineman, Mark and Judy Pasternak. “'96 Games warned of air threat.” Chicago Tribune. November 18, 2001http://www.chicagotribune.com/search/chi-0111180092nov18.story
[4] “'99 Report Warned Of Suicide Hijacking.” CBS News. May 17, 2002.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/05/17/attack/main509471.shtml
[5] “Italy Tells of Threat at Genoa Summit” LA Times. September 27, 2001. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-092701genoa.story

BOJINKA II: PHASE TWO / EVOLUTION

But there was more to Operation Bojinka: a second phase, barely mentioned if at all at the time. In all the evidence and arguments in the 6,000-page transcript of the 1996 trial, there is not a single mention of this second phase, even though one of the defendants was to be the perpetrator. [1] When Philippine interrogators pressed Abdul Murad about his pilot's license, they found out that his years training at multiple American flight schools had been in preparation for one final mission. A 2002 article from the Washington Post explained. “he was to buy, rent, or steal a small plane, fill it with explosives and crash it into CIA headquarters.” [2] Murad was ready to do this, knew how to fly, had plenty of bombs in the works, and only needed a plane.

But had hoped for more, and provided his interrogators with a broader phase two plan complete with a wish list of secondary targets for simultaneous suicide plane attacks. The possible targets mentioned included the U.S. Congress, the White House, the Pentagon, and “possibly some skyscrapers,” like, for example, the ones he and Yousef had failed to bring down the first time. The only problem with carrying out this more ambitious version, Murad complained, was that “they needed more trained pilots to carry out the plot,” and of course more planes – Cessnas, Learjets, crop-dusters, anything small. [3]

Bojinaka was a famous case at the time, and had a grand scale to it that captured imaginations and the attention of writers like Tom Clancy and “John Gilnitz.” If largely forgotten as a real-world threat by 9-11, it was quickly recalled and widely commented on afterwards. But the mainstream accounts of Bojinka are universally dominated by the nightmare image of eleven airliners blowing up, flaming wreckage and thousands of corpses plunging down into the middle of the ocean. People seemed to forget or ignore phase two, since it wasn’t about to happen at the time and was so much more… lame.

It was just an idea - but what an idea. A suicidal mindset and pilot training on the part of a hijacker can turn a 767 full of innocents from a bargaining chip to a guided missile. When Aida Fariscal, the first officer on the scene the night Murad was caught, saw the footage of 9-11 years later, she gasped “oh my God, it’s Bojinka.” The following day, General Avelino “Sonny” Razon flew to Manila to issue the public statement “we told the Americans about the plans to turn planes into flying bombs as far back as 1995. Why didn't they pay attention?” [4]

Their reaction to 9-11, connecting it with Bojinka, meant they had learned the lessons of Murad’s plot and understood its wider implications. All they needed was more trained pilots, as Murad said, and different thinking about the relation between planes and bombs. This was already evident to some in 1995. Gen. Renato De Villa, who served as Philippines Defense Minister at the time, said valuable clues were discovered during Murad’s “tactical interrogation.” An article summed these up:

“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.”[5]

Even in Yousef’s new type of liquid bomb was an example of their shift to easier, less traceable methods. They’d already thought about cashing planes into buildings with bombs on board. Is there an easier way to get explosive things in the air and under your control? Explosions… car crashes… gasoline… jet fuel… Ah! The only thing needed to gain access to ready-made flying bombs, with no labs or chemical shipments to discover, was a few guys with box cutters and a guy who can fly - all willing to die. The government would now have us believe that they did not predict this fairly obvious evolution in thought.


sources:
[1] Terror Timeline. Page 18.
[2] Brzezinski, Matthew. “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.” Washington Post. December 30 2001. Page W09 http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A14725-2001Dec21?language=printer
[3], [4], [5], See [2].