THIS IS NOT 'CANDID' WAR

By Judith Haney

(USNewsLink)/ September 16, 2001

Sometime, somewhere, when you least expect it,
K A-B O O M, you're a victim of terrorism!

And if that is the assumption you have made regarding the terrorist attacks on the United States, Tuesday, September 11, 2001, i.e., that it strikes out of the clear blue, you are wrong. Potentially, DEAD wrong!

The attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was not a surprise. Starting in 1980, the U. S. intelligence community had advance warnings of terrorist attacks ordered to be carried out against the United States.

Ongoing intelligence gathered by our government, and it's allies, pointed to the inevitability of a strike against the United States, and it's allies, by followers of Osama Bin Laden.

Unassailable evidence which documented suspicious terrorist activities by followers of Osama Bin Laden who were/are living in, or traveling in and out of, the United States was provided to our last four Presidents and the United States Congress. 

And, remarkably, contrary to taking appropriate action to secure our borders, and protect Americans from the threat of these terrorists, our government leaders who flowed in and out of office between 1980 and 2001 watched and waited for the attacks to take place.

As an illustration, the parallels emerging between this week's attack and the 1998 bombing of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, as well as other cases involving bin Laden associates, continue to raise questions why American intelligence officials failed to forestall the strike.

The use of trained pilots was only one of the warning signs that bin Laden operates a sophisticated worldwide network of associates who could plan yet another attack on a key American target, terrorism specialists said.

''We all predicted this. It was a matter not of if, but when,'' said Jerry Bremer, a former State Department terrorism specialist who was chairman of a national commission on terrorism last year. ''We had strategic warning. This is not something the analysts missed.''

According to a report, Federal authorities have known for at least three years that two Osama bin Laden associates had trained in the United States as airplane pilots, possibly while operating as members of the suspected terrorist's organization.

US officials were also aware that bin Laden had recruited American citizens to join his Al Qaeda terrorist group and that many of them received military and intelligence training in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Sudan. Members of the organization lived in California, Texas, and Oregon, among other states.

FBI Director Robert Mueller yesterday lamented the failure of US intelligence agencies that allowed terrorists to get pilot training in the United States before they hijacked the four planes involved in Tuesday's attacks.

The link between Al Qaeda members and US flight schools first emerged during this year's trial of four men accused of the 1998 bombing of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, a review of court records shows.

One of the pilots, Essam al Ridi, a naturalized American of Egyptian descent who went to flight school in Texas, was a star witness who testified that he bought a military aircraft at bin Laden's request in Arizona and flew it to Sudan. He was first approached by investigators in 1998.

The second, Ihab Ali Nawawi, identified by prosecutors in court records as a bin Laden contact, was a resident of Orlando, Fla., who trained at a flight school in Norman, Okla.

They are said to be members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which, according to federal court documents in the embassy bombing case, has effectively merged with bin Laden's Al Qaeda group.

According to the Associated Press, Federal agents had previously linked a group of Muslim extremists in Florida to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

An Islamic studies think tank that was affiliated with the University of South Florida has also been linked by investigators to international terrorists.

The think tank, the World Islamic Studies Enterprises, was once headed by Ramadan Abdullah Shallah, who left Tampa in 1995 and assumed a leadership role in the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

Among those attending the group's conferences was Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, a blind cleric convicted of plotting the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Last year, Orlando, Fla., cab driver Ihab Mohamed Ali was indicted on perjury and contempt charges for refusing to answer questions about the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa. Saudi exile Osama bin Laden is the chief suspect in the embassy and World Trade Center bombings and Tuesday's attacks.

Sources say Florida FBI offices have not spent enough time on terrorism because Washington has not directed them to make it a top priority. Florida's biggest recent FBI foreign counterintelligence effort involved Cubans in Miami.

But the cold hard fact remains: the hijackers trained together, lived together and died together, with one goal in mind: acts of destruction on a scale so large they would terrify America.

To illustrate the wide-spread network of terrorists living in the United States: the first man to be arrested in the terrorist attacks investigation was detained at Kennedy International Airport carrying his brother's pilot license. His brother lived in a Boston apartment complex where some of the terrorists believed to be involved in the attacks had been.

In Miami, Fla., a motel owner said he found Boeing 757 manuals, three illustrated martial arts books and an 8-inch stack of East Coast flight maps while cleaning out an alleged hijacker's room two days before he flew into the World Trade Center.

Marwan Al-Shehhi and another Arab man spent a week at the Panther Motel in Deerfield Beach, and they had a constant visitor, owner Richard Surma said Saturday. Surma said he recognized Al-Shehhi from FBI photographs, but not the other two men.

Of the 19 hijackers, at least 15 have Florida ties, and seven of them were believed to be pilots. Al-Shehhi, who trained at two Florida flight schools, was aboard the United Boeing 767 that crashed into the south tower Tuesday.

Al-Shehhi is reported to have checked out last Sunday without taking a three-ring binder full of handwritten notes, an English-German dictionary, an airplane fuel tester, a protractor, tote bag, aircraft manuals, and aeronautical maps of half of the eastern United States.

Some of the men left little trace of their time in the United States. Others stayed for years, taking flight classes, buying cars, moving from apartments to boarding houses to rented homes.

They said they were pilots, or airplane mechanics, or students, or tourists. Most of the 19 came from Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates, two of the Arab countries most friendly to the United States.

Several clustered around Mohamed Atta, a square-jawed 33-year-old pilot who ended up on the first plane to smash into New York's World Trade Center.

Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi, 23, trained as pilots together in Florida and stayed together last summer in the home of a former flight school worker. Those who came across them said the two, believed to be from the United Arab Emirates, called each other "cousin" and kept to themselves.

Al-Shehhi was in the United States on a tourist visa. Like Atta, he had a federal pilot's license.

Atta and Al-Shehhi also were together in Hamburg, Germany. Investigators said the two were part of an extremist group that planned attacks against high-profile American targets. The two also took classes at a technical school there.

Ziad Jarrahi had a pilot's license listing a Hamburg address. Jarrahi was on United Airlines Flight 93, a plane that was hijacked from a Newark, N.J., to San Francisco route and crashed in rural Pennsylvania.

When it came time for their fateful flights, Atta and Al-Shehhi split up. Al-Shehhi was on United Flight 175, the plane that struck the second World Trade Center tower. The plane carrying Atta hit the first.

Authorities believe Atta flew from Portland, Maine, to Boston on Tuesday morning with another hijacker, Abdulaziz Alomari.

Alomari also may have taken flight training in Florida. A man named Abdulrahman Alomari, whose rental house was searched by the FBI this week, told his landlord he was a Saudi Arabian Airlines pilot getting more training at FlightSafety International, the flight school in Vero Beach where John F. Kennedy Jr. trained. A federal pilot's license for an Abdulrahman Saeed Alomari lists the pilot's address as the airline's post office box in Saudi Arabia.

Neighbors in Florida say that Alomari was a family man. Living with him in the $1,400-a-month home were his wife and four school-age children. Neighbor Jim Smith said he noticed that when school started last month, Alomari's wife and children were gone. Alomari moved out on Sept. 3.

He told his landlord he was going home.

With Atta on the first plane was Waleed M. Alshehri, 25. Records show he was in the United States since at least 1994, when he got a Social Security number and a Florida driver's license. In 1997, he graduated from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla., with a commercial pilot's training degree. He also had a commercial pilot's license.

Alshehri gave birth dates from 1974 to 1979 on various documents. Records show he lived in various apartments in a complex in Daytona Beach. He also may have lived for a time at a boarding house in Vienna, Va., a Washington suburb.

Alshehri told his landlord he was going back home and that his father was a Saudi diplomat.

Two hijackers on American Flight 11, Wail Alshehri and Satam Al Suqami, had Florida driver's licenses listing the same address in Boynton Beach. Records show Suqami also had a Saudi driver's license.

Another hijacker who may have had a commercial pilot's license was Hani Hanjour, who was aboard the American Airlines flight that slammed into the Pentagon. Federal records show a Hani Hanjoor received a commercial pilot's license in 1999, listing a Saudi address.

T. Gerald Chilton Jr., a corporate officer for CRM Airline Training Center in Scottsdale, Ariz., said a Hani Hanjoor received pilot instruction there for three months in 1996 and in December 1997.

Hanjour and two other hijackers -- Khalid Al-Midhar and Nawaq Alhamzi -- lived in the San Diego area last year, according to FBI spokeswoman Jan Caldwell said.

In hindsight, the parallels between this week's attack and previous plots are stunning, analysts say. Both the target - the World Trade Center - and the use of airplanes appeared in earlier trials.

In what now seems prescient testimony in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case, US Secret Service agent Brian Parr said terrorist mastermind Ramzi Ahmed Yousef bragged that he hoped the explosion would topple one tower onto the other, killing thousands of Americans.

Yousef and his associates also plotted to blow up 11 US commercial aircraft in one day, records show.

What is stunning, specialists say is that the suspects' actions went undetected, especially with all the knowledge that officials had gathered from previous incidents such as the embassy trial.

In May 1998, bin Laden issued a Fatwah, a decree, in which he called on Muslims to kill Americans, including civilians. Evidence presented at the trial also revealed that Al Qaeda members attempted to buy nuclear weapons.

The portrait of Al Qaeda that emerged through testimony at the embassy bombing trial is of a sophisticated organization. With branches and related businesses around the globe, the group, in the words of prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, operates like a multinational corporation: ''Jihad Inc.''

Its members were highly skilled, trained in counter-intelligence, surveillance, weapons, explosives, and computer use. Some members were specifically asked to train as pilots.

Another key witness, L'Houssaine Kerchtou, testified that he was sent to flight school in Nairobi before becoming more directly involved in the embassy bombing plot. Kerchtou took the stand as part of a plea agreement with the US government, and remains under FBI protection while he awaits sentencing on charges of conspiracy to kill Americans.

Highly secretive, fanatical, and dedicated to bin Laden's vision, members would stop at nothing, prosecutors said. They shaved their beards and wore Western clothes in order to avoid detection, often using aliases and passwords.

Al Ridi, who testified at the trial, received his flight training in 1979, long before he had become associated with bin Laden's organization. He first joined the cause of Afghanistan's fighters, the mujahadeen, when they were battling the forces of the Soviet Union. But his skills as a pilot were called upon over the years, in part to purchase equipment for the Afghan fighters. Al Ridi, who returned to the United States in 1985 after living in Pakistan, said he used his flight credentials to ship night vision goggles and Barrett 50 caliber rifles to the mujahadeen.

After becoming an American citizen in 1994, al Ridi was contacted by one of the men on trial in the embassy bombing case, El Hage, bin Laden's business associate. Equipped with $210,000, al Ridi bought a Saber-40 aircraft from an old military plane storehouse, revamped it, and flew it to Khartoum in 1993, where he met with bin Laden.

A simple conclusion Americans can draw from the events of Tuesday is that the United States suffered a devastating attack with an unprecedented loss of life and property because our intelligence community failed to receive commanding leadership from our federal government.

Within the past twenty years we have allowed the enemy led by Osama Bin Laden to surround us.

They have used our own planes as missiles against us.

And, they have used our schools and our technology to learn how to strike us down like so many pins in a bowling alley - while living in our neighborhoods, sending their children to our schools, and enjoying the benefits of our hard fought and won democracy.

And worst of all, they struck us right under the nose of our defense and intelligence system - a system composed of leaders who stood by and waited for them to carry out their deadly strikes.

(Editor's Note: Certain information in this article was derived from reports published by the Associated Press, Reuters, The Boston Globe, New York Times, and Washington Post.)

05/24/2003-Chicago Tribune
9/11 panel told of cover-ups before attacks
Witnesses: U.S. suppressed warnings
The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, were made possible by gaping holes in airline security, government cover-ups that prevented problems from being fixed and a failure to respond to a growing threat that terrorists might use airliners as weapons, witnesses told an independent commission this week.

"The notion that these hijackings and terrorism were an unforeseen and unforeseeable risk is an airline and FAA public-relations management myth," said Mary Schiavo, a former inspector general at the Department of Transportation, in testimony Friday.