By Jack
Cashill
� 2004 WorldNetDaily.com
At the very beginning of her Thursday interview, 9-11 Commission
Chairman Thomas Kean asked National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice the
most important question of the day.
I've got a question now I'd like to ask you. It was given to me by
a number of members of the families. Did you ever see or hear from the
FBI, from the CIA, from any other intelligence agency, any memos or
discussions or anything else between the time you got into office and
9-11 that talked about using planes as bombs?
"To the best of my knowledge, Mr. Chairman," Rice replied, "this kind
of analysis about the use of airplanes as weapons actually was never
briefed to us." Rice was almost assuredly telling the truth. Republican
Kean would have not asked this question � the second of the whole session
� to catch her in a lie. What is more, no Democrat member of the panel
challenged her.
In fact, Richard Clarke had acknowledged
as much during his earlier testimony before the panel. In response to a
question by Democrat Richard Ben-Veniste, Clarke admitted that the
"knowledge about al-Qaida having thought of using aircraft as weapons" was
relatively old, "five-years, six-years old." He asked that intelligence
analysts "be forgiven for not thinking about it given the fact that they
hadn't seen a lot in the five or six years intervening about it."
That intelligence did, in fact, reach Washington about six years prior
to Sept. 11. The Philippine police had uncovered plans for aerial assaults
as early as December 1994 and shared those plans with the FBI in January
1995. The man responsible for those plans was Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind
of the first World Trade Center bombing.
In the summer of 1996, Yousef was standing trial in New York for his
role in a plot known as "Bojinka," the Serbian word for explosive. Yousef
had been planning to blow up 11 American airliners over the Pacific more
or less simultaneously. The scary thing is that he was capable of doing
it.
One element of Bojinka planning mirrored Yousef's most successful
crime, the truck bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. If one could
stuff a thousand pounds of explosives into a van, reasoned Yousef on the
laptop seized from the Manila apartment he shared with Abdul Hakim Murad,
a Pakistani pilot, why not stuff a comparable amount in a small plane and
strike real terror into the belly of the beast?
The one speculative target cited was the CIA building. But more
important was the methodology. The following excerpt from a classified
Republic of the Phillippines intelligence report shows that al-Qaida had
plans to use small planes as flying bombs as early as 1994.
The document [from Yousef's computer] specifically cited the
charter service of a commercial-type aircraft loaded with powerful bombs
to be dive-crashed by SAEED AKMAN. This is apparently intended to
demonstrate to the whole world that a Muslim martyr is ready and
determined to die for the glorification of Islam.
U.S. Air Force Col. Buzz Patterson carried the "nuclear football" for
the president during that fateful summer of 1996 and, as such, had almost
total access. One morning that Patterson identifies only as "late-summer"
1996, he was returning a daily intelligence update to the National
Security Council when he noticed the heading "Operation Bojinka." As
Patterson relates in his book, "Dereliction of Duty," "I keyed on a
reference to a plot to use commercial airliners as weapons." As a pilot he
had a keen interest in the same.
This was the same summer that Clarke, in his book, describes as "The
Almost War, 1996." On July 17 of that same summer � Saddam's National
Liberation Day and two days before the start of the Atlanta Olympics � TWA
Flight 800 was blown from the sky just 12 minutes outside of New York City
off the south coast of Long Island.
In our book, "First
Strike," James Sanders and I theorize that a small terrorist jet
filled with explosives was involved in the destruction of TWA Flight 800 �
what George Stephanopolous called, in an unguarded moment, "a bombing,"
and what John Kerry has twice referred to as a "terrorist" act.
We have also accepted Richard Clarke at his word that he played
the key role in devising the "exit strategy" from the "Almost
War." In his book, "Against All Enemies," Clarke claims to have discovered
the TWA 800 "exploding fuel tank" theory even before the National
Transportation Safety Board did and while the FBI was still insisting on
terrorism.
Even, however, if one believes that an exploding fuel tank did destroy
TWA Flight 800, one is hard pressed to understand why Clarke did not share
the Bojinka "airplane as bomb" scenario with Rice. It was not, after all,
until August 2000 that the NTSB accepted the exploding-fuel-tank theory.
Withholding this information only makes sense if Clarke had something to
hide.
Please, Chairman Keane, bring Richard Clarke back.
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Exploding hypotheses: Parts 1
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Imaginary
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muffle voice recorder data
Fateful
4 seconds
Unraveling
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TWA 800
controversy heats up
Cashill's five-part series, "Silenced: Flight 800 and the subversion
of justice":
Part
1
Part
2
Part
3
Part
4
Part
5
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Jack Cashill is an
Emmy-award winning independent writer and producer with a Ph.D. in
American Studies from Purdue.
