Mike from Mike’s America has done a great job writing a concise summary of the 9/11 hijackers and what President Clinton knew about them:
The attack on the World Trade Center in February 1993, a few weeks into the presidency of Bill Clinton, was the first foreign instigated terror attack on American soil in the modern age. It was treated by the new administration as a law enforcement problem. Yet the warning signs that it was something much larger, portending more ominous and deadly attacks was clear.
Less than two years later, Laurie Mylroie wrote “THE WORLD TRADE CENTER BOMB: Who is Ramzi Yousef? And Why It Matters in The National Interest in which she describes doubts that this was the work of a loose knit band of Islamic radicals, and disclosing that the FBI agents charged with investigating the crime also saw strong indications of a state sponsor for that terrorist act, namely Iraq.
…Ramzi Yousef, entered the United States in 1992 using a fake Iraqi passport. Yousef lived in Jersey City, New Jersey in the company of a number of Iraqis and Palestinian Mohammad Salameh, who placed 46 phone calls in rapid succession to his uncle in Iraq, who worked for the Palestinian office in Baghdad after being expelled from Israel for terrorism. Considering his uncle’s position and the close relationship between Palestinian terror organizations and the Iraq Security Services, it may be a reasonable assumption that the I.S.S. was aware, or perhaps more directly involved, in the plot to bomb the World Trade Center.
On February 26, 1993, the anniversary of Kuwait’s liberation from Iraq’s brutal occupation, the bomb that Yousef and company manufactured, exploded in a rented Ryder truck in the parking garage of the World Trade Center. The intention of the bombers was to topple one tower into the other.
One of the conspirators, Abdul Rahman Yasin fled to Baghdad,
where ABC News reported he was staying at his father’s house, an official in the Iraqi government. Ramzi Yousef escaped to Pakistan hours after the attack. He used a temporary Pakastani passport based on suspicious documents from Kuwait, which could have easily been tampered with by Iraqi Intelligence during the occupation. In Pakistan, he stayed in a guest house owned by Osama bin Laden where he got reacquainted with his Uncle, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, later arrested in Pakistan as Al Queda’s Operations Chief.
He goes on to detail Yasin and his crew activities in the mid 90’s which I have covered in my Connection series.
What I haven’t written about is the specific documents and testimony that details the Clinton Administration knowledge of the upcoming threat:
FBI and CIA Knew of Plans to Use Planes as Weapons Against
the WTC and Other Buildings in 1995:From Local is Global: A computer expert who regularly assists the National Bureau of Investigation (the Philippine FBI counterpart) and the Philippine National Police in their investigations of computer-related crimes said he downloaded the files, revealing the terrorists’ diabolical project. One plan, code-named “Bojinka” called for the hijacking of U.S.-bound commercial airliners from various Asian capitals and then, according to him, crashing them into “key structures in the United States: The World Trade Center, the White House, the Pentagon, the Transamerican Tower, and the Sears Tower were among the prominent structures that had been identified in the plans that we had decoded.”
From Bust and Boom: 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 attach? were notified. A team of intelligence agents flew in from Washington.
…[Quoting Aida Fariscal, the retired Philippine policewoman who was instrumental in capturing Murad]: The FBI knew all about Yousef’s plans,” she says. “They’d seen the files, been inside 603 [Yousef’s apartment]. The CIA had access to everything, too . . .
…Even in the face of that obvious and unnecessary obstruction, it is believed that some of the threat information made it through to President Clinton. Retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Robert “Buzz” Patterson who later wrote: “Dereliction of Duty” was one of Clinton’s Military Aides during that period. The Military Aide is the one who carries the nuclear “football” or briefcase containing the codes for launching a nuclear strike.
During one trip to Camp David, Patterson describes how he learned of the threat to use planes as weapons, presumably based on the information from Yousef’s computer:
One late-summer [1996] Saturday morning, the president asked me to pick up a few days’ worth of PDBs that had accumulated in the Oval Office. He gave them to me with handwritten notes stuffed inside the folders and asked that I deliver them back to the NSC.
I opened the PDB to rearrange the notes and noticed the heading “Operation Bojinka.” I keyed on a reference to a plot to use commercial airliners as weapons and another plot to put bombs on U.S. airliners. Because I was a pilot, this naturally grabbed my attention. I can state for a fact that this information was circulated within the U.S. intelligence community, and that in late 1996 the president was aware of it.
And then this tidbit about the fact that one PDB given to Pres. Bush was focused on while one six years earlier given to Clinton was disregarded.
However, the report does reveal the Presidential Daily Briefing to President Clinton on December 4, 1998 “SUBJECT: Bin Ladin Preparing to Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks.” (middle to bottom of page here)
Allan J. Favish’s excellent article “What the 9/11 Commission Missed” goes into greater detail on these subjects and is a superb resource for this issue.
The Commission discussed ad nauseam what National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice knew and when she knew it. The Commission focused intense scrutiny on the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing to President Bush, entitled: “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike US.” (PDB image here ).
Did the Commission attempt to sidestep the information passed to the Clinton Administration six years before the attacks so as not to embarrass Commission member Jamie Gorelick, who had an obvious conflict of interest?
You bet your ass they did. Go read it all here.
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