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K2K2 - NOW MINT-FLAVORED!!!
June 2002
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9/11: Once Again, the Ignorance Excuse Is a Lie
by Russ Kick
As the truth about foreknowledge of 9/11 breaks into the mainstream, government officials are deperately trying to contain the damage. Their primary tactic has been to admit, yes, Bush was warned that al Qaeda was planning to hijack US planes and, yes, an FBI memo warned that Muslim terrorists were training at US flight schools (the memo even mentioned bin Laden by name). But, they tell us, we didn't know that they were going to ram the planes into buildings. We thought it was going to be run-of-the-mill hijackings. (If that were so, the officials still need to explain to us why they were unable to scramble jets in a timely manner to intercept at least some of the planes.)
Condoleezza Rice presented a perfect example of this excuse: "Had this president known that a plane was going to be used as a missile, he would have acted on it." We are once again being told that the idea of hijacked planes as weapons was absolutely new. No one could've possibly foreseen it.
This is an absolute lie.
The following excerpts from my article "September 11, 2001: No Surprise" prove conclusively that terrorists have planned and even attempted to ram passenger jets into buildings. What's more, the authorities have sometimes taken precautions against the plans.
Islamic Militant Who Masterminded the 1993 WTC Bombing Had Plans for Crashing Passenger Jets into US Buildings [19]
A small fire broke out in an apartment in Manila in 1995. The place turned out to be a veritable bombmaking factory, and authorities quickly realized it was a hideout for Ramzi Yousef, the terrorist mastermind who has since been convicted for his role in 1993 WTC bombing. Yousef evaded the Filipino authorities, but they nabbed his accomplice, Abdul Hakim Murad, who had been trained as a pilot in the US. Both men are believed to be part of bin Laden's network.
An investigator with Philippine intelligence said: "Murad narrated to us about a plan by the Ramzi cell in the continental US to hijack a commercial plane and ram it into the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and also the Pentagon."
Investigators found evidence that the terrorists were also planning kamikaze attacks on the White House, the Sears Tower in Chicago, the Transamerica Tower in San Francisco, and -- brace yourself -- the World Trade Center.
A search of Yousef's computer also yielded a plan to blow up eleven or twelve US airliners during international flights in a two-day period. The terrorists had even mapped out which flights to target and when to set the timers on the bombs. As the third facet of their plan, they intended to assassinate the Pope and President Clinton when they arrived in the Philippines. This orgy of death and destruction was named Project Bojinka by the terrorists. [20]
Discussing the 911 attacks, an unnamed official admitted the obvious to the World Tribune: "What we saw was the completion of Yousef's plans. The resemblance is too strong to ignore."
Previous Attempts to Turn Planes into Weapons [22]
NBC News put it as well as anyone could: "The World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks with hijacked airliners have been called 'unimaginable,' 'without precedent' and 'impossible to predict.' But were they? In 1994, in a strikingly similar plan, suicidal Algerian hijackers plotted to use an Air France jetliner, loaded with fuel and dynamite, as a deadly weapon -- and to aim it at the Eiffel Tower."
Air France Flight 8969 was hijacked by four Muslim militants--believed to have ties to bin Laden -- as it got ready to take off from Algiers for Paris on Christmas Eve 1994. The terrorists loaded the plane with explosives and, stopping in Marseilles, had it filled with extra fuel to make it highly combustible for ramming into the Eiffel Tower. Before the plane took off again, though, commandos stormed it, killing the hijackers.
In an unrelated incident earlier that year, a disgruntled Federal Express employee broke into the cockpit of a DC-10 and brained all three members of the flight crew with a hammer. Luckily, despite their serious injuries, they fended him off and kept control of the plane. According to the man's coworkers, he planned to crash the plane into FedEx's corporate headquarters in Memphis, Tennessee.
It turns out that even these harbingers of the 911 attacks weren't completely unprecedented. A somewhat similar plan was hatched by Muslim militants to hijack Pan Am Flight 76 in Pakistan in 1986, and blow it to smithereens over Tel Aviv, raining debris and fuel onto the Israeli city. Luckily, the Palestinian hijackers were captured before the plane had taken off.
And let's not forget that the White House has been attacked kamikaze-style by a small plane. In the early morning hours of September 12, 1994, a down-on-his-luck truck driver stole a small plane--a single-engine Cessna 150--and flew it directly at the White House. Not one shot was fired by the Secret Service as the plane instead hit a 160-year-old magnolia tree on the South Lawn, careened end over end, and came to rest against the White House, causing only minor damage.
The Chicago Tribune noted that the pilot "shattered the myth of an impregnable White House and showed how easily someone, perhaps a determined terrorist, could strike again.... Terrorism experts said the White House's vulnerability to attack by air, using readily available technology, is greater than believed."
Unprecedented? Not even close.
When the 1996 Olympics were held in Atlanta, authorities put into place security measures designed to thwart any attempt to crash a plane into the proceedings. The Los Angeles Times reports: "In an extraordinary aerial dragnet, launched quietly that summer and kept largely under wraps ever since, Black Hawk helicopters and US Customs Service jets were deployed to intercept suspicious aircraft in the skies over the Olympic venues, officials said."
Regional airports were monitored, and a no-fly zone was instituted. "From July 6 through the end of the Games on Aug. 11, the FAA banned all aviation within a one-mile radius of the Olympic Village that housed the athletes," says the Times. "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."
Lest you somehow still think the authorities didn't know Islamic terrorists were planning on using hijacked planes as weapons, let's turn our attention to the G8 Summit in Italy. This meeting of the world's eight economic superpowers, which took place in Genoa in July 2001, became infamous when police shot and killed an unarmed protestor.
Security at the event was tight and included surface-to-air missiles, as well as the shutting down of airspace over the city. This seemed ridiculously excessive at the time, but Italy's Deputy Prime Minister Gianfranco Fini revealed the actual reason for the heightened state of alert: Italian intelligence had uncovered a plan to assassinate President Bush during the event by crashing a hijacked commercial airliner either into Air Force One or one of the buildings being used for the summit. According to three sources -- Deputy Prime Minister Fini, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, and Russian President Vladimir Putin's bodyguard service -- the threat to kill Bush (and possibly other leaders) came from none other than Osama bin Laden.
The claim that authorities couldn't possibly have foreseen kamikaze airplane attacks is obviously untenable.
The Philippines Warned the US
As mentioned earlier in this article, authorities in the Philippines uncovered Project Bojinka, the radical Muslim plot to ram hijacked jets into American landmarks and to blow up eleven or twelve US airliners in two days. They turned over this information to the FBI. It is not known what, if anything, the feds did with it.
A Washington Post reporter in the Philippines wrote: "Watching the attacks in New York and Washington unfold on television earlier this month, an investigator here gasped, 'It's Bojinka.' He said later: 'We told the Americans everything about Bojinka. Why didn't they pay attention?'" [53]
ENDNOTES
19. Neuffer, Elizabeth. "Feds Knew Bin Laden's Allies Trained as Pilots." Boston Globe 15 Sept 2001; Ressa, Maria. "US Warned in 1995 of Plot to Hijack Planes, Attack Buildings." CNN, 18 Sept 2001; Struck, Doug, et al. "Borderless Network of Terror." Washington Post 23 Sept 2001; unsigned. "Ramzi Yusef [sic], Architect of First World Trade Center Bombing, Carried Plans for Airliner Suicide Crashes." World Tribune 15 Sept 2001; unsigned. "Airline Terror Plan Was Codenamed 'Project Bojinka'." Geostrategy-Direct, date unknown; unsigned. "Western Intelligence Knew of Laden Plan Since 1995: Report." Agence France-Presse, 7 Dec 2001.
20. An aside: It's quite interesting to note that when speaking of Ramzi's scheme, the media almost never mention his plans to send hijacked commercial planes into targets in the US. Since 911, many mainstream media outlets have discussed Project Bojinka, but they focus only on the assassinations and explosions, deliberately ignoring the aspect of the plan that was actually carried out. A perfect example is this from Time magazine: "Investigators discovered plots to assassinate the Pope and President Clinton during visits to the Philippines and to explode a dozen commercial jets over the Pacific." That's it; that's their entire description of Project Bojinka. Bower, Amanda. "Terrorist Hits and Misses: A Chronology of Mayhem." Time 12 Nov 2001: 68.
22. Hansen, Chris. "The Lesson of Air France Flight 8969." NBC News, 30 Sept 2001; Neikirk, William, and Christopher Drew. "Small Plane Crashes on White House Lawn, Pilot Dies." Chicago Tribune 12 Sept 1994; Sheley, Chuck. "Smokejumper Training Thwarts Hijacking of Pan-Am Clipper" 73." The Smokejumper (no date); Wald, Matthew L. "Earlier Hijackings Offered Signals That Were Missed." New York Times 3 Oct 2001.
23. Fineman, Mark, and Judy Pasternak. "Suicide Flights and Crop Dusters Considered Threats at '96 Olympics." Los Angeles Times 17 Nov 2001.
24. Unsigned. "Italy: Bush Targeted at G8." New York Newsday 19 Sept 2001; unsigned. "Extremists 'Planned Genoa Attack on Bush'." BBC News, 27 Sept 2001.
53. Struck, Doug, et al. "Borderless Network of Terror." Washington Post 23 Sept 2001.
Thus, we see the incontrovertible proof that the authorities knew that terrorists have tried to use hijacked planes as instruments of mass destruction. Let's not believe their lies anymore.
An early version of this article is available in its entirety at:
A longer version is available in the anthology Everything You Know Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Secrets and Lies, edited by Russ Kick (The Disinformation Company, 2002). For more info, see http://www.alternewswire.com/eykiw/
