March 30, 2004

Chicago, L.A. towers were next targets --

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, al Qaeda's purported operations chief, has told U.S. interrogators that the group had been planning attacks on the Library Tower in Los Angeles and the Sears Tower in Chicago on the heels of the September 11, 2001, terror strikes.
    
Those plans were aborted mainly because of the decisive U.S. response to the New York and Washington attacks, which disrupted the terrorist organization's plans so thoroughly that it could not proceed, according to transcripts of his conversations with interrogators.
[The rapid response of the federal government combined with that of our air traffic controllers got the planes out of the sky and on the ground in record time on 9/11. Thank God!--Jen]

Mohammed told interrogators that he and Ramzi Yousuf, his nephew who was behind an earlier attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, had leafed through almanacs of American skyscrapers when planning the first operation.

"We were looking for symbols of economic might," he told his captors.
   
 He specifically mentioned as potential targets the Library Tower in Los Angeles, which was "blown up" in the film "Independence Day," and the Sears Tower in Chicago.
[...]

According to the transcript, Mohammed has maintained that Zacarias Moussaoui, the French-Moroccan facing trial in the United States as the "20th hijacker," had been sent to a flight school in Minnesota to train for a West Coast attack.

That would buttress Moussaoui's contention that he is improperly charged with participation in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, because he was preparing for a different al Qaeda operation.
[So, Moussaoui's not really lying and he's not really telling the truth, either. He swears on the Koran!--J.T.]
    
The new transcripts confirm an earlier report by the Associated Press that al Qaeda originally had planned to crash hijacked airliners into targets on both coasts.
[...]
The confessions reveal that planning for the September 11 attacks started much earlier and was more elaborate than previously thought.
   
 "The original plan was for a two-pronged attack with five targets on the East Coast of America and five on the West Coast," he told interrogators, according to the transcript.
    
"We talked about hitting California as it was America's richest state, and [al Qaeda leader Osama] bin Laden had talked about economic targets."
    
He is reported to have said that bin Laden, who like Mohammed had studied engineering, vetoed simultaneous coast-to-coast attacks, arguing that "it would be too difficult to synchronize."
[Note: This may be some of the stuff that KSM is making up; because we did respond quickly to the attacks on the East Coast, Mohammed would want to downplay their failure to pull off all the attacks they had planned and so he falsely would claim that OBL vetoed it.--Jen]
   
 Mohammed then decided to conduct two waves of attacks, hitting the East Coast first and following up with a second series of attacks.

"Osama had said the second wave should focus on the West Coast," he reportedly said.
    
But the terrorists seem to have been surprised by the strength of the American reaction to the September 11 attacks.
[Hurray for the Red, White and Blue!]
   
 "Afterwards, we never got time to catch our breath, we were immediately on the run," Mohammed is quoted as saying.
    
Al Qaeda's communications network was severely disrupted, he said. Operatives could no longer use satellite phones and had to rely on couriers, although they continued to use Internet chat rooms.

"Before September 11, we could dispatch operatives with the expectation of follow-up contact, but after October 7 [when U.S. bombing started in Afghanistan], that changed 180 degrees. There was no longer a war room ... and operatives had more autonomy."
[This is precisely what President Bush had in mind when he made our aggressive, muscular response to 9/11! He told his War Cabinet that day, " I don't want to send a $10 million missile through a tent to hit a camel's butt again."
Guess who was the guy who executed that old plan under the Clinton Administration? That's right. RICHARD CLARKE.]
[...]
The interrogation reports also indicate that Mohammed had introduced bin Laden to Hambali, the Indonesian militant accused in the terror attack that killed more than 200 people in Bali, Indonesia, in October 2002.

Certainly, it must be said that 9/11 did happen and we lost 3,000 innocent American citizens and civilians that day, but what these admissions of KSM point out is that this country led by the Bush Administration has been doing a lot of things right since that dark day.
And Khalid doesn't know about all of it, either.
It shouldn't be forgotten that bagging him was a good thing, too!
The GWOIT isn't over, however, and I fear that AQ still has sleeper cells both abroad and in our country, so neither the West Coast, East Coast or Chicago should stand down on watch altogether.
Once these killers get a target on their minds, they seem to keep after it with some degree of persistence.
We can only hope and pray that our efforts to foil the terrorists continue to be as successful in the future and also we need to keep the Patriot Act in place, support the efforts of Homeland Security and our fine military and look to the CIA and the FBI to continue working the problem(s) vigorously!