U.S. Authorities Warned of Hijack Attack Plotting in 1995

U.S. authorities were alerted as early as 1995 that several Middle Eastern pilots were training at American flight schools and at least one had proposed hijacking a plane to crash into federal buildings, according to documents and interviews with Filipino and U.S. authorities.

The information came from police interrogations with Abdul Hakim Murad and a computer seized from Ramzi Yousef, two men arrested after an accidental chemical fire at a Manila apartment tipped authorities to a major terrorist plot linked to Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)'s al-Qaida network.

Murad and Yousef eventually were convicted in the United States and sentenced to life in prison in a plot to blow up 12 U.S.-bound airliners flying out of Asia.

Filipino police and intelligence officers, along with several secret police reports reviewed by The Associated Press, say Murad's intentions were much broader and included suicide hijackings like those that occurred on Sept. 11.

``Murad's idea is that he will board any American commercial aircraft pretending to be an ordinary passenger, then he will hijack said aircraft, control its cockpit and dive it at the CIA (news - web sites) headquarters,'' one Filipino police report from 1995 said.

``There will be no bomb or any explosive that he will use in its execution. It is a suicidal mission that he is very much willing to execute,'' it said.

Filipino authorities told AP they shared the information immediately with FBI (news - web sites) agents in Manila in 1995, and ultimately concluded that U.S. authorities focused too much on the bombing plot and not enough on the possibility of suicide hijackings.

``We shared that with the FBI,'' said Robert Delfin, chief of intelligence command for the Philippine National Police. ``They may have mislooked (sic) and didn't appreciate the info coming from the Philippine police.''

Murad, who later claimed he was tortured during his interrogations, detailed to Filipino authorities how he and a Pakistani friend crisscrossed the United States, attending flight schools in New York, Texas, California and North Carolina on his way to earning a commercial pilot's license.

He also identified to Filipino police approximately 10 other Middle Eastern men who met him at the flight schools or were getting similar training.

One was a Middle Eastern flight instructor who came to the United States for more training; another a former soldier in the United Arab Emirates. Others came from Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.

None of the pilots match the names of the 19 hijackers from Sept. 11, but Filipino police's investigation of Murad and Yousef uncovered information pointing to a Muslim cleric from Malaysia who has emerged in the past few months as a key figure in the investigation of last year's suicide hijackings.

Authorities in Malaysia have said they believe the cleric, who goes by the name Hambali, met with two of the Sept. 11 hijackers in 2000 and may be a central figure in terrorist groups with links to bin Laden that have emerged in southeast Asia. Authorities are seeking Hambali's arrest.

FBI and other law enforcement officials involved in the Murad investigation, who spoke only on condition of anonymity, said American authorities were focused mostly on the plot to detonate bombs on airliners because it was developed and imminent when the men were arrested.

The officials said the government had very general information from Murad about an idea, not a complete plan, for flying a plane into the CIA headquarters near Washington, but believed he was considering a small single engine plane and not a commercial airliner.

The officials said the FBI interviewed people at the flight schools highlighted by Filipino police but did not develop evidence that any of the other Middle Easterners other than Murad were directly plotting terrorism. With no other evidence of a threat, they took no further action, the officials said.

FBI agents descended upon the flying schools in 1995, and returned to some of those locations immediately after Sept. 11.

``There were several of them (Middle Eastern pilot students) here. At one point three or four were here,'' said Laura Flynn, an assistant manager at Richmore Flight School in Schenectady, N.Y., where Murad and a friend attended in the mid-1990s.

``Supposedly they didn't know each other before, they just happened to show up here at the same time. But they all obviously knew each other,'' she said.

Flynn said FBI agents mentioned Murad was suspected in a bombing plot but did not say anything about a suicide hijacking. She said agents returned to the school after Sept. 11 ``and asked about any of the foreign people, pulled some records.''

Delfin said when he saw the Sept. 11 attacks on television, Murad's disclosures immediately came to mind.

``This is it, this was what Murad was saying,'' Delfin said he remarked to other intelligence officials.

Rodolfo Mendoza, the former police intelligence official who oversaw Murad's interrogations, had the same reaction. ``It's exactly as what Murad said before, 'I will hijack a commercial plane and dive crash it,''' Mendoza said.

Murad told authorities he discussed the suicide hijacking idea with Yousef just a few months before their arrest and had not yet developed a specific plan, although they discussed targets like the CIA building and the Pentagon (news - web sites) in the Virginia suburbs of Washington. The Pentagon was struck Sept. 11.

``I am telling you that I told Basit (Yousef) that there is a planning, what about we dive to CIA building,'' Murad is quoted in one transcript as telling police interrogators. ``He told me OK, we will think about it.''

Filipino police questioned his willingness to die. ``You are willing to die for Allah or for Islamic?,'' one asked.

Later Murad offered some insight. ``All my thinking was,'' he said, ``that I should fight the Americans. I should do something to show them that we are, we could stay in their face.''

--to me, the really disturbing thing about this and other cases is the culture of "shutup and sit down" that has happened to the federal police and intelligence communities. They have those folks thoroughly buffloed. I'd bet a box of donuts that there were many efforts to actually follow through and investigate this or that, and they were squashed on orders from higher levels. Motives for the squashing can be many, I can think of several easily, but it's the ability of those people to have such control over their employees despite the fact of it being of national importance and gravity. For instance, we are supposed to accept the fiction that the secret service was clueless for 8 years about crimes in high level executive branch offices. Well, to be fair, even longer than 8 years, take it way back, it's the same. That's just another along with the intel and police agencies.

I just don't buy it.

Although I want to still respect and have some hope that those agencies can do a proper job, until individuals there are stopped being threatened, or they develop enough courage to not care about their checks and jobs and are willing to go public when they have evidence of being ordered to 'stand down", then these sorts of incidents will just increase.

And it doesn't make it any easier for any of them when "revealing" what evidence they have is automatically considered a crime, and when they have no practical higher office to turn to to present their cases without fearing probable retribution. That exists now, it's a "crime' to reveal 'sensitive' information, even if said information reveals the crime! Catch 22 for anyone with insider information.

IF there can be some extreme high level managers actually busted, prosecuted and incacerated for either on purpose collusion or just from being "chicken" and not following their oaths, and passing 'being chicken" down their command chain as a matter of policy, then perhaps we can end this cycle of "coverups". The rank and file should not be afraid of doing the jobs they are actually hired for. I've just heard this over and over from cops in general when they get a chance to speak privately and off the record. Drug investigations that started to go extremely uphill into politics and bureaucracy, sliding into "official"people as opposed to private citizens-cop ordered to stop investigating. Stuff like that. Heard it from guys in the military as well, intel branches or in decent security areas where the intel branch orders them off looking at what they are looking at or discovered.

The last disturbing trend is the type and style of modern "police' training. I know some cops who have actually quit because they didn't want to particpate any longer, that policing has changeed for the worse, and they had no control over what was going on. so they quit rather than keep participating. I know another guy, a young man a few years ago was seeking to enter the police here in georgia. He is really quite the upstanding guy, someone you would actually appreciate being in some for of government 'service', educated, motivated, extremely loyal to the nation and honest, regular adult boy scout type of kid. His father is retired career army, and had given him a higher than average norm of interest and background in US history and the constitution. He gets accepted, gets into training, and sees it's not to be a cop like he thought, it's to learn to be a military person with a cop uniform on , and he was told to treat all civvies as the enemy, and the constitution isn't even mentioned in any practical way in the training. So, he quit, refused to even consider being a cop then.

But many thousands DON'T, they just accept the training, and then you see all these examples of apparent 'bad stuff' that happens that is scary. there's threads on this or that daily, and i bet it's the tip of the iceberg, it's happening all over, we only get to see the very high profile cases and that's already too high a number.

It's one thing to follow orders, it's another to follow orders so blindly and so consistently that you become part of an increasing problem. Being an efficient robot is not the mark of an intelligent or concerned human. It's possible to retain the qualities of great training and cohesivness, and it's possible to retain your "human-ness", UNLESS, you are ordered from the git-go to "not do that".

I don't have an easy answer other than to try and get it out that honest cops still got friends, and to tell them to try to be brave enough to do what's right even if what you have been ordered to do is clearly wrong or illegal or against national security or identiy.

Here's one, wouldn't it be nice if from every scrambled eggs on the cap guy on down in the military, they all refused to fight under any UN auspices? A big michael new effort? Just said "no, wouldn't be prudent, oath is to the US", said it politiely but firmly and stuck to it? That's another sort of bravery, there's fighting in combat, then there's that kind, too. We got lots of the first kind, not enough of the latter. Fighting in undeclared wars, there's another.

How about if a group of just mid level honest cops are ordered to stop investigating some crime that is headed up hill into the 'connected ones". As soon as they get ordered to 'stop looking", they arrest whatever 'superior" ordered them to do so under RICO or something else depending on the situation? Obstruction of justice perhaps. Literally slap the cuffs on them.

It's not "mutiny" when you are ordered to commit a crime, although I guess it can be argued that way. I think that argument is on shaky ground when you still have oaths that have lawful standing and are not just mumbled ritualistic words.

Besides that, i don't know. congressional oversight committess? We saw it in the impeachment, we have a design flaw in the constitution that is biting us now, it's obvious. The executive and judicial branch have guns and badges and armies of paramilitary police or the actual military, all following orders no matter what, the legislative branch doesn't, and there ya go. There's no effective check or balance any longer, PLUS we have a large standing army under the executive branch, something we were told to NEVER to do as it was too dangerous and subject to abuse. That was one of the clearest 'things' the founders warned about and tried to get carved in stone, because their memories were vivid. they noted the phenomenon that most people suffering persecution and abuse are not being abused by any foreign invading army, nope, they noticed that consistently it was various governments abusing their own populations and calling it "law". Last centyury many millions in wars around the planet killed for foreign armies, but the bulk of people killed in abusive manners were offed by their own governments, and the discrepancy in numbers is staggering.

Well, now we got "decades of past abuse". And following past historical trends and examples you can see which direction it's headed. And I just don't see the executive branch giving up this nifty power trip they have control over now,, no matter whichever R or D gets elected to head it.

When you have "law" by dictate and edict, what's that form of government called again?

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Authorities Warned of Hijack Risks