More context for Condi's statement, "We had no idea that jets could be used as bombs"

9/11 -- Six years in the making

It was to be the most spectacular terrorist act of all time. Thousands would die, and it would cripple the airline industry. I'm not talking about 9/11. I'm talking about the Bojinka plot that was uncovered in early 1995. I'm talking about it because I know for a fact the FBI doesn't want it known. I know this because of the just recently released declassified FBI documents that are now available at http://intelfiles.egoplex.com/index.html

These documents are heavily redacted. But if we can know what they are redacting then we know what they are hiding. And they are hiding the bojinka plot and more importantly they are also hiding the beginnings of the 9/11 plot, that were known to them just as it was developing more than 6 years before it happened.

Take a look at this document recently released thru the FOIA. On page 3/9 although heavily redacted it is about someone who was arrested in Manila in 1995 and involved in some plot that would involve airlines and the pope. It then redacts the other information regarding this.
http://intelfiles.egoplex.com/2001-07-20-FBI-Daily-UBL-x2.pdf

The person the FBI doesn't want to identify in this report is Abdul Murad. Here is a document concerning his interview with them.

http://intelfiles.egoplex.com/1995-05-11-FBI-FD302-Abdul-Hakim-Murad.pdf
Notice it states he was arrested in Manila. And the date of the interview is 4/13/95 which is perfectly consistant with previously published reports of when he was turned over to U.S. authorities after his arrest on Jan 6 1995. As can be shown here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Hakim_Murad_(terrorist)
Also notice his interview is completely redacted. What could he be telling them?

The Bojinka Plot was a planned large-scale terrorist attack by Ramzi Yousef and Abdul Hakim Murad to blow up eleven airliners and their approximately 4000 passengers as they flew from Asia to the United States. There were a combination of plots by Yousef and Murad to take place in January 1995, including a plot to assassinate Pope John Paul II. Ramzi Yousef had an uncle named Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who also seemed to be in the area, and was most likely aware of the plots, he is known today as the "mastermind of 9/11".

The plots that were foiled with the arrests in January of 1995 of Murad who was the roommate of Ramzi Yousef and Wali Khan Amin Shah, coincidently came just in time to prevent the terrorist acts from being carried out. The pope was scheduled to be in the Philippines on Jan 12, just 6 days after the police uncovered the plot.

Philippine police arrived at the apartment supposedly because of a fire alarm going off, details are sketchy as to what exactly happened. But police did arrive and thought the actions in apartment 603 seemed to be suspicious. What they found at the apartment were street maps of Manila, plotting the papal motorcade's route; two remote-control pipe bombs; and a phone message from a tailor saying the cassock Saeed (Murads' alias) had ordered was ready for a final fitting.

http://www.prisonplanet.com/operation_bojinkas_bombshell.html
It was obvious they had planned to dress someone up as a priest, and smuggle the bomb past the Holy Father's security detail. But they also found a treasure trove of other evidence. Multiple bomb making equipment and chemicals and Ramzi Yousefs computer.

The most damning information was gleaned from Yousef's computer, and four accompanying diskettes. On the computer were manifestos of sorts which explained why they were carring out terror attacks. It turns out it wasn't because they hated our freedom as we are lead to believe but rather U.S. foreign policy, which by the way is exactly what Ron Paul the Republican presidential candidate has been trying to make the public aware of.

Intelligence officials had gleaned a treasure-trove of information on the inner workings of bin Laden's terrorist network. Cell members did not appear to even know one another's real names. Intelligence officials now knew more about this terrorist network than the individual terrorists that were involved in it.

Another file found on Yousef's computer consisted of a printout of U.S. airline schedules, which initially baffled investigators. The file, named Bojinka, listed the travel itineraries of 11 long-haul flights between Asia and the United States, mostly on United and American airlines. All the flights had several legs, and were grouped under five headings bearing code names of accomplices such as Zyed, Majbos or Obaid. Each accomplice would leave the bombs on the first leg of the flight, and then eventually return to locations like Lahore, Pakistan.

Obaid, for instance, would fly from Singapore to Hong Kong on United Flight 80, which continued as United Flight 806 to San Francisco. Under the flight plan, Yousef had written: "SETTING: 9:30 PM to 10:30 PM. TIMER: 23HR. BOJINKA: 20:30-21:30 NRT Date 5." There were 11 flights mentioned with details such as these.

They had even done a test run a few weeks earlier on a Philippine Airlines flight from the Philippine town of Cebu to Tokyo's Narita International Airport. A device Ramzi had planted on the plane blew a hole in the Boeing 747, killing a Japanese passenger and forcing the plane to make an emergency landing. U.S. federal prosecutors later estimated that 4,000 passengers would have died had the plot been successful. "We had never seen anything that complicated or ambitious before. It was unparalleled," recalls Cannistraro, a
former CIA counter-terrorism head, who left the agency in 1991.

But, Philippine and U.S intelligence officials said, the Bojinka operation called for a second, perhaps even more ambitious phase, as interrogators discovered when they pressed Murad about his pilot's licence. All those years in flight school, he confessed, had been in preparation for a suicide mission. He was to buy, rent, or steal a small plane, fill it with explosives and crash it into CIA headquarters, while others would fly planes into other targets. He mentioned the other targets being the White House, the Pentagon and some skyscrapers. The only problem, Murad complained, was that they needed trained pilots to carry out the plot.

The person in charge of the Philippine police who foiled the plot Aida Fariscal, had this to say about the events of 9/11 and what she had discovered more than 6 years before. "I thought, at first, that I was having a bad dream, or that I was watching a movie." But as the burning towers came crashing down under their own weight, disbelief turned to anger. "I still don't understand," she says, "how it could have been allowed to happen." The footage made Fariscal bolt upright. "Oh my God," she gasped. "Bojinka." "The FBI knew all about Yousef's plans," she says. "They'd seen the files, been inside 603. The CIA had access to everything, too." "This should have never, ever been allowed to happen," she repeats angrily.

Gen. Avelino "Sonny" Razon, one of the lead investigators in the Bojinka case, was so shocked at what he saw on Sept. 11 that he jumped on a plane in Cebu, where he was now police chief, and flew to Manila to convene a hasty press conference. "We told the Americans about the plans to turn planes into flying bombs as far back as 1995," he complained to reporters. All this according to the Washington post. http://www.prisonplanet.com/bust_and_boom.html

So now you know why there are these redactions being released 13 years after U.S. Intelligence was made aware of a plan to fly planes into buildings. The President and at the time of 9/11 National Security Adviser Condeleeza Rice have both publicly stated that they nor the previous administration could never have imagined flying planes into buildings. And the
Intelligence agencies of the United States still want you to believe that they couldn't either.

FBI spokesperson John E. Collingwood denies that the bureau had advance knowledge of a plot to turn airliners into flying bombs. "The FBI had no warnings about any hijack plots. There was a widely publicized 1995 conspiracy in Manila to remotely blow up 11 U.S. airliners over the Pacific," Collingwood said in a letter to the Washington Post in October, "but that was disrupted. And, as is the practice, what was learned in that investigation was widely disseminated, even internationally, and thoroughly analyzed by multiple agencies. It does not connect to the current case."

However there is every reason to believe that not only was the 9/11 attacks connected to the Bojinka plot but that it was also connected to the first bombing of the trade towers in 1993. Ramzi Yousef has been convicted of that attack. There is also every reason to believe that Intelligence officials knew in advance of 9/11, bojinka, and the 1993 attack. It turns out the FBI had an informant that was heavily involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing named Emad A. Salem, who claims the FBI knew about the bombing in advance. To believe the bojinka plot being discovered just before it was to be carried out is to believe in an amazing coincidence. It has since been reported in the LA Times that the police in Manila actually set the fire in order to have a reason to go the apartment, and ultimately foil the bojinka plot.
http://www.911readingroom.org/whole_document.php?article_id=150
This seems to indicate that this group had already been heavily infiltrated and according to some reports the informants are even named. Rolando San Juan was reportedly an undercover agent monitoring Yousef and his apartment mate Murad. He was passing what he learned to his brother Erick San Juan, of special intelligence.
http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/entity.jsp?entity=aida_fariscal_1

But to suggest that elements of the U.S. Government could have actually been aware and knew of the 9/11 plot because it had already infiltrated deeply the organization behind these terrorist attacks is a serious charge. Is there any other evidence? There is enough evidence to write a book. And several have already been written including several by Peter Lance. The latest of which was called Triple Cross: How bin Laden's Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets, and the FBI--and Why Patrick Fitzgerald Failed to Stop Him.

As great as the work is that Lance has done, as you can tell from the title of his latest book, he puts forth the assumption that it is Al Qaeda that is the one that infiltrated the U.S Intelligence agencies. The only way to believe this is to believe the intelligence agencies are so unbelievably incompetent beyond all imagination. But how can you blame him? Most would prefer that thought to the alternative one. That those who control the agencies would actually allow events to occur in order to promote global political objectives. I believe the evidence grows each day to prove the latter the more obvious explanation.

Original article posted here.