The Ignorance Excuse Is a Lie
9/11: Once Again! 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.
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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.
Security at the 1996 Olympics[23]
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."
Plane Terror at the G8 Summit[24]
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.
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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
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