http://www.newsweek.com/id/75993 - link to full original article

 

Note: As the quote is not easy to find on the Newsweek website at the link above, we include the full article here. The statement about the Pentagon generals cancelling travel plans the day before 9/11, as mentioned in the 9/11 summaries is highlighted in bold face for your viewing ease.

 

 

‘We’ve Hit the Targets’

 

            That message, allegedly sent by Osama bin Laden’s men, makes him

            suspect No. 1. Can he be stopped at last?

 

            By Michael Hirsh

            NEWSWEEK

 

          Sept. 13 issue —  At the time it seemed an empty boast, if a chilling

      one. On Feb. 7, 1995, Ramzi Yousef, considered the mastermind of the 1993

      World Trade Center bombing, was being escorted in shackles back to New

      York City. The FBI had just seized Yousef in Pakistan, and agents felt

      they could crow a little. An FBI SWAT commando pulled up his captive’s

      blindfold and nudged him as they flew in a helicopter over mid-Manhattan,

      pointing to the World Trade Center’s lights glowing in the clear night.

      “Look down there,” he told Yousef. “They’re still standing.” Yousef

      replied, “They wouldn’t be if I had enough money and explosives.” 

 

        RECALLS LEWIS SCHILIRO, a former head of the FBI’s New York field

      office, “He was as cold as ice.” Today Ramzi Yousef is safely in prison,

      as are five of his confederates from the failed 1993 attempt. But Yousef’s

      passion for killing Americans is flourishing in a loose network of tiny

      Islamic fundamentalist terror groups spread around the world. And the main

      suspect in the worst foreign attack on the continental United States is

      the chief impresario and financier of that network, Osama bin Laden, the

      gaunt, bearded Saudi exile who in February 1998 declared all Americans to

      be legitimate targets of jihad, or holy war. Bin Laden has nursed a

      fervent hatred of the United States since its troops landed on Saudi soil

      to fight the gulf war, and he has haunted the worst nightmares of U.S.

      security officials for years. The scion of a wealthy Saudi magnate, he was

      linked to the 1998 twin U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa and the explosion

      aboard the USS Cole in Yemen last year. But until last Tuesday, bin Laden

      had not succeeded in shedding blood on American soil.

 

             By the end of America’s day of horror, U.S. intelligence officials

      said, most people inside the federal government were almost certain—about

      90 percent certain, the consensus had it—that bin Laden and his global

      organization, Al Qaeda (The Base), were behind the attacks. One key

      reason: shortly after the suicide attacks, a source with access to

      intelligence told NEWSWEEK, U.S. intelligence picked up communications

      among bin Laden associates relaying a message: “We’ve hit the targets.”

 

              On Wednesday, the FBI detained several people whom they are now

      describing as “material witnesses” in Boston and south Florida.

      Authorities also said they had identified the two or three terrorists who

      hijacked each plane. The suspects were said to have entered the country

      from all over the world, and some had been living in the United States for

      up to a year. Early leads suggest the team had domestic support networks

      rooted in the Boston area, but some of the bombers may have come from

      Canada, which also harbored the terrorist cell that planned the millennium

      bombing in Los Angeles. A British intelligence source told NEWSWEEK that

      “two brothers, working on United Arab Emirates passports, one of them a

      trained pilot, have been placed at the Boston airport.”

 

      Even so, investigators had only just begun to ferret out the full

      dimensions of the plot. “We’re in Oklahoma mode now,” said one FBI

      counterterrorism agent, referring to the frenzy of police work that

      followed the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. He added: “This is a rubble pile

      that makes Oklahoma City look like a sandbox.” New FBI chief Robert

      Mueller, on only his second week of work, conducted a 6 p.m. conference

      call with special agents in charge of all the 56 field offices. He

      announced that Washington would take control of the biggest investigation

      in the agency’s history and appointed veteran deputy director Tom Pickard

      to run it. FBI officials said they knew this probe was different from

      anything else they’d ever done. “This is not going to be a classic

      forensic investigation,” said the counterterrorism agent. “You’re not

      looking for a traditional bomb ‘signature’ like the rear axle of the Ryder

      truck. The bomb signature is a plane in the sky.” In other words, there

      may be little forensic evidence to investigate.

            

      SEARCHING FOR LINKS

             For the moment the link to bin Laden and Ramzi Yousef appeared to

      be largely circumstantial. Investigators believe that radical Egyptian

      organizations were directly behind the suicide attacks. One, Al Gamaa al

      Islamiya, was run by Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, the blind Muslim cleric who

      is serving a prison term in Minnesota for allegedly conspiring with World

      Trade Center bombing suspects to blow up other New York landmarks. Bin

      Laden recently has turned complaints about Abdel-Rahman’s imprisonment and

      treatment by U.S. authorities into a crusade, committing his followers to

      freeing the religious leader. U.S. officials have identified Ayman

      al-Zawahiri, the head of another Egyptian militant group that supports the

      sheik, as deputy leader of Al Qaeda. Abdel-Rahman is kept in solitary

      confinement, and a month ago U.S. authorities seized his radio.

      Bush called last Tuesday’s searing experience a demonstration of American

      fortitude. In truth it was a stunning display of America’s

      vulnerability—now and well into the future.

 

              The fast fingering of bin Laden also did not mask the fact that,

      like the rest of the country, U.S. officials were in a state of shock over

      what may go down as the most massive failure of military and intelligence

      readiness in the nation’s history. Bush called last Tuesday’s searing

      experience a demonstration of American fortitude. In truth it was a

      stunning display of America’s vulnerability—now and well into the future.

      Always before, U.S. experts tended to dismiss the idea that terrorists

      could combine both suicidal fervor and technical skill and sophistication.

      The 1993 World Trade Center attack, in which conspirators exploded a

      bomb-laden van in the basement, was seen as just another ragged effort;

      afterward the terrorists gave themselves away when one was stupid enough

      to try to get his deposit back on the rental van. Similarly, when an

      Algerian terrorist was arrested crossing the border from Canada just

      before Y2K, his obvious nervousness gave him away to an alert Customs

      official.

 

              By contrast, last Tuesday’s coordinated assault on the World Trade

      Center and the Pentagon was as sophisticated a terror attack as U.S.

      investigators have seen. A chief mystery was how the culprits might have

      found four apparently trained pilots to fly suicide missions. One

      frightening prospect is that bin Laden is winning educated Arab elites to

      his cause, especially as the Palestinian intifada inflames the Arab world.

      The FBI has picked up previous hints of high-level help: in 1995 Abdul

      Hakim Murad, a Pakistani, was accused along with Yousef of a plot to bomb

      11 U.S. airliners in a single “day of rage” against the United States.

      Murad, a commercial pilot, allegedly told investigators that he had been

      trained as a kamikaze pilot.

          

      WAS THERE HELP?

             Just as scary, the new attacks also suggested that the terrorists

      had an extensive domestic support network—confederates on the ground who

      helped them gather intelligence on the targets and possibly provided

      shelter and logistical support.

 

              Could the bombers have been stopped? NEWSWEEK has learned that

      while U.S. intelligence received no specific warning, the state of alert

      had been high during the past two weeks, and a particularly urgent warning

      may have been received the night before the attacks, causing some top

      Pentagon brass to cancel a trip. Why that same information was not

      available to the 266 people who died aboard the four hijacked commercial

      aircraft may become a hot topic on the Hill. In testimony to the

      Intelligence Committee earlier this year, CIA Director George Tenet said

      bin Laden posed the most immediate terrorist threat to Americans around

      the world and was capable of “multiple attacks with little or no warning.”

      “There is a giant accountability issue starting today,” says former

      Afghanistan CIA station chief Milt Bearden, “and in the midst of

      legitimate accountability there will be a lot of scapegoating. They’re

      going to start looking for the modern-day equivalent of General Short and

      Admiral Kimmel [the armed-forces commanders at Pearl Harbor], and they’re

      going to find them.”

            

              The deeper problem for counterterrorism experts is that bin

      Laden’s network is so diffuse and diverse—a patchwork of renegade

      Algerian, Palestinian, Egyptian and other cells—and that foreign

      governments, including friendly ones, move slowly to crack down on people

      they know are his supporters. Only last February, a few weeks before

      Tenet’s testimony, a NEWSWEEK reporter sat down in a London coffee shop

      with Yasser el-Sirri, one of bin Laden’s alleged associates. El-Sirri

      cheerfully boasted that the Egyptian government had sentenced him to death

      for crimes of terrorism. Attempts to snatch or kill bin Laden have been

      frustrated by the difficulty of getting precise information on where he is

      in the mountains of Afghanistan, not to mention a U.S. presidential order

      barring assassination. Though U.S. intelligence had wiretaps on bin

      Laden’s key lieutenants before the Kenya and Tanzania embassy bombings,

      they were unable to pick up enough information to prevent them.

 

      TESTING U.S. INTELLIGENCE

              Some counterterrorism operatives now speculate that intelligence

      picked up by U.S. agencies about possible terrorist attacks on Americans

      last June may actually have been leaked by operatives associated with bin

      Laden. Now it appears the terrorists “may have been testing where and how

      we picked up information—and what were the things we missed,” says a U.S.

      investigator based in the Persian Gulf. “They saw where we reacted, and

      presumably also where we didn’t react.” Were they casing American airports

      to see if extra precautions went into effect? “They not only know how to

      plan, but they know how to test,” said this source, “and they know,

      obviously, where the gaps are.”

 

              Among the worst of those gaps is the ramshackle state of security

      checks at U.S. airports. The ability of unknown bombers to exploit these

      soft spots—and to do it so jarringly, ripping a hole in the heart of

      America’s financial and military power—could itself have serious

      consequences. For it demonstrates that it can be done again. In fact,

      terrorism experts say that for years their worst fear has been that a

      suicide bomber would hit inside U.S. borders. “If someone really wants to

      kill himself in order to blow up a building here, there is no level of

      sustainable security in this country that could prevent it,” says one

      official. “We just aren’t equipped to handle it. It is beyond us

      psychologically. And the citizens of this country are not willing to

      tolerate the lack of freedom that this level of security would mean.”

 

             That could now change, as part of a tectonic shift in America’s

      sense of vulnerability. “This shows that you can have mass-destruction

      terrorism without weapons of mass destruction,” says Gideon Rose, a terror

      expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. And that even a missile

      defense won’t help. “We’re going to have to enact laws that some people

      from the far left and the far right won’t like,” adds a senior

      intelligence source. He points to Britain’s sweeping new law that, as he

      puts it, extends the draconian security measures—including surveillance

      and holding people on mere suspicion—already used in troubled Northern

      Ireland. He adds: “We have to understand that national security will have

      to take some precedence over what we have seen as the right to privacy.”

 

              Sen. Jon Kyl, a member of the Intelligence Committee, says he’s

      been pushing for years for more intelligence money and less red tape—and

      for dropping concerns about recruiting human-rights violators as

      infiltrators into terror groups. “My first reaction was that my knees were

      weak,” he said. “But frankly, my second reaction was that all of the

      things we’ve been saying we have to do—maybe through this disaster they’ll

      get more attention.” No doubt they will.

             

 

      With Mark Hosenball, Daniel Klaidman and Donatella Lorch in Washington and

      Peg Tyre, Christopher Dickey and Andrew Nagorski in New York

 

            A New Date of Infamy

               1 of 9

 

                   1. A New Date of Infamy

                   2. Bush's Test of a Lifetime

                   3. Suspect #1: Can He Be Stopped?

                   4. An Icon Destroyed

                   5. A Capital Under Siege

                   6. New York Voices

                   7. How the Hijackers Did It

                   8. Next Chapter: Day of Agony

                   9. Return to America Under Attack Front

 

            

             © 2003 Newsweek, Inc.

 

 

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