Bojinka

Time for a serious post. This would fall under the category of "More."

One conclusion that can be drawn from the final Report by the 9/11 Commission is that no one person was responsible. It wasn't Bush's fault, or Clinton's fault, or the CIA's, or the FBI's. Rather, it was a collective failure by virtually our entire government over the course of several years. In fact, out of all the dozens of individuals and agencies that had opportunities to thwart the attacks, there was only one group that came through in defense of our nation on that awful day: The crew and passengers of United Flight 93. While our own intelligence people failed, and the FAA dropped the ball, and our own Air Force planes flew off in the wrong direction, it was those 40 individuals that stepped up to the plate and acted to defend their country.

And if you listened to the various people that testified, as well as any number of other defenders of the government, the one theme that comes through was the whole idea of hijacked planes being used to destroy buildings was beyond anyone's imagination.

On the surface, that seems true enough.

Unfortunately, it was NOT an unheard of concept. And the story of Bojinka further amplifies the failures of our intelligence community.

It was January of 1995 when police and firefighters in Manila responded to reports of smoke billowing from an apartment. A suspicious police investigator eventually discovered that the apartment was being used to manufacture bombs. The plot--codenamed Operation Bojinka--was to blow up 11 commercial airliners in midflight over the Pacific. Had it not been foiled, an estimated 4000 people would have died.

The one terrorist that was arrested at the apartment, Abdul Hakim Murad, happened to be a trained pilot. And during his interrogation, Murad revealed that there was a phase two to the plan, and that was for him to fly an explosives laden Cessna into CIA headquarters. He also said that there was an additional list of targets to be hit by planes--Congress, the White House, the Pentagon, and some skyscrapers--once they had more trained pilots.

Granted, there's a bit of a difference between someone flying a Cessna into a building and hijacking a 767. But when you have groups of middle eastern men learning to fly airliners without bothering to study landings and takeoffs, coupled with what had happened in the Phillipines six years earlier, alarms should have gone off in someone's head.