The Khallad Identification, Day of, More Blind Sheikh, and Yemen – Additions to 9/11 Timeline as of October 6, 2007
A set of recent additions to the 9/11 Timeline deals with the identification of al-Qaeda leader Khallad bin Attash for the CIA. The identification, made by an asset known as Omar, placed bin Attash at al-Qaeda's Malaysia summit, with 9/11 hijackers Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar, who was connected to the Cole bombing and who the CIA appears to have confused with bin Attash for a short while. The identification should have been communicated to the FBI, but not only did the CIA again fail to watchlist Alhazmi, Almihdhar, or Cole bombing mastermind bin Attash, but they also failed to inform the FBI's Cole investigators of the identification, not once, not twice, but three times in the month after the identification.
On the day of 9/11, President Bush prolonged a briefing about a school visit, top CIA officials learned of the first attack at 8:48, the CIA counterterrorist centre learned of an unaccounted for plane shortly after 9:03, the Pentagon's war room did not realize the building had been hit after flight 77's impact, and a report of a jet approaching President Bush's ranch was a false alarm.
The 'Blind Sheikh', Sheikh Omar Abdul-Rahman, whose representatives held secret talks with US officials in the late 1980s, should have been a suspect in the murder of a bin Laden fundraiser in the US, but he was never even questioned. Egyptian intelligence warned the US about the Sheikh, but the CIA reportedly obstructed the FBI's investigation of him after the WTC bombing in 1993, as it did after the assassination of Meir Kahane in 1990. Sheikh Abdul-Rahman was finally arrested after the Landmarks plot was foiled.
Elsewhere, the US withdrew from Somalia after the Black Hawk Down incident and also withdrew from Yemen after militants bombed two hotels near where US troops stayed in 1992. Al-Qaeda later used a communications hub in Yemen the National Security Agency was monitoring to coordinate the bombing of the USS ''Cole''. The NSA went on to repeatedly intercept calls by Khalid Almihdhar to and from the hub.
Miscellaneous entries include US special forces not being allowed to target Taliban leader Mullah Omar, Zacarias Moussaoui meeting a CIA asset in Azerbaijan in 1997, Dick Cheney saying Ned Lamont's primary win over Joe Lieberman would please al-Qaeda types, and an Oregon lawyer being wrongly arrested for the Madrid train bombings. What's more, a fire at the CIA in August 2001 helped prepare the agency for its evacuation on 9/11, and Bosnian intelligence was penetrated by al-Qaeda.
In addition, Mohamed Atta, who learned to fly near the base of a CIA front company, traveled through Prague on his way to the US. Two days before he arrived a Pakistani businessman with a similar name arrived, but was deported because he did not have a visa. After 9/11, this caused some confusion, but the CIA figured it out by December 2001. Finally, the US started investigating a suspicious charity, the Benevolence International Foundation, in 1998, only a few years after learning it was suspicious and after it was shut down in Saudi Arabia. It and an affiliate were raided after 9/11.
- Kevin Fenton's blog
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