In between studying I’ve been reading through the 9/11 Commission report. My personal opinion is that the investigation done by the 9/11 Commission was very thorough, and they have done a good job trying to turn over every rock relating to the events leading to 9/11. Not all of the 9/11 report has been declassified and the methods in which information was extracted from captured 9/11 plotters hasn’t been revealed. But the investigators have analyzed every statement obtained from the captured plotters and attempted to corroborate their story with actual facts in order to come to reasonable conclusions.
There are many interesting topics in this report that I would love to discuss because a lot of it I haven’t seen in the mainstream media; but for today I’m just going to talk about captured terrorist Kalid Sheikh Mohammad‘s original plan for 9/11 according to interrogations with US authorities.
Kalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM) grew up in Kuwait and was educated in the United States; graduating from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro in 1986 with a Mechanical Engineering degree. After graduating, KSM went back to the Middle East and fought against the Soviets in Afghanistan and then worked a job to help run a nongovernmental organization in Peshawar and Jalalabad. He later worked as a project engineer with the Qatar Ministry of Electricity and Water while traveling and taking part in terrorist activities. His nephew Ramzi Yousef was responsible for planning the 1993 bomb attack on the World Trade Center.
Like his nephew, KSM was most interested in attacks against the United States government and the United States economy. He and Osama Bin Laden had this in common which is what brought the two together in the late 90’s. Planning for KSM’s “plane operation” began in late 1998 and early 1999. Unlike most terrorists who worked with Bin Laden, KSM didn’t swear a formal oath of allegiance to Bin Laden. He preferred to work independently of Bin Laden, but he needed al Qaeda for many reasons: funding, recruitment, training and providing him a safe house.
KSM originally proposed a “grandiose” plane operation to Bin Laden where he planned to hijack a total of 10 planes, nine of which would crash into targets on both coasts of the United States including the WTC, the Pentagon, CIA and FBI headquarters, nuclear power plants, and the tallest buildings in California and the state of Washington. Kalid Sheikh Mohammad was to personally “land the tenth plane at a U.S. airport and, after killing all adult male passengers on board and alerting the media, deliver a speech excoriating U.S. support for Israel, the Philippines, and repressive governments in the Arab world.
The report indicates that Bin Laden turned down this grandiose scheme and opted for a more pragmatic and realistic operation against the United States. That is indeed what ended up happening on September 11th.