Based on the confession of Mohamed Rashed al-‘Owali, the Saudi who drove the bomb-laden truck in the August 1998 embassy bombing in Kenya, the FBI learned of a safehouse in Yemen that was “being used as an al Qaeda ‘logistics center’…to patch through phone calls from bin Laden operatives worldwide…As a result, the NSA [National […]
1/4/2000
On January 4, 2000, “After receiving a copy of [future 9/11 hijacker Khalid] al-Midhar’s picture, the Agency [CIA] failed to add him to the Watch List. Worse yet, deliberate steps were taken to prevent the FBI from getting the information. As the 9/11 Commission’s final report told the story: ‘An FBI agent detailed to the […]
1/4/2000
Former CIA Director George Tenet noted that “In December 1999, intelligence collected…indicated that several men would be traveling to Kuala Lumpur for a meeting to be held in Malaysia early the next month. …With the help of a local intelligence agency, on January 4, 2000, one person whom we initially knew only as ‘Khalid’ was […]
1/3/2000
In a videotaped meeting of Osama bin Laden and other group leaders in Kandahar, Afghanistan, presumably dated January 3, 2000, during Ramadan: “bin Laden’s chief lieutenant, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of Egypt’s Jihad, says, ‘Enough of words, it is time to take action against this iniquitous and faithless force [the United States] which has spread […]
1/3/2000
Shortly after accepting Osama bin Laden’s mission to learn how to fly and then attack America with a passenger jet, future 9/11 hijacker Marwan al-Shehhi went home to the United Arab Emirates. “He immediately applied for a new passport and a U.S visa. On January 3, 2000, he ordered a pilot-training video online, the first […]
1/3/2000
“The Malaysian summit [of 9/11 masterminds and hijackers in January 2000] was so high-profile, according to intelligence scholar James Bamford, that it was monitored, as it took place, at the highest levels of the intelligence community–even at the White House. ‘Updates were circulated to senior officials on January 3 and 5 [2000],’ wrote Bamford in […]
1/3/2000
On January 3, 2000, “a small group of men in Yemen backed a trailer down to the waterline of Aden Harbor and slid a 20-foot skiff into the surf. The boat, which was packed with at least several hundred pounds of explosives, immediately took on water and began to sink. The bomb’s intended target, an […]
1/3/2000
“The first attempt [by al Qaeda] to sink an American warship [in the Gulf of Aden] came on January 3, 2000–the holiest day of Ramadan, ‘the night of power’ when Muhammad received the first verse of the Koran. The religious significance would hardly have escaped the bombers: dying on this day is said to be […]
1/3/2000
An al Qaeda operative named Nashiri, who was working with Bin Ladin, “was developing a plan to attack a ship near Yemen. On January 3 [2000], an attempt was made to attack a U.S. warship in Aden, the USS The Sullivans. The attempt failed when the small boat, overloaded with explosives, sank. The operatives salvaged […]
12/31/1999
According to the Department of State’s Patterns of Global Terrorism 1999 report, issued in April 2000: “As of the end of 1999, there were fifty-five organizations on this [the State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organizations] list.” [The 31st of the month used for date sorting purposes only.] – Yonah Alexander, ed., Combating Terrorism, Page 30 […]