Following a short ground campaign against an Iraqi army already defeated by 39 days of bombing, a theatrical and photogenic ceasefire is declared after 100 hours. On the orders of President Bush, offensive operations against Iraq end at 0801 local Riyadh time (one minute after midnight in Washington, DC (EST) and at 0501 GMT). CENTCOM says in its SITREP: “Effective 280500Z Feb, all forces ceased offensive operations. All units are prepared for a potential resumption of hostilities.”
The ostensible reason for the ceasefire is that Iraqi forces had been ejected from Kuwait, and indeed the last of the occupation forces stream north, where the “Highway of Death” forms on the highway to Basra. Though the theater is covered in a dense fog, Army Mohawk (OV-1D) aircraft with side-looking airborne radars detect major Iraqi unit movements into and north of Basra.
But Saudi King Fahd and President Bush also have a telephone call in which the Saudi leader insists that hostilities end, that the United States minimize is presence on Iraqi territory, and the U.S. military not march on Baghdad or seek regime change.
In Washington, the State Department begins drafting a U.N. Security Council resolution with all of the conditions of a ceasefire. Israel reportedly demands that Iraq be prohibited from having missiles or any weapons of mass destruction, but the “arms control” presumption of Cold War experienced drafters is already to emulate their experiences in U.S.-Soviet negotiations. So an elaborate arms control inspection and verification regime is set up, one that demands full accounting of WMD from Baghdad but also allows short-range missiles to continue to exist, both leading to two decades of wrangling and stand-off.
All of that – and the brutal Iraqi military campaign that starts almost immediately to suppress the Shi’a in the south and the Kurds in the north (the Iraqi army wasn’t defeated) – results in the continued presence of American military forces in Saudi Arabia (and parts of Iraq) and the imposition of a no-fly zone. In other words, the Americans never leave. And a young Saudi millionaire and popular fighter from the Afghanistan war – Osama bin Laden – is outraged over the continued “occupation” of Islam’s holiest center.

The strange case of the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, unfolds when federal and local law enforcement in Los Angeles execute three search warrants and arrest seven individuals on charges of alleged material support of a terrorist organization. The individuals arrested are charged with have knowingly conspired to support the MEK by conducting fund raising, financial transactions, and other activities in support of the MEK organization.
In 1999, the State Department designated MEK a foreign terrorist organization. “We have sufficient grounds for concluding that they are a terrorist organization and continue to engage in terrorist violence,” the Department said. The designation of the MEK as a terrorist organization is strange because the MEK had worked with the Agency in covert actions against Tehran. The MEK’s presence in Iraq had also been generously funded by Saddam Hussein, who similarly had supported attacks on Iran from the MEK base near Fallujah.

The World Trade Center in lower Manhattan is badly damaged when a car bomb planted explodes in an underground garage of 2 World Trade Center, on the second subterranean level of Vista Hotel’s public parking garage. The bomb leaves six people dead and more than 1,000 people are treated for injuries.
Ramzi Yousef constructs and helps plant the bomb, and the six men subsequently convicted of participated in the bombing are identified as followers of Omar Abdul Rahman (the “blind Sheikh”), an Egyptian cleric who lived and preached in the New York City area.
Just after noon, the bombers parked a Ryder rental van loaded with the bomb outside Room 107 on the B-2 level between the twin towers. At 12:17:37 the bomb detonates, blowing a four-story crater down to the B-4 level. Monica Smith, a pregnant secretary, is instantly killed along with her unborn child.
According to The Cell (p. 96), the FBI is “caught by surprise.” Richard Clarke later writes somewhat hyperbolically in Against All Enemies (pp. 78-79) that: “The FBI and CIA should have been able to answer my question, ‘Who are these guys?’ but they still could not. The real answer was a group that the FBI and CIA had not yet heard of: al Qaeda. … Not only had no one in the CIA or FBI ever heard of it, apparently they had never heard of bin Laden either. His name never came up in our meetings in 1993 as a suspect in the World Trade Center attack. We did hear about someone who appeared to be Ramzi Yousef’s uncle. He went by various names, and he appeared to be behind Yousef’s mysterious money. One name he used was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.” It is misremembering of the highest order of Clarke’s part, as if he knew al Qaeda and as if KSM was discussed – neither are true. Of course the Agency and FBI were already tracking bin Laden and KSM’s connection wouldn’t be established to the World Trade Center bombing (and then only as a minor financier) for another two years.

The first of many reports on German “intelligence” linking al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein emerge, ultimately forming the basis for later speculation of an Iraqi link to the 9/11 attacks.
After two unidentified Iraqi men are arrested in Germany on suspicion of spying, a French-based Arab newspaper reports: “The arrests came in the wake of reports that Iraq was reorganizing the external branches of its intelligence service and that it had drawn up a plan to strike at U.S. interests around the world through a network of alliances with extremist fundamentalist parties.” These reports, U.S. intelligence now believes, were planted by Saudi intelligence.
German authorities were supposedly surprised by the extent of Iraqi intelligence activities in several cities. The matter was considered so important that reportedly a special team of CIA and FBI agents was sent to Germany to interrogate the two Iraqi spies.
According to the BBC, a German intelligence report also later claims that Iraq will have nuclear weapons capability within three years and will be able to fire a missile as far as Europe by 2005. Secretary of State Powell, who was visiting the Middle East when the German reports are released, makes the case to Iraq’s neighbors as to the need for continued U.N. sanctions on Iraq. “We have to make sure that we do everything we can to contain him, constrain him, to get inspectors back in under the terms of the U.N. resolutions,” Powell said.

Colin Powell takes his first foreign trip as Secretary of State, to the Middle East. He stops in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, Jordan, Kuwait, and Syria. In Riyadh, he meets with King Fahd, Crown Prince Abdullah and other high-ranking officials. He then travels on to Damascus, where he meets with President Bashar Assad. Powell hears an earful throughout the Middle East as to opposition of continued rigid sanctions against Iraq. There is no evidence that terrorism was discussed in any of his visits.
There would be many, many more Powell trips before 9/11. He flies to Belgium after the Middle East. He is then in Canada, France, Macedonia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina in April. He is in Hungary, Mali, Kenya, Uganda, and South Africa in May. He is in Spain, Slovenia, Egypt, Jordan, and the West Bank in June. He is in Italy, Australia, South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and China in July.
On August 27, the administration says that Powell would not attend the UN conference on racism in Durban, South Africa. But on 9/11, he is back on the road, in Lima, Peru, attending meetings of the Organization of American States, with plans to fly on to Colombia. Powell flies back to Washington arriving in time for an evening Cabinet meeting. But he is also out of touch for most of the day and has little or no interaction with Bush or Cheney on that day, a symbol of his secondary status in the unfolding war against terror.

Osama bin Laden issues his second fatwa, or religious ruling. He calls for jihad against U.S. military and civilian targets anywhere in the world. The fatwa represents a shift from criticizing the Gulf states and Saudi Arabia.
Even with this fatwa, bin Laden’s name and the al Qaeda cause had been obscure outside of Saudi Arabia and Sudan. But bin Laden’s call enervates a new generation of fighters throughout the Middle East, in the madrassas in Pakistan, as well as in the Muslim west. “Publicity was the currency bin Laden was spending, replacing his wealth with fame, and it repaid him with recruits and donations,” writes Lawrence Wright in Looming Tower.

President George W. Bush holds his first full-fledged Presidential news conference. He does not mention, nor is he asked by the White House press, about terrorism.
On Iraq, he says that Secretary of State Colin Powell was traveling to the Middle East to “listen to our allies as to how best to effect a policy, the primary goal of which will be to say to Saddam Hussein, we won’t tolerate you developing weapons of mass destruction, and we expect you to leave your neighbors alone.”
Bush says that the sanctions regime instituted in 1991 is like “Swiss cheese” and that his administration was reviewing how to make sanctions against the country “more effective.” He says though, that the primary goal will be to “make it clear to Saddam that we expect him to be a peaceful neighbor in the region, and we expect him not to develop weapons of mass destruction.” He does not push regime change.

A previously unarmed Predator drone (RQ-1) hits a stationary target for the first time with a Hellfire-C anti-tank missile, the first unmanned aerial vehicle to destroy an armored target on the ground. At Indian Springs Air Force Auxiliary Field in Nevada, the Air Force sets up the Predator on a hardstand, positioning it more than a kilometer from a stationary tank. The drone test fires three Hellfire-C missiles, gauging the load impact on the spindly drone shooting a missile. All three missiles find the laser spot on the target and hit. The armed Predator is given the new designation MQ-1A.
Further weapons tests occur between May 22 and June 7, with mixed results. While missile accuracy was excellent, there were some problems with fusing and it was realized that modifications would have to be made to the Army missile to make it more capable for aerial attack. George Tenet testified before the 9/11 Commission in 2004 that the problems were not resolved before 9/11.
In June 2001, as part of a special access program, a Hellfire missile was launched against a engineer-constructed replica of Osama bin Laden’s Tarnak Farm residence near Kandahar. The missile exploded inside one of the replica’s rooms and the final assessment was that any people in the room would have been killed.
Five days after 9/11, before any U.S. troops (and most aircraft) had arrived in the region, Air Force Predator drones with Hellfire missiles quietly deployed to Shahbaz airfield in Jacobabad, Pakistan, located some 300 miles southeast of Kandahar. The deployment was “secret” but local residents soon protested the deployment. Shahbaz was also used by special operations forces as a hub for deployment and to stage combat search and rescue (CSAR) assets.

The new long-range Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle rolls out of its production plant in California. A development version of Global Hawk (RQ-4A) took off from Edwards AFB, in California on April 22 and had flown a 23-hour, 8,600-mile mission, nonstop and unrefueled over the Pacific Ocean, to Royal Australian Air Force Base at Edinburgh, Australia the next day.
Officials planned to acquire a total of 63 aircraft and 14 ground stations for mission launch, recovery, and control. They would all be dedicated to single missions, some having imagery intelligence capabilities and others having signals intelligence intercept equipment. The Global Hawk returned to the U.S. on June 8. While in the Pacific region, the drone completed 11 of 12 planned sorties in 238.5 flight hours, taking over 1,500 pictures. Though still under development, less than a month after 9/11, Global Hawk was deployed to the Gulf region to participate in Afghanistan operations. Within a decade, the Global Hawk fleet had conducted over 1,500 combat sorties.

Four persons associated with Osama bin Laden are arrested in Frankfurt, Germany, part of ongoing CIA operations – “disruptions” – where director George Tenet and White House counterterrorism specialist Richard Clarke believe al Qaeda’s ability to carry out attacks is being thwarted.
On May 10, Tenet tells Senate Appropriations Committee that though terrorism is on the rise, especially against the United States, the strategic initiative to pre-empt terrorist plans – and specifically bin Laden plots – has been paying off. That month, he later writes, three suspects are arrested in Malaysia for attempted robbery, but that interrogation indicated that they “had cased U.S. facilities and U.S. Navy vessels in preparation for an attack.” (At the Center of the Storm, p. 147) He warns that attacks are likely against U.S. interests over the next year but that the Agency does not have sufficient intelligence to predict either the times or places.
On May 29, Tenet, CTC chief Cofer Black, and Richard Blee, the CTC group chief with authority over the Bin Ladin unit, meet with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, telling that though the Agency was continue to “take the offensive” against al Qaeda and the Taliban in its disruption activities they also felt that bin Ladin could not be deterred.