On nine occasions between March 11-27, the FBI says (in the famed “28 pages” partially declassified in 2016) that a Saudi “naval officer” by the name of Lafi al-Harbi is in telephone contract with Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi in San Diego. He is at least the second Saudi government official – the other being Omar Bayoumi – who has contact with the two future 9/11 hijackers in California.

Mohammed bin Laden and his wife, Alia Ghanem, a Syrian, give birth to Osama bin Laden in Riyadh. He is 17th of 52 children sired by bin Laden, who had 11 different wives. Bin Laden the senior is Saudi Arabia’s wealthiest construction magnate and is granted my contracts by the Royal family to build buildings, roads, and renovate Islamic holy shrines.
Osama means “young lion” in Arabic. His mother divorced Mohammed when he was three, and bin Laden was raised by his mother’s second husband. He grows up and attends school mostly in Jeddah, joining the Muslim Brotherhood at a young age.

A dozen Hanafi Muslims seize 134 hostages in three buildings in Washington DC, America’s first acquaintance with Islamic terror. The leader of the Hanafi Movement said that the purpose of the siege was to bring attention to the 1973 murders of his wife, two children, and nine-day-old grandchild, and the shooting of his daughter, at the hands of the Nation of Islam.
Only blocks from the White House, they take over the Islamic Center, the international headquarters of B’nai Brith, and the District building, Washington’s city hall. Two are killed (a journalist and a police officer) and 12 are wounded. The group surrender two days later after negotiations with ambassadors of Egypt, Iran, and Pakistan.
One of the four recognized schools in Islam in jurisprudence, the Hanafi Movement had a membership of more than 1,000 in the United States. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar first came into contact with Islam through this movement.

National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice directs the CIA to prepare a new series of legal authorities for a program of consolidated and methodical covert action in Afghanistan. Rice later tells the 9/11 Commission that the subsequent draft CIA document prepared and presented on March 28 provided for “consolidation plus,” superseding the various Clinton administration documents.
CIA director George Tenet later writes: “These authorities would place us much more on the offensive, rather than have us reacting defensively to the terrorist threat … The authorities in the draft were very broad and would have explicitly authorized CIA or its partners to plan and carry out operations to kill UBL [sic] without first trying to capture him. We believe these authorities were unprecedented in scope.” (At the Center of the Storm, pp. 143-144) The 9/11 Commission Report (p. 210) says that Tenet argued for deciding on a policy before deciding on the legal authorities to implement it, and the Presidential Findings was subsequently be put on hold.

Attorney General John Ashcroft meets with National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to discuss the existing legal authorities for covert action against Osama bin Laden. He says that Justice Department lawyers determined that the authorities – both for actions in Afghanistan and to capture or kill bin Laden – were unclear and insufficient. He suggested new, explicit kill authorities be developed.

President George H.W. Bush mention the “New World Order” for the first time in a address to Congress. With the defeat of Iraq in Desert Storm, he outline a plan for maintaining a permanent U.S. naval presence in the Persian Gulf, for providing funds for Middle East development, and for instituting safeguards against the spread of WMD. He pledge an Arab-Israeli treaty based on the territory-for-peace principle and the fulfillment of Palestinian rights, saying he would reconvene the international peace conference in Madrid.
On April 13, President Bush spoke at the commencement of the Air University at Maxwell AFB in Montgomery, Alabama. He praised the performance of the Air Force in Desert Storm and says a New World Order was now “within our reach.” It could emerge, he says, from the rubble that was the Cold War and the Warsaw Pact. He again stresses the need for a policy of “active engagement” in the Middle East and elsewhere to prevent the eventual worsening of relations that followed each of the two World Wars. He said the New World Order was a responsibility, created by the success of the U.S., to achieve stability, economic progress and peace around the world. The responsibility of the U.S., he says, was not to maintain perpetual global peace, but to contain aggression.

After losing track of Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi after they left Malaysia in January (they flew to Los Angeles via Bangkok), the CIA gets a belated response from Thailand’s intelligence service with three names, Mihdhar, Hazmi, and one Salah Saeed Mohammed Bin Yousaf. The Thai service reports that Hazmi traveled onward to Los Angeles, arriving on January 15.
It is the first positive identification of al-Hazmi, and certainly suggests that Mihdhar – a “known” jihadi – traveled to the United States as well but coming two months after the CIA so aggressively tracked the two, no one takes much notice of the dispatch, having moved on to other issues. The 9/11 Commission later determines that no one at CIA headquarters pays heed to the cable, and the Agency does not start checking to determine whether Mihdhar is in the U.S. until August 21, 2001, 17 months later.
CIA director Tenet later says: “CIA officers in the field sent this information back to headquarters but included it at the end of a cable that contained routine information. The cable was marked as being for ‘information’ rather than ‘action.’ Unfortunately, no one — not the CIA officers nor the FBI colleagues detailed to CTC — connected the name Nawaf al-Hazmi with the [Malaysia] meeting of eight weeks before.” (At the Center of the Storm, p. 197)
(As for Yousaf, he is said to have left Bangkok on January 20 for Karachi, Pakistan. Sometime after 9/11, Yousaf is determined to be Walid bin Muhammad Salih bin Attash aka “Khallad,” the organizer of the USS Cole attack and a close associate of Khalid Sheik Mohammed.)

Osama Bin Laden first visits Pakistan and Afghanistan, less than three months after the Soviet invasion. He is working for Saudi authorities, or at least cooperating with Saudi intelligence in providing information and support for Saudi and Gulf-state citizens motivated to go to Afghanistan to fight.
Bin Laden also begins to provide financial, organizational, and engineering aid for the local mujahidin in Afghanistan. Some believe he was doing so with the advice and support of the Saudi royal family and that he was hand-picked for the job by Prince Turki al-Faisal, head of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service.
Bin Laden stays in the region – mostly in Peshawar but then inside Afghanistan in the Jalalabad area – until the Soviet withdrawal in 1989. He returns to Saudi Arabia after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990.

Sudanese minister of state for defense Maj. Gen. Elfatih Erwa secretly meets with U.S. Ambassador Timothy Carney and CIA officers in Hyatt hotel room in Rosslyn, Virginia with the purpose of opening a back channel discussion on how to get Sudan off the list of state sponsors of terrorism.
The CIA produces a list, asking for the names of Osama bin Laden associates, their passport numbers, and dates of travel; about al Qaeda camps and finances, and any information about plots.
It is the first of many meetings, and later, the U.S. pushes Sudan to expel bin Laden. Erwa argues that it is better for him to remain in Sudan, where the government can keep an eye on him. After Saudi Arabia says it will not accept bin Laden if he is deported, Erwa warns that bin Laden would likely go back to Afghanistan. The Americans reportedly says “let him go.” Within months, bin Laden is gone – the Sudanese exacting some revenge, confiscating his businesses and assets.

Paul Wolfowitz is sworn in as Deputy Secretary of Defense under Donald Rumsfeld, a big brain regarded for his strategic studies knowledge. He was another in the stable of national security experts to school and provide cover for the inexperienced George W. Bush.
On Iraq in particular, Wolfowitz as Pentagon policy chief under Bush the elder (and a deputy to then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney) was in favor of finishing the job in Iraq. He wrote after he left office that the United States should have marched on Baghdad, and as Deputy Secretary, even before 9/11, agitated for a more aggressive policy, engaging the Iraq opposition, which of course, provided bad intelligence on both the existence of the WMD and the internal state of the country. Based on that, Wolfowitz uttered the now famous claim to Congress on February 27, 2003: “I am reasonably certain that they will greet us as liberators … the notion of hundreds of thousands of American troops is way off the mark.”