Author: William Arkin

4 January 2001

Posted on by William Arkin

 

Mohammed Atta and Ziad Jarrah (the pilots who flew the 9/11 planes into the North Tower of the World Trade Center and crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania) both fly internationally on the same day (but separately), Atta leaving the United States for the first time since he arrived in June 2000.

Though Khalid Sheikh Mohammed discouraged external travel except for operational purposes, the two were so confident of their operational security that they both left the country soon after receiving their commercial pilot’s licenses.

Atta had overstayed his tourist visa by one month. He flew from Tampa to Madrid, returning on January 10, again gaining entry into the U.S.

Jarrah was already in Lebanon visiting his family. He flew Olympic Airlines from Beirut to Athens; and then from Athens to Dusseldorf, Germany. There he was met by Aysel Senguen, his common law wife, and the two flew from Dusseldorf to Newark, New Jersey, continuing on to Tampa. Senguen, a German national, left the United States on January 15, returning to Germany.

3 January 2000

Posted on by William Arkin
USS Sullivans

 

The Navy destroyer USS The Sullivans (DDG 68) makes a port call in Aden, Yemen, part of a U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) military initiative to improve diplomatic relations with the Sana’a government under President Ali Abdullah Saleh.

Not known until the USS Cole was attacked on October 12 in a subsequent port call was an unsuccessful attempt by al Qaeda to attack the ship on January 3. Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, now held at Guantanamo Bay, was the local organizer behind the operation, probably masterminded by al Qaeda operative Walid bin Attash (“Khallad”), also a Yemeni. The small skiff loaded with explosives sank not far offshore as it was launched to attack the USS The Sullivans. Had the plot been discovered by U.S. intelligence, the foolish program to curry favor with the Saleh government probably would have been stopped, or at least greater force protection measures would have been applied to protect the USS Cole when it subsequently visited.

2 January 2001

Posted on by William Arkin
Niger Embassy in Rome

 

The embassy of the Republic of the Niger in Rome is ransacked and thousands of passports and documents are stolen.

Many months later, a set of documents—on Niger government letterhead—would emerge to indicate attempts by Saddam Hussein to obtain uranium yellowcake from the country. The supposed Iraqi pursuit of Nigerien uranium is one of the key pieces of evidence used in “proving” Saddam Hussein’s pursuit of WMD. It is also at the core of the later Valerie Plame affair, where the CIA-dispatched Joseph Wilson (the former ambassador to Niger, and Plame’s husband) to investigate whether Iraq indeed was pursuing nuclear materials.

The documents are later conclusively proven to be forgeries.

1 January 2000

Posted on by William Arkin

 

The Lights are Still On!

After Biblical warnings that society would come crashing to a halt with the computer changeover to the year 2000—the so-called Y2K bug—goes smoothly.

Is it government and private sector preparation that is responsible for the smooth transition? Or is it a case that all of the warnings proved completely exaggerated, that very nature of government overreaction? It is an important question for the future, as the doomsayers are prone to pronouncing cyber and terror and weapons of mass destruction-related Pearl Harbors always around every corner, so much so that it subtly feeds apocalyptic culture so rampant in the news media while also inuring the public to tend to not want to listen to the government crybabies.

31 December 1999

Posted on by William Arkin

 

Y2K fever reaches its peak, having captivated the country—and particularly Washington—for the past four or five years on the uncertainty that computerdom will able to process information properly when the Year Two Thousand arrives.

The fear, worked on for months and involving billions of dollars, is to forestall the possibility that December 31, 1999 will be followed by January 1, 1900, thus disabling systems that depend upon time synchronization.

In Washington in particular, dire predictions abound of a digital Pearl Harbor, with the effects that airplane navigation systems will fail, that telecommunications will halt, that financial records will die, with trillions in assets disappearing. An entire industry forms to eradicate the problem of the Y2K bug.

Richard Clarke later writes of his experiences on New Year’s Eve: “In a vault just off the floor of the Y2K Coordination Center, we waited for midnight in Riyadh, then in Paris … I could hardly hear [FBI special agent] John O’Neill when I called his cell phone; he was at the New York Police Command Post in Time Square … At midnight I went to the roof to look down on the celebration at the Lincoln Memorial … At 3:00 a.m., we went back to the rooftop and popped open a bottle.” (Against All Enemies, p. 214)

30 December 1995

Posted on by William Arkin
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

 

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind behind 9/11, is identified by an al Qaeda captive from a photograph and labeled an “associate” of Osama bin Laden.

He is subsequently indicted by a federal grand jury the next month. The FBI and U.S. Attorney do not really know who KSM is, other than as a financier of the 1993 World Trade Center attack and an accomplice in Ramzi Yousef’s activities in the Philippines. The indictment is sealed—secret—only to be opened once KSM is in custody.

29 December 1992

Posted on by William Arkin
Gold Mohur Hotel

 

Probably the “first” direct attack by al Qaeda on the United States occurs in Yemen.

Two hotels that cater to westerners are attacked, one at the Movenpick and the other at the Gold Mohur. Though directed at U.S. military personnel staging for operations in Somalia, the bombs kill one Australian tourist. In fact, the U.S. military are staying at a completely different hotel and the attack is barely noticed in Washington.

Two Yemenis, later found to have trained in Afghanistan, are eventually arrested, having been injured in the blast. Osama bin Laden claimed responsibility for the attack in 1998.

28 December 2000

Posted on by William Arkin

 

President Bill Clinton announces that he will not travel to North Korea before the end of his term, citing “insufficient time to complete the work at hand.”

White House national security adviser Sandy Berger and other White House officials were hesitant to have the president leave the country during the ongoing election dispute between Al Gore and George W. Bush. Berger called it a “potential Constitutional crisis.”

Whether Clinton’s trip to North Korea would have achieved anything anyhow is questionable, but the precedent had also been set for an outgoing president not to leave new and pressing national security business for their successors. Hence the real reason behind not “retaliating” for the October attack in Yemen on the USS Cole: that the reverberations might have locked the new administration into some specific action.

27 December 1993

Posted on by William Arkin

 

In Egypt, an attack on a bus in old Cairo wounds 16 Austrian and Egyptian tourists. Gama’a al-Islamiya (Islamic Group) claims responsibility. In September, the group warned tourists that they shouldn’t enter Qana province, which includes some of Egypt’s most famous sites. The first attack on tourists occurs a month later, killing one British national. Six more attacks on tourists—in Qana and Cairo—kill more than a dozen foreign tourists.

The Islamic Group’s “spiritual” leader is Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman. The group would claim responsibility for the multi-year campaign of tourist attacks, including the November 1997 attack at Luxor that killed 58 foreign tourists.