20 December 2000

Posted on December 20, 2020December 23, 2020 by William Arkin

A grand jury in the Southern District of New York (SDNY) returns an indictment against five additional suspects in the case of the United States v. Usama bin Laden, et al. The five suspects—Saif Al-Adel, Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah (Abu Muhammad al-Masri), Muhsin Musa Matwalli Atwah, Ahmed Mohamed Hamed Ali, and Anas Al-Libi—are charged in the overall conspiracy, led by al Qaeda, to kill U.S. nationals and engage in other illegal acts.

In addition, Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah is charged for his role as the mastermind of the August 7, 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.

Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah was gunned down on the streets of Tehran in August 2020.

Muhsin Musa Matwalli Atwah was killed in an airstrike or drone strike in October 2006.

Ahmed Mohamed Hamed Ali was killed in a drone strike in 2010.

Anas al-Libi was captured by operators of the Joint Special Operations Command in Libya on October 5, 2013. Ten days later, he appeared in Manhattan federal court and pled not guilty to terrorism charges. His trial was scheduled for January 2015, but he died just before it began in a New York hospital.

Saif al-Adel, if alive, is still at large 20 years later.

14 December 1999

Posted on December 14, 2020December 23, 2020 by William Arkin

Ahmed Ressam, traveling on a Canadian passport under the name of Benni Antoine Noris, is arrested at Port Angeles, Washington at the U.S.-Canadian border. His car contains bomb-making chemicals and detonator components and he is entering the U.S. with the intention of blowing up a bomb at Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Eve.

Algerian native Ahmed Ressam is later found to have trained in Afghanistan al Qaeda camps in Khalden and Darunta, receiving instructions on bomb making and probably the Los Angeles assignment. His case involved terrible failures by French and Canadian authorities. Ressam managed to initially fly from France to Montreal using a photo-substituted French passport under another false name, that of Tahar Medijadi. Under questioning in Canada, he admitted that the passport was fraudulent and claimed political asylum. He was released pending a hearing, which he failed to attend. He was then arrested four times for pick-pocketing, usually from tourists, but was never jailed nor deported.

Ressam eventually obtained his genuine Canadian passport through a document vendor who stole a blank baptismal certificate from a Catholic church. He used the passport to travel to Pakistan, and from there to Afghanistan for his training, returning to Canada before attempting to enter the United States.

Though the CIA and others in the Clinton administration would later crow about the capture of Ressam, his arrest in Port Angeles was completely by chance, due to the work of an individual customs agent on the spot (who had never received any terrorist warnings from higher headquarters or Washington).

“In looking back,” George Tenet later wrote, “much more should have been made about the significance of this event. While Ressam’s plot was foiled, his arrest signaled that al Qaeda was coming here.” (At the Center of the Storm, p. 126)

9 December 2000

Posted on December 9, 2020December 23, 2020 by William Arkin

Another missed opportunity occurs to expose the 9/11 plotters. Fahd al-Quso, an al Qaeda operative, is arrested in Yemen. In addition to being involved in the bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000, al-Quso was at a January 2000 meeting in Malaysia also attended by Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, the San Diego duo who would go on to become hijacker “musclemen” on 9/11.

The FBI tries to get direct access to al-Quso after his arrest but is thwarted by the government of Yemen. (He is finally interrogated days after 9/11 and reveals his presence in Malaysia in January 2000.)

The CIA write in a December 2000 cable it had learned that al-Quso had received $7,000 from someone named Ibrahim, which he delivered to “Khallad” in Southeast Asia. They incorrectly identify this “Khalled” as Khalid al-Mihdhar. Khallad turns out to be Walid Muhammad Salih bin Mubarak bin Attash, currently in Guantanamo detention camp, and a close associate of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

6 December 1999

Posted on December 6, 2020December 23, 2020 by William Arkin

Further increasing the level of anxiety about terrorist attacks during the Millennium transition, Jordanian authorities arrest 16 alleged terrorists who were accused of planning attacks on the John the Baptist’s shrine on the Jordan River and the Radisson SAS hotel in Amman. George Tenet later wrote: “The Jordanian intelligence service, through its able chief, Samikh Battikhi, told us that individuals on the team had direct links to Usama bin Ladin.” (At the Center of the Storm, p. 125)

The CIA Counterterrorist Center circulates an intelligence report, according to Tenet: “accepting the theory that UBL [Osama bin Laden] wants to inflict maximum casualties, cause massive panic, and score a psychological victory, then UBL may be seeking to attack between 5 and 15 targets on the Millennium. Because the U.S. is UBL’s ultimate goal… we must assume that several of these targets will be in the U.S. …”

Over the next weeks, the CIA and allied intelligence services would launch operations in 55 countries against 38 separate targets to disrupt plots in the making and to arrest terrorists under surveillance. But there is no question that once the Millennium passed without incident, the intensity of these efforts would generally decline. And they had little impact on al Qaeda central.

Of note, the same Radisson hotel was one of three hotels in Amman later attacked within a half an hour of each other on the night on November 9, 2005. There, suicide bombers killed over 50 and wounded over 100.

5 December 1999

Posted on December 5, 2020December 23, 2020 by William Arkin

Richard Clarke's book "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror"

A year after CIA director George Tenet’s “We Are at War” memo, White House counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke is still agitating for stronger action against al Qaeda, for a comprehensive strategy, for stronger covert action, for even the use of U.S. military forces in Afghanistan.

On December 4, Clarke wrote a memo to White House national security advisor Samuel “Sandy” Berger. In it, he laid out a proposal to attack al Qaeda facilities again in the week before the Millennium transition. On December 5, Clarke got the memo back. In the margin, Berger wrote “no.”

4 December 1998

Posted on December 4, 2020December 23, 2020 by William Arkin

“We Are at War.” It is perhaps the most ridiculous memo ever written by a government bureaucrat, with neither the authority or the army to so declare. And it made no difference.

On the evening of December 3, CIA director George Tenet “furiously drafted” a longhand memo declaring war and telling his staff that “I wanted no resources or people spared in the effort to go after al Qaeda.”

“We must now enter a new phase in our effort against Bin Ladin,” Tenet wrote in the top-secret memo that circulated the next day. “We all acknowledge that retaliation [for American cruise missile attacks] is inevitable and that its scope may be far larger than we have previously experienced.”

Tenet later writes: “I want [deputy CIA director] Charlie Allen to immediately chair a meeting with NSA, NIMA, CITO [our clandestine information technology organization] and others to ensure we are doing everything we can to meet CTC’s [Counterterrorist Center] requirements.”

“The 9/11 Commission later said that I declared war but that no one showed up. They were wrong.” (At the Center of the Storm, pp. 118–119)

3 December 1995

Posted on December 4, 2020December 23, 2020 by William Arkin

President Bill Clinton speaks to US troops

At the end of a five-day European tour, President Bill Clinton gives the order for the first group of American soldiers to go to Bosnia in the former Yugoslavia. About 700 soldiers are slated to deploy as part of an international peacekeeping force.

“I have authorized the secretary of defense to order the deployment of the preliminary troops … to Bosnia as I said I would as soon I was convinced that the military plan is appropriate,” Clinton said.

The remaining 20,000 U.S. forces are to be sent after the planned signing of the Bosnian peace treaty on December 14. In total, 25 countries are slated to send peacekeepers.

“Our destiny in America is still linked to Europe,” Clinton said, sort of sad commentary on an America or two geographic realities—the European domination and the challenges everywhere else in the world. The CIA is already engaged in covert operations against al Qaeda (and the next day George Tenet would declare war) but the Middle East—outside of dealing with rogues Iraq and Iran and protecting Israel—barely gets a strategic consideration. Is American destiny linked to Europe? It is a question we could still debate today.

30 November 1999

Posted on November 30, 2020December 23, 2020 by William Arkin

The so-called “Millennium Plot” is first detected, leading to the arrest of numerous plotters in Amman, Jordan. Jordanian intelligence uncovered the al Qaeda plot to attack the Radisson Hotel as well as other sites on the night of December 31/January 1, linking local extremists to Abu Zubaydah, an al Qaeda operative then-considered to be Osama bin Laden’s top terrorist planner.

When Zubaydah was apprehended in Pakistan in 2002 (and severely injured in a fire fight), he was characterized as “chief of operations” for al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden’s “number three” with the assumption that he was the main 9/11 planner. He wasn’t of course—that was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. But he would go on to be the first captive to be water boarded and tortured at CIA black sites.

As an interesting aside: after 9/11, many would report that Abu Zubaydah made a mistake and said in an intercepted telephone call that “the grooms are ready for the big wedding,” a tip-off which U.S. intelligence had already determined was a reference to an attack. (The Cell, p. 214) The 9/11 Commission reported, though, that Zubaydah actually said “the time for training is over.” (9/11 Commission, pp. 174–175).

Somehow then—and even now—terrorism experts think it is effective to stress that al Qaeda operatives make mistakes, or they don’t understand Islam, or were “failures”—such as that the Hamburg Three did poorly in pilot training—to delegitimize when none of those things seem to make a bit of difference in their ability and willingness to continue to attack. Nor do they dissuade others from joining their ranks.

25 November 1999

Posted on November 25, 2020December 23, 2020 by William Arkin

The “Hamburg Four” begin their journey to join al Qaeda, ultimately being assigned to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s “planes operation.”

Ziad Jarrah flies from Hamburg, Germany to Karachi, Pakistan via Istanbul, on Turkish Airlines flight 1662 and the 1056, the first of the “Hamburg Four” to fly to Afghanistan. He stays in Pakistan for two months.

According to the interrogations of Ramzi Binalshibh, one of the four (and now in Guantanamo), sometime in 1999, the four decided to act on their beliefs and to pursue jihad against the Russians in Chechnya. They were advised that it was difficult to get to Chechnya and that they should go to Afghanistan first. The four then traveled separately to Quetta in Pakistan, meeting with a trusted representative, who arranged their passage to Kandahar.

In Afghanistan, the four have an audience with Osama bin Laden and pledge loyalty, knowing that they were volunteering for a martyrdom operation. They were instructed to enroll in flight training. Mohammed Atta was chosen to lead the group, and before they left Afghanistan, he met with bin Laden and received a preliminary list of targets: the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol. (See 911 Commission, p. 166; 911 Commission, Staff Statement 16, p. 3)

21 November 2000

Posted on November 21, 2020December 23, 2020 by William Arkin

Satam Muhammed Abdel Rahman al-Suqami, a 24-year-old Saudi who would end up being one on the musclemen on American Airlines Flight 11 that hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center, gets a visa with an altered passport.

Suqami applied for and received a two-year B-1/B-2 (tourist/business) visa in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia on November 21. After 9/11, the FBI concluded that he had fraudulent travel stamps associated with al Qaeda. In his application, Suqami also left blank the line on which he was asked to supply the name and street address of his present employer. But Suqami raised no suspicions—that was the case with Saudis—and his application was approved the next day.

After 9/11, the FBI also pieced together that in the two years prior to the attacks, Suqami had traveled to Iran, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Oman, and had taken additional international trips using Bahrain and the UAE as jumping off points.