When was 9/11 planned

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Reset Password Cancel. Sunday newsletter. By proceeding, you are agreeing to our Terms and Conditions. If you are not already registered, this will create a PS account for you. You should receive an activation email shortly. Sep 9, Richard Haass. Support High-Quality Commentary For more than 25 years, Project Syndicate has been guided by a simple credo: All people deserve access to a broad range of views by the world's foremost leaders and thinkers on the issues, events, and forces shaping their lives.

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Email required Password required Remember me? The FBI agent realised the scale of Mohammed's ambition in when he was linked to a plot to blow up multiple international airliners over the Pacific.

In the mids, Pellegrino had come close to getting his man, tracking him to Qatar. He and a team went to Oman from where they planned to cross into Qatar and arrest Mohammed.

A plane was ready to bring the suspect back. But there was resistance from US diplomats on the ground. Pellegrino went to Qatar and told the ambassador and other officials at the embassy that he had an indictment against Mohammed for the plot involving airliners. But he says they seemed wary of causing trouble in the country. Eventually the ambassador informed Pellegrino that Qatari officials claimed to have lost Mohammed. But he acknowledges that in the mids Mohammed was not seen as a high-priority target.

Mohammed seems to have been tipped off about the US interest in him and fled Qatar, ending up in Afghanistan. Over the next few years KSM's name kept cropping up, often in phone books of terror suspects arrested across the world, making clear he was well connected. It was during these years that he went to Bin Laden with the idea of training pilots to fly planes into buildings inside the US.

Pellegrino's suspicions of KSM's role would be proven right when a key al-Qaeda figure in custody identified him. In , Mohammed was tracked down and arrested in Pakistan. Pellegrino hoped he would stand trial under the indictment he had worked on. But then he disappeared. The CIA had taken him to a "black site" where "enhanced interrogation techniques" were used.

Mohammed was waterboarded at least times, something described as "near drownings". He was subjected to rectal rehydration, stress positions, sleep deprivation, forced nudity, and told his children would be killed.

He would confess to multiple plots during that time. But a Senate report later found that much of the intelligence supposedly produced had been made up by the detainee. After details of the CIA's detention programme were revealed, "high value detainees" like Mohammed were moved to Guantanamo Bay in The FBI were finally allowed access. In January Frank Pellegrino came face-to-face with the man he had pursued for so long. Less than 15 minutes after the terrorists struck the nerve center of the U.

The structural steel of the skyscraper, built to withstand winds in excess of miles per hour and a large conventional fire, could not withstand the tremendous heat generated by the burning jet fuel. At a. Only six people in the World Trade Center towers at the time of their collapse survived. Almost 10, others were treated for injuries, many severe.

Because the plane had been delayed in taking off, passengers on board learned of events in New York and Washington via cell phone and Airfone calls to the ground. Knowing that the aircraft was not returning to an airport as the hijackers claimed, a group of passengers and flight attendants planned an insurrection.

One of the passengers, Thomas Burnett, Jr. I love you, honey. Sandy Bradshaw, a flight attendant, called her husband and explained that she had slipped into a galley and was filling pitchers with boiling water. The passengers fought the four hijackers and are suspected to have attacked the cockpit with a fire extinguisher.

The plane then flipped over and sped toward the ground at upwards of miles per hour, crashing in a rural field near Shanksville in western Pennsylvania at a. All 44 people aboard were killed. Its intended target is not known, but theories include the White House , the U. Capitol, the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland or one of several nuclear power plants along the eastern seaboard. Citizens of 78 countries died in New York, Washington, D.

At the World Trade Center, 2, died after the two planes slammed into the twin towers. That figure includes firefighters and paramedics, 23 New York City police officers and 37 Port Authority police officers who were struggling to complete an evacuation of the buildings and save the office workers trapped on higher floors. At the Pentagon, people were killed, including 64 on American Airlines Flight 77, the airliner that struck the building.

On Flight 93 , 44 people died when the plane crash-landed in Pennsylvania. Bush , who was in Florida at the time of the attacks and had spent the day being shuttled around the country because of security concerns, returned to the White House. These acts shatter steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve. In a reference to the eventual U. Within two months, U. Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the September 11th attacks, remained at large until May 2, , when he was finally tracked down and killed by U.

In June , then-President Barack Obama announced the beginning of large-scale troop withdrawals from Afghanistan; it took until August for all U. It was signed into law by President George W.