The Terror Watch

• June 2000: Mohammed Atta, the alleged 911 ringleader, is in Prague for the first of two meetings with Colonel Muhammed Khalil Ibrahim al-Ani. Al-Ani is one of Iraq’s most highly decorated intelligence officers and a reported senior official in the Department for Special Operations, which specializes in sabotage, terrorism and assassinations.

• September 1999: The National Intelligence Council prepares a report for the CIA and the Clinton administration entitled ”The Sociology and Psychology of Terrorism: Who Becomes a Terrorist and Why.“ In addition to detailing the motives behind religiously inspired terrorism, the council reported that suicide bombers belonging to ”al Qaeda‘s Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the CIA or the White House.“

• 1999: Ihab Mahammed Ali, an al Qaeda member arrested in Orlando, Florida, and later named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa, is called before a grand jury. He denies participation in bin Laden’s network and is charged with perjury. The FBI learns that Ali had obtained flight training at the Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma. Ali became al Qaeda‘s first pilot. Accused September 11 terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui also took flight lessons at the Airman school.

• 1996: Abdul Hakim Murad, a Pakistani terrorist affiliated with al Qaeda and Ramzi Yousef, confesses to Filipino police that he intended to use his American flight training to crash a plane filled with explosives into the CIA’s headquarters in Virginia. Murad was arrested in Manila in 1995 after accidentally setting his apartment on fire while making a bomb. He also told investigators about Yousef‘s plot to blow up 12 airliners over the ocean. Yousef was convicted of masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Murad was convicted in New York of conspiring with Yousef to blow up the airliners.

• 1994: French intelligence thwarts a plan by Algerian Islamic militants to hijack a plane and crash it into the Eiffel Tower or blow it up over Paris.

• 1993: Yossef Bodansky, executive director of the U.S. House Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, and the author of six books, including Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America, publishes Target America. In it, Bodansky details an alleged terror program devised by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps of Iran, in which suicide pilots were trained to fly small jets, loaded with explosives, into targets. The program, started in the early 1980s, reportedly zeroed in on Gulf state palaces and the U.S. Sixth Fleet. A number of training accidents eventually stalled the program.