New confirmation US knew about early version of 9/11 plot in 1995

[paulthompson]

Here's a new entry I'm very happy to have just completed. This material was in Nafeez Ahmed's book, The War on Freedom, but I was never able to find the source article he used, so I couldn't use the info in my timeline without having the source. But today, by sheer luck (fooling around with various URLs), I was able to find the article.

Spring 1995
US Authorities Learn of Bojinka Second Wave Plot from Yousef's Computer
Rafael Garcia, Chairman and CEO of the Mega Group of Computer Companies in the Philippines, often works with the Philippine National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) to decode computer files. He is assigned the task of decoding encrypted files on Ramzi Yousef's computer. Garcia will later comment to a popular Philippine newsweekly, "This was how we found out about the various plots being hatched by the cell of Ramzi Yousef. First, there was the plot to assassinate Pope John Paul II. Then, we discovered a second, even more sinister plot: Project Bojinka... This was a plot to blow up 11 airlines over the Pacific Ocean, all in a 48-hour period... Then we found another document that discussed a second alternative to crash the 11 planes into selected targets in the United States instead of just blowing them up in the air. These included the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia; the World Trade Center in New York; the Sears Tower in Chicago; the TransAmerica Tower in San Francisco; and the White House in Washington, DC... I submitted my findings to NBI officials, who most certainly turned over the report (and the computer) either to then Senior Superintendent Avelino Razon of the or to Bob Heafner of the FBI... I have since had meetings with certain US authorities and they have confirmed to me that indeed, many things were done in response to my report." Around the same time, Philippine interrogators were learning the same information from captured Bojinka plotter Abdul Hakim Murad. There has been some question whether Murad's complete description of Bojinka's second wave plot reached US authorities, but if they did not, they appear to have learned the information from Garcia's report.
Newsbreak Weekly, 11/15/01
http://www.inq7.net/nwsbrk/2001/nov/15/nbk_4-1.htm

This is extremely important, in my opinion, because there seems to always have been an attempt to surpress US knowledge of this second wave plot involving planes as weapons that goes way back before 9/11. (There's been a widely reported story about Murad wanting to crash a plane into CIA headquarters, but that was based on an early point of Murad's confession, and he soon confessed that was just one part of the larger plot.) So, for instance, in Yousef's 1997 trial, not a word of the second wave plot was mentioned, and the people who had gotten that information from Murad weren't asked to testify at the trial. And, for example, in 2002, AP reported, "FBI and other American law-enforcement officials, who spoke only on condition of anonymity, said that they considered Murad's suicide hijacking idea was half-baked, and in any case involved taking control of only a small single-engine plane that could not do much damage."

But now we know these denials are BS. Some US authorities, at least, knew this very clearly, probably from both Murad's interrogation and Garcia's report. In the years to come, they would be told various times, for instance by the government of Qatar, that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was working on hijacking plots. They knew KSM had co-masterminded the WTC bombing in 1993 and the Bojinka plot, so he should have been the most wanted man in the world. Yet they seemed to do little to try to find him or take steps to defend against the second wave plot.