USA TODAY International Edition
10 things you may have forgotten
For all the talk about 9/ 11, many elements of the attacks and the actions leading up to them have receded from the public memory.
1. WE DON’T KNOW HOW THE HIJACKERS GOT INTO THE JETS’ COCKPITS
The comprehensive report of the commission created to investigate the attacks, which was published in 2004, said, “Perhaps the terrorists stabbed the flight attendants to get a cockpit key, to force one of them to open the cockpit door, or to lure the captain or first officer out of the cockpit.”
2. PEOPLE ABOARD THE JETS PROVIDED CRITICAL INFO
Those aboard the four hijacked flights — American 11, United 175, American 77 and United 93 — called family and friends from their cellphones or used the aircrafts’ radios to report the hijackings.
3. LIGHT PASSENGER LOADS MADE IT EASIER FOR THE HIJACKERS TO MANEUVER
American 11, bound from Boston to Los Angeles, had 81 passengers on board out of a possible 158. United 175, which also left Boston for Los Angeles, had 56 passengers out of a possible 168. American 77, headed to Los Angeles from Washington, had 58 passengers out of a capacity of 176. United 93, bound from Newark to San Francisco, had only 37 passengers.
4. HIJACKER MISSING FROM UNITED 93
This is the only one of the four hijacked flights that did not strike its intended target, the U. S. Capitol. There were four hijackers on the flight instead of the five that took down the other jets. “The operative likely intended to round out the team for this flight, Mohamed al Kahtani, had been refused entry by a suspicious immigration inspector at Florida’s Orlando International Airport in August,” the 9/ 11 report said. As the passengers were seconds away from getting into the cockpit, the hijacker at the controls crashed the jet in an empty field in Shanksville, Pa.
5. TRADE CENTER HAD BEEN TARGETED BEFORE
Shortly after noon on Feb. 26, 1993, a bomb planted in a van parked in the World Trade Center’s underground parking garage exploded, killing six people and wounding more than 1,000. “Ramzi Yousef, the Sunni extremist who planted the bomb, said later that he had hoped to kill 250,000 people,” the 9/ 11 report said.
6. CHENEY GAVE OK FOR FLIGHT TO BE SHOT DOWN
Before passengers forced the crash of United 93, Vice President Cheney gave the approval for the jet to be shot down before it could reach Washington, the 9/ 11 report said.
However, the report said, the Air Force fighters that were airborne at the time probably would not have found and reached United 93 in time.
7. EARLIER PLOTS TARGETED COMMERCIAL AIRCRAFT
Ramzi Yousef planned a massive attack on 12 U. S. airliners in 1995, the 9/ 11 report said. Yousef was arrested in Pakistan on Feb. 7, 1995, and the plot was never carried out.
8. U. S. WORKED ON MULTIPLE ATTEMPTS TO KILL BIN LADEN BEFORE 9/ 11
The CIA and other agencies developed a plan to capture alQaeda leader Osama bin Laden in early 1998, the report said. That was hampered by concerns from military officials about relying on Afghan tribal leaders. National security adviser Sandy Berger was concerned about whether the evidence against bin Laden could lead to a criminal conviction in a U. S. court. After the U. S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed on Oct. 8, 1998, President Bill Clinton authorized cruise missile strikes against bin Laden’s compound in Afghanistan. Bin Laden survived.
9. THE CIA WARNED CLINTON ABOUT HIJACKINGS IN 1998
In the Dec. 4, 1998, President’s Daily Brief from the CIA, the agency told Clinton that bin Laden planned to hijack planes to gain the release of Yousef and other terrorists, the 9/ 11 report said. But the agency had no firm information.
10. SAUDI ARABIA HAD TIES TO THE HIJACKERS
When the 9/ 11 report was released in 2004, 28 pages of material remained classified. Those pages, which were released in July, showed multiple links to associates of Saudi Arabian Prince Bandar, a former ambassador to the United States. The documents, as USA TODAY reported in July, “show possible conduits of money from the Saudi royal family to Saudis living in the United States and two of the hijackers in San Diego.” Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia.