midair--as carried out against Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland--
a promising means to inflict massive casualties; and (3) they did not yet con-
sider using hijacked aircraft as weapons against other targets.
original plan: a total of ten aircraft to be hijacked, nine of which would crash
into targets on both coasts--they included those eventually hit on September
11 plus CIA and FBI headquarters, nuclear power plants, and the tallest build-
ings in California and the state of Washington. KSM himself was to land the
tenth plane at a U.S. airport and, after killing all adult male passengers on board
and alerting the media, deliver a speech excoriating U.S. support for Israel, the
Philippines, and repressive governments in the Arab world. Beyond KSM's
rationalizations about targeting the U.S. economy, this vision gives a better
glimpse of his true ambitions. This is theater, a spectacle of destruction with
KSM as the self-cast star--the superterrorist.
to KSM's proposal, he was not convinced that it was practical. As mentioned
earlier, Bin Ladin was receiving numerous ideas for potential operations--
KSM's proposal to attack U.S. targets with commercial airplanes was only one
of many.
for the attack while retaining his independence. It is easy to question such a
statement. Money is one thing; supplying a cadre of trained operatives willing
to die is much more.Thus, although KSM contends he would have been just
as likely to consider working with any comparable terrorist organization, he
gives no indication of what other groups he thought could supply such excep-
tional commodities.
posal to attack the United States using commercial airplanes as weapons.
Though KSM speculates about how Bin Ladin came to share his preoccupa-
tion with attacking America, Bin Ladin in fact had long been an opponent of
the United States. KSM thinks that Atef may have persuaded Bin Ladin to
approve this specific proposal.Atef 's role in the entire operation is unquestion-
ably very significant but tends to fade into the background, in part because Atef
himself is not available to describe it. He was killed in November 2001 by an
American air strike in Afghanistan.
al Qaeda as the "planes operation."