Americans were confronted yesterday with the unabridged horror of Osama bin Laden's original plans for September 11, and witnessed a devastating assault on the credibility of the White House campaign to justify war in Iraq by linking Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda and the attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.
Americans will be chilled by an independent commission's reconstruction of what might have been - a Doomsday attack by 10 hijacked aircraft across the US, with the synchronised mid-air explosion of more aircraft over the Pacific.
The additional hijacked aircraft would have been crashed into nuclear power plants and symbolic buildings on both coasts. On one commercial jet all of the male passengers were to have been murdered before the plane was landed as a grotesque show-and-tell for the media at a big US airport.
The reconstruction, the damnation of the Bush effort to hold Saddam responsible, and the commission's detailed portrait of life and business in al-Qaeda were based on more than 1000 interviews, including records of the interrogation of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay since their capture by US forces in Afghanistan in the war that followed the September 11 attacks.
The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States is not scheduled to make its final report public until July 26, only three months before the US presidential vote.
But a report by its investigative staff concludes with conviction: "We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaeda co-operated on attacks against the United States."
The report kicked the legs from under another long-held White House justification for war when it declared that there was no evidence to support the theory that the lead hijacker, Mohammed Atta, had met an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague before the attacks.
Going even further, it left the White House exposed by reporting that bin Laden had "explored possible co-operation with Iraq" while he was based in Sudan in the early 1990s.
He had requested space in Iraq for training camps and sought assistance in procuring weapons, but these efforts "do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship".
The inquiry's investigators say that bin Laden apparently scaled back to a four-aircraft attack on September 11 because he worried that the original plan was too complex to pull off.
Estimating that the final plan cost no more than $US550,000 ($800,000), they portray in graphic detail how ragged its execution was.
"The 9/11 conspirators confronted operational difficulties, internal disagreements and even dissenting opinions within the leadership of al-Qaeda," the investigators say, detailing clashes over targets, timing and scope of the long-planned attacks.
Meanwhile, FBI and CIA officials giving evidence on the last hearing days of the inquiry, appointed by President George Bush, warned that al-Qaeda operatives were preparing fresh attacks inside the US.
While conceding that they knew little about al-Qaeda's capacity in the US, the officials insisted that functioning terrorist cells were still operating in the country.
Authorities had probably prevented a few aviation attacks since 2001, but "there are operatives involved in those plots that we still cannot account for", one of the officials told the 10-man commission.
An FBI special agent, Mary Deborah Doran, who has specialised in the al-Qaeda investigation, said the terrorist network could still look for help from sympathisers in the US.
But Ms Doran emphasised that any large-scale terrorist attack would require new operatives who had been infiltrated into the US. "The threat comes from outside," she said.
The Bush Administration is already under pressure over the failure of another of its justifications for the Iraq war - the supposed existence of weapons of mass destruction in the country that might have been channelled to terrorist groups.
In recent weeks it has also been criticised over the abuse and torture of prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere.
Responding to the new disclosures, Senator John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, said that the Bush Administration had "misled America ... it had reached too far".
SMH.com.au
Americans will be chilled by an independent commission's reconstruction of what might have been - a Doomsday attack by 10 hijacked aircraft across the US, with the synchronised mid-air explosion of more aircraft over the Pacific.
The additional hijacked aircraft would have been crashed into nuclear power plants and symbolic buildings on both coasts. On one commercial jet all of the male passengers were to have been murdered before the plane was landed as a grotesque show-and-tell for the media at a big US airport.
The reconstruction, the damnation of the Bush effort to hold Saddam responsible, and the commission's detailed portrait of life and business in al-Qaeda were based on more than 1000 interviews, including records of the interrogation of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay since their capture by US forces in Afghanistan in the war that followed the September 11 attacks.
The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States is not scheduled to make its final report public until July 26, only three months before the US presidential vote.
But a report by its investigative staff concludes with conviction: "We have no credible evidence that Iraq and al-Qaeda co-operated on attacks against the United States."
The report kicked the legs from under another long-held White House justification for war when it declared that there was no evidence to support the theory that the lead hijacker, Mohammed Atta, had met an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague before the attacks.
Going even further, it left the White House exposed by reporting that bin Laden had "explored possible co-operation with Iraq" while he was based in Sudan in the early 1990s.
He had requested space in Iraq for training camps and sought assistance in procuring weapons, but these efforts "do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship".
The inquiry's investigators say that bin Laden apparently scaled back to a four-aircraft attack on September 11 because he worried that the original plan was too complex to pull off.
Estimating that the final plan cost no more than $US550,000 ($800,000), they portray in graphic detail how ragged its execution was.
"The 9/11 conspirators confronted operational difficulties, internal disagreements and even dissenting opinions within the leadership of al-Qaeda," the investigators say, detailing clashes over targets, timing and scope of the long-planned attacks.
Meanwhile, FBI and CIA officials giving evidence on the last hearing days of the inquiry, appointed by President George Bush, warned that al-Qaeda operatives were preparing fresh attacks inside the US.
While conceding that they knew little about al-Qaeda's capacity in the US, the officials insisted that functioning terrorist cells were still operating in the country.
Authorities had probably prevented a few aviation attacks since 2001, but "there are operatives involved in those plots that we still cannot account for", one of the officials told the 10-man commission.
An FBI special agent, Mary Deborah Doran, who has specialised in the al-Qaeda investigation, said the terrorist network could still look for help from sympathisers in the US.
But Ms Doran emphasised that any large-scale terrorist attack would require new operatives who had been infiltrated into the US. "The threat comes from outside," she said.
The Bush Administration is already under pressure over the failure of another of its justifications for the Iraq war - the supposed existence of weapons of mass destruction in the country that might have been channelled to terrorist groups.
In recent weeks it has also been criticised over the abuse and torture of prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere.
Responding to the new disclosures, Senator John Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, said that the Bush Administration had "misled America ... it had reached too far".
SMH.com.au
