Reply #123: BOJINKA: Bust and Boom

[Octafish]

Here's more evidence:

Bust and Boom

Six years before the September 11 attacks, Philippine police took down an al Qaeda cell that had been plotting, among other things, to fly explosives-laden planes into the Pentagon

By Matthew Brzezinski
Washington Post Magazine
Sunday, December 30, 2001; Page W09

It was already evening, here on the other side of the international date line, when the first plane struck the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Aida Fariscal had gone to bed early on September 11, only to be awakened by a frantic colleague. "Quick," he instructed, "turn on your television."

The footage of the hijacked airliner bursting into flame made Fariscal bolt upright. "Oh my God," she gasped. "Bojinka."

For the retired Philippine policewoman, that word and the nightmare scenario it evoked had receded into distant memory these past six years. Sometimes weeks went by without her even thinking about the terrorist plot she had foiled so long ago. But there it was, after all this time, unfolding live on her small-screen television. "I thought, at first," she tells me, "that I was having a bad dream, or that I was watching a movie." But as the burning towers came crashing down under their own weight, disbelief turned to anger. "I still don't understand," she says over a club sandwich, "how it could have been allowed to happen."

We are having lunch at a chicken rotisserie in a busy Manila shopping center, not far from the Dona Josefa Apartments, where it all started, where she -- and the CIA and the FBI -- first heard the words "Operation Bojinka." Fariscal has insisted on a corner table, so she can keep an eye on the other patrons and the shoppers beyond the restaurant's greasy glass partition. Old habits, she explains, die hard, and, after a life of fighting crime, she always takes security precautions, especially now that she is off the force, a widowed grandmother living off a police pension in a small one-bedroom apartment. Her brother, in fact, is supposed to swing by the rotisserie -- just to make sure I am who I say I am.

As we speak, she seems bitter, and surprisingly fragile in her hoop earrings and bright pink lipstick. She is bitter that the generals in the Philippine high command hogged all the credit for Bojinka, while all she received was $700 and a free trip to Taiwan. She is bitter that the Americans apparently didn't take the foiled plot seriously enough. But most of all, she is angry that, in the end, her hunch didn't save thousands of lives after all. "I can't get those images," she says of the World Trade Center wreckage, "out of my mind."

CONTINUED...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A14725-2001Dec21

This is stuff that the State Department or CIA now keeps secret.



Why do you suppose that is, huh Unka Dick?

BTW: That's one helluva sig line you got there, Trevelyan. Norm hit a home run with that statement on history.