Hijacking

“ The FAA had a security mission to protect the users of commercial air transportation against terrorism and other criminal acts. In the years before 9/11, the FAA perceived sabotage as a greater threat to aviation than hijacking. First, no domestic hijacking had occurred in a decade. Second, the commercial aviation system was perceived as more vulnerable to explosives than to weapons such as firearms. Finally, explosives were perceived as deadlier than hijacking and therefore of greater consequence. ”

“ Whoever unlawfully and intentionally seizes or exercises control of an aircraft in service by force or threat thereof, or by coercion, or by any other form of intimidation, or by any technological means, commits the offence of hijacking.
(2) A person shall also be deemed to have committed the offence of hijacking specified in sub-section (1) , if, such person––
(a) makes a threat to commit such offence or unlawfully and intentionally causes any person to receive such threat under circumstances which indicate that the threat is credible ”

“ Sheikh Mohammed claimed that he wanted to get as many muscle hijackers as possible to the U.S. to enhance the odds for a successful hijacking, even if there were as many as six or seven hijackers or more per flight. There were four muscle hijackers for three planes and three muscle hijackers for the fourth plane because that was the maximum number of operatives that Sheikh Mohammed was able to find and send to the U.S. before 9/11. ”

“ The reporting noted that operatives might opt to hijack an aircraft or storm a U.S. embassy. This report led to a Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) information circular to airlines noting the potential for “an airline hijacking to free terrorists incarcerated in the United States.” Other reporting mentioned that Abu Zubaydah was planning an attack, possibly against Israel, and expected to carry out several more if things went well. ”

“ KSM followed a rather tortuous path to his eventual membership in al Qaeda.1 Highly educated and equally comfortable in a government office or a terrorist safehouse, KSM applied his imagination, technical aptitude, and managerial skills to hatching and planning an extraordinary array of terrorist schemes. These ideas included conventional car bombing, political assassination, aircraft bombing, hijacking, reservoir poisoning, and, ultimately, the use of aircraft as missiles guided by suicide operatives. ”

“ The final layer, security on board commercial aircraft, was not designed to counter suicide hijackings. The FAA-approved “Common Strategy” had been elaborated over decades of experience with scores of hijackings, beginning in the 1960s. It taught flight crews that the best way to deal with hijackers was to accommodate their demands, get the plane to land safely, and then let law enforcement or the military handle the situation. According to the FAA, the record had shown that the longer a hijacking persisted, the more likely it was to end peacefully. ”

“ Report of the President's Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism (Pan Am/Lockerbie Commission) , May 15, 1990, pp. 113-114; Final Report of the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security (Gore Commission) , Feb. 12, 1997.While the sabotage of commercial aircraft, including Pan Am 103 in 1998, had claimed many lives, hijackings had also been deadly, including the 1985 hijacking of an Egypt Air flight in which 60 people were killed and 35 injured; the 1986 hijacking of Pan Am 73 in which 22 people were killed and 125 injured ”

“ Jewish right-wing extremist and U.S. citizen Baruch Goldstein machine-gunned Moslem worshippers at a mosque in West Bank town of Hebron, killing 29 and wounding about 150.
Air France Hijacking, December 24, 1994: Members of the Armed Islamic Group seized an Air France Flight to Algeria. The four terrorists were killed during a rescue effort. ”

“ Clarke added that VX precursor traces found near al Shifa were the “exact formula used by Iraq.”110This language about al Qaeda’s “understanding” with Iraq had been dropped, however, when a superseding indictment was filed in November 1998.111 On Friday, December 4, 1998, the CIA included an article in the Presidential Daily Brief describing intelligence, received from a friendly government, about a threatened hijacking in the United States.This article was declassified at our request. ”

“ American 11: We have some planes. Just stay quiet, and you'll be okay. We are returning to the airport. The controller only heard something unintelligible; he did not hear the spe- cific words "we have some planes." The next transmission came seconds later:
American 11: Nobody move. Everything will be okay. If you try to make any moves, you'll endanger yourself and the airplane. Just stay quiet.109 The controller told us that he then knew it was a hijacking. He alerted his supervisor, who assigned another controller to assist him. He redoubled his efforts to ascertain the flight's altitude. ”

“ Cathal Flynn interview (Sept. 9, 2003) ; Lee Longmire interview (Oct. 28, 2003) ; Leo Boivin interview (Sept. 17, 2003) . A 1994 FAA assessment of the threat to civil aviation in the United States stated that "system vulnerabilities also exist with respect to hijackings . . . aircraft can be hijacked with either fake weapons or hoax explosive devices. Cabin crew or passengers can also be threatened with objects such as short blade knives, which are allowable on board aircraft." See FAA report,"The Threat to U.S. Civil Aviation in the United States," Sept. ”

“ It stated that the FAA had no credible evidence of specific plans to attack U.S. civil aviation, though it noted that some of the “currently active” terrorist groups were known to “plan and train for hijackings” and were able to build and conceal sophisticated explosive devices in luggage and consumer products.29 Tenet told us that in his world “the system was blinking red.” ”

“ We stopped an al Qaeda plot to fly a hijacked airplane into the tallest building on the West Coast. We broke up a Southeast Asian terror cell grooming operatives for attacks inside the United States. We uncovered an al Qaeda cell developing anthrax to be used in attacks against America. And just last August, British authorities uncovered a plot to blow up passenger planes bound for America over the Atlantic Ocean. For each life saved, we owe a debt of gratitude to the brave public servants who devote their lives to finding the terrorists and stopping them. ”

“ We were greeted by other prisoners: "American planes have been making daily bombing raids on the port area only a few blocks away and on the ships in the harbor - Manila Bay." We thought, "That's good! Maybe they won't be able to get
us out."
"MacArthur must be getting close! When the air-raid alarms sounded, the guards have been chasing all of the prisoners inside the buildings."
"We were able to find peepholes where we could watch the U.S. planes dive down through heavy flak of anti-aircraft guns, to drop their bombs on important targets." ”

“ Analyzing their characteristic travel documents and travel patterns could have allowed authorities to intercept some of the hijackers and a more effective use of information available in government databases could have identified some of the hijackers. (6) The routine operations of our immigration laws and the aspects of those laws not specifically aimed at protecting against terrorism inevitably shaped al Qaeda's planning and opportunities. (7) New insights into terrorist travel gained since September 11, 2001, have not been adequately integrated into the front lines of border security. ”

“ On September 11, 2001, 19 men hijacked four airplanes and used them to murder nearly 3,000 people. They struck at our military and economic nerve centers. They took the lives of innocent men, women and children without regard to their faith or race or station. ”

“ The Federal Civil Defense Act of 1950 contemplated an attack or series of attacks by an enemy of the United States which conceivably would cause substantial damage or injury to civilian property or [24] persons in the United States by any one of several means: sabotage, the use of bombs, shellfire, or atomic, radiological, chemical, bacteriological, or biological means or other weapons or processes. ”

“ But, another historian observes,“in the face of a clear warning, alert measures bowed to routine.”12 It is therefore crucial to find a way of routinizing, even bureaucratizing, the exercise of imagination. Doing so requires more than finding an expert who can imagine that aircraft could be used as weapons. Indeed, since al Qaeda and other groups had already used suicide vehicles,namely truck bombs,the leap to the use of other vehicles such as boats (the Cole attack) or planes is not far-fetched. ”

“ Across the Atlantic, over the pole, via Alaska, the great bombers flew. In cities, great and small, the air raid sirens sounded, high screaming noises which had jarred the people from sleep in time to die. The defending planes roared into the sky to intercept the on-rushing bombers. The horrendous battle split the universe. Many bombers fell, victims of fanatical suicide planes, or of missiles that streaked across the sky which none could escape. ”

“ Need it be noted here that even if in any locality an imprudent civilian had fired a shot, it would still remain—in accordance with the Hague Convention, International Law, and plain morality—a veritable crime to massacre in a heap, haphazard, and without enquiry, so many innocent souls? ”

“ The air-ships, flying hither and thither a few hundred feet above the house-tops, like spirits of destruction, sent their shells into their crowded masses and wrought the most awful havoc of all with their frightful explosives, blowing hundreds of men to indistinguishable fragments at every shot, while from the windows of every house that was not in ruins came a ceaseless hail of missiles from every kind of firearm, from a magazine rifle to a shot-gun. ”

“ Even after the landing of Anglo-Americans in France, the order of the Fuehrer on the destruction of terror and sabotage units of 18 Oct 1942 remains fully in force.
Enemy soldiers in uniform in the immediate combat area of the bridgehead, that is, in the area of the divisions fighting in the most forward lines as well as of the reserves up to the corps commands, according to #5 of the basic order of 18 Oct 1942, remain exempted.
2. All members of terror and sabotage units, found outside the immediate combat area, who include fundamentally all parachutists, are to be killed in combat. ”

“ We could hear the guns barking close by and occasionally the louder boom that told us one of the German bombs had landed. Particles of shrapnel began falling in the garden beneath the windows of our ward and we could hear the rattle of the pieces on the slate roof of a pavilion there. It is most unpleasant, it goes without saying, to lie helpless on one's back and grapple with the realisation that directly over your head—right straight above your eyes and face—is an enemy airplane loaded with bombs. ”

“ That was written at the time because the question of sentence by courts-martial came up for discussion since this very document laid down in detail for the first time what a terror-flier was, and because it stated that terror attacks were always attacks carried out from low-flying aircraft with machine guns. I was led to think that crews attacking in low-level flights could not, generally speaking, in 99 out of 100 cases be captured alive, if they crashed; for there is no possibility of saving oneself with a parachute from a low-level attack. ”

“ First of all, Document 553-PS, the note: This memorandum was issued by me in August 1942. As I have already described in connection with the Nacht und Nebel Decree, sabotage acts, the dropping of agents by parachute, the parachuting of arms, ammunition, explosives, radio sets and small groups of saboteurs reached greater and greater proportions. They were dropped at night from aircraft in thinly populated regions. This activity covered the whole area governed by Germany at that time. It extended from the west over to Czechoslovakia and Poland, and from the East as far as the Berlin area. ”

“ The revolting proceedings of the invasion, the unscrupulous methods of the German chiefs, the tranquillity with which their submarines were sinking boats filled with defenseless passengers, the deeds of the aviators who were hurling bombs upon unguarded cities, destroying women and children—all this was causing the events of revolutionary terrorism which, years ago, used to arouse his wrath, to sink into relative unimportance. ”

“ AND AERIAL TORPEDOES — MACHINE GUNS IN AIRCRAFT — ACCURACY IN DROPPING BOMBS.
Ten years ago the dropping of bombs from balloons was still considered an illegitimate form of warfare, involving danger to non-combatants, and was under the ban of the Geneva Convention. At the Hague Peace Conference the Germans refused to abstain from bomb-dropping, and other nations followed suit. According to the German conception of war, civilians in the theater of operations must take their chance of being killed, but must not shoot back under pain of summary execution. ”

“ A sickening pause—then a deafening detonation, followed by another and another, cut the stillness, and the earth beneath was aflame with light as the high explosives and shells stored in the concealed ammunition depot were set off. Nothing escaped destruction; flesh and blood, mortar and brick went skyward together, and a great gash in the earth was all that was left to tell the story of the enemy's successful raid.
From a safe height the German airman and his observer watched their handiwork. Suddenly the latter caught sight of an aeroplane winging its way toward them. ”