SEPT. 11 COMMISSION Report says mastermind had idea for much bigger attack on U.S.
The report says Khalid Sheik Mohammed saw himself as a 'superterrorist.'
WASHINGTON POST
WASHINGTON -- To hear Khalid Sheik Mohammed tell it, the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were nothing compared with what he had in mind.
The original plan, which Mohammed says he presented to Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden in 1998 or 1999, called for hijacking 10 jetliners on both coasts of the United States and crashing nine of them. The kicker would have been the final plane, which he would commandeer personally. After killing all the men on board, Mohammed would alert the press and deliver a speech excoriating the U.S. government for its support of Israel and repressive Arab regimes.
According to the new report from the Sept. 11 commission, the idea is classic KSM -- as Mohammed is referred to in U.S. intelligence reports -- mixing grim nihilism with a flair for the dramatic and always putting Mohammed at the center of things.
Mohammed's original vision of Sept. 11 provides "a glimpse of his true ambitions," the commission says. "This is theater, a spectacle of destruction with KSM as the self-cast star -- the superterrorist."
Revealing portrait
Mohammed, the architect of the Sept. 11 attacks, has been in U.S. custody at an undisclosed location since March 2003, when he was captured in a safe house in Pakistan. The commission's report, which was released last week, reveals rafts of information gleaned from the classified interrogations of Mohammed for the first time and relies heavily on the interviews in its examination of how the attacks were carried out.
The report portrays Mohammed, now 39, as a flamboyant and zealous operative who was continually hatching grandiose plans for terrorist attacks, even as bin Laden and other senior Al-Qaida leaders urged him to stay focused on the Sept. 11 plot.
"No one exemplifies the model of the terrorist entrepreneur more clearly than Khalid Sheikh Mohammed," the commission wrote. "Highly educated and equally comfortable in a government office or a terrorist safe house, 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."
'Inflating his own role'
In U.S. interrogations, Mohammed has claimed that it was he and his colleagues who pushed a reluctant bin Laden to attack the United States; the commission disagreed, saying Mohammed was "probably inflating his own role."
Abu Zubaida, another senior Al-Qaida official now in U.S. custody, maintains Mohammed's original plan for Sept. 11 was more humble and it was bin Laden who urged him to expand it. "Why do you use an ax when you can use a bulldozer?" Abu Zubaida quotes bin Laden as saying. Some high-level Al-Qaida detainees portray Mohammed as an opportunist, although he was popular with the Al-Qaida rank-and-file.
Even after the 2001 attacks, which killed 3,000 and ranked as the deadliest terrorist assaults on U.S. soil, Mohammed portrayed himself as unsatisfied. In an interview with the al-Jazeera satellite channel after Sept. 11, he claimed an Al-Qaida reconnaissance committee had identified 30 potential targets in the United States.