The Mysterious 9/11 Apology By Condoleezza Rice

 President George W. Bush’s National Security Advisor on September 11, 2001 was Condoleezza Rice.  On the 25th anniversary of the attack, she apologized:

‘Those of us in authority on that day did not see the nature of the danger in time to prevent the attack of 9/11,’ said Rice….

‘We did what we knew to do, but by definition, it was not enough.’

‘I want to say something deeply personal,’ she said. ‘I will always carry deep personal remorse for the pain that you, the families of the fallen, still feel, and for the trauma that our country endured.’

She “did not see the nature of the danger in time to prevent the attack” because the Clinton Administration failed to give her all the details it knew about the danger.  It is President Bill Clinton who should be apologizing.

In 1995 the Clinton Administration learned about Operation Bojinka when terrorist Abdul Hakim Murad was captured in the Philippines.  On September 18, 2001 CNN reported:

The FBI was warned six years ago of a terrorist plot to hijack commercial planes and slam them into the Pentagon, the CIA headquarters and other buildings, Philippine investigators told CNN.

 

Philippine authorities learned of the plot after a small fire in a Manila apartment, which turned out to be the hideout of Ramzi Yousef, who was later convicted for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.  Yousef escaped at the time, but agents caught his right-hand man, Abdul Hakim Murad, who told them a chilling tale. 

‘Murad narrated to us about a plan by the Ramzi cell in the continental U.S. to hijack a commercial plane and ram it into the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and also the Pentagon,’ said Rodolfo Mendoza, a Philippine intelligence investigator.

 

Philippine investigators also found evidence targeting commercial towers in San Francisco, Chicago and New York City.

They said they passed that information on to the FBI in 1995, but it's not clear what was done with it.

On September 23, 2001 the Washington Post made a similar report.

On September 26, 2001 the Village Voice reported:

According to Federal Bureau of Investigation director Robert Mueller, there were ‘no warning signs’ of the kamikaze assaults.  But somewhere in its files there is information indicating that as early as 1995 there existed a chilling plot code-named ‘Project Bojinka,’ which included mid-air bombings of planes headed to the United States from Asian countries on a single day, as well as hijacking airliners and crashing them into targets like the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.  According to Philippine authorities, this information was passed on that year to the U.S. Embassy in Manila and to the U.S. Joint Task Force on Terrorism.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a computer expert who regularly assists the National Bureau of Investigation (the Philippine FBI counterpart) and the Philippine National Police in their investigations of computer-related crimes said he downloaded the files, revealing the terrorists' diabolical project.  One plan called for the hijacking of U.S.-bound commercial airliners from various Asian capitals and then, according to him, crashing them into ‘key structures in the United States: The World Trade Center, the White House, the Pentagon, the Transamerican [sic] Tower, and the Sears Tower were among the prominent structures that had been identified in the plans that we had decoded.’  The expert pointed out that in fact a dry run had been conducted in 1994, on a Tokyo-bound Philippine Airlines flight, when a small bomb under a passenger seat went off, killing a Japanese tourist.

When I noted the discrepancy between blowing up the planes in flight and crashing them into buildings, the expert said, ‘When we searched the files in the archive, there was a specific plan to blow planes up, but there were several other plans.  One of them was to crash [the planes] into specific targets.’

On May 19, 2002 the Washington Post reported:

A broad array of signals -- from foiled plots to FBI field interviews -- suggested for years that al Qaeda-affiliated terrorist groups had considered employing airplanes as missiles and U.S. flight schools as pilot training grounds.

FBI investigators visited two of the flight schools in 1996 after the plot was uncovered in the Philippines, school operators said.  In 1998 and 1999, analysts warned federal officials that terrorists might crash hijacked aircraft into landmarks such as the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

On December 30, 2001 the Washington Post Magazine reported more details about the capture of Murad: “According to U.S. and Philippine officials interviewed for this article, both the CIA Manila station chief and the resident FBI legal attache were notified.  A team of intelligence agents flew in from Washington.”

The Post quoted Aida Fariscal, the retired Philippine policewoman who was instrumental in capturing Murad: “‘The FBI knew all about Yousef’s plans,’ she says.  ‘They’d seen the files, been inside 603 [Yousef’s apartment].  The CIA had access to everything, too….’”  The Post added:

In her outrage at the biggest U.S. intelligence failure since Pearl Harbor, Fariscal is not alone in the Manila law enforcement community.  Gen. Avelino ‘Sonny’ Razon, one of the lead investigators in the Bojinka case, was so shocked at what he saw on September 11 that he jumped on a plane in Cebu, where he was now police chief, and flew to Manila to convene a hasty press conference.  ‘We told the Americans about the plans to turn planes into flying bombs as far back as 1995,’ he complained to reporters.  ‘Why didn’t they pay attention?’

On September 11, 2026 the California Post reported about a newly declassified Presidential Daily Brief memorandum dated September 10, 1998:

On Sept. 10, 1998, material for the daily brief presented to Clinton warned: ‘Bin Laden late last month said his preferred option is to strike the US on its own soil in Washington … the same group responsible for the [US Embassy] bombings in Africa [Kenya and Tanzania] may fly an explosive-packed airplane into a US city.’

Additional evidence of the Clinton Administration’s knowledge was revealed by retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Robert “Buzz” Patterson, who was a military aide to Clinton from May 1996 to May 1998 and one of five individuals entrusted with carrying the “nuclear football”—the bag containing the codes for launching nuclear weapons.  On page 139 of Patterson’s book “Dereliction of Duty,” published in March 2003, he wrote:

During the summer of the 1996 attacks, I myself learned firsthand that the administration knew that terrorists were plotting to use commercial airliners as weapons.  The president received a Presidential Daily Brief, or PDB, every morning.  It was a document encased in a smart leather folder, and emblazoned with the presidential seal, that contained the president’s daily intelligence update from the NSC.  A senior NSC representative normally delivered it to the president.  On weekends, at Camp David, and on vacations, the military aide was responsible for delivering and retrieving the brief.

One late-summer Saturday morning, the president asked me to pick up a few days’ worth of PDBs that had accumulated in the Oval Office.  He gave them to me with handwritten notes stuffed inside the folders and asked that I deliver them back to the NSC.

I opened the PDB to rearrange the notes and noticed the heading ‘Operation Bojinka.’  I keyed on a reference to a plot to use commercial airliners as weapons and another plot to put bombs on U.S. airliners.  Because I was a pilot, this naturally grabbed my attention.  I can state for a fact that this information was circulated within the U.S. intelligence community, and that in late 1996 the president was aware of it.

Speaking at a press conference on May 16, 2002, Rice stated that the Clinton Administration did not tell her about Bojinka.

Testifying before the 9/11 Commission on April 8, 2004, Rice stated that the Clinton Administration did not tell her about what was uncovered in 1995 in the Philippines.

Rice’s apology about not seeing the nature of the danger is misplaced given the evidence that the preceding Clinton Administration failed to disclose the key facts to her.  She should not blame herself for failing to connect dots that the Clinton Administration failed to give her.

Allan J. Favish is an attorney in Los Angeles.  His website is allanfavish.com.  In 2010 James Fernald and Mr. Favish co-authored a book about what might happen if the government ran Disneyland, entitled “Fireworks! If the Government Ran the Fairest Kingdom of Them All (A Very Unauthorized Fantasy).”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/09/the-mysterious-9-11-apology-by-condoleezza-rice/