<solipsistic
well said

**

from a US cousin by way of my Asian cousin:

Friends, I would like to take this occasion to share with you e-mail correspondence from my friend Ambassador Asher Naim of Israel.

Here is what he wrote:

Dear XXX,

Last week I received Steven Emerson and Daniel Pipes article from The Wall Street Journal of May 31. I sent it to some friends including a dear Philippine friend Ambassador Ramon Pedrosa who in turn sent me this very interesting information from the Philippines on project Bojinca, and I wish to call your attention to it just in case it is not known to you.
Shanah Tova,
Asher Naim


From: Rafael M. Garcia III
Subject: Project Bojinka

To my Classmates:
Sometime in January 1995, when Philippine Police authorities captured Ramsey Youssef in Manila, I was asked, because of my affiliation with the NBI, to help
decode and decipher the hard drives of the computers found in Youssef's possession. This is where we found most of the evidence of the projects that were being funded by Osama Bin Laden in the Philippines.
The first plan was to assassinate Pope John Paul II who was then scheduled to visit the Philippines. The second was Project Bojinka, which called for the hijacking of US bound commercial airliners from the Philippines, Korea, Thailand, Taiwan, Honking and Singapore and then crash them into key structures in the United States. The World Trade Center, the White House, the Pentagon, the Transamerica Tower, and the Sears Tower were among prominent structures that had been identified in the plans that we had decoded.

A dry-run was even conducted on a Tokyo bound Philippine Airlines flight, which fortunately was aborted by our security personnel.
It was also from these computers that we found the plans for the first bombing of the World Trade Center in February 1993. This evidence was eventually used to convict Ramsey Youssef, Abdul Hakim Murad and Wali Khan for the WTC bombing.
Obviously, the original Project Bojinka was modified to give it more significant impact on the USA. By hijacking planes that originated from within the United States instead of Asia, they made sure that AMERICANS would be killed in the hijacking instead of Asians, which obviously would elicit a stronger reaction from the Americans. And transcontinental flights (East Coast to West Coast) would have more fuel for most of the targets which were on the East Coast. Abdul Hakim Murad admitted that they had been taking flying lessons in the Philippines for Project Bojinka. Obviously, after they were caught and convicted, a new set of terrorists were trained in the United States (Venice, Florida) for the modified Bojinka.

The Philippines has been having a lot of problems lately because Osama Bin Laden has been funding the activities of the Abu Sayyaf through his brother-in-law, Khalifa Janjalani. The success of these recent terrorist acts in the United States will embolden Commander Robot and Commander Sabaya, both of the Abu Sayyaf, to wreak more havoc in our part of the world.
What is strange is that the United States agencies that took possession of the evidence that we gathered, obviously, did not take Project Bojinka seriously. I
would have thought that intelligence operatives would have analyzed all the evidence and worked out various scenarios that could have included the modified Bojinka plan. If they had done so, the US would have been prepared for this attack.
Let us thank God that many of our friends were spared from the horrors of the other day.
I have been stuck in Minneapolis for the last two days after attending the reunion of the East Coast Eagles in Washington, DC. I am irritated that I am unable to travel but I am gratified that I am still alive enough to be irritated!