WASHINGTON – Hitting the tallest building in Washington state was part of an initial plan involving 10 hijacked planes envisioned by Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, according to a report released Wednesday by the commission investigating the attacks.
Based on interviews with government officials and documents they reviewed, the commission said Mohammed initially proposed attacks against the tallest buildings in Washington state and California, the headquarters of the CIA and FBI, and unidentified nuclear plants, in addition to the World Trade Center, Pentagon and White House or Capitol.
The report does not specify which buildings in Washington or California were targets. But the tallest building in Washington is the 76-story Bank of America Tower in downtown Seattle.
In an interview, commission member Slade Gorton told KOMO Radio in Seattle that the building “would be the Bank of America Tower in Seattle, of course.”
About 5,000 people work in the 937-foot-tall skyscraper, which opened in 1985 and was known as the Columbia Seafirst Center before changing its name in 1999.
The assertion was among new details about the plot revealed Wednesday in a report by the commission’s staff.
The report said Mohammed, who is in U.S. custody at an undisclosed overseas location, told interrogators he wanted to pilot one of the 10 hijacked planes. But rather than crashing his plane into a target, he proposed killing every male passenger aboard, landing at a U.S. airport and making a “speech denouncing U.S. policies in the Middle East before releasing all the women and children.”
That plan was rejected by Osama bin Laden, who ultimately approved a scaled-back mission involving four planes. Training for it began in 1999.
Convicted terrorist Ahmed Ressam also is mentioned in the report.
Ressam was arrested in December 1999 in Port Angeles as he tried to enter Washington state from Canada with explosives in the trunk of his car. He was convicted of plotting to bomb the Los Angeles airport during millennium celebrations and is awaiting sentencing after agreeing to testify in other terrorism cases.
The report says Ressam conceived and prepared for the attack on his own, though he had offered to let bin Laden claim credit for the attack in return for future funding.
The report says Ressam took support from al-Qaida-associated camps but did not follow the traditional al-Qaida top-down planning and approval model.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
