9/11 planning began in mid-90s

WASHINGTON — Five years before the worst terror attack in American history, a U.S.-educated Kuwaiti pitched an outlandish idea to Osama bin Laden.

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, now a U.S. captive, concedes his apocalyptic vision of 10 planes steered into nuclear power plants, skyscrapers and other American targets received only a lukewarm response from the al-Qaida kingpin.

The meeting in Afghanistan in mid-1996, however, apparently was the genesis of the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001. Three reports issued this week by the Sept. 11 commission provide the fullest picture yet of how Mohammed's idea evolved from wild scheme to unfathomable reality — and the government's chaotic response.

Mohammed had targeted U.S. airliners before. He was indicted in the United States earlier in 1996 for plotting to bomb 12 flights over the Pacific Ocean, but he wasn't captured. Mohammed, born in Kuwait and a 1986 graduate from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, also wanted to crash a plane into CIA headquarters.

His new plan needed bin Laden's money and his muscle.

Between May 1996, when bin Laden moved to Afghanistan from Sudan, and the Sept. 11 attacks, more than 20,000 men trained at his terror camps. They learned to be soldiers and, the Sept. 11 commission said, "to think creatively about ways to commit mass murder."

They floated ideas: take over a Russian launch site and fire a nuclear missile at the United States, pump poison gas into a building's air conditioning, hijack a plane to attack a city.

Advanced terrorism training was given to only the most promising recruits, among them the Sept. 11 hijackers. Early in 1999, bin Laden gave the go-ahead for a scaled-down version of Mohammed's proposal three years earlier.

According to Mohammed, the two drew up a list of potential targets:

• the Capitol, perceived source of U.S. policy in support of Israel;

• the White House and Pentagon, both advocated by bin Laden as potent American symbols;

• the World Trade Center, favored by Mohammed, whose nephew Yousef was in prison for the 1993 bombing of the towers that represented America's financial might.