BRITISH ATTACKS WERE PLANNED FOR

BRITISH ATTACKS WERE PLANNED FOR 9/11: Found on CNS.com today:

Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network reportedly had plans to attack the British Parliament building and the Big Ben clock tower on the same day it engineered strikes on New York’s World Trade Center and the Pentagon. However, according to the Jerusalem Post, the would-be hijackers, who were scheduled to leave London’s Heathrow Airport on Sept. 11, 2001, were prevented from carrying out their attacks because news had already spread of the strikes against the U.S. and all flights from London had been grounded. The newspaper spoke with Rohan Gunaratna, author of “Inside al-Qaida: Global Network of Terror,” Gunaratna told the Post that Afroz Muhammed, one of the would-be hijackers in Great Britain, was subsequently arrested in India, where he confessed to being part of the foiled plot. Afroz also attended flying schools in Great Britain, Australia, and the United States, in preparing for the 9/11 terrorist mission, according to Gunaratna, who is a scholar with the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St. Andrew’s University in Scotland. He told the Jerusalem Post his book was based on intelligence sources and the testimony of former members of Osama Bin Laden’s terrorist network. (Editor’s note: CNSNews.com spelling of al Qaeda differs from the title of Gunaratna’s book)

See also this Reason article, posted late in the day on September 11th, which talked about the terrorists’ goal (they weren’t yet identified as Al Qaeda) of escalating their terrorism to dominate the television news cycle.