Al Qaeda Had a Nuclear Follow Up to the 9/11 Attack

This week we observe the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on our country by a terrorist organization that few people, outside the FBI and CIA, knew of at that time.

Now we're learning what other plans Osama bin Laden, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ayman al-Zawahiri and their Al Qaeda adherents had in mind for the even bigger follow up attack.

A nuclear option.

We'll get to Mike Lebowitz's book Second Wave: Inside Al Qaeda's Post-9/11 Attack Plan and America's Secret Effort to Stop It in a minute. The former Guantanamo Bay prosecutor meticulously details the people, places, and plots collected from his GITMO colleagues as they drilled detainees for information.

In looking back on 9/11/01, we can spend a lot of time ruminating over how the FBI brass blew off John O’Neill's warnings and how, on the day of the attack, the USS Cole attack investigator, who now worked as head of security for the World Trade Center Towers, knew immediately who pulled it off.

Those of us who lived through this generation's Pearl Harbor have been angered that the Islamists, attempting to undermine the U.S. and Western Civilizational underpinnings, wanted to build an Islamic center near Ground Zero. There's the current insult of supercilious New York City voters hiring an Islamic communist adherent for mayor; a man who has more in common with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed than Joe Wrench Turner. We noticed the smirk as Mayor Mamdani made sure that a pen used to sign a commemoration for the 9/11 victims' families was publicly handed, not to a family member, but to a man who acted as an attorney for a terrorist.

Al Qaeda's Second Wave plan, however, was even worse than flying planes into the Trade Center Towers, the Pentagon, or the White House, which was where the Shanksville, Pa., plane was headed.

As Lebowitz reports in meticulous detail, the follow-up plan included plotters at a Pakistani shipping company, import/export links, and homegrown U.S. jihadis to plant bombs, including fissile material, along the Eastern Seaboard to create simultaneous bombings that would be, as bin Laden envisaged, Hiroshima on U.S. soil. He wanted 100,000 American dead bodies in one move.

And bin Laden, the terror money man, would have access to nuclear materials.

Lebowitz explains that in 1997 it was dawning on U.S. investigators how dangerous bin Laden was becoming. Bin Laden's mission was to find nuclear material. The next year, Pakistan tested its first nuke.

The threat was beyond the theoretical at that point, but of course, the wobbly State Department waved off the threat and fought serious sanctions against Pakistan. It bears mentioning here that the State Department had never operated in the past as it does now with Marco Rubio at the helm. It's what makes the Trump Administration so game-changing.

Bill Clinton's State Department sought cooperation through capitulation.

O'Neill's battles with the Clinton State Department over the signs of trouble to come were so pitched that Murray Weiss wrote The Man Who Warned America about them.

If the 1993 Black Hawk Down by Al Qaeda's franchise in Somalia and 1996 Khobar Towers bombings in Saudi Arabia by Hezbollah and Iran, with an assist from Al Qaeda, weren't enough to convince the FBI and intelligence agencies that Al Qaeda presented a frightening threat, the 1998 Embassy bombings, and the 2000 USS Cole bombing by Al Qaeda should have thrown counter terrorism experts into paroxysms of concern. Red lights were flashing everywhere.

Lebowitz told me in a recent Adult in the Room Podcast (see our conversation below) that the battle to get to the bottom of the nuclear plot was feverish. But there was no plan. No direction. Just a lot of sweaty palms and puckers everywhere.

And then once KSM was being waterboarded and things like that, he said, "I know a guy who has told us he can help us obtain nuclear weapons through the ports." And the hysteria amongst the intelligence community was fever pitched. This was the ultimate ticking time bomb. Yeah. And so what the book describes was this is right after 911 and the government was trying to really change its strategy on the fly. It went from a law enforcement strategy or toolkit to military and a lot of things weren't going right. And the book really describes, you know, how a lot of that was getting in the way of the investigation.

It's 2026 now; the Middle East order of operations is now a troika of Pakistan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. Turkey is slipping into Iran's spot as the world's largest state sponsor of terror, and the world is still a fraught and dangerous place.

And now, what do we know about Al Qaeda? Here are a few things that bear mentioning.

Al Qaeda leadership is now ensconced in Iran.

We know that the man who planned the 9/11 attack, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, is still at GITMO in a "zombie" trial, as Lebowitz put it.

And the new president of Syria is an al-Qaeda guy.

Lebowitz says the threats are real and clues are falling through the cracks in the nation's expanded counter terrorism constellation of three letter agencies.

Here's our discussion.

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