The plan was found in a notebook that may have been in Osama bin Laden’s handwriting. ABC News reports that intelligence analysts “are seeking an example of the handwriting of Osama bin Laden to see if it matches the handwritten document.” (Why doesn’t U.S. intelligence already have a sample of his handwriting?) There’s no evidence so far that a specific train/bridge had been selected, or that the plan was anything more than a brainstorm—the NYT is reporting that officials believe the plan to be “aspirational.”

Then again: The seized computer discs and hard drives require decoding and only after that will they be translated, so who knows, maybe there’s more about trains in there. ABC News has obtained a bulletin by the FBI and Homeland Security that explains:

As of February 2010, al-Qa’ida was allegedly contemplating conducting an operation against trains at an unspecified location in the United States on the 10th anniversary of September 11, 2001. As one option, al-Qa’ida was looking into trying to tip a train by tampering with the rails so that the train would fall off the track at either a valley or a bridge.

The plans seems to have been to derail the train “using trees and cement blocks… suggesting al Qaeda concluded it would be difficult to obtain explosives.” NYT adds that Christmas, New Year’s Day, and the day of the State of the Union address were also considered as possible dates for train-full-of-passengers-flying-off-into-a-valley day.

Christopher Frizzelle was The Stranger's print editor, and first joined the staff in 2003. He was the editor-in-chief from 2007 to 2016, and edited the story by Eli Sanders that won a 2012 Pulitzer...

29 replies on “Al Qaeda Was Hatching a Plan to Derail a Train as It Traveled Across a Bridge on the 10th Anniversary of 9/11”

  2. The fact that these things haven’t already happened shows the limited reach of al Queda, in manpower, skill, and resources. If you had a few people in the US, it would be trivial to carry out repeated attacks like the transit bombings in London and Spain. One plot in the US got close (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_New_Yo…), but was discovered, and the leader had difficulty producing even the simplest explosives.

    Ramzi Yousef, who bombed the WTC the first time, was a competent bomb maker even if he did a poor job of covering his tracks, and is luckily in prison now. The fact that most other attempts (shoe bomber, underwear bomber, printer ink cartridges) originated outside the US and involved small quantities of explosives shows they have a very limited ability to get resources into the US or acquire them once here.

    The fact that they haven’t carried out another successful or significant attack in the US since 9/11 puts this pretty clearly in the “aspirational” category.

  4. Were we not already anticipating and trying to foil a terrorist attack on the 10th anniversary of the biggest terrorist attack in US history?

  5. So, al Qaeda’s big plan for 9/11 X was to put cement blocks on train tracks to derail a train, even though Americans don’t actually ride trains?

    Guys…I think we’ve won. Can we please stop spending trillions going after these assholes now?

  6. @1 actually, the local trains have had TSA with sniffer dogs checking them out for quite some time, but they don’t waste the passengers time with useless and ineffective pat-downs.

    Sniffer dogs and vigilence works. An informed traveling public works. Xray backscatter machines and patdowns … don’t work.

    It’s like torture – you think it works, but it actually doesn’t.

  8. Yeah, wow these guys are supervillain masterminds. Derail a train–who could have known? I sincerely hope that this is the extent of their aspirations because they haven’t really graduated from the box cutter mindset if that’s the case. Which to me indicates they’re third-rate criminals and should’ve been treated that way from the start.
    Forgive me but in comparison to the million plus we’ve blown to smithereens as a reaction to the terrorist campaigns (inviting us to do just that while corrupting our values on the way), it’s hard to tell the difference between villains and their relative capabilities for destruction and murder sometimes.

  9. I look forward to the next six months of wide-eyed fear-soaked publicizing of every doodle and half-cocked scheme scribbled on a notebook or found on a AQ hard drive. OMG. What are they planning next? Pay backs a bitch! Amiright?

    A terror organization was “planning” terror. And that is news exactly how?

    Yeah. I’m sure we will see some innovative capers that might be successful at blowing up some people. And we can react to that.

    Let’s make sure we speculate about shit that didn’t happen yet a whole bunch so that maybe congress can outlaw teenagers loitering near rail road tracks. Take THAT AQ!

    Thank you, my fellow Americans for never failing to show my what a bunch of whiny pussies you are.

  10. holy shit! how much money did this cost to find out? can we dismantle the military surveillance industry yet? oh, it never will be? ok…

  11. Aardvark, this came as a consequence of the raid on bin Laden’s house, so I don’t suppose it technically cost anything. Or at least anything more.

  12. I’m reading now that this “Mansion” Bin Laden was hiding in seems more designed to keep somebody in rather than keep somebody out? It’s seems entirely possible that Bin Laden was a “Guest” in protective custody of the ISI. Now that is interesting to speculate about.

  14. Really Sloggers? No Atlas Shrugged jokes yet? I’ve got nothing, but I was expecting a few beauties. I’m disappointed with you all.

  16. There’s at least one train derailment every week. How would this have inspired terror? Deferred track maintenance means bigger bonuses for the bigwigs. The railroads just go, pffft, that’s what insurance is for…

  17. Again, dirac nails it. I’ve nothing to add, except to point out that slog’s apologists for Obama’s amoral foreign policy are obviously grasping at straws.

  18. Is anyone else annoyed to hear that they STILL haven’t cracked the encryption on those storage devices?

    1) it’s probably in Truecrypt, because it’s open-source and free.

    2) if the passphrase isn’t “Death to America” or “World Trade Center,” then it’s probably some vindictive-sounding phrase from the Koran.

    3) at this point, they should just post one of the drives to the ‘net and offer a reward to whoever decodes it first. Some 14-year-old will score 200 years worth of allowance before midnight tonight.

  20. @19 they’re using a form of multi-disk threading that stores the info in plain sight on a disk (on a 200 GB disk it uses 40 GB) but in a scatter mechanism you need the encryption s/w to use.

    My guess is the key for that wasn’t part of the collection at the time. Which makes it useless and virtually impossible to crack.

    (more details at Infoworld, CBC, and other places, but you have to put it together)

  22. @5 I’m taking a train from San Diego to Houston and back. Because, you know, fuck TSA. When I was buying the tickets two months in advance, lot of the dates were sold out.

  23. @ 22 – “Bridge On the River Kwai” was what I was thinking…..

    bin Laden must have had a video library that was hella old.

  26. We don’t ride a lot of trains here, but there’s a whole hell of a lot of people riding trains between Boston/New York/Washington DC and them there far-East places.

  27. @12 i got you. but its the more im curious about (or up to this point). id love to see some numbers to put this in perspective because i dont think this industry is deescalating any time soon. and i think the point of the logs on train tracks is that it’s not worth it anymore.

  28. @19: “2) if the passphrase isn’t “Death to America” or “World Trade Center,” then it’s probably some vindictive-sounding phrase from the Koran.”

    Bullshit, they’re not as religious as you might assume.

Comments are closed.