Bojinka Redux

CNN International has an excellent piece the link above should bring you to. Money quotes:

"The parallels with Bojinka are amazing: the number of targets, explosive solution," said Roger Cressy, former director of counterterrorism on the National Security Council under President Clinton and President Bush. "It is something right out of the playbook.

"It has to be something either inspired by or directed by al Qaeda," he said.

Cressy said it was no surprise that terrorists were still trying to carry out Yousef's ideas. He was an egotistical man known in that world for his creativity. "He has a proven track record. They admire his brilliance and his bomb-making skills," Cressy said.

Yousef, who once boasted that he wanted to write a book of his exploits, said as he was sent to prison for life: "I am a terrorist and am proud of it."

Pat D'Amuro, a former FBI assistant director, said the London plot showed that terrorists "like to come back to areas, like they did the World Trade Center."

After Yousef and four others set off a bomb beneath the trade center in 1993 that killed six people and injured more than 1,000 others, he went across the Hudson River and watched smoke rise from the towers. He was disappointed he had not toppled them.

He fled the United States on a plane later that night and evaded law enforcers until they learned in late 1994 that he was in the Philippines. Among the Bojinka plans were plots to crash a hijacked airplane into CIA headquarters outside Washington and to assassinate Pope John Paul II and President Clinton.

I'll bet this article doesn't get picked up by the NYT or other lemming leapers!