Day of 9/11, Londonistan – Additions to the 9/11 Timeline as of December 15, 2008

Many of this week's new entries in the 9/11 Timeline again cover the day of 9/11. The control tower at Otis Air Force Base, from which fighters were launched to intercept the hijacked airliners, called Otis operations center shortly after 8:34 a.m. and the military liaison at Boston Center, Colin Scoggins, updated NEADS around the same time. After the first crash, FAA manager Ben Sliney failed to realize it was Flight 11 that had hit the WTC, but Scoggins wondered if it was.

Regarding Flight 175, an air traffic controller watched it suddenly climb 3,000 feet shortly after it was hijacked, but did not contact NEADS, the fighters from Otis flew towards it, although accounts of their speed differ, and controllers watched it descending 10,000 feet per minute just before it crashed.

At the Pentagon, people in nearby buildings were concerned they might be targets of an attack before it was hit, and a construction trailer was the source of smoke and explosions.

In Londonistan, a top militant relocated from France to London in 1997 and linked up with Abu Hamza, an informer for the British authorities who wanted to inspire a "generation of jihadis" and formed a suicide squad in London. One of the young radicals Abu Hamza recruited was told that the ISI controlled some terror groups in Pakistan and another fought allied troops after the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan.

Miscellaneous entries cover a 1998 warning by counterterrorism "tsar" Richard Clarke about a terrorist threat to New York and Washington, an air defense chief's fears of airborne attack, which kept him awake at night in 2000, and a statement by reporter Jonathan Landay that the war in Afghanistan was far more important than that in Iraq, but was largely forgotten by the media. Finally, the pilot of Flight 77, Charles Burlingame, worked on counterterrorism before 9/11, former ISI Director Hamid Gul claimed the US and Israel, not Osama bin Laden, were responsible for 9/11, and President Bush again extended the national emergency declared after 9/11 in August 2008.

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