Attack Scenarios

In addition to actual precedents to the 9/11/01 attack, there were proposals or plans for attacks that had shared certain of its elements. Two examples are Operation Northwoods and Operation Bojinka. At first glance, these two plans appear to be fundamentally different: whereas Northwoods was admittedly a false-flag operation by the US military to attack US targets as a pretext for war, Bojinka was a plan by al Qaeda-like cells to attack US and international targets for terrorist motives.

These two operations may have much more in common than it appears. Like other false-flag operations, Operation Bojinka might have been hatched by US intelligence agencies in order to build the myth that an ambitious network of jihadists was bent on attacking the United States "because they hate us". This possibility becomes more plausible when one considers the history of connections between intelligence agencies and Islamic terrorists groups.