From the Archives: On The CBS Evening News, Dan Rather reports from Iraq on “1000 Years for Revenge”

Sept. 11th, 2024 Twenty years ago, on the anniversary of the greatest intelligence failure since The Trojan Horse –  the eve of publication of my first investigative book for HarperCollins, 1000 Years For Revenge: International Terrorism and The FBI,  Dan Rather reported from Iraq on two consecutive nights.

This is the link on my YouTube Channel for both pieces. This is a link to my discussion of 1000 Years on C-Span2’s BOOK TV program. 

In those back-to-back pieces on CBS’s premier nightly news program, Rather detailed my reporting on how both attacks on The World Trade Center: the 1993 bombing and the “planes as missiles” attack on 9/11 were directly connected and bankrolled by Osama bin Laden.

But more importantly, how the FBI and DOJ had gathered enough intelligence to stop the bombing on February 26th, 1993 that killed six and injured 1,000 and first learned of what became known as “the planes operation” as early as 1995.

The architect of both plots was Ramzi Yousef, whose uncle, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM), was later identified by the FBI as the “mastermind” of 9/11. But, as reported by Dan Rather, citing the evidence in my book, KSM was merely implementing a plot Yousef conceived in Manila in the late fall of 1994 — a plot uncovered by Col. Rodolfo B. Mendoza of The Phillippines National Police and communicated to prosecutors in the Southern District of New York after Yousef’s capture and rendition back to New York City in 1995.