What we ignored then—because it seemed too fantastic—was another plot to hijack commercial planes and crash them into buildings: the World Trade Center in New York City, the Pentagon, the Sears Building in Chicago, and the TransAmerica Pyramid in San Francisco.9 The more I reported, the more I could see how every major al-Qaeda plot from 1993 to 2003 had some link to the Philippines, the United States’ former colony,10 from the attack on the World Trade Center in 1993 to the 1998 bombings of US embassies in East Africa to the JW Marriott Hotel attack in Jakarta in 2003.
