Nine more pages here...
Posted on 09/25/2001 2:57:50 AM PDT by Liz
Nine more pages here...
"Anyone in any walk of life who is content with mediocrity is untrue to himself and the American way."
General George S. Patton
The FBI & CIA seem to filled with slugs content with mediocrity.
Last month former NBC reporter Jayna Davis told Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly that compelling evidence links McVeigh to a Middle Eastern terrorist cell ultimately controlled by bin Laden. "What we discovered, an intelligence source at one of the highest levels in the federal government later confirmed, was a Middle Eastern terrorist cell living and operating in the heart of Oklahoma City just a few miles from the Alfred P. Murrah building," Davis said. Her NBC affiliate had located several witnesses who claimed that an Iraqi national with ties to Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard was seen in the company of McVeigh just prior to the bombing, Davis said. The Iraqi was also seen driving away from the bomb scene in a car identified by the FBI as a possible getaway vehicle.
"We have 24 sworn witness affidavits that tie seven to eight Arab men to various stages of the bombing plot from the beginning all the way to the day in which the plot was executed," the former NBC reporter told O'Reilly.
"It really is a foreign conspiracy masterminded and funded by Osama bin Laden, according to my intelligence sources," she asserted.
Davis is not alone in that belief. In his 1999 book on the Oklahoma City tragedy, "Others Unknown," McVeigh's lawyer Stephen Jones made similar claims, citing a meeting in the early 1990s between World Trade Center bomber Yousef and McVeigh's partner, Terry Nichols, in the Philippines, which he called a "hotbed of fundamentalist Muslim activity." Jones said his research shows that bin Laden was in the Philippines at the same time as Yousef and Nichols. Both Jones and Davis said federal investigators were uninterested in exploring any possible Middle Eastern connection to the crime.
[For further details see 'From Dublin to Oklahoma City'. Also recommended is the book 'Others Unknown' by Stephen Jones.]
The jury found Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the alleged mastermind of the plot, and two other defendants, Abdul Hakim Murad and Wali Khan Amin Shah, guilty on seven counts after two-and-a-half days of deliberations.
Yousef, 29, also is the alleged mastermind of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York. He still faces trial in that case.
Yousef, who holds an Iraqi passport, also has been linked to schemes to assassinate President Clinton, and Pope John Paul II during the pontiff's visit to Manila.
Each man was charged with conspiring and attempting to bomb the dozen targeted aircraft during a 48-hour period in January 1995. The bombings could have killed 4,000 people aboard the planes, prosecutors said.
The men could face life sentences.
Fire led to arrests
Officials said they uncovered the airline plot in January 6, 1995, when a fire broke out in a Manila apartment where, they said, Yousef and Murad were mixing chemicals.
Yousef fled the country after the fire, and police arrested Murad as he allegedly came back to the apartment to clear out incriminating evidence.
Those items included nitroglycerin, bomb-making equipment, manuals containing bomb formulas, a computer with information on airline flights, timers for detonating bombs and a letter threatening to attack American targets.
The government said the defendants even devised a name for their airline terror plot: "Project Bojinka." 7 Yousef was captured the next month in Islamabad, Pakistan, after a 23-month manhunt.
During the trial, which began in May, Yousef represented himself. Speaking clearly and calmly in his closing argument, he accused police in the Philippines and Pakistan of planting evidence against him.
His appointed legal adviser, Roy Kulcsar, supported that contention: "I think the evidence fully supports the finding that almost everybody who came from the Philippines, certainly everyone who was with the Philippine Nation Police, lied at one critical point or another. They admitted as much in their testimony,"
Timers tested?
In June, a Philippine bomb squad officer cast doubt on the prosecution's case when he testified that his written report falsely claimed a pipe bomb was found in an attaché case outside the apartment door and that he was ordered by his supervisor to list items he hadn't seen in the attaché.
But prosecutors said there was little doubt that Yousef orchestrated the "Bojinka" plot, trained his two co-defendants and tested a watch timer.
Yousef was charged with placing a bomb on a Philippine Air Lines 747 flight from Manila to Tokyo on December 11, 1994, in what prosecutors believe was a test run for the 1995 airline plot. One passenger was killed.
Defendant Shah is accused of testing a different timer by leaving a bomb in a Manila theater.
Shah's attorney dismissed the evidence, saying his client lost three fingers from his left hand fighting in Afghanistan and was hardly a candidate to plan an airline bombing.
But that argument apparently carried little weight with the jurors.
Aviation Security (Focusing on Training & Retention of Screeners
03-16-00
The purpose of this hearing is to review the current state of airport and airline security in this country. There will be a closed briefing (MEMBERS ONLY) at 9:30 a.m. to hear from FAA and GAO about the level of the threat and the failures of current screeners. The open hearing will start at 10:00 a.m.
Security concerns were heightened in 1995 when Abdul Hakim Murad was arrested after fire broke out in his apartment in Manila, Philipines. Murad had been living there with Ramzi Yousef. Police found explosives and bomb-making materials in the apartment. Yousef was later indicted for the 1994 bombing of a Philippine Airline flight. This bombing was determined by authorities to have been a test run for a plot to blow up 11 U.S. planes simultaneously.
When TWA 800 exploded off the coast of New York in July 1996, the FAA had certified only 1 EDS and had hardly begun to deploy it. Although it is now believed that the TWA crash was caused by a center fuel tank explosion, at the time, most people initially suspected a bomb. In response:
The White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security, known as the "Gore Commission" was established in July 1996 and issued its initial report in September (even before all its members were appointed), which included 20 recommendations to enhance security; Title III of the Federal Aviation Reauthorization Act of 1996 (Public Law 104-264) was enacted containing several measures designed to beef up aviation security; and The 1997 Appropriations Act (Public Law 104-208) provided $144.2 million for the FAA to purchase and help install bomb detection equipment.
Both the Commission’s recommendations and the two public laws changed the FAA’s focus from relying on a certified explosive detection system to purchasing and deploying any commercially available explosive detection equipment. Also, for the first time, the FAA purchased the equipment to be deployed rather than directing the airlines to do it.
In addition, section 303 of public law 104-264 directed the National Academy of Sciences to study the explosive detection technologies being deployed. Its report was issued late last year.
The Road to Sept. 11
For a decade, America’s been fighting a losing secret war against terror. A NEWSWEEK investigation into the missed clues and missteps
NEWSWEEK
Oct. 1 issue — He was more than a little suspicious. At the Airman Flight School in Norman, Okla., the stocky aspiring pilot with the heavy French accent acted oddly. He was abrupt and argumentative, refusing to pay the whole $4,995 fee upfront (he shelled out $2,500 in cash instead). He had been dodgy in his e-mails. “E is not secure,” explained Zacarias Moussaoui, 33, who preferred to use his Internet alias, “zuluman tangotango.”
July 19, 1996 New York Times.
A specific warning about the flight had been sent by an extremist Saudi organization called the Movement of Islamic Change, the organization that claimed responsibility for blowing up US military personnel in Saudi Arabia last November. "Late this morning we got a copy of a letter in Arabic that we then had translated, and got it to the FBI" said a State Department spokesman ... "It's a ... statement that seems aimed at the Saudi regime or the American presence in Saudi Arabia"......... Officials said they were reviewing a telephone call placed to a Tampa, Florida television station yesterday morning from a man who identified himself as a member of a jihad and claimed responsibility for the crash.
September 1997 The American Spectator
Letter from John B. Roberts II in reply to an earlier one from James Hall - Chairman of the NTSB Early this summer Hall testified before Congress that a meteorite may have blown up TWA, an event about as likely as an attack by a UFO. Apparently, Mr. Hall is prepared to got to any length to avoid confronting evidence of terrorism in the crash of TWA 800..... minute traces of PETN and RDX were found in TWA 800. Hall would have us believe they came from a bomb-sniffing dog test. But the St. Louis Police Department test record says only that a "wide-bodied jet" was used in the test, and provides no serial number for the aircraft......As TWA's 800's debris was being hauled ashore, it was being tested by the EGIS high-tech explosives detection system operated by FBI technicians and BATF bomb experts. Within five days of the crash, EGIS registered the first of more than a dozen "hits" for PETN on the aircraft. The FBI laboratory--whose work, even before it was subsequently criticized by the Justice Departments's inspector general, was questioned by FBI agents working on EGIS--confirmed only two findings. Do the EGIS findings mean that there was once much more explosive residue .... Whether there were two positive findings or a dozen, the dog-test explanation is almost as zany as Hall's meteorite theory..... Hall states that the U.S. lacks intelligence leads, but at least one terrorist has claimed credit for the TWA 800 bombing. World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Ahmed Yousef told authorities his group is responsible. Yousef's claim has not been made public, but it is in the FBI file.
November 8, 1998 CNN
Two sons of an Egyptian cleric convicted of plotting terrorist attacks in New York City have joined the terrorist organization of Osama bin Laden, which is suspected of carrying out deadly bombings against two U.S. embassies in east Africa, CNN has learned. Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, serving a life sentence in a federal prison, also has written a will calling on his sons to seek revenge against the United States, according to sources who have seen it. .... Abdel-Rahman's two sons, Omar and Asim, both in their late 20s, were among those present when bin Laden held a press conference near Khost, Afghanistan, in May. It was at that press conference that bin Laden publicly unveiled his International Islamic Front and talked about an edict he issued in February, calling for a jihad, or holy war, against American civilians anywhere in the world. A person who spoke to one of Abdel-Rahman's sons told "NewsStand" that "he said that he would follow into the footprints of his father and he would continue the jihad."
The American Spectator's claim was backed up in writing by two individuals who tried to bomb a Brooklyn subway ....
July 12, 1998, NY Times No Flight 800 Connection
Abu Maizar and Khalil, 23, were arrested last July when the police raided an apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, and found what they described as a pipe bomb "fully rigged and ready to be detonated," along with a rambling note that threatened attacks against Jewish and American interests if various demands were not met. The demands included the release of imprisoned Islamic militants including Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who was convicted of masterminding the World Trade Center bombing in 1993. Lawyers for Abu Maizar have suggested that he did not intend to set off the bomb but rather planned to use it as a prop in some hazy plot to defraud a government anti-terrorism program of reward money. Khalil's lawyer has not yet addressed the jury, but Khalil insisted after his arrest that he had not known about the bomb's existence. The note -- it was typed on lined yellow paper and rife with grammatical and spelling and punctuation errors -- not only warned that Islamic militants were "ready to hit everywhere" with suicide bombs, but also claimed responsibility for the crash of Trans World Airlines Flight 800 in July 1996, in which 230 people died. Whether Abu Maizar and Khalil are guilty of plotting a subway calamity will be decided by the jury at their trial, but the note's claim of responsibility for the Flight 800 catastrophe will not require a trial, an FBI spokesman indicated. The claim was one of the "thousands of leads" the bureau pursued in its investigation of the TWA crash, the spokesman, Joseph Valiquette, said on Friday. "We are comfortable with our announcement last November that we have found no evidence that a criminal act was responsible for the plane going down," he said.
JG's note:
Valiquette seems satisfied; not sure about me.
Author of Study of Revenge:
Saddam Hussein’s Unfinished War Against America
*What do you mean by Saddam Hussein’s unfinished war against America?
The Gulf War has never really ended. It has never really ended for the United States, and it has never really ended for Saddam. We maintain sanctions on Iraq that are themselves the product of a war, and we bomb Iraq on a regular basis. And Saddam, for his part, continues the war, mainly through terrorism.
* What terrorist acts do you have in mind?
The World Trade Center bombing for one: this attempt to topple New York’s tallest tower onto its twin may even have been caused by a bomb containing cyanide gas, as Secretary of Defense William Cohen and others have suggested.
* Why do you say Saddam was behind that bomb?
New York law enforcement suspected Iraqi involvement. The World Trade Center bombing occurred on the second anniversary of the Gulf War cease-fire. According to the authorities, many Iraqis were peripherally involved. In fact, the last remaining fugitive charged in the bombing is an Iraqi. He came from Baghdad and fled back to Baghdad.
In addition, the bomb produced a huge effect. Americans may not really realize how big it was because most of the damage was to the basement floors. The bomb left a crater six stories tall. Jim Fox, who headed New York’s FBI bureau then and led the investigation in New York, once told me that—after a hard day’s work searching for evidence—he would often sit and relax at the edge of the crater, stare down into the enormous hole, and ask himself, "Who the hell did this?"
* Can you take it further than just suspicions?
Yes, Study of Revenge does that. It is written as a detective story, and it guides the reader through a very careful analysis of the government’s own evidence, as presented in the terrorism trials that followed the World Trade Center bombing. The analysis of that evidence is really the core of the work, and the book is liberally illustrated with key documents, so the reader can follow the argument and judge for himself.
The key evidence revolves around the identity of the bomb’s mastermind, Ramzi Yousef. He entered the United States as Ramzi Yousef, Iraqi citizen, but left as Abdul Basit Karim, Pakistani national. In fact, both names are aliases.
We know that Abdul Basit Karim is a real person. We know that he was born and raised in Kuwait, studied in Britain, and then returned to Kuwait. He was in Kuwait when Iraq invaded, and he probably died then. As a permanent resident of Kuwait, his records were on file at the Ministry of the Interior in Kuwait City. We also know that his file was tampered with.
* What was done to the file, and why is that significant?
There are things that should be in the file but aren’t. For example, copies of the front pages of Abdul Basit Karim’s passport, with his picture and signature, should be there. But they were removed.
There are also things in the file that shouldn’t be there. For example, a notation that Abdul Basit Karim and his family left Kuwait on August 26, 1990, traveled from Kuwait to Iraq, and crossed into Iran on their way to Pakistani Baluchistan, where they live now—that information shouldn’t be in a Kuwaiti file. There wasn’t a Kuwaiti government in August 1990. Iraq was occupying the country. Moreover, that’s not the kind of information you give authorities when you travel. You tell them where you came from and where you’re going. You don’t give them your whole itinerary.
But the clincher is that the fingerprint cards in Abdul Basit Karim’s file have Ramzi Yousef’s fingerprints. Yet Yousef is definitely not the same person as Karim. Yousef is tall, and Karim was of medium height. That can only mean that someone took Abdul Basit Karim’s fingerprint card out of the file and substituted a card with Yousef’s prints on it. The only reason for doing that and making other changes was to create a false identity for Yousef. And the only party that reasonably could have done so is Iraq, while it occupied Kuwait.
* What have other people said about this?
I discussed this with Jim Fox, who by then had retired from the FBI. He agreed that Abdul Basit Karim’s file had been tampered with and that that was the "smoking gun." He had passed the information on to the New York FBI, but he cautioned me that he wasn’t sure what they would do with it.
I also discussed this with the Israeli ambassador in Washington and with a senior Saudi official. They both agreed it was the decisive evidence against Iraq. Soviet-style intelligence agencies routinely do just that—develop false identities for agents involved in illegal operations by appropriating the identity of someone who has died.
* What does the U.S. government have to say about this?
I have indeed discussed this with the administration. Initially, I had very good relations with them. In fact, Martin Indyk, who became the National Security Council (NSC) adviser on the Middle East when Clinton became president, brought me out of academia and introduced me to policy-making in Washington. Largely because of Indyk, I was an adviser on Iraq to Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. In fact, I even briefed Clinton on Iraq during the campaign. Clinton seemed tougher on Saddam than Bush, although that changed once he became president.
The New York investigation into the World Trade Center bombing on February 26, 1993 soon began to point to Saddam Hussein. I discussed the matter with Indyk and his aides. I also cautioned them about the possibility that Iraq might carry out biological terrorism, because I had reliable information that Saddam was still producing biological agents. And indeed he was, as was learned after his son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, defected to Jordan. Indyk was alarmed at what I told him, but nothing was ever done. It seemed that he took the information to those above him, but they dismissed it.
* Why would they do that?
I don’t think that back then—in Clinton’s first term—Clinton and his top national security advisers really understood the kind of threat that Saddam could pose to the United States and its allies. Sandy Berger, when he was about to become head of the NSC, made a telling statement in late 1996, after Clinton’s reelection. Berger likened U.S. policy toward Iraq to a whack-a-mole game at the circus, "They bop up and you whack ’em down, and if they bop up again, you bop ’em back down again."
* Isn’t that dangerous?
Of course it is. Nor do I think the World Trade Center bombing was the end of Saddam’s terrorism. That bomb was attributed to a "loose network" of Muslim extremists. It came to be seen as the harbinger of a new kind of terrorism carried out by loose networks, without the support of states. But I tend to doubt that. I think the strong evidence that Iraq was behind the World Trade Center bombing raises questions about later bombings that were attributed to loose networks, but about which much less information is available.
* What do you expect in the future from Saddam?
I fully expect there will be more terrorist bombings, possibly using more dangerous unconventional biological agents. This would cause terrible casualties.
There’s also the possibility that Saddam might some day launch another war for Kuwait or key oil facilities in the gulf. Saddam got rid of the U.N. weapons inspectors very deliberately—through the series of crises over UNSCOM in 1997 and 1998. And now he is free to develop and improve Iraq’s unconventional weapons programs. Assuredly, the Iraqis are working on developing a nuclear bomb. They are also probably working on developing better delivery systems for their biological and chemical agents.
Iraq poses a very serious problem. But we have been unable to come to terms with that and develop a strategy to deal with it. Yet the more we delay, the stronger Saddam becomes, particularly in terms of his unconventional weapons.
Y-e-e-s-s-s! Kevl has an agenda. He/she is overlooking these important reasons why terrorism flourished.
Klintoon gutted our intel-gathering capabilities. withthe ridiculous Human Rights Policy Scrub.
Under Klintoon, only Mr Rogers would have qualified as an intel asset......would have looked cute in his cardigan, eh?
What are you talking about? I happen to think that the Clintons, Gores, et al, are VERY MUCH responsible for ALL of this. PLEASE EXPLAIN?!
THE WORLD TRADE CENTER BOMB:
Who is Ramzi Yousef? And Why It Matters
by Laurie Mylroie
ACCORDING TO THE presiding judge in last year's trial, the bombing of New York's World Trade Center on February 26, 1993 was meant to topple the city's tallest tower onto its twin, amid a cloud of cyanide gas. Had the attack gone as planned, tens of thousands of Americans would have died. Instead, as we know, one tower did not fall on the other, and, rather than vaporizing, the cyanide gas burnt up in the heat of the explosion. "Only" six people died.
Few Americans are aware of the true scale of the destructive ambition behind that bomb, this despite the fact that two years later, the key figure responsible for building it--a man who had entered the United Stares on an Iraqi passport under the name of Ramzi Yousef--was involved in another stupendous bombing conspiracy. In January 1995, Yousef and his associates plotted to blow up eleven U.S. commercial aircraft in one spectacular day of terrorist rage. The bombs were to be made of a liquid explosive designed to pass through airport metal detectors. But while mixing his chemical brew in a Manila apartment, Yousef started a fire. He was forced to flee, leaving behind a computer that contained the information that led to his arrest a month later in Pakistan. Among the items found in his possession was a letter threatening Filipino interests if a comrade held in custody were not released. It claimed the "ability to make and use chemicals and poisonous gas... for use against vital institutions and residential populations and the sources of drinking water." [1] Quickly extradited, he is now in U.S. custody awaiting trial this spring.
Ramzi Yousef's plots were the most ambitious terrorist conspiracies ever attempted against the United States. But who is he? Is he a free-lance bomber? A deranged but highly-skilled veteran of the Muslim jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan? Is he an Arab, or of some other Middle Eastern ethnicity? Is there an organization--perhaps even a state--behind his work?
These questions have an obvious bearing not only on past events but on possible future ones as well. [2] It is important to know who Ramzi Yousef is and who his "friends" are, because if he is not just a bomber-for-hire, or an Islamic militant loosely connected to other Muslim fundamentalists, Yousef's "friends" could still prove very dangerous to the United States. It is of considerable interest, therefore, that a very persuasive case can be made that Ramzi Yousef is an Iraqi intelligence agent, and that his bombing conspiracies were meant as Saddam Hussein's revenge for the Gulf War. If so, and if, as U.S. officials strongly suspect, Baghdad still secretly possesses biological warfare agents, then we may still not have heard the last from Saddam Hussein.
This essay will focus on three points. First, it will argue that, as things stand now, coordination between the Justice Department and the relevant national security agencies is such that the latter--and thus national security itself gets very short shrift when it comes to dealing with terror incidents perpetrated on U.S. soil. Second, it will look afresh at the evidence from the World Trade Center bombing case and suggest that the most logical explanation of the evidence points to Iraqi state sponsorship. Third, it will assay briefly what dangers the Iraqi regime may still pose to the United States should this analysis prove correct.
A High Wall
THE SUGGESTION THAT Iraq might well have been behind Ramzi Yousef's exploits may initially strike many as implausible. Wouldn't the U.S. government investigation of the World Trade Center bombing have uncovered evidence to that effect, evidence that the press, in turn, would have broadcast far and wide? Wouldn't America's robust anti-terrorist intelligence capacities have focused on such suspicions long ago?
While these are reasonable questions, they reveal a lack of understanding about how the U.S. government works when legal and national security issues of this special sort overlap. A high wall, in fact, stands between the Justice Department, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, on the one hand, and the national security agencies on the other. Once arrests are made, the trials of individual perpetrators take bureaucratic precedence over everything else. The Justice Department inherits primary investigatory jurisdiction, and the business of the Justice Department is above all the prosecution and conviction of individual criminals. Once that process is underway, the Justice Department typically denies information to the national security bureaucracies, taking the position that passing on information might "taint the evidence" and affect prospects for obtaining convictions. [3]
In effect, the Justice Department puts the prosecution of individual perpetrators--with all the rights to a fair trial guaranteed by the U.S. judicial system--above America's national security interest in determining who may be behind terrorist attacks. Questions of state sponsorship that are of pressing interest to national security agencies are typically relegated to a distant second place, or never properly addressed at all, because the national security agencies are denied critical information. In particular, whenever early arrests are made regarding a terrorist incident on American soil, the U.S. government cannot properly address both the national security question of state sponsorship and the criminal question of the guilt or innocence of individual perpetrators at the same time.
This is precisely what happened in the World Trade Center bombing. In the case of Ramzi Yousef, the perfectly reasonable questions posed above about who this man is and who may sponsor him have never been properly investigated. Instead of the appropriately trained people conducting a comprehensive investigation, the World Trade Center bombing was followed by an undercover operation, in which an informant of dubious provenance led a handful of local Muslims in a new bombing conspiracy, aimed at the United Nations and other New York landmarks. For this conspiracy Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman and nine others were found guilty in early October 1995. Yet none of those in the trial of Sheikh Omar et al., as it is formally called, was accused of actually participating in the World Trade Center bombing.[4] They were only charged with conspiracy regarding it. The government contended that other followers of Sheikh Omar--four fundamentalists who stood trial in 1994--were actually responsible for puffing it into effect.
But what if Ramzi Yousef, who eluded the grasp of U.S. authorities until after his second bombing conspiracy, is neither a follower of Sheikh Omar nor a Muslim fundamentalist? That if he is an Iraqi agent? From a legal perspective--as the judge in that trial advised the defense team--whether state sponsorship played a role in the World Trade Center bombing was irrelevant to the guilt or innocence of Sheikh Omar et al. And indeed, the prosecution did not need to address the question of whether the World Trade Center bombing had state sponsorship in order to obtain the convictions sought against Sheikh Omar and the others.
Indeed, that state sponsorship can be irrelevant to a criminal prosecution was explained most clearly by the federal prosecutors in the New York bombing conspiracies, the lead prosecutor in the trial of Sheikh Omar et al., and the lead prosecutor in last year's Trade Center bombing trial, who will also prosecute Ramzi Yousef. When I put it to them that Iraq was probably behind the Trade Center bombing, they replied, "You may be right, but we don't do state sponsorship. We prosecute individuals." Asked who does "do" state sponsorship, they answered, "Washington." "Who in Washington?" No one seemed to know.[6]
Yet by responding to state-sponsored terrorism solely by arresting and trying individual perpetrators, the U.S. government, in effect, invites such states to commit acts of terror in such a way as to leave behind a few relatively minor figures to be arrested, tried, and convicted. Done adroitly, this makes it unlikely that the larger, more important, and more difficult question of state sponsorship will ever be addressed.
The problem is illustrated vividly in the case of Ramzi Yousef since his arrest in February 1995. The Justice Department has passed on very little information to other bureaucracies. The FBI's typical response to any question about Yousef is: "We can't tell you much because of the trial." [7] As a result, the State Department, which is responsible for determining whether a terrorist act had state sponsorship, lacks the most basic information-- even, for example, a point as simple as what passport Yousef was traveling on when he was arrested in Islamabad.
The details of the World Trade Center case are chilling. From the outset, the Justice Department refused to share key information with the national security agencies. The government had two sets of relevant information--foreign intelligence, gathered by the CIA from watching terrorist states such as Iran and Iraq, and evidence gathered by the FBI largely within the United Stares for use in the trial. The FBI flatly told the national security bureaucracies that there was "no evidence" of state sponsorship in the World Trade Center bombing. When the national security agencies asked to see the evidence themselves, the FBI replied, "No, this is a criminal matter. We're handling it." Thus, all that the national security agencies had available to decide the question of state sponsorship was foreign intelligence they themselves had collected.
But many cases of stare-sponsored terrorism cannot be cracked by means of intelligence alone. The crucial element linking the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 to Libya, for example, was not intelligence but a piece of physical evidence--a microchip, part of the bomb's timing device, that could be tied to other bombs built by Libyan agents.
After the World Trade Center bombing, the FBI was the only bureaucracy with both the intelligence and the evidence. Even if the FBI did make a serious effort to examine the evidence for state sponsorship--and it is not clear that it did--the Bureau alone is not competent to carry out such an investigation. "They're head hunters", one official in Pentagon Counterterrorism remarked--that is, they are oriented to the arrest of individuals. A State Department expert described the FBI's new Office of Radical Fundamentalism as "a joke", bereft of any genuine Middle East expertise.
But the more fundamental problem is that the Justice Department in Washington seems not to have been interested in pursuing the question of state sponsorship. In fact, the New York FBI office suspected an Iraqi connection early on, but the Washington brass seemingly wanted to tell America that they had already cracked the case and caught most of the perpetrators. It is always easier to go after the small fry than to catch the big fish, and law enforcement is ever vulnerable to the temptation to cut off a conspiracy investigation at the most convenient point.
Thus, five weeks after the World Trade Center bombing, four Arabs were under arrest. The mastermind, Ramzi Yousef, had fled. Still, at that point in early April 1993, the FBI proclaimed that it had captured most of those involved. The bombing, it claimed, was the work of a loose group of fundamentalists with no ties to any state. The predictable media frenzy followed and, perhaps as a result, some obvious questions were not asked. How could the government know so early in the investigation that those it had arrested had no ties to any state? If the government knew so much so soon, then why did one of those arrested never stand trial for the bombing, and why were three others indicted much later? In short, the Justice Department determined that the bombing had no state sponsorship even before it decided definitively who had been involved.
Moreover, by April it was impossible to have conducted a sufficiently thorough investigation. Such an investigation required, at a minimum, a meticulous examination of all records associated with the defendants to insure that they had had no contact with foreign intelligence agencies--or at least that none could be found. That process simply could not have been accomplished in five weeks. And it must be kept in mind that, at the time, the mastermind of the bomb was a fugitive about whom almost nothing was known. How could anyone therefore declare confidently that he was not a foreign agent, especially in light of the fact that he had entered the United States on an Iraqi passport and had been known among the New York fundamentalists as "Rashid, the Iraqi"?
Ironically, this sort of problem would not have arisen had the bombing occurred abroad. In such cases there are usually two separate investigations by two different bureaucracies, one to determine state sponsorship, the other to catch the individuals responsible. After the bombing of Pan Am 103, for example, the CLA led an inter-agency intelligence investigation addressing the question of state sponsorship. There was also a separate criminal investigation, headed by the FBI, aimed at individual perpetrators.
But there was no intelligence investigation of the World Trade Center bombing. The CIA is, after all, prohibited from operating in America. Of course, a crack inter-agency team could have been established to examine the question of state sponsorship. But Clinton administration officials set up no such team.
In September 1995, the State Department forwarded to Congress the report of an independent panel, established to examine whether mistakes in security training had contributed to the March 8 assassination of two U.S. consular officials in Karachi--apparent retaliation for Ramzi Yousef's extradition. The report expressed concern about the FBI's lack of cooperation with the national security agencies. Clearly, discontent with the FBI is growing among those agencies as issues such as international crime--and with them the Bureau's international role--assume a mare prominent role in the post-Cold War world. Indeed, one State Department official described the FBI'S unwillingness to share information as "the train wreck coming"--meaning that given the FBI's lack of expertise in international politics, there may well come a time when the Bureau will be sitting on information that, in the hands of others, could have been used to avert a disaster.
One may indeed ask whether the World Trade Center bombing itself is not a harbinger of the train wreck coming. For if Saddam Hussein was behind it, then the Justice Department, in effect, has blinded the national security bureaucracies to a serious danger, namely the possibility that in the extreme Iraq might use biological agents, whether for terrorism in America or in the context of military' action in the region, possibly involving U.S. troops.
Of course, that is an important "if." It is to that issue we now turn.
Dramatis Personae
Ramzi Yousef, a.k.a. Abdul Basit Karim -the key man; likely Iraqi agent.
El Sayid Nosair--murderer of Rabbi Meir Kahane, bomb plot initiator.
Emad Salem--FBI informant with ties to Egyptian intelligence.
Mohammed Salameh--Palestinian fundamentalist, Nosair accomplice and early plotter; left a trail of phone calls to Iraq.
Musab Yasin--Iraqi with New Jersey apartment where Yousef first went.
Abdul Rahman Yasin--Musab's brother, led FBI to apartment where bomb was made; employee of Iraqi government; indicted fugitive, presently in Baghdad.
Nidal Ayyad--Palestinian fundamentalist convicted in the World Trade Center bombing.
Mahmud Abu Halima--Egyptian fundamentalist cab driver convicted in the World Trade Center bombing
Eyyad Ismail--Palestinian from Jordan charged with having driven the van.
Forty-Six Calls to Iraq
ALTHOUGH THE national security agencies never received the World Trade Center evidence, at the conclusion of a trial evidence becomes public. Anyone can examine it, and I did so meticulously. The raw data consist mostly of telephone records, passports, and airplane tickets. Such data reveal nothing directly about state sponsorship, but under close analysis certain facts begin to stand out and certain patterns emerge. And it helps to know the Middle East well.
The story begins in November 1990 when an Egyptian fundamentalist, El Sayid Nosair, shot and killed Meir Kahane, an extreme right-wing Israeli-American, in Manhattan. A year later, in November 1991, Nosair's trial became a cause celebre among local fundamentalists, who turned out in force to support their "martyr." Planted among them was an Egyptian, Emad Salem, working as an FBI informant, even as he maintained ties to Egyptian intelligence. In December, the jury returned a bizarre verdict, acquitting Nosair of murder and finding him guilty on lesser charges. An outraged judge gave Nosair a maximum sentence on those lesser charges, and sent him to Attica.
The fundamentalists continued to support Nosair, arranging bus trips from their mosques to visit him in prison. Salem, the FBI plant, remained among them. In early June 1992, with Salem acting as an agent provocateur, Nosair convinced his friends to execute a bomb plot. He wanted them to make twelve pipe bombs, to be used for assassinating his judge and a Brooklyn assemblyman, the others to be used against Jewish targets. A cousin was to organize the plot, and Salem was to build the bombs.
A twenty-six year old Palestinian, Mohammad Salameh, was soon recruited into the plot. Salameh comes from a long line of terrorists on his mother's side. His maternal grandfather fought in the 1936 Arab revolt against British rule in Palestine, and even as an old man joined the PLO and managed to get himself jailed by the Israelis. A maternal uncle was arrested in 1968 for terrorism and served eighteen years in an Israeli prison before he was released and deported, making his way to Baghdad where he became number two in the "Western Sector", a PLO terrorist unit under Iraqi influence.
Despite this pedigree, Salameh himself is naive and manipulable. When one considers that he was arrested in the process of returning to collect the deposit on the van he had rented to carry the Trade Center bomb, it is not so surprising that on June 10, soon after being recruited into Nosair's plot, Salameh made the first of forty-six calls to Iraq, the vast majority to his terrorist uncle in Baghdad. We can only speculate about what Salameh told his uncle, but it seems very likely that he spoke about the bold new project Nosair was organizing, perhaps seeking his help and advice. Salameh's telephone bills suggest that the pipe bombing plot was one of the most exciting events in his life: In six weeks he ran up a bill of over four thousand dollars and lost his phone service.
Iraq is one of the few remaining Stalinist states. Iraqis routinely assume their telephones are bugged, and are even cautious about discussing sensitive issues in their own homes. The more significant the person, the greater the likelihood his activities are monitored--at least that is what Baghdadis assume. My own experience in Baghdad makes clear that when Iraqis want to be sure that a conversation is not monitored, it takes place out of doors. It is thus more than likely that Iraqi intelligence learned of Nosair's bombing plot and Salameh's participation in it through Salameh's phone calls to his uncle. In any event, key preparatory steps to the World Trade Center bombing were taken within days of Salameh's first call-including steps taken in Baghdad.
On June 21, an Iraqi living in Baghdad, Abdul Rahman Yasin (subsequently an indicted fugitive in the Trade Center bombing) appeared at the U.S. embassy in Amman asking for a U.S. passport. Born in America, Abdul Rahman received his passport, which he soon used to travel to this country.
Just at this crucial point, unfortunately, the FBI lost track of the Nosair-Salameh conspiracy. It did not fully trust its informant, Emad Salem, and Salem's ties to Egyptian intelligence; the Bureau severed relations with him in early July when he refused to follow its procedures relating to criminal investigations.
Salameh's phone bills and other evidence raise the distinct possibility that, Iraqi intelligence having learned of Nosair's plans from Salameh's calls to his uncle, Baghdad decided to help out, transforming the plot in the process. If so, the speed of the reaction suggests that Iraqi intelligence may have already been planning some operation against America, and that Salameh1s calls to his uncle provided it with a fortuitous means of carrying it out. Here probably lies the source of Ramzi Yousef s exploits in America.
Enter Ramzi Yousef
ON SEPTEMBER 1, 1992, Ramzi Yousef arrived at JFK airport. He presented an Iraqi passport without a U.S. visa, was briefly detained (and fingerprinted) for illegal entry, and granted asylum pending a hearing. Yousef went to stay at the apartment of Musab Yasin, an Iraqi living in Jersey City. So too did Abdul Rahman Yasin, Musab's younger brother, who arrived in America from Iraq soon after Yousef. (Musab had an unlisted telephone number under an Israeli-sounding alias, Josie Hadas.)
Musab lived in the same building as Mohammad Salameh. Many young Arab men used their two apartments, praying and eating together; relations were so close that the apartments were connected by an intercom. Once established within this group, Ramzi Yousef befriended Salameh, and the two left to share an apartment elsewhere in Jersey City. From then on, the impressionable Salameh was under Yousef s wing.
Although the principal conspirators had been in place since September, it was not until after the U.S. elections on November 3 that Yousef began to prepare the World Trade Center bomb. In mid-November the first of many calls to chemical companies appears on his phone bills. At the same time, Yousef also began calling surgical supply companies for the gloves, masks, and rubber tubing he needed to make the bomb. In the meantime, two other local fundamentalists were recruited into the plot, Nidal Ayyad and Mahmud Abu Halima. Ayyad, a Palestinian, was the same age as Salameh and Salameh's friend. Abu Halima, a thirty-four year old Egyptian cab driver, was a friend of Nosair. Abu Halima was older and generally savvier than the two Palestinians.
In January 1993, Yousef and Salameh moved into another Jersey City apartment where the bomb was actually built. Set well back from the street, the building provided seclusion. On February 21 a twenty-one year old Palestinian named Eyyad Ismail arrived from Dallas. Ismail is charged with having driven the bomb-laden van.[8] On February 23, Salameh went to a Ryder rental agency to rent the van to carry the bomb. On the morning of February 26, the conspirators gathered at a local Shell gas station where they topped up the tank--one last explosive touch--before driving to Manhattan. Shortly after noon, the bomb went off, on--let it be well noted--the second anniversary of the ending of the Gulf War.
That evening Salameh drove Yousef and Ismail to JFK airport; Yousef escaped to Pakistan on falsified travel documents, and Ismail flew home to Jordan. But Salameh looks to have been deliberately left behind by Yousef, not provided with money he needed for a plane ticket. Salameh had a ticket to Amsterdam on Royal Jordanian fight 262, which continues on to Amman, dated for March 5, but it was an infant ticket that had cost him only $65. While Salameh had been able to use this ticket to get himself a Dutch visa, he could not actually travel on it Needing more money for an adult fare, he tried to get his van deposit back by telling the rental agency that the van had been stolen. With either desperate or inane persistence, he returned three times before he was finally arrested on March 4.
Salameh had used Musab Yasin's phone number when renting the van, and Abdul Rahman Yasin was picked up the same day in a sweep of sites associated with Salameh. Abdul Rahman was taken to New Jersey FBI headquarters in Newark. He is reported to have been extremely cool, as a trained intelligence agent would be. He was helpful to investigators who themselves faced tremendous pressure to produce answers. He told them, for instance, the location of the apartment that was used to make the bomb, a key bit of information. They thanked him for his cooperation and let him walk out. This, although he had arrived just six months before from Iraq, and might well attempt to return there. And indeed, the very next day, Abdul Rahman Yasin boarded Royal Jordanian 262 to Amman, the same plane Salameh had hoped to catch. From Amman he went on to Baghdad. An ABC news stringer saw him there last year, outside his father's house, and learned from neighbors that he worked for the Iraqi government.
Meanwhile, as U.S. authorities searched for Abdul Rahman Yasin in March 1993, after his "helpful" session with the FBI and before they knew for certain that he had fled, an FBI agent who had worked with Emad Salem in June 1992 speculated:
"Do you ever think that Iraqi intelligence might have known of these people who were willing to do something crazy, and that Iraqi intelligence found them out and encouraged them to do this as a retaliation for the bombing of Iraq. . . . So the people who are left holding the bag here in America are Egyptian. . . or Palestinian. . . . But the other people we are looking for, Abdul Rahman, he is gone. . I hate to think what's going to happen if this guy turns out to be. . an Iraqi intelligence operative...and these people were used." [9]
Mahmud Abu Halima had similar thoughts. As he told a prison companion who later turned state's evidence:
"The planned act was not as big as what subsequently occurred. . . Yousef showed up on the scene. and escalated the initial plot. . . . Yousef used [them]. . .as pawns and then immediately after the blast left the country." [10]
That, indeed, is the most straightforward explanation of the World Trade Center bombing: that it was an Iraqi intelligence operation, led by Ramzi Yousef, with the local fundamentalists serving first as aides and then as diversionary dupes.
To be continued...
Since Yousef's arrest and extradition to the United States, the evidence for this explanation has, if anything, grown stronger. First of all, he is clearly no fundamentalist. According to neighbors, he had a Filipina girlfriend and enjoyed Manila's raucous night life.[11] Yousef's nationality and ethnicity have also become known: He is a Pakistani Baluch.
The Baluch are a distinct ethnic group, speaking their own language, one of several Middle Eastern peoples without their own homeland. They live in eastern Iran and western Pakistan in inhospitable desert terrain over which neither Tehran nor Islamabad exercises much control. Baluchistan is a haven for smuggling, both of drugs and of arms. The Baluch are Sunni and are at sharp odds with Tehran's Shia clerical regime. Through Iraq's many years of conflict with Iran, first in the early 1970s and then during the Iran-Iraq war a decade later, Iraqi intelligence developed close ties with the Baluch on both sides of the Iranian-Pakistani border. Above all, it used them to carry out terrorism against Iran.
Yousef's associates in Pakistan, too, were anti-Shia. This fact, taken together with his Baluch ethnicity, make it nearly impossible that Iran could be behind Yousef. The most recent inquiries, made since Yousef's arrest, have reduced the question to two possibilities: He is a free-lancer connected to a loose network of fundamentalists; or he worked for Iraq. [12]
Of Passports and Fingerprints
THE SINGLE MOST important piece of evidence pointing to Iraq is the passport on which Yousef fled America. It was no ordinary passport.
On November 9,1992, just after the final green light for the bombing had been given, Yousef reported to Jersey City., police that he had lost his passport. He claimed to be Abdul Basit Mahmud Abdul Karim, a Pakistani born and reared in Kuwait. Then, between December 3 and December 27, Yousef made a number of calls to Baluchistan. Several of them were conference calls to a few key numbers, a geographical plotting of which suggests that they were related to Yousef's probable escape route--through Pakistani and Iranian Baluchistan--across the Arabian Sea to Oman, after which the "telephone trail" ends. After Yousef s arrest, a National Security Council staffer confirmed to me that Yousef had indeed fled from the United States through Baluchistan.
On December 31, 1992, Yousef went to the Pakistani consulate in New York with photocopies of Abdul Basit's current and previous passports. Consistent with his story to police in Jersey City, he claimed to have lost his passport and asked for a new one. The consulate suspected his non-original documentation enough to deny him a new passport. But it did provide him a six-month, temporary passport and told him to straighten things out when he returned "home." This turned out to be good enough for the purpose at hand.
By now it should be clear that the World Trade Center bomber's real name is probably neither Ramzi Yousef nor Abdul Basit. After all, would someone intending to blow up New York's tallest tower go to such trouble to get a passport under his own name? Yousef was a man of many passports; he had three on his person when he was arrested in Pakistan. Rather, it seems that Ramzi Yousef risked going to the Pakistani consulate with such flimsy documents because he wanted investigators to conclude that he was in fact Abdul Basit, and so would stop trying to determine his real identity. And that is pretty much what happened.
But why Abdul Basit Karim? Here we come to one of the most intriguing and vital aspects of the case. Because there really was an Abdul Basit Karim, a Pakistani born in Kuwait, who later attended Swansea Institute, a technical school in Wales. After graduating in 1989 with a two-year degree in computer-aided electronic engineering, he returned to a job in Kuwait's planning ministry. As Abdul Basit and his family were permanent residents of Kuwait, Kuwait's Interior Ministry maintained files on them. But the files for Abdul Basit and his parents in Kuwait's Interior Ministry have been tampered with. Key documents from the Kuwaiti files on Abdul Basit and his parents are missing. There should be copies of the front pages of the passports, including a picture, a notation of height, and so forth, but that material is gone. There is also information in the file that should not be there, especially a notation stating that Abdul Basit and his family left Kuwait for Iraq on August 26, 1990, transiting to Iran at Salamchah (a crossing point near Basra) on their way to Pakistani Baluchistan, where, according to the file, they now live.
Moreover, Iraqi intelligence apparently switched fingerprint cards, removing the original with Abdul Basit's fingerprints and replacing it with one bearing those of Yousef. Fingerprints are decisive for investigators because no two people's match. But the very fact that fingerprints are so decisive makes them the perfect candidate for careful manipulation. Thus, after U.S. authorities learned that Yousef had fled as Abdul Basit, they sent his fingerprints (taken by the Immigration and Naturalization Service at JFF airport when he was briefly detained for illegal entry) to Kuwait, asking if they matched those of Abdul Basit. When the Kuwaitis said that they did, everyone assumed the question settled--forgetting that Kuwait's files were not secure during the Iraqi occupation.
Pakistan also maintains files on those of its citizens permanently resident abroad, at the embassy in the country in which they live. On August 9, Baghdad ordered all embassies in Iraq's "nineteenth province" to close. Most did, including the Pakistani embassy. The files on Abdul Basit and his family that should be in the Pakistani embassy in Kuwait are missing. The Pakistani government now has no record of the family.
What does all this suggest? To me it suggests that Abdul Basit and his family were in Kuwait when Iraq invaded in August 1990; that they probably died then; and that Iraqi intelligence then tampered with their files to create an alternative identity for Ramzi Yousef. Clearly, only Iraq could reasonably have: 1) known of, or caused, the death of Abdul Basit and his family; 2) tampered with Kuwait's Interior Ministry files, above all switching the fingerprint cards; and 3) filched the files on Abdul Basit and his family from the Pakistani embassy in Kuwait.
Of course, the best way to verify or falsify this would be to check with people who knew Abdul Basit before August 1990. To this end, Brad White, a former Senate Judiciary Committee investigator and CBS newsman, contacted an overseas source he knew in the United Kingdom who had looked into the matter. Two people had a good memory of Abdul Basit but, shown photos of Yousef, were unable to make a positive identification. They both felt that while there was some similarity in looks, it was not the same person. "Our feeling is that Ramzi Yousef is probably not Basit", White was told.[13]
Logic and circumstance also suggest the same conclusion. Is it likely to be mere coincidence, after all, that during Iraq's occupation of Kuwait key documents were removed from Abdul Basit's and his parents files, while the same files were filched in their entirety from the Pakistani embassy? Moreover, Abdul Basit had no criminal record in Britain, nor did he or his parents have any security record in Kuwait. The first concrete knowledge we have of Ramzi Yousef/Abdul Basit comes in early 1991, around the end of the Gulf war when he showed up in the Philippines seeking contact with a Muslim group there. Introduced as "the chemist", he proposed to collaborate in bombing conspiracies. Now, how did a young man who had led a seemingly normal life up until August 1990 suddenly become a world class terrorist six months after Iraq invaded his country of residence? Where did he get such sophisticated explosives training in just six months? (The real Abdul Basit's degree, remember, was in electronic engineering, not chemistry, which Swansea Institute does not even teach.)
And where are Abdul Basit's parents? They never returned to Kuwait after its liberation, nor have they appeared anywhere else. Did they too take up a life of crime after decades of abiding by the law?
Ramzi Yousef's arrest has made it easy enough to resolve a key question and perhaps produce important evidence implicating Iraq in the World Trade Center bombing: Is "Ramzi Yousef" really Abdul Basit or not? Let those who remember Abdul Basit from before August 1990 meet Yousef in person and tell us. It sounds simple and logical, but strangely, the Justice Department has shown no interest in arranging such a meeting. Moreover, it has decided to try, the bomber as Ramzi Yousef even though no one, including Yousef by now, maintains that that is his real name. If the government believes that Yousef is really Abdul Basit, why doesn't it try him as Abdul Basit? Why is the Justice Department uninterested even in definitively determining his identity, even though doing so might help get to the bottom of the matter. I recently asked a Justice Department official, who maintains his confident view that Yousef is indeed Abdul Basit, "Why don't you bring the people who knew Abdul Basit to the prison to meet Yousef, so they can say for sure if they are the same?" "But you", I was told, "are interested in an intelligence question." Earlier I had been told, "It does not matter what we call him. We just try a body."
And so back we come to the high wall. As before, those who have the information about Ramzi Yousef and his bombing conspiracies are not concerned with the question of state sponsorship, or at least consider it secondary to their trials; while those who are concerned with state sponsorship are denied the information that they need to investigate the question properly.
To be continued...
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