Posted on 03/02/2003 7:23:33 PM PST by ConservativeMan55
The article is in error in placing him in college in the 1970s. The Kuwaiti student named "Kahlid Sheikh Mohammed" who is supposedly the same person as the terrorist in the picture attended college in the US from 1982 to 1986, graduating with a degree in mechanical engineering. Now, the interesting question is, is this really the same person? That student was born in 1965, so he would be almost 38 today. If you do not believe that the terrorist in the photograph could be 38 years old (and I'm not so sure myself) then that is hugely significant. Although news stories are reporting that Mohammed joined the Afghan jihad on leaving college, that is apparently not what his friends at college remember. They remember him going back to Kuwait. Similarly, Abdul Basit, the supposed "real identity" of Ramzi Yousef, was a Kuwaiti engineering student at Swansea Institute in the UK. He returned to Kuwait in 1989 on completing his studies. The last entry in his passport prior to his re-emergence as "Ramzi Yousef" is an annotation made at the Pakastani embassy in Kuwait on May 22, 1990, two months before Iraq invaded and occupied that country.
If you look at the side by side photos, imagine that one of them is reversed - so the left eyebrow of one photo is the right eyebrow of the other. It looks like that may the case, one eyebrow is more arched, one is more flat. And a lot of men's eyebrows thicken or get rougher as they age.
Arrest of Khalid: Another of Hydra's heads?
By B Raman
Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, described by Major General Rashid Qureshi, the media spokesman of President General Pervez Musharraf, as "the kingpin of al-Qaeda", was arrested by Pakistani intelligence officials from the house of the son ( Abdul Qadoos) of a local women's leader of the Jamaat-e-Islami (JEI), at Rawalpindi over the weekend, and handed over to officials of the US intelligence community based in Pakistan. The latter immediately airlifted him to the US naval base in Diego Garcia for interrogation.
It is understood that an Arab and the Pakistani son of the JEI leader was also arrested by the Pakistani authorities during the raid. While the arrested Pakistani has not been handed over to US officials, it is not clear as to whether the Arab is also now in US custody.
According to details available so far, during the interrogation of two members of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LEJ) arrested in Karachi last month on a tip-off from some members of the Kashmiri Shi'ite community of Karachi hailing from Gilgit, the intelligence officials came to know of the whereabouts of another wanted LEJ terrorist, who had taken shelter in Quetta, the capital of Balochistan. He, too, was then arrested and questioned. He is reported to have revealed that Khalid was staying with him, but had managed to escape just before the raid. He gave the address of the JEI leader's son in Rawalpindi as one of the likely places where he might have taken shelter.
The house in Rawalpindi was raided thereafter and Khalid and the Arab were arrested. Khalid had first come to notice in 1995 when he was reportedly involved, along with Ramzi Yousef, formerly of the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan, the political wing of the LEJ, in a plot for a series of terrorist attacks directed against US airlines and other American interests. Khalid and Ramzi Yousef, described as Khalid's nephew, had drawn up the plot from a hideout in Manila, where they had taken shelter after the involvement of Ramzi in the explosion at the World Trade Center at New York in February, 1993.
Following an accidental fire in their hideout, which drew the attention of the Filipino authorities to their presence and activities in Manila, they escaped to Pakistan. While Ramzi was arrested by the Pakistani authorities and handed over to US officials for trial in the World Trade Center explosion case in which he was convicted along with others and sentenced to life imprisonment, Khalid had been absconding since then.
Accounts emanating since September 11 from US intelligence officials and some non-governmental counter-terrorism experts known for their proximity to the US intelligence agencies, who generally reflect in their analyses the views of US intelligence, have projected Khalid as the real action man of Osama bin Laden and as the man who orchestrated the September 11 terrorist strikes in the US. In an interview with al-Jazeera TV in the last week of August, 2002, Khalid and Ramzi Binalshibh, a Yemeni member of al-Qaeda, had bragged about their role in September 11, and Khalid, during his talk with an al-Jazeera correspondent, was reported to have introduced himself as the head of al-Qaeda's military committee. The correspondent reported that he interviewed them in a hideout in Karachi.
US intelligence officials then organized a hunt for them in Karachi and, through electronic intercepts, managed to locate their hideout, which was raided by the Pakistani authorities on September 11, 2002. During an exchange of fire lasting about four hours, Khalid managed to escape, but Ramzi Binalshibh was captured and airlifted to Diego Garcia for interrogation. According to US officials, he was also to have joined in the hijacking of the aircraft in the US on September 11, but could not do so as he could not get a US visa. Since then, US officials have been hunting for Khalid.
Since 1995, the following six terrorists involved in acts of terrorism against US nationals and interests have been among those arrested in Pakistan:
Ramzi Yousef, involved in the World Trade Center explosion of February,1993.
Mir Aimal Kansi, involved in the murder of two officers of the CIA outside their office in Langley, US, in January,1993. He has since been executed in the US after his conviction in that case.
Sheikh Omar, involved in the kidnapping and murder of Daniel Pearl, the US journalist kidnapped in January-February-2002. He actually surrendered to a former official of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), who was then posted as the Home Secretary of Punjab in Lahore.
Abu Zubaidah, described by US officials as the No 3 man in al-Qaeda after the death of Mohammed Atef during the US air strikes in Afghanistan. He was arrested from a hideout of the Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) of Pakistan at Faislabad in Punjab on March 28, 2002, and flown to Diego Garcia.
Ramzi Binalshibh arrested in Karachi on September 11, 2002. Khalid Sheikh Mohammad.
Under Pakistani law, anyone arrested in Pakistani territory for a criminal offense has to be produced before a local court, tried for any offense pending against him in Pakistan and only then deported or extradited to any foreign country to face trial in that country. The Pakistani authorities strictly followed this procedure in the Daniel Pearl case, and have until now refused to hand over Sheikh Omar to the US authorities. He has been sentenced to death by a Pakistani court, but his appeal against the death sentence has not yet been disposed off. Their refusal to hand him over to the US for interrogation and trial in the US is due to his past linkages with the ISI, his self-confessed role as the kingpin of the ISI's terrorist operations in Indian territory and his reported claim, as made to the Karachi police during his interrogation, that during a visit to Kandahar in Afghanistan before September 11 he had come to know of al-Qaeda's plans for the terrorist strikes in the US and had passed on the information to Lieutenant-General Ehsanul Haq, the present Director-General of the ISI, who was then the Corps Commander in Peshawar. The Pakistani authorities were worried that if he made these disclosures to the US interrogators, the US might be constrained to act against Pakistan.
In the case of the other five, the Pakistani authorities had no hesitation in informally handing them over to US officials without following the due process of law since they were apparently confident that these five were unlikely to implicate Pakistan in any acts of terrorism during their interrogation by US agencies. Sheikh Omar was a UK resident of Pakistani origin and Abu Zubaidah, a Palestinian. Binalshibh is a Yemeni and the other three are stated to be Yemeni-Balochis, of mixed Yemeni-Balochi parentage. There is considerable confusion about the nationalities of Ramzi Yousef and Khalid. Some past reports that they were Kuwaiti nationals have been denied by the Kuwaiti authorities. Pakistani authorities have denied that they are Pakistani nationals. Ramzi Yousef entered the US as an Iraqi national fleeing persecution from the Saddam Hussein government, participated in carrying out the explosion and fled the US with a Pakistani passport issued by the Pakistani consulate in New York. From this, sections of the Pakistani media used to refer to him and Khalid as Pakistani nationals of Iraqi origin.
When Abu Zubaidah was arrested, US officials projected him as the most significant catch and one that was likely to disrupt future al-Qaeda operations. Their claims were belied by the series of terrorist strikes thereafter in Pakistan and other countries. Similar claims made after the arrest of Binalshibh were belied by the terrorist strikes in Bali and Mombassa.
The fact that neither of them could help in the prevention of the terrorist strikes that followed showed that while they might have been knowledgeable about the acts of terrorism of the past in which they had participated, they had little knowledge of the operations planned for the future.
This is because the operations of bin Laden's International Islamic Front (IIF) after September 11 are being planned and carried out by the remnants of the various components of the IIF acting autonomously without any central planning and coordination. Even though bin Laden claimed responsibility for these terrorist strikes in his al-Jazeera broadcast of November 12, 2002, it is uncertain whether he himself had any advance knowledge of thee strikes by different local units of the IIF.
It is doubtful, therefore, whether the arrest of Khalid will cause any major disruptions in the operations of the IIF, which is spread out in Asia. Claims that his arrest could deliver a serious blow to terrorist operations in Southeast Asia are unduly over-optimistic and unwarranted.
B Raman is Additional Secretary (ret), Cabinet Secretariat, Government of India, and presently director, Institute For Topical Studies, Chennai; former member of the National Security Advisory Board of the Government of India. E-Mail: corde@vsnl.com. He was also head of the counter-terrorism division of the Research & Analysis Wing, India's external intelligence agency, from 1988 to August, 1994.
I've felt like a nut, for warning about this on Free Republic, since back in 2001.
I feel vindicated (and a little saner) now.
How likely is it that they would release news of his capture before they had a chance to study these documents and computer files?
Then again, the moment he was captured, word of that capture would be expected to work its way back through covert and not-so-covert channels to all the other important al-Qaeda operatives. I have got to believe the CIA would have planned his capture very carefully so they could track that response in real time back to bin Laden himself.
This was not a casual or impromptu snatch. It has been in planning for some time. They have studied KSM's movements and monitored his activites and carefully noted every single human being he has spoken with and intercepted every telephone call he has made or taken during the period of tight surveillance. This could lead to the capture of bin Laden himself.
I say, turn up the heat, CIA.
This man's face is *not* vacant.
2.No.
Indeed.
The face is not vacant.
What you see is what you get.
However, you can't judge a person's intelligence or character by his appearance, especially his appearance in one carefully selected photograph taken after his presumed capture.
Does the following look like the kind of person who would, or could, start a world war? Does this question mean anything?
How about this picture of him?
[For anybody who didn't guess or know, this is Gavrilo Princip.]
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