Posted on 03/10/2003 8:45:34 PM PST by Oldeconomybuyer
ISLAMABAD, 11 March 2003 — Pakistan’s chief intelligence agency, in an unprecedented briefing to foreign media, confirmed yesterday that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said he last met Al-Qaeda chief Osama Bin Laden in December at an unknown location.
“KSM (Sheikh Mohammed) confirmed he met Bin Laden in December,” a senior Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) official told some three dozen foreign correspondents at ISI headquarters in the capital Islamabad.
However Khalid, who was captured in an ISI-led raid on a private home in the northern city of Rawalpindi on March 1, told interrogators that he did not know “the exact destination.”
“I don’t believe him unless he gives us the location,” the official said, questioning the credibility of Khalid’s revelations. Journalists were instructed not to reveal the names of the three ISI officials briefing them. A top intelligence official had told AFP last week that Khalid said he had met Bin Laden in November or December in a mountainous region.
“Khalid said he met Bin Laden late last year and the meeting took place somewhere in a mountainous region,” the official told AFP on Friday, as he denied other reports claiming a meeting between the two in February possibly in Rawalpindi. In yesterday’s briefing the ISI official also said that Khalid had handwritten letters on him which he said were from Bin Laden.
“He was carrying notes he claims are written by Osama Bin Laden.”
The ISI, which is leading counterterrorism operations in Pakistan with US assistance, believes Bin Laden is alive following information gathered from Khalid and Mustafa Ahmed Al-Hawsawi, an alleged financier of the Sept. 11 terror attacks who was captured with him.
“From our intelligence gathering we feel that he is alive,” the official told the briefing. As a result of the wealth of information gathered from the pair, Al-Qaeda hunters were moving significantly closer to capturing Bin Laden, he said.
“Yes, progressively we are moving,” he said when asked.
“The main fact that KSM’s arrest was executed proves we’re in the right direction,” he said, adding that Bin Laden’s arrest was “the logical progression.”
He refused to say where the ISI believed Bin Laden was hiding, saying only that there was no clear indication he was in Pakistan.
Here's another pic of our boy Khalid. I wouldn't say it's definitive, but he does look a bit older than 37, wouldn't you agree? Poking around the web looking for articles on the Chowan/A&T connection, I'm even more skeptical that Khalid is the Kuwaiti student who got his ME degree in North Carolina in 1986. I strongly suspect that student is dead -- and that he died sometime in 1991.
In 1995 she published an article in the foreign policy journal The National Interest, which argued that the ringleader of the '93 WTC bombing, Ramzi Yousef, was an Iraqi agent, and that his most widely accepted identity, that of a UK-educated Kuwaiti computer programmer by the name of Abdul Basit, was stolen and recycled by the Iraqi occupiers of Kuwait. She blamed the Clinton administration's shortsightedness and structural problems in the FBI and CIA for the failure to pursue the question of state sponsorship, and predicted future acts of mega-terrorism backed by bioterror blackmail on the part of Iraq. She subsequently developed this thesis into a book, Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War on America, which came out in 2000, and was reissued after the successful WTC attacks as the War on America: Saddam Hussein and the World Trade Center Attacks. The new edition features an introduction by Clinton's first CIA director, James Woolsey, who endorses Mylroie's analysis. Mylroie's book has also been praised by Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, William F. Buckley and Vincent Cannistraro.
Ostensibly, Khalid Sheik Mohammed is Abdul Basit's uncle, although I've noticed that articles which claim this usually shy away from mentioning Abdul Basit's real name, preferring to refer to the first WTC bomber by the name Ramzi Yousef, the alias in the Iraqi passport he used to enter the United States and the name under which he was tried. Ostensibly, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, like Abdul Basit, is a Western-educated Kuwaiti. Only, the same questions which exist concerning the Abdul Basit identity arise with respect to "KSM." The matter of Abdul Basit's fate has never been publicly resolved, although it is safe to assume that the administration knows the answer. If KSM is indeed the student who attended Chowan, then Mylroie is almost certainly mistaken in her theory about Basit. If the reason nobody seems to remember the terrorist in the pictures we have seen from Chowan or A&T is because they are not really the same person -- if the real Khalid Sheikh Mohammed died in Kuwait in 1991 -- then Mylroie must have been correct about Basit. In fact, that would pretty much seal it that she was right about everything. Last Sunday, Washington Post columnist Jim Hoagland hinted very strongly that Mylroie was indeed right about everything: 9/11 Mysteries In Plain Sight.
WAS AL QAEDA THE TARGET OF A TAKEOVER BY IRAQ?
Another mistaken 'conceptzia'
WHY AMERICA (& THE WORLD) CANNOT SURVIVE ANOTHER CLINTON
(INDEED, IT IS NOT CLEAR THAT WE ARE GOING TO SURVIVE THE FIRST ONE,)
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