This is the key to the election right here, as far as I'm concerned. If we can disembowel the anti-war left with the truth, Kerry has nothing.

I certainly wish people would pay more attention to this stuff. But have you asked yourself why the administration is not making this case?

Ramzi Yousef

Ramzi Yousef's most recent distinction is his status as the resident of the most expensive studio apartment in the history of the world. His 7 by 12 foot luxury suite comes complete with convenient toilet in the living room, 13-inch black and white TV and the handy chute through prison guards slide his delicious meals.

It cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build the Colorado Supermax prison, and somewhere significantly upwards of $20 million to keep it secure each year, and that doesn't even include free HBO.

However, it's hard to imagine you could ever spend "too much" to keep Ramzi Yousef locked up. The only thing more impressive than the terrorist attacks he accomplished are the ones he didn't have time to finish before he was caught.

And there's no doubt in anyone's mind that if he ever got out of prison, he would pick up right where he left off. He's just that kind of guy.

Yousef's nationality is a matter of some dispute, but it's believed he was a native of the Baluchistan area of Pakistan, a wild lawless border region with deep and broad ties to terrorism and al Qaeda. Yousef's uncle and partner-in-crime, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, is also believed to hail from Baluchistan.

Yousef (whose birth name is probably Abdul Basit Karim) appears to have been raised in Kuwait, where the man thought to be his father was a worker. Immigrant workers in Kuwait at the time were roughly equivalent in social status to black slaves in the deep South prior to the civil war; Yousef's biographers speculate that this upbringing might explain a lot.

As a young man, Yousef attended college in the U.K., where he studied electrical engineering, a skill he would put to productive use. During the late 1980s, he began spending his spring breaks in Pakistan, where the girls don't go wild, but everyone else does. He visited al Qaeda training camps in the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he learned the ins and outs of firearms and explosives.

It turned out that young Ramzi had a particular genius for the latter, and he was soon promoted from student to teacher. A diabolical designer of explosives, bombs would make his name (or rather, his alias) a household name (in households that read newspapers).

Blowing Things Up

The first major explosion Ramzi Yousef added to his resume was significant in a number of ways — the World Trade Center.

In late 1992, Yousef entered the country with a fake Iraqi passport and asked for asylum. His traveling companion was arrested immediately when a search of his luggage revealed bomb-making manuals. Because the INS holding cells were overcrowded, Yousef was released with instructions to come back a month later for a hearing. D'oh!

Yousef traveled around New York and New Jersey, immediately contacting a cell of Islamic Jihad operatives loyal to the notorious blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, a controversial extremist Muslim preacher who had been granted entree to the country by the CIA (which had hoped to befriend him). D'oh! D'oh!

A member of Rahman's cadre had been arrested in 1991 for the murder of radical racist Rabbi Meir Kahane. Despite being caught at the scene with a literally smoking gun in his hand after shooting Kahane in front of hundreds of witnesses, Nosair had been acquitted of murder (but was convicted on gun charges). When investigators raided Nosair's apartments, they seized dozens of bomb-making manuals and documents related to planned terrorism plots in New York City, which they didn't bother to translate from Arabic. D'oh! D'oh! D'oh!

Yousef was able to get the bomb-making manuals seized from his travel companion after a judge ordered the property returned to its owner (who remained incarcerated). D'oh! D'oh! D'oh! D'oh! He gathered together his list of motley conspirators and began buying and mixing chemicals for his big bomb. At one point, Yousef was injured in a car accident. The cop on the scene testified that she "felt a little sorry for him because he was so far from home." After recovering with a brief hospital stay, Yousef was able to recover the bomb-ingredients that remained in the trunk of his car while it sat in a police impound. D'oh! D'oh! D'oh! Argh! D'oh! Do'h!

A couple days before the bombing, one of Yousef's accomplices rented a Ryder van. The gang reported the truck stolen, in a ploy to slow investigators from picking up the trail after the bombing. On the morning of February 26, 1993, the conspirators drove the truck into the underground parking lot of the World Trade Center complex, lit the fuse and drove away.

A few minutes later, mayhem ensued. A massive explosion ripped through the garage and one of the two towers. Six people were killed, and hundreds were injured, but Yousef failed in one key objective. He had sought to cause the collapse of Tower One in such a way that it would fall onto Tower Two, killing thousands and demolishing the complex.

As it turned out, Yousef's triumph was delayed, but it would not be denied.

Thinking Bigger

Yousef was out of the United States before the smoke had cleared from the World Trade Center's halls. He escaped to Pakistan just hours after the bombing, where he visited with family and stayed at guest houses funded by Osama bin Laden. In Pakistan, he reacquainted himself with family members and current terrorists, including his uncle, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.

During his stay in Pakistan, Yousef organized several attempted terrorist acts, some of which succeeded (like a violent attack in Iran) and others of which did not (like the attempted assassination of then-president of Pakistan, Benazir Bhutto).

In a meeting with Khalid and Abdul Hakim Murad, an old friend of Yousef's, the three discussed airplanes and pilot training. After a few months, all three were dispatched to Manila, the Philippines, under orders from Osama bin Laden to begin plotting direct strikes on the United States.

As with many elements of Yousef's life, it's a bit of a mystery exactly when he first joined forces with al Qaeda. There is some evidence that the first WTC bombing may have been assisted or facilitated by bin Laden, but there's a lot more evidence that Yousef's Manila cell was an al Qaeda shop, financed by bin Laden's brother-in-law, Mohammed Jamal Khalifa.

There's a school of thought that Yousef might have been working for Iraq instead of (or in combination with) al Qaeda, particularly since the first WTC bombing took place on the anniversary of the liberation of Kuwait by allied forces in the first Gulf War. However, most theories closely tying Yousef to the government Iraq tend to involve an amount of misdirection and arcane identity switching that's extreme even by the labyrinthine standards of international terrorism. The connection has never been proven.

In Manila, Yousef and Khalid Shaikh let their devious imaginations run wild. They planned several schemes of various magnitudes. On orders from bin Laden, they considered plots to assassinate Pope John Paul II and President Bill Clinton. The latter was abandoned as too difficult; the former was only averted by chance. Various conspiracy theories also tied Yousef to preparations for the Oklahoma City bombing during this period.

Yousef and Khalid also availed themselves of all the high living they could get their hands on. They frequented local discos and nightclubs and courted numerous local women. There are reports of scuba trips to the southern regions of the Philippines, but it seems likely these trips were cover for visits with the Abu Sayyaf, a Muslim separatist group operating in the region with funding from bin Laden.

Unlike Khalid and bin Laden, there is little evidence to suggest that Yousef was especially Muslim or that his terrorist activities were driven by religious zeal. Yousef mouthed the usual extremist mantras when eventually arrested, but there was never any indication that he comported himself with any kind of religious demeanor or according to any code of behavior even vaguely resembling Islam.

Although he occasionally expressed political anger over the plight of the Palestinians, Yousef had never even visited the occupied lands. In the final analysis, it's most likely that he became a terrorist for two very basic reasons: He was good at it, and he liked it.

He probably never enjoyed his work so much as in Manila. With funds flowing from al Qaeda and lots of local girls to pass his evenings with, Yousef sat down with Khalid and together they devised what would have been the biggest and most devastating terrorist in history. And they came within two weeks of pulling it off.

Project Bojinka

Project Bojinka (apparently a Croatian word for "explosion") was the devious brainchild of these sessions. The plan was ruthless and devious, and it employed every scrap of ingenuity that Yousef could muster, which is saying quite a bit.

In Phase One of Bojinka, a minimum of five al Qaeda operatives would work in concert to destroy 11 U.S.-bound airliners over the Pacific almost simultaneously starting on Jan. 21, 1995.

The terrorists would board planes bound for the U.S. with stopovers all across Asia. They would plant bombs timed to explode on the second leg of the flight, then get off during the layover and repeat the process for another plane. The plan was elegant and highly coordinated. All five operatives would have escaped to Pakistan unharmed.

If the plan had succeeded, it would have killed an estimated 4,000 people and completely shut down all air travel around the world for days or even weeks.

The bombs were ingenious constructions, using Casio digital watches as timers and virtually undetectable liquid nitroglycerin as the explosive. Yousef tested the device on a flight from Manila to Tokyo on Dec. 11, 1994. He built his bomb in the lavatory and left it under his seat when he disembarked in Cebu, the Philippines. It exploded on the way to Japan, killing the businessman unfortunate enough to have taken over Yousef's seat. The plane managed to land successfully thanks to a heroic effort by the pilots. Yousef resolved to increase the potency of the explosive.

On Jan. 5, 1995, one of Yousef's compatriots started a small chemical fire in the apartment where the bomb supplies were being mixed. The conspirators fled, leaving documents and alaptop computer behind. Watching smoke pour out the apartment window, Yousef calmly sent Abdul Murad back to retrieve the computer after the fire department left, but the police were already on their way and Murad was arrested.

Yousef left the country a day or two later, and Khalid Shaikh wasn't far behind. Murad, left to the gentle ministrations of the Philippines police, began a lengthy confession under torture. During the course of his confession, he laid out Phase Two of Bojinka.

Murad told his interrogators that he had been selected for the great honor of martyrdom (an honor the secular Yousef preferred to leave for others). Murad, who had trained as a pilot in the United States, had been instructed to hijack a commercial airliner and crash it into a U.S.landmark. Possible targets included the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and CIA headquarters.

Yousef and Khalid Shaikh fled to Pakistan. One month later, U.S. officials tracked him down and arrested him. The team of FBI agents and Pakistani intelligence officials who made the arrest were so busy patting themselves on the back that they completely ignored Khalid, who was sleeping in the room next door.

Yousef was flown back to the United States, and into New York, where an outstanding indictment for the WTC 1993 bombing awaited him. As the plane landed, an FBI agent pointed out the World Trade Center towers to the terrorist, and commented, "They're still standing."

"They wouldn't be if I had enough money and explosives," Yousef reportedly responded.

Yousef was convicted in a New York courtroom for both the WTC bombing and the Bojinka plot, and sentenced to life in prison without parole. Judged a high escape risk, he was sent to serve his sentence at the Supermax prison in Colorado. His cellmates included the Unabomber, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. After McVeigh's execution, Yousef wrote of the Oklahoma City bomber, "I have never (known) anyone in my life who had so similar a personality to my own."

Yousef might have been locked away, but on Sept. 11, 2001, he still managed to take one last shot at his favorite target, and this time he succeeded. An al Qaeda operation led by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed finally made the Bojinka plan a reality, hijacking four jets and crashing three of them into their targets, the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon.

It must have given Yousef some satisfaction to see the fruits of his handiwork on his tiny black-and-white TV set. With a body count around 3,000, it was only a little less mayhem than would have been caused by Yousef's first draft of the plan (which U.S. authorities had reviewed in detail well before 9/11). And this time, the towers did come down.

We can only hope that was the last plan Ramzi Yousef left unfinished on the drawing board...

INDIVIDUAL TERRORISTS
Ramzi Yousef

Ramzi Yousef

Aliases
Abdul Basit Karim

Who is Ramzi Yousef?
Ramzi Yousef is the convicted mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He also plotted to bomb U.S. airliners in January 1995.

In 1993, before the bombing, Yousef lived in Jersey City, New Jersey, with fellow bomber Mohamed Salameh, one of the first four men convicted in the WTC attack and sentenced to life in prison.

According to the presiding judge in his 1998 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.

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."

Quick Facts
• Yousef lived for a time in a Pakistani boarding house run by Saudi exile Osama bin Laden. Although in an interview in 1997 bin Laden said he did not know Yousef personally.

Yousef fled the country the night of the attack and made it onto the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, with a $2 million reward for information leading to his arrest. Law enforcement authorities apprehended him after receiving a tip from an informant.

Ramzi Yousef's plots were the most ambitious terrorist conspiracies ever attempted against the United States.

Arrest and conviction
Pakistani police arrested Yousef a month later, on February 7, 1995, in an Islamabad hotel room. Authorities also arrested Shah in Malaysia, based on his photo agents found scanned into Yousef's laptop. He later admitted providing money and fake passports to Yousef and Murad but denied knowing about bomb plots.

Yousef and Murad were high school friends who grew up in a village in Kuwait, and later lived together in Pakistan and the Philippines.

Prosecutors depicted Yousef as the leader of the cell that carried out the February 26, 1993, World Trade Center truck bombing that killed six people and injured more than 1,000 -- at the time, the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Yousef's fingerprints turned up on bomb-making manuals and storage lockers used by the trade center bombers. He was believed to have bought the chemicals used to construct the 1,500-pound bomb placed inside a rented Ryder truck and detonated after the vehicle was driven into one tower's parking garage.

U.S. District Court Judge Kevin Duffy sentenced Yousef to life in prison on January 8, 1998, for the trade center bombings; Murad was sentenced to life on May 16, 1998.

Yousef is incarcerated at the federal "supermax" prison in Florence, Colorado, where Yousef has been cooperating with the government and has yet to be sentenced. He recently was housed close to prosecutors at a facility in lower Manhattan, New York.

Links between Nichols and Ramzi Yousef timelines present a strong, if circumstantial, case

In November 1994, Terry Nichols and Ramzi Yousef both walked on the grounds of the same college campus in the Philippines.
Whether their paths crossed is a question that still dogs researchers. But it's increasingly clear that what separates their respective itineraries is sometimes a matter of yards, feet or even inches, within a span of days, hours and sometimes mere minutes.

They even booked travel on the same airline, on the same route and apparently on the same day â€” the exact date Yousef planned to unleash a massive September 11-style attack on the United States.

-- By J.M. BERGER, INTELWIRE.com

Is 'Waly Samar' an Iraqi Bioterrorist on U.S. Soil?

J. Adams
Author of The Persian Gulf Deception
November 11th, 2002

"At this stage it is possible to turn to biological attack, where a small can,
not bigger than the size of the hand, can be used to release viruses that affect everything....
The viruses easily spread by air, and people are affected without feeling it."

- Uday Hussein, 9/20/01 (NOTE: The first Anthrax-laced letters were mailed on 9/18/01)
(That means Hussein's son wrote this before any news had come out about the Anthrax mailings in the U.S.)
(Noted in the Wall Street Journal, "Saddam and the Next 9/11", 2/14/03)

"I didn't think it possible that Osama sitting up there
in the mountains could do it....those who executed it were much more modern.
They knew the U.S., they knew aviation. I don't think he
has the intelligence or the minute planning. The planner was someone else."

- Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf

"If Saddam's operatives manipulated simple-minded Islamic zealots to bomb the World Trade Center,
it is only prudent to assume his agents are capable of striking again."

- The Boston Globe, 1/18/95

"From inside America, how five planes flew.
Such a mishap never happened in the past!
And nothing similar will happen.
Six thousand infidels died.
Bin Ladin did not do it;
the luck of the president [Saddam] did it."

(Text of poem recited in the presence of President Saddam Hussein by
Shaykh Ali Bin Shallal, head of the al-Sharji tribes, at a meeting with
tribal chieftains from Basra and Maysan Governates on 12/3/01.
Was the 5th plane the crash of AA Flight 587 into Queens, NYC on November 12, 2001?)

NOTE: This author has been in touch with the FBI since January 2002 regarding 'Waly Samar' and his potential involvement in the 2001 Anthrax mailings. Furthermore, a more detailed version of this article along with my associated articles on 'Waly Samar' was provided to the FBI on October 22nd, 2002. The real name and identity of 'Waly Samar' is here concealed. He currently works in New York City and likely resides in New Jersey. No action has been taken against this individual to-date by American law enforcement agencies. At the current time, with a war against Iraq appearing imminent, I'm releasing this information in the hopes that 'Waly Samar' and/or his cohorts are placed in custody or otherwise diverted from engaging in preemptive and/or retaliatory acts of bioterrorism against the United States on behalf of Saddam Hussein.

Ramzi Yousef masterminded the World Trade Center bombing that occurred on February 26th, 1993 - the second anniversary of Kuwait's liberation from Iraqi occupation. His plan in '93 was to topple New York City's tallest tower onto its twin, but his plot that year did not succeed. In 1995, Phillipine authorities foiled a plot by Ramzi Yousef to blow up 11 U.S. jetliners over the Pacific Ocean and crash a plane laden with explosives into the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia (see related article). This so-called "Project Bojinka" ("bojinka" is a serb/croat term for "explosion") may have been an initial conception of the plot eventually hatched on 9/11 that actually did bring down the Twin Towers.

The discovery of the Project Bojinka plot led to Ramzi Yousef's apprehension and arrest in Pakistan in 1995. He was eventually sentenced to life plus 240 years for his terrorist activities. On September 11th, 1996 a New York judge convicted Ramzi Yousef and his cohorts Wali Khan Shah and Abdul Hakim Murad for their involvement in Project Bojinka airliner bombing plot. On November 12th, 1997, Ramzi Yousef was further convicted on murder and conspiracy charges for his role in the 1993 attempt to topple the trade center's two 110-story towers.

After Ramzi Yousef's convictions in federal district court in Manhattan in 1996, the State Department issued advisory warnings that "the potential exists for retaliation by Youssef's sympathizers against American interests" (see related article). Is it possible that this occurred five years later to the day: September 11th, 2001? (Notably, a similar State Department advisory was issued after Yousef's conviction on November 12th, 1997. It was on that same date last year when American Airlines Flight 587 crashed into New York City.)

As uncovered in Laurie Mylroie's book, "THE WAR AGAINST AMERICA - Saddam Hussein and the World Trade Center Attacks", Ramzi Yousef is most likely an Iraqi intelligence agent. The '93 World Trade Center bombing may very well have been an attempt by Saddam Hussein to exact revenge against America for Iraq's humiliating Gulf War defeat. There is reason to believe that Project Bojinka, which evolved into the September 11th attacks, was an extension of Ramzi Yousef's and Saddam Hussein's terrorist plotting against America.

That September 11th traces back to Ramzi Yousef can be surmised by a shadowy figure that is believed to have masterminded 9/11: Ramzi Yousef's uncle, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed). Khalid Mohammed was a key coconspirator with Ramzi Yousef in both the '93 World Trade Center bombing and the 1995 Project Bojinka terror plot. The FBI believes Mohammed was the operational mastermind behind 9/11 more so than Osama bin Laden and is currently offering a $25 million reward for information leading to his arrest, the same amount being offered for bin Laden (see related article). Did Khalid Mohammed avenge the arrest and imprisonment of his nephew by planning and executing the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11th of 2001, the five-year anniversary of Ramzi's conviction? What's more, are the three terrorist plots in 1993, 1995 and 2001 centered around Ramzi Yousef and his desire to destroy the Twin Towers the handiwork of Ramzi Yousef's puppetmaster, Saddam Hussein?

Given the importance of Ramzi Yousef and Iraq recent terrorist plots against America, clearly anyone connected to him and Iraq in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing should be carefully examined.

One noteworthy individual that worked with Yousef in 1993 but was never criminally implicated in the bombing is 'Waly Samar', an Iraqi-American currently teaching microbiology in New York City. 'Samar' is an potential Iraqi bioterrorist on U.S. soil that may have been involved in the Anthrax mailings.

It appears that 'Waly Samar' worked integrally with Ramzi Yousef and associated Iraqi terrorists in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. As revealed in Laurie Mylroie's book, in the days immediately after the bombing almost all of the reporting calls to overseas operational planners (potentially Ramzi Yousef, who fled the country immediately after the bombing, and Khalid Mohammed who was overseas at that time), were apparently made by Samar from his dormitory room at Hunter College in New York City where he was then studying microbiology (see my article, "Is Waly Samar & Iraq Behind the Anthrax Mailings?").

When Waly Samar made his reporting calls from his dorm room in New York City, he charged them to the apartment of Abdul Rahman Yasin, an Iraqi who was eventually convicted in absentia for his involvement in the '93 bombing plot....in absentia because shortly after the World Trade attack Yasin fled the country for Baghdad, Iraq where he remains a fugitive to this day.

'Waly Samar' eventually got his Ph.D. in biology from Hunter College and has been teaching in New York City since then while residing in New Jersey, the state where the Anthrax mailings were sent from.

Interestingly, Kathy Nugyen, the Anthrax victim who had no traceable exposure to the Anthrax mailings, worked less than a 1000 feet from Hunter College and school laboratories Samar has had access to where it would be possible for a trained microbiologist to produce Anthrax (see related article).

Dr. Samar's focus of graduate research when at Hunter College and current research is Bacillus subtilis. This is noteworthy because Bacillus subtilis is used as a simulant for anthrax in biological weapons testing. Over a 5-day period in 1966, the U.S. army carried out a secret Anthrax attack simulation in New York City's subway system using Bacillus subtilis. In 1989, Iraq tested 150-litre fermenters it had acquired to produce Anthrax by initially producing batches of Bacillus subtilis for later use in bioweapon field trials.

Notably, in the year 2000, 'Waly Samar' applied for a position in the biology department at the University of Minnesota Crookston Campus. While he was offered a position there, apparently he did not take it as he continues to teach in New York City to this day. Samar's interest in this particular school is somewhat disturbing given that the University of Minnesota Crookston Campus is one of the nation's top schools for training in 'agricultural aviation', i.e., crop dusting. In fact, Zacarias Moussaoui, the alleged "20th hijacker" and only terrorist charged to-date for 9/11, inquired in depth at the Crookston Campus about getting courses and literature on crop dusting (see related article).

Given that Mohammed Atta, the lead 9/11 hijacker, sought a government loan to buy a commercial crop duster, there are clear warning signs of plans for future bioterrorism using crop dusters (see related article). This is most alarming given estimates that half a million or more casualties would result from an Anthrax attack using a crop duster (see related article). Since we already know terrorists in the U.S. have weaponized Anthrax, the potential for a crop duster bioterror attack should be at the top of concerns for those dealing with Homeland Security.

In 1998, Laurie Mylroie called upon the FBI to arrest 'Waly Samar' and his associates in order to prevent future acts of bioterrorism against the United States by Iraq (see related article). This failed to happen then and has not occurred to-date.

In light of the disturbing information concerning 'Waly Samar', and given that his whereabouts are known by U.S. law enforcement agencies, one can only hope that the FBI has examined him closely for potential involvement in the Anthrax mailings. What's more, given that Samar is such an obvious prospect for engaging in bioterrorism against America on behalf of Saddam Hussein, he should be closely monitored, if not apprehended, in order to prevent future terrorist acts in response to a new war against Iraq. If Samar and his cohorts are not kept in check or otherwise stopped, then the nation is likely being left vulnerable to bioterror that could cause millions of American casualties and bring our nation to its knees.

ALSO SEE:

WAS SADDAM HUSSEIN'S STAMP ON THE ANTHRAX MAILINGS?

IS 'WALY SAMAR' AND IRAQ BEHIND THE ANTHRAX MAILINGS?

WALY SAMAR'S COLLEGE LESS THAN 1000 FEET FROM THE MYSTERIOUS NEW YORK CITY ANTHRAX CASE

LAURIE MYLROIE TOLD FBI TO ARREST NEW JERSEY IRAQI-AMERICAN ANTHRAX MAILING SUSPECT YEARS AGO

A Washington Post Expert's Pick on Terrorism and the Middle East

THE WAR AGAINST AMERICA

Saddam Hussein and the World Trade Center Attacks:
A Study of Revenge

(Previously Published as Study of Revenge)

By Laurie Mylroie
COAUTHOR OF THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf With a foreword by former CIA Director R. James Woolsey,
and newly revised introduction and conclusion by the author.

Saddam and the Next 9/11
The Iraqi dictator and his son talk about the uses of biological weapons.

Friday, February 14, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST

America is on orange alert, Osama bin Laden is issuing new threats, and already the opponents of military action against Iraq are preparing to blame the next terror attack on U.S. policy. By threatening Iraq, which has nothing to do with al Qaeda, the U.S. is said to be inviting Saddam Hussein to become another bin Laden.

This argument manages to ignore the detail that we were attacked the first time without any provocation. But more importantly it ignores the shared anti-American purpose that has long united both Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.

Certainly bin Laden's latest taped threat shows he understands this mutual purpose. Bin Laden refers to "our mujahideen brothers" inside Iraq and stresses "the importance of martyrdom operations against the enemy, these attacks that have scared Americans and Israelis like never before." Iraq may be run by Baath Party "infidels," he adds, but "it does no harm in these circumstances that the interests of Muslims and socialists crisscross in the fighting against the Crusaders."

What our readers should understand is that the rulers in Iraq have also long admired the methods of bin Laden and other anti-American terrorists, going back before September 11, 2001. This is clear simply from reading the Iraqi press, which is of course government controlled. We sort through some of that evidence below, and nearby we reprint Iraqi magazine covers that give the most graphic indication of how much Saddam admires bin Laden's 9/11 handiwork.

Baghdad Al-I'lam
September 11, 2002
"Proof of U.S. Failure: Al Qaeda Still Exists"

As long ago as the bombing of the U.S. military offices in Riyadh in 1995, a November 14 Agence France Presse report from Baghdad quoted an official Iraq newspaper as saying, "The Tigers of the Gulf have shaken the Saudi throne and made Washington tremble." It praised the emergence of a "secret Saudi opposition movement" and predicted "dramatic events" in the country. A core bin Laden goal is of course to oust the U.S. from Saudi Arabia and topple its monarchy.

More recently, and eerily, a July 21, 2001, commentary in the Iraqi publication Al-Nasiriya praised bin Laden: "In this man's heart you'll find an insistence, a strange determination that he will reach one day the tunnels of the White House and will bomb it with everything that is in it."

The article recounts bin Laden's attacks on U.S. targets and U.S. efforts "to pressure the Taliban movement so that it would hand them bin Laden, while he continues to smile and still thinks seriously, with the seriousness of the Bedouin of the desert about the way he will try to bomb the Pentagon after he destroys the White House."

The commentary is ominously prescient, especially since it could never have appeared without official sanction. "Bin Laden is a healthy phenomenon in the Arab spirit," it continues, speaking about his goal to "drive off the Marines" from Arabia. Most eerily of all, the writer adds that those Marines "will be going away because the revolutionary bin Laden is insisting very convincingly that he will strike America on the arm that is already hurting. That the man . . . will curse the memory of Frank Sinatra every time he hears his songs." Is that a reference to Sinatra's "New York, New York"? Did Saddam know what would happen two months later?

Baghdad Alif Ba
September 11, 2002
"September 11 Events Revealed the True Face of America"

This convergence of Iraq and al Qaeda interests appeared again in the Iraqi press after September 11, this time in a commentary by Saddam Hussein's son, Uday. Writing in Babil on September 20, Uday sketches the scenarios for the war in Afghanistan he expects to come. Iraq should merely be "the spectator" at first, he writes, because "if we do anything Iraq will be attacked . . . perhaps like the attack of 1991."

The Americans will join the Northern Alliance to topple the Taliban, but will then "sink into the Afghan quagmire"--a point that could have been stolen at the time from the New York Times. But then the son of Saddam adds, "In this scenario, there is nothing wrong with Iraq turning from a spectator to an active player on its territory to restore the north, which has been out of its control since 1991." So Iraq's interests are again furthered by bin Laden's terror.

Uday continues: "At this stage it is possible to turn to biological attack, where a small can, not bigger than the size of the hand, can be used to release viruses that affect everything. The attack might not necessarily be launched by the Islamists. It might be done by the Zionists or any other party through an agent. The viruses easily spread by air, and people are affected without feeling it." We now know that the first U.S. anthrax letters were sent on September 18.

Saddam himself got into the anthrax game a month later, in a rambling October 29, 2001, "open letter" carried by Baghdad Radio. He ridicules reports "that American officials think that the source of anthrax is probably the U.S. itself. Is this conclusion or information just a tactic to divert the attention of those who were terrorized to hear that bin Laden is the source of anthrax, and to hear insinuations to other accusations, that many Americans think that they should not persist in harming the people he cares for, because that would push him to a stronger reaction in this way or by other means?"

Baghdad al-Iqtisadi
September 11, 2002
"September 11: Allah's Punishment"

Neither Saddam nor his son are admitting here that they are the source of the anthrax. But the news is that both of them clearly believe in its utility to achieve their political goals. Saddam goes so far as to assert that U.S. officials are lying about anthrax because if Americans thought the source was bin Laden they'd force the Bush Administration to stop hunting him down.

Another anthrax clue also deserves to be more widely known: In October 2002, the Iraqi embassy in Stockholm made an official request of the Swedish Foreign Ministry to provide "appropriate" means for "the early detection of anthrax." The request was also for "protection methods from anthrax and types of methods, procedures and equipment to be used for decontamination." Iraq made a similar request at the time to the Japanese and Finns.

The question is, what was Iraq's point? It's doubtful Saddam believes the U.S. would use anthrax. But was he trying to send a warning that he could and would use it against us? Or does he want to know more about how to protect his own troops if he uses it against U.S. forces?

The U.S. homeland may again be hit by terrorism, and if it is the point to understand is that the sources will be at root the same ones who attacked us on September 11. Saddam Hussein is probably too clever to get caught openly canoodling with Osama bin Laden, but the evidence above shows that they share the same evil purposes. When it comes to the uses of terror and antipathy to America, Saddam and bin Laden are brothers under the skin.

A Saddam connection?
While the world focuses on Osama bin Laden, some experts argue that Iraq was a likely conspirator.

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By David Neiwert

Sept. 21, 2001 | Even as the Bush administration and the national media focus almost exclusively on Osama bin Laden as the seemingly preordained "prime suspect" in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, evidence is beginning to emerge that a more familiar enemy may also have been involved in the devastation: Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

The central trail of evidence appears to show bin Laden's unquestionable complicity, but a second, subtler set of footprints may lead to Saddam's door. That trail originates with the first World Trade Center bombing, with evidence that some analysts believe links the 1993 operation to Iraq. That theory has gained currency over the past few years among some intelligence experts, including former CIA director R. James Woolsey. In recent days, the administration has contended that the Sept. 11 attacks likely had some state-supported assistance, and others (including Israeli intelligence) have pegged Iraq as the likely co-conspirator. Moreover, there are reports of possible ties between at least one of the hijackers and Iraqi intelligence.

All of which raises a new and troubling possibility: that last week's attacks were not just the insane acts of a small fringe fundamentalist network, but the completion of unfinished business -- and that their ultimate intent is not merely terror, but revenge for the 1991 Gulf War and subsequent military actions against Iraq.

The case against Iraq is also being made against the political backdrop of a split among Bush advisors, reported in the New York Times -- pitting hard-liners like Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz, who has long advocated action against Iraq, against more cautious officials, like Secretary of State Colin Powell. And the hypothesis of an Iraqi connection may be being pushed by conservatives who, long irritated that the U.S. did not push on to Baghdad during the Gulf War and finish off Saddam Hussein, see an opportunity to conclude that unfinished business.

The specter of Saddam's involvement in the series of hijackings and subsequent attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was raised officially this week by administration sources who told reporters at CBS News and the Boston Globe that one of the known hijackers, Mohammad Atta, may have met with Iraqi intelligence officials during his travels to Europe this past summer. Those sources were quick to say the connection was not a "smoking gun," and Iraqi officials immediately denied their government's involvement.

This was not, however, the first indication of Iraqi complicity. A number of intelligence experts have questioned whether bin Laden's organization possessed the intelligence capacity required to pull off the Sept. 11 attacks. They say that even though bin Laden may well have provided the personnel, the most likely suspect behind the logistics of the disaster is Saddam Hussein's intelligence operation.

According to Woolsey, who was CIA director from 1993 to 1995, the model of terrorism currently at play in the media -- in which a "loose network" of Islamic fundamentalists is solely to blame for the attacks -- may well be incomplete, since it obscures the possibility of state sponsorship, and ignores the possibility that these small terror groups may in fact be useful front organizations for larger entities.

Woolsey and other intelligence analysts say that although the Sept. 11 attacks themselves were a relatively low-tech affair involving box cutters and knives used to hijack jets and convert the airliners themselves into potent bombs, the entire operation was in fact extremely sophisticated. The logistics, the planning, the coordination, the ability to apparently provide new identities for a large team of operatives and to hide them effectively within U.S. borders -- all these point to the greater likelihood of a state-operated intelligence agency's complicity.

"Unless it is bin Laden himself or one of his senior colleagues, this attack, this whole thing says to me that there was some integrated plan," says Woolsey, who also wrote of Iraq's possible involvement in the New Republic. "Terrorist groups are not -- I mean, driving a truck bomb into the Marine barracks in Beirut is one thing, but an integrated plan is not the first thing you think of when you think of a terrorist group. Even a relatively wealthy terrorist group."

The highly visible media campaign that has given bin Laden the widespread image as the world's top terrorist strikes Woolsey as disinformation: "I mean, if you look at bin Laden sitting over there issuing fatwahs and making video tapes and reciting poems, sound bites about attacking the United States, and having his lieutenants talk openly and loudly and often on open telephone lines about attacking the United States, you begin to think that there might be somebody sitting back there who is just as happy as bin Laden is for him to be front and center, because he likes the fame and being the pin-up boy. And somebody else -- possibly the Iraqis -- may like the fact that somebody else is getting the attention rather than them," Woolsey says. "They care about the damage, not the attention."

If Iraqi intelligence is involved, Woolsey does not believe that necessarily absolves bin Laden. "I'm not comfortable with the formulation of one or the other having done it," he says. "I'm more comfortable with the formulation that it was a partnership, and each one was doing what he does best. Who knows? It may have been that Iraqi intelligence handled part of the logistics, and bin Laden's group provided the people."

Woolsey and other intelligence analysts point to a number of other pieces of evidence linking Iraqi intelligence to Islamic terrorists, ranging from regular gatherings of such groups in Baghdad, to the way Saddam -- whose ruling Baath Party is avowedly atheistic -- has altered the Iraqi flag to include an Islamic blessing. But the trail of evidence most starkly goes back to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

The similarity of that attack to the Sept. 11 disaster extends beyond the target itself. Perhaps the most striking point is that the mastermind of that plot, when arrested two years later, had been in the process of organizing a highly coordinated mass hijacking of airliners.

And as it happens, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that this man -- contrary to the contention of the Clinton administration at the time -- was an agent of Saddam's elite intelligence unit.

A man who calls himself Ramzi Yousef is currently serving a 240-year sentence in federal prison for masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in which six people died, though even his trial judge noted at sentencing: "We don't even know what your real name is."

What is known about him is that he entered the United States in 1992 on an Iraqi passport bearing Yousef's name, and then promptly sought political asylum. Shortly afterward, he began organizing a group of Islamic radicals in the Jersey City, N.J., area who had been planning to pipe-bomb government officials and Jewish leaders in retaliation for the imprisonment of one of their martyrs, Meir Kahane assassin El Sayyid Nosair. However, Yousef promptly escalated the plot into one with a bigger target -- namely, the World Trade Center.

Yousef's real identity has been the particular obsession of intelligence analyst Laurie Mylroie, whose 2000 book, "Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America," which reads now like a prophecy about the Sept. 11 attacks, and is referenced by many, including Woolsey, who question whether bin Laden was solely responsible for the attacks. Mylroie has an extensive background in Middle East intelligence, and her book is largely based on a thorough examination of the trial documents in the World Trade Center cases.

Mylroie says Yousef's operations were a classic "false flag" in which actions are carried out in a way that makes others look responsible -- and Yousef, she believes, was almost certainly an Iraqi intelligence operative. She points particularly to the circumstances around his flight from the United States after his team of bombers set off their device in 1993 -- which had been intended to kill 250,000 people, toppling one tower into the other and releasing a deadly cloud of cyanide, but which only created a ball of flame that instead burned up the cyanide -- and in short order were arrested.

Yousef fled the country and flew to Karachi, Pakistan, with the passport of a Kuwaiti named Abdul Basit Karim. For the next two years he remained at large, but resurfaced in Manila when a batch of chemicals he was mixing for his next bombing plot caught fire. Forced to flee, he was apprehended a month later in Pakistan, thanks to information on a computer he left behind in the Philippines.

The details of the plot contained on that computer were chilling. Investigators found that Yousef was planning to plant bombs, comprised of a liquid explosive that could get past metal detectors, in coordinated fashion aboard a series of 11 American airliners scheduled to fly at roughly the same time over the Pacific Ocean.

Mylroie believes that even though Yousef was captured, at least some of the logistical planning behind this plan may have lived on with whomever his cohorts might have been, and may well have provided the groundwork for the Sept. 11 attacks on America.

"I don't know if these attacks are part of the same plan -- I haven't seen any evidence of that -- but there are clearly echoes of the logistical side of Yousef's plot in it," she says. "Even more striking is that he plotted to destroy the Trade Center as well. "I don't think it's hard to see the hand of Iraqi intelligence at work here. It's clear a state was involved in the attack because it was so sophisticated, and Iraq is the most likely candidate. They are the only state we are at war with."The penultimate piece of evidence linking Yousef to Iraqi intelligence, Mylroie says, is his assumption of the identity of Abdul Basit Karim. There really was an Abdul Basit, who was a Kuwaiti educated in Britain, but who was living in Kuwait when Iraq invaded in August 1990. He also was four inches shorter than Yousef, who generally bears little resemblance to the man.

Despite that, Yousef's fingerprints appear in Basit's official Kuwaiti file. Mylroie collected an array of evidence, including missing pages and a strikingly out-of-place notation, that the file was tampered with extensively, all indicating that Yousef had assumed the identity of someone killed during the Iraqi invasion. Creating such identities is common for agents involved in "wet" operations by Soviet-style intelligence agencies.

And in the case of Yousef/Basit, the only such organization that could have done so was Iraq's.

Saddam Hussein rose to power through the ranks of Iraqi intelligence, and consolidated his grip on the nation in the 1970s by dramatically expanding the power and scope of his intelligence and security forces. Over the years, that power has if anything grown and intensified, particularly in the wake of Saddam's defeat in the Gulf War.

Today's Iraqi intelligence agencies cover a broad range of activities, from Saddam's personal protection force to handling political dissent. But by far the most powerful and feared of these is the Iraqi Intelligence Service, or Mukhabarat. Its powers range from electronic surveillance to counterintelligence and special operations; notably, its mysterious "Office Sixteen" exists solely for training agents for clandestine operations abroad, including lessons in the use of terror techniques.

The Mukhabarat received considerable notoriety in 1994, when U.S. intelligence uncovered proof that Iraqi agents had attempted to assassinate former President George Bush during his visit to Kuwait. In retaliation, President Clinton ordered a missile attack on the Mukhabarat headquarters in Baghdad.

The missiles found their mark, but the response was nonetheless inadequate in impressing Saddam, since few of the spy agency's personnel were lost. "The only thing the Clinton administration did was launch a few cruise missiles at an empty building in the middle of the night," says Woolsey, who was CIA chief at the time. "That probably made him laugh even harder."

Woolsey believes Saddam was already laughing at the Americans because of their failure to uncover his likely involvement in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. At the time, the plot's mastermind, Yousef, was still at large, and investigators were still focusing on the sacrificial lambs he had left behind -- one of whom, desperate for airfare, had actually attempted to redeem his deposit on the truck used in the bombing.

The FBI's chief in New York at the time, Jim Fox -- who had a background in counter-terrorism -- was in fact doggedly pursuing the likelihood of Iraqi complicity in the bombing. Several of his agents had uncovered what he believed were strong indications that Mukhabarat agents had enacted the plot, including information from foreign intelligence agencies.

But Fox was replaced in mid-1994 for ostensibly bureaucratic reasons, and his successors chose not to keep pursuing the state-sponsorship angle, saying they had found no evidence of it. Instead, they focused on convicting the perpetrators they had in hand, including a second set of bombing conspirators associated with a blind Muslim cleric in Jersey City named Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman.

Mylroie believes the Clinton administration made a conscious effort to downplay the Iraqi connection because it was wedded to a policy designed to "contain" Saddam rather than confront him. Woolsey demurs, suggesting that the problem was more a pragmatic one, given the American system of justice and the difficulty often associated with obtaining conspiracy convictions.

Despite their often overlapping interests, a high bureaucratic wall exists between American security and law-enforcement agencies, and that wall proved crucial in the World Trade Center cases, particularly Ramzi Yousef's. With the Justice Department firmly in charge, national security concerns such as the possibility of state sponsorship of the terrorism took a back seat to the reality of prosecuting the case in U.S. courts.

"There's nothing nefarious about that," says Woolsey. Conspiracy cases in particular can be quite complex and difficult for obtaining convictions, and he thinks the prosecutors were mostly intent on trying to keep the case simple for the sake of putting the men behind bars: "They were only doing what good prosecutors do."

But in the process, the chance of establishing whether or not Yousef was an Iraqi intelligence agent carrying out Saddam's orders was lost. If the Iraqi dictator was in fact involved, then the message he got was clear: He could sponsor covert terrorism in America and get away with it.

It might still be possible to determine whether or not Ramzi Yousef is really Abdul Basit Karim; the latter had friends in London who could identify him, and Scotland Yard possesses papers with Basit's fingerprints from 1988. If those prints match those in the tampered Kuwaiti file, then it would confirm he is indeed Basit. If they don't, then it means within a high degree of certainty that he is an Iraqi agent. However, that simple test has never been conducted by U.S. agencies.

"I think that there are very good indications that [Saddam] was involved in '93, and it's a testable hypothesis by looking at the fingerprints that Scotland Yard has," says Woolsey. "And if he was involved in '93, that substantially enhances the possibility that he was involved Sept. 11 -- because it means he was sitting over there for eight years laughing at us because he got away with the first one, and continuing to undervalue us, as he did in 1990 when he invaded."

It is difficult to say whether or not the Bush administration, in its seemingly single-minded pursuit of bin Laden, will take the time to examine the matter, despite assurances it is investigating all potential aspects of the Sept. 11 attacks. So far, officials have shied away from connecting Saddam to the disaster, though there are indications that may change soon.

On last Sunday's "Meet the Press," Vice President Cheney was asked if there was any evidence linking Iraq to the attacks, and he flatly stated, "No," adding: "In the past, there have been some activities related to terrorism by Saddam Hussein. But at this stage, you know, the focus is over here on al-Qaida [bin Laden's organization] and the most recent events in New York. Saddam Hussein's bottled up, at this point, but clearly we continue to have a fairly tough policy where the Iraqis are concerned."

The only rumblings to the contrary have come from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who paused for five seconds at a press briefing this week when asked about the possibility of "state sponsorship" of the attacks. He finally answered that he would leave the question to Justice officials, but added: "I know a lot, and what I have said ... is that states are supporting these people."

The chief reason intelligence analysts have given for dismissing the notion of a specific Saddam/bin Laden connection has been the supposed enmity between the two men, based on Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, which bin Laden violently opposed. But Mylroie is skeptical, pointing out that the invasion occurred more than 10 years ago, which is an aeon in diplomatic years. Woolsey, too, has his doubts.

"First of all, that may be a cover story," he says. "Secondly, they have the same chief hatred, which is for us. Thirdly, bin Laden is Sunni, so there's not any of the Sunni-Shi'a tension that there would be if the allegation were that he was working with Iran.

"And finally, Saddam has gotten reasonably close in the last few years to some of the fundamentalist terrorist Sunni groups. They have meetings in Iraq -- I can't point to any personal meetings or any personal link between bin Laden and Saddam, but if you just look at his relationships with the terrorist groups generally, and particularly the fundamentalist Sunni ones, it's striking. Some of them call him 'the new Caliph' [an Islamic term for a temporal and spiritual leader]."

Certainly, identifying Saddam Hussein as one of the co-perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attack would drastically change the landscape of the "crusade" Bush has proposed against terrorism. Making such an identification would require an all-out response. Instead of focusing solely on capturing bin Laden and crushing his organization, U.S. forces would simultaneously be faced with the far more formidable task of a full-scale military assault on Iraq.

That daunting prospect might intimidate the Bush team into withdrawing from pushing the issue, preferring to continue the current course of "containing" Saddam. Laurie Mylroie says a number of key intelligence players within the administration are fighting to bring the Iraqi issue forward, but she fears that politics may ultimately hold them back.

"My main concern is that the administration will put this off and choose to just focus on bin Laden, for policy considerations," Mylroie says. "I think we run the risk of focusing on the individuals and not looking at the states -- forgoing security concerns for the sake of prosecuting criminals. If the states go untouched, we'll just have more of the same."

Woolsey contends that even if no further evidence links Saddam to the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration should at least look into the evidence now in hand, and determine if he was behind the 1993 bombing. "If they determine that Iraqi intelligence was behind '93, that should be enough. We got Al Capone not for the many murders that he contracted for, but for income-tax evasion.

"In the '93 bombing, although six people died, it was certainly not as major a thing as what happened on Sept. 11. There's no statute of limitations on terrorism, and as far as I'm concerned, if he did the '93 bombing, that's enough to get him on the list of folks who need to have their regimes changed."

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About the writer
David Neiwert is a freelance writer based in Seattle. He won a 2000 National Press Club award for distinguished online journalism, and is the author of "In God's Country: The Patriot Movement and the Pacific Northwest."

The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden and the Future of Terrorism (1999)

For now, nothing should distract us from pursuing the War on Islamic fundamentalist terrorism, and looking back to see what went wrong in the past would surely derail our current efforts. If nothing else, the presence of the last president's wife in the Senate, the second to last president's son in the White House, and the senate campaign of the former Attorney General would all seem to guarantee that any hearings on the matter would quickly degenerate into blame shifting and partisan bickering. But when you read this book and realize exactly how much even an independent journalist was able to uncover about Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda network and their ongoing plans to attack the West, you will find yourself first becoming infuriated and then demanding that someone in government, perhaps many people in government, be punished for the monumental lapse in National Security that allowed the 9/11 attack to occur.

In The New Jackals, Simon Reeve tackles a topic that at the time sparked so little interest that the book was published by a university press, the February 26, 1993 truck-bombing of the World Trade Center. Thanks to one great piece of luck, the quick discovery of a piece of the truck which made identification possible, and the incredible stupidity of one of the plotters, who infamously returned to the truck rental place to get back his deposit, authorities were able to determine those responsible for the blast in fairly rapid fashion. But tracking down Ramzi Yousef, the gifted bomb-maker who pulled off the attack and who planned many more in the future, proved much more difficult, as he had already fled back to the Middle East. His trail led throughout the Muslim world, from Kuwait to the Philippines to Pakistan, and it is a testament to the doggedness with which the professionals of the FBI pursued him that he was eventually captured and returned to the States to stand trial.

Mr. Reeve not only provides the details of the investigation and subsequent trial, he also gives a complete biographical sketch of Yousef and off the man who it turns out what behind the scenes, providing guidance and training to Yousef and his cohorts, Osama bin Laden. No one reading this book would ever kid themselves that bin Laden and the determined band of fanatics he had assembled would have let the matter drop after this first failed attempt. In one of the most chilling moments in the book, Mr. Reeve relates the scene as Yousef is helicoptered towards New York City, after his arrest, riding with William Gavin of the FBI :

    The chopper took off at 8:55p.m., circled the field and then headed off towards Manhattan. Bill Gavin, the head of the FBI in New
    York, sat opposite Yousef, watching his blindfolded young charge. The Sikorsky followed the Hudson River towards the southern tip
    of Manhattan, and rounded the proud towers of the World Trade Center at a height of 600ft. Gavin leant forward and eased Yousef's
    blindfold away from his eyes. 'Look down there,' he said to Yousef, gesturing towards the twin towers. 'They're still standing.'
    Yousef squinted and looked out of the window. 'They wouldn't be, if I had had enough money and explosives,' he replied defiantly.

As we well know, to our eternal horror, the next time they did indeed have enough explosives.

But the fact that we weren't ready for them raises a number of issues which eventually have to be addressed in the public forum. Can the Clinton administration seriously have believed that lobbing a few cruise missiles around Afghanistan and the Sudan was going to deter future attacks? Mr. Reeve, with none of the resources or intelligence gathering capabilities of the American government at his disposal, makes it perfectly apparent that here was a reasonably well organized, very well funded, tactically adept, and deeply motivated, organization that was waging war on the West in general and on the United States in particular. How is it possible that the Clinton and Bush administrations and the members of Congress responsible for overseeing Defense and Intelligence did not understand this rather basic fact or at least did not treat it with the seriousness which it deserved? It is the sad fact that much of what appears in this book is old hat to us now, because we've been reading it in the papers ever day, but had a president come forward and laid out only the case that Mr. Reeve makes, never mind any classified information, and announced that he was declaring war on Al Qaeda, while there certainly would have been grumbling, one has to think that the American people would have supported him. That this was not done, that we were taken unawares, that Al Qaeda was allowed to carry out attacks on us with relative impunity, entitles us to some answers about why not. In all likelihood, some folks need to lose their jobs, perhaps many people, at the CIA and the State Department and the National Security Council, and maybe at Defense and Justice. We need sworn testimony from the people who bear responsibility for our failure to adequately respond to the threat that Al Qaeda posed and they, whoever they are, of whichever party, need to resign or be fired.

Of course, that's all water over the dam at this point, but there remains one way in which the book can be used prospectively, rather than retrospectively. There are a series of points at which we can discern the dangers of handling incidents like the first World Trade Center bombing through normal court channels. First, Mr. Reeve tells the story of how the Islamic radical who assassinated Meir Kahane in New York City in 1990 escaped the death penalty, after his attorney, William Kuntsler, apparently bewildered the jury. Second, there's a maddening scene where once Ramzi Yousef was turned over to American law enforcement in Pakistan, he had to be flown nonstop to the States, lest a landing in some other country create extradition problems. Finally, there's the wealth of information about U. S. intelligence sources and methods that became public over the course of the trial. All of these factors need to considered as we decide how to handle any terrorists we capture in the future.

Suppose that a jury handed down an "O.J. verdict" and let a terrorist walk, would we allow this? Suppose Osama bin Laden was being flown from afghanistan to the U.S. and bad weather or engine failure made it advisable to land in France, would we risk the lives of the crew and law enforcement officials on board in order to avoid landing, or would we land and allow France to refuse to extradite him to a country with the death penalty? Slobodan Milosevic is on trial now and has said he'll seek to have Bill Clinton testify. How much will we allow terrorists to expose in court, what witnesses are they entitled too? There are a whole host of questions here that those who reflexively oppose military tribunals appear not to have thought through to their logical conclusions.

Better, more comprehensive, books about Osama and Al Qaeda are sure to come, now that we're all paying attention, but, in the meantime, this one's pretty good. Be warned though, you'll be infuriated, particularly when Mr. Reeve closes the book by warning that worse is to come, as it did.

(Reviewed:03-Jan-02)

'America Should Act in Self Defense Against Iraq For 9/11, OKC, 1993 WTC Attacks

Personal Reserach, interviews and Opinions by Author ^ | September 5, 2002 | Patrick B. Briley

Saddam Hussein of Iraq hired mercenaries from Baluchistan for his war on terror against the US even before the 1991 Gulf War.

Saddam’s Baluchi mercenaries have been very successful in attacking American targets and killing innocent American citizens in the 9/11, OKC and 1993 WTC Attacks.

Khalid Mohammed and his nephew Ramzi Yousef were Saddam’s Baluchi mercenaries who attacked America for Saddam and Iraq.

Middle East expert Lorie Mylroie has given eloquent proofs over the years of Saddam’s involvement in the 1993 WTC attack.

The FBI and DOJ publicly say Khalid Mohammed was a mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks and the 1993 WTC bombing.

Ramzi Yousef is in Federal prison for his bombing of the WTC in 1993.

he FBI and DOJ and Bush White House have not yet told you that Khalid Mohammed was a mastermind of the OKC bombing and behind the meetings of Terry Nichols in the Philippines to plan the OKC bombing. They have not yet told you that the Abu Sayeff cell in the Philippines run by Khalid Mohammed and Ramzi yousef was filled with Iraqi agents besides just Khalid Mohammed and Yousef. In December 1995 the Philippine police arrested nine members of the Abu Sayeff terror group. Six of the nine members arrested were identified by the Philippine authorities to the US government as Iraqi agents. So counting Khalid Mohammed and Ramzi Yousef, there were at least eight Iraqi agents involved in the Abu Sayef cell in the Philippines that helped Nichols plan and carry out the OKC bombing.

There is now a public debate about whether or not to go to war against Iraq and Saddam. The debate so far has been framed and deliberately limited by the White House and in Congress as to whether or not Saddam has weapons of mass destruction and if he will in the future use them sooner rather than later against the US.

It is possible that Congress and the American people and the world will not be adequately persuaded of the need to remove Saddam now based solely on the weapons of mass destruction arguments that may not yet be compelling and verifiable enough to enough people.

The case should be made by the White House to Congress and to the American people and to the world (UN, Europe,etc.) that the US has the right of self defense for the acts of war committed by Saddam and Iraq against Americans in the 9/11 attacks, the OKC bombing and the 1993 WTC attack. In fact these acts of war against the US are vastly more compelling and provable than weapons of mass destruction that Saddam has hidden but cannot be completely verified.

The FBI and CIA and previous administrations have many skeletons in their closet for their connivance, for their not stopping, and for their not telling the American people about the role of Iraq in the 9/11, OKC and 1993 WTC attacks against America. Please see my article “FBI and DOJ Connivance Permeates, Interconnects Terror Attacks” on the FreeRepublic.com dated August 15, 2002.

The White House should immediately and urgently make the strongest case possible against Saddam and Iraq, namely Saddam’s use of Iraqi agents in the attacks on Americans. If the White House fails to do so out of trying to protect FBI and administration failures in the past, then the White House would be performing a great disservice to America and could be held responsible for future Iraq attacks on Americans if the result should be that action is not taken against Iraq and Saddam soon enough

The White House should first worry about saving Americans from Iraq and Saddam before the White House worries about saving political careers and failed FBI and DOJ officials.

Mylroie, Clarke Blind to Iraq's al Qaeda Connection, WSJ

From: Laurie Mylroie
Subject: Mylroie, Clarke Blind to Iraq's al Qaeda Connection, WSJ
Date: Thu, 01 Apr 2004 21:46:30 -0800

The Wall Street Journal
COMMENTARY
Very Awkward Facts
By LAURIE MYLROIE
April 2, 2004

The credibility of Clinton counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke has come
under withering fire. He has been caught in error after error, omission
after omission. I can attest to one error more: a highly revealing error
that tells us a great deal about who Richard Clarke really is.

Mr. Clarke singles me out for special criticism in his book, "Against All
Enemies." This is not surprising. He believes that Islamic terrorism is the
work of a few individual criminals, many of them relatives. I have for years
gathered the evidence that shows that terrorism is something more than a
mom-and-pop operation: that it is supported by powerful states, very much
including Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Mr. Clarke is a man famously intolerant of those who disagree with him. When
he cannot win the argument, he cheats. And that is what he has done again in
the pages of his book. In order to explain why he opposed the war with Iraq,
Mr. Clarke mischaracterizes the arguments of those of us who favored it. The
key mischaracterization turns on an important intelligence debate about the
identity of the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. This
mastermind goes by the name of "Ramzi Yousef." But who was "Ramzi Yousef"?

The evidence suggests that "Ramzi Yousef" had close connections to the Iraqi
security services. This evidence has impressed, among others, former CIA
chief James Woolsey, and Richard Perle, former head of the Defense Policy
Board. Mr. Clarke calls the Yousef-Saddam connection an "utterly
discredited" theory, unworthy of serious debate. He likes the phrase so
much, he even uses it on the dust jacket of his book. But let's review the
facts:

* Fact #1: "Ramzi Yousef" entered the U.S. in September 1992 on an Iraqi
passport, with stamps showing a journey beginning in Baghdad. This fact is
attested by the inspector who admitted Yousef into the U.S. Yet Mr. Clarke
contends that Yousef entered the U.S. without a passport.

* Fact #2: The sole remaining fugitive from the 1993 bombing, Abdul Rahman
Yasin, is an Iraqi. After the attack, Yasin fled to Iraq. The Iraqi regime
rewarded Yasin with a house and monthly stipend. Yet Mr. Clarke claims,
incredibly, that the Iraqis jailed Yasin.

* Fact #3: Seven men were indicted in the 1993 attack. Two of the seven,
Yousef and Yasin, have Iraqi connections. Yet Mr. Clarke inflates the number
of participants to 12, so as to create the impression that the presence of
one or two men with Iraqi connections was no big deal.

* Fact #4: The truth is, we don't really know much about the prisoner
bearing the name "Ramzi Yousef." Judge Kevin Duffy, who presided over
Yousef's two trials, observed at sentencing: "We don't even know what your
real name is." Yet Mr. Clarke claims to know what the judge did not: Yousef,
he writes, "was born Abdul Basit in Pakistan and grew up in Kuwait where his
father worked."

To reach this conclusion, Mr. Clarke has to ignore a forest of awkward
facts. In late 1992, according to court documents, Yousef went to the
Pakistani consulate in New York with photocopies of the 1984 and 1988
passports of Abdul Basit Karim (those documents have Karim born in Kuwait).
Yousef claimed to be Karim, saying he had lost his passport and needed a new
one to return home. He received a temporary passport, in the name of Abdul
Basit Karim, which he used to flee New York the night of the Trade Center
bombing.

Karim was, indeed, a real person, a Pakistani reared in Kuwait. After
completing high school in Kuwait, Karim studied for three years in Britain.
He graduated from the Swansea Institute in June 1989 and returned home,
where he got a job in Kuwait's Planning Ministry. He was there a year later,
when Iraq invaded.

Kuwait maintained an alien resident file on Mr. Karim. That file appears to
have been altered to create a false identity or "legend" for the terrorist
Yousef. Above all, the file contains a fingerprint card bearing Yousef's
prints. But Yousef is not Karim -- as Judge Duffy implied -- for many
reasons, including the fact that Yousef is 6 feet tall, while Karim was
significantly shorter, according to his teachers at Swansea. They do not
believe their student is the terrorist mastermind. Indeed, according to
Britain's Guardian newspaper, latent fingerprints lifted from material Mr.
Karim left at Swansea bear "no resemblance" to Yousef's prints. They are two
different people.

The fingerprint card in Mr. Karim's file had to have been switched. The
original card bearing his prints was replaced with one bearing Yousef's. The
only party that reasonably could have done so is Iraq, while it occupied
Kuwait, for the evident purpose of creating a "legend" for one of its
terrorist agents.

The debate over Yousef's identity has enormous implications for the 9/11
strikes. U.S. authorities now understand that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
masterminded those attacks. But Mohammed's identity, too, is based on
Kuwaiti documents that pre-date Kuwait's liberation from Iraq. According to
these documents, Mohammed is Ramzi Yousef's "uncle," and two other al Qaeda
masterminds are Yousef's "brothers."

A former deputy chief of Israeli Military Intelligence, Amos Gilboa, has
observed that "it's obvious" that these identities are fabricated. A family
is not at the core of the most ambitious, most lethal series of terrorist
assaults in U.S. history. These are Iraqi agents, given "legends," on the
basis of Kuwait's files, while Iraq occupied the country.

When Mr. Clarke reported, six days after the 9/11 strikes, that no evidence
existed linking them to Iraq, or Iraq to al Qaeda, he was reiterating the
position he and others had taken throughout the Clinton years. They
systematically turned a blind eye to such evidence and failed to pursue
leads that might result in a conclusion of Iraqi culpability. These
officials were charged with defending us "against all enemies." Their own
prejudices blinded them to at least one of our enemies and left the nation
vulnerable.

Ms. Mylroie, an advisor on Iraq to the 1992 Clinton campaign, is author of
"The War Against America" (HarperCollins, 2001)

IS KHALID SHAIKH MOHAMMED (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) AN IRAQI AGENT?

J. Adams
Author of The Persian Gulf Deception
Post Date: March 18th, 2003

"When Iraq occupied Kuwait in 1990 and 1991, it used some Kuwaiti files to create false identities for key agents. It tampered with those files. It tampered with Abdul Basit Karim's files to create a false identity for Ramzi Yousef."

"Questions also exist about Abdul Hakim Murad, who was convicted with Yousef in the plane bombing plot [Ed. Note: a plan to bomb 12 U.S. airplanes in the Philippines] and also claims to be born in Kuwait. Questions also exist about Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed), also involved in the plane bombing, a fugitive who also claims to be born in Kuwait. People should check those files to see if they've been tampered with."

- Quote from Dr. Laurie Mylroie in an interview with Frontline for the episode dubbed "Gunning For Saddam". Dr. Mylroie is an Adjunct Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute which originally published her book "The War Against America: Saddam Hussein and the World Trade Center Attacks"

"What little is known about the sister (of Khalid) includes one compelling piece of information: She is thought to be the mother of Abdul Karim Basit, better known as Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the man convicted of masterminding the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York."

-The Plots and Designs of Al Qaeda's Engineer: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed), Los Angeles Times, December 22, 2002

"After September 11 many, including myself, believe that the attacks may be the result of a partnership between the terrorists and a state with a sophisticated intelligence service and a program of biological warfare. If this proves to be true and Iraq is shown to be the terrorists' partners, there is no reason for anyone to ask, 'Why didn't someone warn us?' because Laurie Mylroie did."

-R. James Woolsey, former CIA Director

"In this man's heart (Osama bin Laden) you'll find an insistence,
a strange determination that he will reach one day the tunnels of the White House
and will bomb it with everything that is in it.....with the seriousness of the Bedouin
of the desert about the way he will try to bomb the Pentagon after he destroys the White House.
...the revolutionary bin Laden is insisting very convincingly that he will strike America on the arm that is already hurting.
That the man....will curse the memory of Frank Sinatra every time he hears his songs."
(A reference to Sinatra's "New York, New York"?)

- From the Iraqi publication Al-Nasiriya: July 21, 2001
(Also noted in the Wall Street Journal, "Saddam and the Next 9/11", 2/14/03)

Does this man look 38?

Is Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed), the mastermind of 9/11 who was captured March 1st in Pakistan, an Iraqi agent?

There is reason to suspect he is and, what's more, since he is now in custody, it should be possible for authorities to verify whether or not he is who people think he is. And should Khalid Mohammed NOT be the real Khalid Mohammed, then the smoking gun has been found that establishes Iraqi complicity in the terrorist attacks on the U.S. in September 2001.

On the tenth anniversary of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, President George W. Bush gave a key speech at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washingtonian think tank, concerning Iraq and the seemingly inevitable war to come. The Presidential address focused on the direct threat Iraq poses to the United States and her allies:

"...We're opposing the greatest danger in the war on terror, outlaw regimes arming with weapons of mass destruction. In Iraq, a dictator is building and hiding weapons that could enable him to dominate the Middle East and intimidate the civilized world and we will not allow it. This same tyrant has close ties to terrorist organizations and could supply them with the terrible means to strike this country, and America will not permit it. The danger posed by Saddam Hussein and his weapons cannot be ignored or wished away. The danger must be confronted. We hope that the Iraqi regime will meet the demands of the United Nations and disarm fully and peacefully. If it does not we are prepared to disarm Iraq by force. Either way, this danger will be removed."

-President George W. Bush, 2/26/03

On September 11th of 2001, terrorists achieved what was unsuccessully attempted in 1993: the destruction of the Twin Towers,the ultimate symbol of American power. In the aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks and subsequent Anthrax mailings, Washington awoke to the potential threat posed to America by Saddam's Iraq. In his speech on February 26th, the President highlighted that Saddam's pursuit of weapons of mass destruction and his apparent willingness to work with radical terrorist networks like al Qaeda constitutes a clear and present danger to the American people. Consequently, the United States is on a path to war intended to remove Saddam Hussein from power and eliminate the Iraqi threat.

But is, in fact, Saddam Hussein's Iraq a terrorist state as branded by the President Bush? This is the key question in the wake of 9/11. Clearly if Saddam was involved in 9/11, then George Bush's concern is warranted and war against Iraq is seemingly justified.

None of what occurred in September of 2001 came as a surprise to Dr. Laurie Mylroie. For years she has been telling the world that Saddam Hussein is likely behind the spectacular acts of terrorism against U.S. interests the world has been witnessing since Iraq's seeming defeat in the 1991 Gulf War. Following the Gulf War, Saddam Hussein continued to wage the Mother of All Battles covertly through terrorism. While Western intelligence agencies have been easily fooled into blaming "false flags" of moslem extremists that were witting or unwitting stooges of Iraqi operatives, Dr. Mylroie has managed to uncover the true story which has very serious implications for what may come next.

In her book, "The War Against America: Saddam Hussein and the World Trade Center Attacks", Dr. Mylroie judiciously reexamines the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and shows how the mastermind of the terrorist plot, Ramzi Yousef, is in fact an Iraqi intelligence operative. This is mainly established by the fact that Yousef fled the U.S. using the false identity of Abdul Basit Karim, a Kuwaiti who disappeared when Iraq occupied Kuwait in August 1990. In a November 2001 interview, Dr. Mylroie summarized her case as follows:

Mylroie: Well, the first thing is, people should understand the general context. New York F-B-I, particularly its director, Jim Fox, believed that the 1993 World Trade Center bombing was an Iraqi intelligence operation. There are Iraqis all around the fringe of the plot, including one who is an indicted fugitive who came from Baghdad before the bombing [and] returned to Baghdad afterwards. But I think the key piece of evidence is the identity of Ramzi Yousef. He came on an Iraqi passport in the name of Ramzi Yousef, which is how he’s known, and fled the night of the bombing on a Pakistani passport in the name of Abdul Basit Karim. There really was an individual, Abdul Basit Karim, born and raised in Kuwait. He graduated from high school in Kuwait at the age of eighteen; studied for three years in Britain; got his degree in the summer of 1989; returned to Kuwait, where he got a job in the planning ministry; and was in Kuwait when Iraq invaded.

Host: And you’ve argued that Iraqi intelligence assumed that man’s identity and gave it to their agent, Ramzi Yousef.

Mylroie: Iraqi intelligence doctored the file of Abdul Basit Karim to create a false identity for Ramzi Yousef.

Host: Now, do you have hard evidence of that, or is this your best surmise from the evidence you’ve looked at?

Mylroie: The file in Kuwait was doctored with. There should have been copies of the passport of Abdul Basit Karim, with the information on the first page -- the picture, the signature -- those were taken out. Information was put in that should not be there: above all, the information that Abdul Basit and his family left Kuwait on August 26th, 1990, traveling from Kuwait to Iraq, crossing from Iraq to Iran at Salamchah which was the border-crossing point, on the way to Pakistani Baluchistan where they live now.

Ramzi Yousef was captured in 1995 after his next major plot was foiled in the Phillipines. This "Project Bojinka" plot would have involved bombing 11 U.S. airliners and driving an explosive-laden airplane into the CIA headquarters or Pentagon in a single day of infamy. Clearly this plot, in combination with the first attempt to take down the Twin Towers in 1993, was a forerunner of what eventually was successfully hatched on 9-11. Notably, Yousef's partner in the Bojinka plot was ostensibly a Kuwaiti pilot named Abdul Hakim Murad who claimed to have grown up with Abdul Basit. Of course, if Abdul Basit was not really Ramzi Yousef, then Abdul Murad would recognize this, suggesting that Murad's Kuwaiti identity was false as well.

The operational planner of Project Bojinka was Khalid Mohammed, who was accordingly indicted in 1996 in the Southern District of New York. Khalid is also believed to have worked with Ramzi Yousef in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Time and time again there have been reports in the media about how Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) is Ramzi Yousef's uncle. This, however, is slightly off the mark. Khalid Mohammed is, in fact, the uncle of Abdul Basit. In an article entitled, "The Plots and Designs of Al Qaeda's Engineer: Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed)", the Los Angeles Times uncovered the following ciritical piece of information:

"What little is known about the sister (of Khalid) includes one compelling piece of information: She is thought to be the mother of Abdul Karim Basit, better known as Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the man convicted of masterminding the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York."

The implication of this point can not be overstated.

Given that Ramzi Yousef, as judiciously examined in Laurie Mylroie's "The War Against America", is not Abdul Basit, obviously Khalid Mohammed would have noticed the man he was working with in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 1995 Project Bojinka plot was not his nephew.

The logical explanation is that Khalid Mohammed, like Abdul Basit and Hakim Murad, is a stolen Kuwaiti identity. As with Basit, since this identity was undoubtedly stolen when Iraq occupied Kuwait in August 1990, the implication is that Mohammed's identity was stolen by Iraqi intelligence for Saddam's sake. Thus, the family of Khalid Mohammed and Abdul Basit, as well as Abdul Murad who grew up with Basit and was the son of a Kuwait pilot, were likely among the 600+ Kuwaitis that disappeared when Iraq took over the emirate in 1990. These identities were then handed over to Iraqi agents that became key operational planners in al Qaeda and carried out Saddam's revenge in the form of brazen terrorist plots against the United States including 9/11.

NEXT - the Baluchistan connection.

The Baluch Connection:
Is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed tied to Baghdad?
BY LAURIE MYLROIE

The Wall Street Journal
Tuesday, March 18, 2003

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, is a Pakistani Baluch. So is Ramzi Yousef, who masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In 1995, together with a third Baluch, Abdul Hakam Murad, the two collaborated in an unsuccessful plot to bomb 12 U.S. airplanes. Years later, as head of al Qaeda's military committee, Mohammed reportedly planned the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings, as well as the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000.

Why should the Baluch seek to kill Americans? Sunni Muslims, they live in the desert regions of eastern Iran and western Pakistan. The U.S. has little to do with them; there is no evident motive for this murderous obsession. The Baluch do, however, have longstanding ties to Iraqi intelligence, reflecting their militant opposition to the Shiite regime in Tehran. Wafiq Samarrai, former chief of Iraqi military intelligence, explains that Iraqi intelligence worked with the Baluch during the Iran-Iraq war. According to Mr. Samarrai, Iraqi intelligence has well-established contacts with the Baluch in both Iran and Pakistan.

Mohammed, Yousef and Murad, supposedly born and raised in Kuwait, are part of a tight circle. Mohammed is said to be Yousef's maternal uncle; Murad is supposed to be Yousef's childhood friend. And U.S. authorities have identified as major al Qaeda figures three other Baluch: two brothers of Yousef and a cousin. The official position is thus that a single family is at the center of almost all the major terrorist attacks against U.S. targets since 1993. The existence of intelligence ties between Iraq and the Baluch is scarcely noted. Indeed, these Baluch terrorists began attacking the U.S. long before al Qaeda did.

Notably, this Baluch "family" is from Kuwait. Their identities are based on documents from Kuwaiti files that predate Kuwait's liberation from Iraqi occupation, and which are therefore unreliable. While in Kuwait, Iraqi intelligence could have tampered with files to create false identities (or "legends") for its agents. So, rather than one family, these terrorists are, quite plausibly, elements of Iraq's Baluch network, given legends by Iraqi intelligence.

SOMEONE NAMED Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was born in Kuwait to Pakistani parents on April 19, 1965. After high school in Kuwait, he enrolled at Chowan College in North Carolina in January 1984, before transferring to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, where he received his degree in December 1986. Is the Sept. 11 mastermind the same person as the student? He need not be. Perhaps the real Mohammed died (possibly during Iraq's occupation of Kuwait), and a terrorist assumed his identity.

Mohammed should now be just under 38, but the terrorist's arrest photo, showing graying sideburns and heavy jowls, seems to suggest an older man (admittedly, a subjective judgment). Yet this question can be pursued more reliably. Three sets of information exist regarding Mohammed: information from U.S. sources from the 1980s (INS and college documents, as well as individuals who may remember him); Kuwaiti documents; and information since the liberation of Kuwait (from his arrest, the interrogation of other al Qaeda prisoners, and the investigation into the 1995 plane-bombing plot).

The Kuwaiti documents should be scrutinized for irregularities that suggest tampering. The information about Mohammed from the '80s needs to be compared with the information that has emerged since Kuwait's liberation. The terrorist may prove to be taller (or shorter) than the student. Interrogators might ask him what he remembers of the colleges he is claimed to have attended. Acquaintances--like Gaith Faile, who taught Mohammed at Chowan and who told the Journal, "He wasn't a radical"--should be asked to provide a positive identification.

Along these lines, Kuwait's file on Yousef is telling. Yousef entered the U.S. on an Iraqi passport in the name of Ramzi Yousef, but fled on a passport in the name of Mohammed's supposed nephew, Abdul Basit Karim. But Kuwait's file on Karim was tampered with. The file should contain copies of the front pages of his passport, including picture and signature. They are missing. Extraneous information was inserted--a notation that he and his family left Kuwait on Aug. 26, 1990, traveling from Kuwait to Iraq, entering Iran at Salamcheh on their way to Pakistani Baluchistan. But people do not provide authorities an itinerary when crossing a border. Moreover, there was no Kuwaiti government then. Iraq occupied Kuwait and would have had to put that information into the file.

KARIM ATTENDED college in Britain. His teachers there strongly doubted that their student was the terrorist mastermind. Most notably, Karim was short, at most 5-foot-8; Yousef is 6 feet tall. Nevertheless, Yousef's fingerprints are in Karim's file. Probably, the fingerprint card in Karim's file was switched, the original replaced by one with Yousef's prints on it. James Fox, who headed the FBI investigation into the 1993 WTC bombing, has been quoted as affirming that Iraqi involvement was the theory "accepted by most of the veteran investigators." Pakistani investigators were likewise convinced that Yousef had close links with the MKO, an anti-Iranian terrorist group run by Iraq, and conducted a bomb attack in Mashhad, Iran, in 1994.

U.S. authorities may unravel the story very quickly if they pursue the question of Mohammed's identity, instead of assuming they know who their captive really is. As for the larger issue of these murderously anti-American Baluch, that matter may become clear soon, once U.S. forces take Baghdad--and take possession of Iraq's intelligence files.

Ms. Mylroie is the author of "The War Against America" (HarperCollins, 2001). A related editorial appears here.

ALSO SEE: IRAQI LINKS TO TERRORISM AGAINST AMERICA

But have you asked yourself why the administration is not making this case?

I think they have, to some extent. And they've been successful, to some extent. More than 50% of Americans believe Iraq played a role in the 9/11 attacks among others.

But I share your frustration. The links between Hussein and AQ are so glaring and so abundant, nobody should be able to push the "no connection" mantra with a straight face or an ounce of credibility. Yet they do, and get away with it all the time.

When I look at all of this information, I don't ask myself why they haven't made the case. I ask myself how they can make the case more effectively. There's a lot of information out there, and the average American swing-voter may not have the attention-span to follow this stuff to its obvious conclusion. "How do we reach those people with the truth?" is the question we need to be asking ourselves.

Great work!

ping!

Please FReepmail me if you want on or off my infrequent ‘miscellaneous’ ping list.

bttt; thanks for posting this.

Found your thread in a search today I was doing on Gore, Gorelick and TWA 800, here is some further info I found that is interesting:

On Aug. 22, 1996, just a few days before the start of the Democratic National Convention, Ms. Gorelick oversaw a critical Justice Department meeting with the FBI. Immediately after this meeting, as it happened, all serious inquiry into the fate of TWA 800 came to an end.

On the next day, for instance, the FAA began to inquire whether any dog-training exercises had ever taken place on the plane that would become TWA 800. On the same day, as CNN reported, the FBI now claimed publicly for the first time that the explosive residue found along the right wing "could have been brought on the plane by a passenger and was not part of a bomb." Likewise, after the meeting, the FBI would do no more eyewitness interviews, at least not for the next two months. The Bureau only did a handful after that – and all of those for the wrong reasons.

WND

So...it seems Gore and Jaime Gorelick of the 9/11 commission were in collusion on the cover-up of TWA Flight 800.

It should be noted that the USS Cole was on its way to enforce sanctions on Iraq when it was bombed. The USS Cole was the second attempt to take out a US ship- the first being the failed plot on USS The Sullivans which is believed to have been a palestinian terrorist operation (their boat sank before reaching the US ship).

Iraqi officers have said that al Qaeda were in Iraq and were being trainied with the help of Uday. On Hussein's birthday in one year, Uday put on a demonstration for his father where a US ship was attacked using divers.

Insight on the News, Nov 19, 2001, by Kelly Patricia O'Meara

Who's behind the deadly anthrax letters? That is the hot-button question of the moment. While federal law-enforcement officials have come up short in connecting the postal poison to Osama bin Laden, Iraq or any other individual terrorist or state sponsor of terrorism, experts well-versed in terrorism wonder why more attention hasn't been focused on a connection much closer to home.

For example, considerable evidence that may prove helpful in the ongoing investigation has been made public in other recent terrorism cases. Nowhere is this more evident than in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and the relationship of convicted bombing conspirator Terry Nichols to elements of Iraqi intelligence.

During the trial of Timothy McVeigh, the convicted mastermind behind the Oklahoma City bombing, information surfaced concerning Nichols' frequent visits to the Philippines; McVeigh attorney Stephen Jones later wrote about this extensively in his book Others Unknown: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing Conspiracy. According to Jones' investigation, Nichols made numerous trips to the Philippines beginning in 1990, many lasting more than a month.

Nichols reportedly attended a meeting in the early 1990s on the predominantly Muslim island of Mindanao, a hotbed of fundamentalist activities, at which Ramzi Yousef, Abdul Hakim Murad and Wali Khan Amin Shah were present. The themes of the meeting were "bombing activities, providing firearms and ammunition, training in making and handling bombs." Yousef was the mastermind of the World Trade Center bombing in 1993; Murad and Shah were convicted in a 1996 conspiracy to blow up 12 U.S. jetliners.

Laurie Mylroie, a Harvard-trained Ph.D. who is an expert on Iraqi terrorism and author of Study of Revenge: The First World Trade Center Attack and Saddam Hussein's War Against America, was a consultant to Jones during the Oklahoma City investigation. She tells INSIGHT "the connection of Terry Nichols, the Philippines and Ramzi Yousef is a very important point that neither the FBI nor the press pursued." Mylroie adds, "I doubt that Nichols has ever been asked about his connections to Yousef because the government didn't want to know. It wanted to say, `Here are the perpetrators; we arrested them and we brought them to justice. Case closed.'"

Mylroie continues: "The fact is, Ramzi Yousef was in the Philippines at the same time as Nichols and visited the same city out of which the Oklahoma City bombing was planned. I doubt that connection ever was pursued. Only the people in charge of the investigation can explain their motives in failing to focus public attention on this, but I can guess. Remember that before the bombing [President Bill] Clinton was in deep political trouble but, by dealing with it in the fashion he did, his kite rose and he was able to make it look like the FBI did a splendid, knockdown investigation. It was kind of like, `Okay, Tim McVeigh is the mastermind; Terry Nichols assisted him; don't ask any more questions] That settled, with Clinton's tremendous capacity to feel everyone's pain, he improved his own position."

But suppose the investigation had been done another way, says the terrorist expert, "such as saying, 'Terry Nichols has all these suspicious contacts in the Philippines, and we're gonna pursue them because it may be there's been a foreign bombing on American soil] More important is that there were other Americans involved in the McVeigh/Nichols bombing, and they could be involved today in other terrorist activities. But the FBI just isn't going to recognize it. The kind of irresponsibility that I and others believe the Clinton administration committed is so mind-boggling that many well-meaning people just can't believe it, even though there is significant evidence -- a standard of probable cause. They find it hard to accept because it would follow that the White House and the FBI were corrupt."

A recent Fox News program appeared to support Mylroie's contention of an FBI cover-up. Paul Bedard of U.S. News and World Report announced on the Fox and Friends show that "top defense officials say that in all the evidence used against Timothy McVeigh to execute him in the Oklahoma City bombing, that he had Iraqi telephone numbers on his person. He had information about Iraq which has led some officials to think that he was an Iraqi agent and maybe was doing Saddam Hussein's business in Oklahoma City."

Bedard further claimed that "the FBI says this is crazy, there is no evidence. DOD [Department of Defense] comes back and says, `That's because you didn't tell us it was a cover-up.' The theory is that he [McVeigh] got those numbers from some militia groups out west which he was associating with. This led the FBI to tell the guys at the Pentagon, `Go fight your war.'"

Bedard's "news" is news to those who conducted the investigation of the Oklahoma City bombing. This startling information never was brought forward at any time during the investigation or trial. At no point in the last six years nor the $50 million investigation did such evidence ever surface or did anyone connect McVeigh to an Iraqi agent, let alone turn up "Iraqi telephone numbers" on his person or in his effects. Jones tells INSIGHT that "we spent considerable time and money investigating the connection between Nichols and the Philippines and Iraq, but I certainly don't know anything about McVeigh and Iraqi telephone numbers."

While Nichols' ties to the Iraqis are well-documented in numerous books and independent investigations, such as the recent report of Oklahoma state Rep. Charles Keys, he also had ties to other militant groups. For instance, he attended meetings in Michigan of the Posse Comitatus, a militant, right-wing organization founded by Col. William Potter Gale and headed by James Wickstrom. Members of Posse Comitatus, according to legal documents released prior to McVeigh's trial, have for years been in contact with Iraq and other rogue Arab nations that share a hatred of Israel.

This fits with the Oklahoma City defense team's conclusions concerning Dennis Mahon, long suspected of being a player in the conspiracy to bomb the Murrah building. Mahon is described in Jones' book as "a virulent racist and Three of a kind? Anthrax envelopes sent to Daschle and Brokaw, top and bottom, and the Atlanta abortion-bombing letter have similar script. avowed enemy of the U.S. government" and is a high-ranking member of the White Aryan Resistance (WAR) movement. The defense team reports that its investigation shows "the Iraqi government has given Dennis Mahon thousands of dollars over the past six years, and Mahon has been banned from entering Canada and the United Kingdom and is classified by Interpol as an international terrorist." The FBI did not bother to interview Mahon in connection to the Oklahoma City bombing.

Beyond Nichols and Mahon, there are others with connections to domestic militant groups sympathetic to Islamic fundamentalists. These include Larry Wayne Harris, a licensed clinical and public-health microbiologist who was arrested in Las Vegas in February 1998 for conspiring to "possess biological agents and toxin, to wit: anthrax and anthrax precursors for use as a weapon." At the time of Harris' arrest he was on probation for a 1995 conviction for fraudulently obtaining bubonic-plague toxins. According to the 1998 Las Vegas FBI complaint, "Harris told a group about plans to place a globe of bubonic-plague toxins in a New York City subway station, where it would be broken by a passing subway train, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths"

Furthermore, in a 1996 letter to Aryan Nation founder Pastor Richard Butler, the white-supremacist leader says Harris requested that Butler publish his manuscript on germ warfare, in the preface of which Harris described an encounter with an Iraqi who provided a lengthy commentary on biological warfare and detailed the progress of the Iraqi program in the United States. Butler did not publish the manuscript but confirms that, until his arrest in 1998, Harris had been a member of the Aryan Nation.

Whether any of these men or organizations are involved in or have knowledge of the current flurry of anthrax attacks is anyone's guess,just as it is anyone's guess whether anyone in law enforcement is so much as curious about what these organizations and individuals might have to contribute to the current investigation.

Still there are other clues pointing to possible domestic involvement in the anthrax attacks that might be checked. Beyond the acknowledgment that all the anthrax-infected letters have been mailed from within the United States, the letters sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) and NBC Nightly News anchorman Tom Brokaw also share similarities to past domestic terrorism.

For instance, federal law-enforcement officials have confirmed that the handwriting on both the Daschle and Brokaw letters is the same, and the media, FBI, and Daschle himself have referred to the handwriting as "childlike scrawl." An identical reference to a "childlike scrawl" was made by Associated Press reporter Russ Bynum in a June 1997 article updating the investigation into a series of bombings around Atlanta. Authorities "released a letter claiming responsibility for the Jan. 16 [abortion] clinic blast and the Feb. 21 [gay] nightclub bombing [that] was written by the Army of God," Bynum reported. "The letter is scrawled in childlike block letters."

That letter spoke of the "ungodly communist regime in New York" and called for "death to the New World Order" and bore the nom de guerre "signature" of accused abortion-clinic bomber Eric Rudolph.

In addition to the letters sent to Daschle and Brokaw, more than 100 abortion clinics also received letters containing white powder, of which a handful made reference to the Army of God, an extremist antiabortion group.

The connection may be of some interest because the FBI charged fugitive antiabortionist Rudolph for the Atlanta abortion clinic, gay nightclub and Centennial Park bombings. The Army of God claimed responsibility for those bombings, but it appears the FBI believes Rudolph himself uses the term the "Army of God."

It is not known whether Rudolph is a member of the Aryan Nation, but it has been reported widely that he lived in a trailer at the Christian Identity Church of Israel in Schell City, Mo., and as a teenager participated in at least one Aryan Nation ceremony. Furthermore, the FBI has produced a profile of the alleged bomber that states: "Rudolph learned the radical ideology of the Christian Identity Movement as a teen-ager and espouses the view that the white race is God's chosen nation." The FBI maintains that Rudolph appears to have been in contact with the Aryan Nation.

Butler of the Aryan Nation tells INSIGHT any allegations that his organization is involved in any of the current terrorism events are false. According to Butler, "We don't have anything to do with the Iraqis. They're not white people, but we're sympathetic to them. We're not into spreading plagues, but I say more power to whoever [sic] is doing what he thinks is best. That's between him and his God. But we've never trained with the Iraqis or learned from them how to build bombs. For that you just have to go on the Internet to get the information."

When asked if it was possible that a member of his organization could be involved in the mailing of the deadly anthrax letters to take advantage of the current crisis, Butler says he couldn't rule it out. "Biological is something that is beyond most of us, but it could be a copycat thing or Eric Rudolph or something like that." Laughing, Butler puts the situation in perspective, "They had 500 FBI guys looking for him [Rudolph] in the hills of North Carolina and now we've got an army looking for bin Laden. I guess this shows that they like to make a target of one man at a time"

Affiliations don't necessarily make a connection or prove culpability, but in the midst of the largest FBI investigation in history there are many who are wondering why these groups and individuals have not been questioned. They might have useful information.

KELLY PATRICIA O'MEARA IS AN INVESTIGATIVE REPORTER FOR Insight.

On Hussein's birthday in one year, Uday put on a demonstration for his father where a US ship was attacked using divers.

I'm working on formatting that article ("Inside Saddam's Terror Regime", Vanity Fair, 2002), putting it on an external site and linking it here. It's extremely long, but hopefully I'll have it up by the end of the week.

It's an incredible article.

Thanks for the ping - excellent bookmark!

Ramzi Yousef

Blowing Things Up

Thinking Bigger

Project Bojinka

Is 'Waly Samar' an Iraqi Bioterrorist on U.S. Soil?

ALSO SEE:

A Washington Post Expert's Pick on Terrorism and the Middle East

THE WAR AGAINST AMERICA

Saddam Hussein and the World Trade Center Attacks:A Study of Revenge

(Previously Published as Study of Revenge)

The New Jackals: Ramzi Yousef, Osama bin Laden and the Future of Terrorism (1999)

Mylroie, Clarke Blind to Iraq's al Qaeda Connection, WSJ

IS KHALID SHAIKH MOHAMMED (Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) AN IRAQI AGENT?

Saddam Hussein and the World Trade Center Attacks:
A Study of Revenge