Posted on 05/05/2004 9:16:00 AM PDT by epluribus_2
http://www.intelwire.com/khalifa100603.html
INS Deported al Qaeda-Linked Suspect Just Days After Oklahoma Bombing
Gov't Returned Evidence, Erased Charges, Despite Ties to OKC Bombing Confession
By J.M. BERGER
Seven days after the Oklahoma City bombing, the INS agreed to deport a brother-in-law of Osama bin Laden who had been implicated as a possible accessory to the attack by a jailhouse confession and documents relating to bomb construction.
At the same time, the government agreed to remove allegations of terrorism from Mohammed Jamal Khalifa's INS records and to return evidence seized from his luggage.
Arrested in San Francisco on an immigration violation in December 1994, Khalifa was a figure of primary interest to the FBI, which suspected him of assisting al Qaeda operatives Ramzi Yousef and Abdul Hakim Murad in a plot to bomb a dozen U.S. airliners from their base in the Philippines earlier that year, according to Peter Lance (http://www.peterlance.com), author of "1000 Years for Revenge," a new book covering the FBI's investigation of Yousef.
Evidence in the FBI's possession at the time potentially implicated the Saudi businessman in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the airliner bombing plot and the Oklahoma City bombing. Khalifa was formally named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1993 New York City Landmarks bombing plot.
LINKS WERE SUSPECTED EARLY
Khalifa's deportation was ordered after direct intervention in the case by then-Secretary of State Warren Christopher in January 1995, but the Saudi businessman fought the action in immigration court through April, according to court documents and newspaper accounts.
By April 1995, both Yousef and Murad were already in U.S. custody, according to Lance. Interrogation reports obtained by Lance also show that both Yousef and Murad were questioned about their links to Khalifa within hours of entering U.S. custody.
On the basis of evidence in the FBI's hands at the time a deal was finally approved in April, Khalifa was at minimum a material witness in the three biggest criminal cases in the history of the United States.
On the day of the Oklahoma bombing, Murad told a prison guard that the "Liberation Army" was responsible for the attack, an allegation he repeated to the FBI the following day, according to documents obtained by Lance, who contributed to this article.
Convicted World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef had claimed responsibility for the 1993 WTC attack on behalf of the Liberation Army. Items seized from his Manila apartment and at the time of his arrest also contained references to the group.
According to Lance, Philippines investigators had forwarded a complete report on the Manila airline-bombing plot, known as Project Bojinka, to U.S. authorities by April 1995. Khalifa's deportation wasn't completed until May 1995, according to a contemporaneous UPI report.
Just one day before the Oklahoma City bombing, on April 18, Khalifa had made an immigration court appearance in which his attorney continued a monthlong fight against INS efforts to deport the Saudi businessman to Jordan, according to contemporaneous newspaper accounts in the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner.
On April 19, Timothy McVeigh used a truck bomb to blow up the Alfred E. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. On April 21, his accomplice, Terry Nichols, surrendered to police.
By April 23, the Chicago Tribune printed one of the first news stories about Nichols' longstanding connection to Cebu, a city in the south of the Philippines. In 1990, Nichols married a Filipina he met through a "mail-order bride" service and visited her family the country several times subsequently.
His last trip to the Philippines took place from November 1994 to January 1995, the same period that Yousef and his coconspirators had been working out of Manila.
Khalifa had lived in the Philippines for several years prior to the U.S. visit, according to dozens of sources. Contemporaneous news accounts of his INS proceedings detailed Khalifa's Philippines history as well as his alleged ties to Yousef, which were well-known.
While in Manila, Khalifa founded a series of businesses and charities that federal investigators now claim transferred money and resources on behalf of al Qaeda. Philippines investigators charged that Khalifa funded the Bojinka plot through a charity front in Manila, according to Lance.
But the FBI was in possession of even more evidence suggesting Khalifa could be linked to the 1993 WTC attack, Bojinka and Oklahoma City.
RECIPES CONSISTENT WITH OKC
An indictment of the Benevolence International Foundation in 2002 claims that Khalifa was in possession of a phone number connected to the Bojinka plot when detained by the INS in December. According to that indictment and Bojinka trial records, the Manila terror cell was in frequent contact with Khalifa during November 1994.
The 2002 indictment alleged that an alias used by Khalifa was found on one of several bomb-making manuals brought into the U.S. in 1992 by an accomplice of Ramzi Yousef.
Those manuals included detailed instructions about how to build improvised explosives, including recipes for urea nitrate (used in the World Trade Center attack) and ammonium nitrate (used in Oklahoma City), according to trial records.
The manuals included instructions on the use and handling of every major component currently believed to have been part of the Oklahoma City bomb, including ammonium nitrate, nitromethane, PETN, blasting caps and instructions on creating shaped charges for use in destroying buildings.
The manuals also contained entries on using hydrogen peroxide and aluminum powder. Ammonium nitrate, hydrogen peroxide, aluminum powder, diesel fuel and blasting caps were found at the Michigan farm of James Nichols, brother of Terry, during an FBI search around April 21, according to a criminal complaint filed in April 1995 but subsequently dropped.
The Bojinka airline-bombing plot had been exposed by an accidental fire in Yousef's apartment in early January 1995, which resulted in the arrest of Abdul Hakim Murad (the prisoner who had claimed responsibility in the Oklahoma bombing). In that apartment and in related phone records, Philippines police also discovered information related to Khalifa, according to court filings. When Yousef was arrested in February 1995 in Pakistan, he was carrying one of Khalifa's business cards.
A spiral-bound notebook seized when Murad was arrested contained a page of instructions on the properties of nitromethane, one of the Oklahoma City bomb components, according to evidence presented at Murad's trial. Murad had used the notebook to record instructions on bomb-making provided by Yousef, who is universally considered an explosives genius.
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF NITROMETHANE
The notation on nitromethane is located in a section of the notebook that can be dated to late December 1994, at which time Terry Nichols was staying in the Philippines, according to trial testimony.
The entry on nitromethane appears to differ from other content in the notebook, which consisted largely of shopping lists for the Bojinka plot and notes on the manufacture of chemicals specifically used in that plan, as described at length during Murad's trial.
Nitromethane was not visibly used in the Bojinka plan, according to trial testimony, but it was a significant component of the OKC bomb.
The basic idea for that bomb is widely thought to have been inspired by the racist novel "The Turner Diaries," which describes white supremacists using an ammonium nitrate-fuel oil bomb to blow up FBI headquarters.
According to author Lance, Ramzi Yousef employed a similar ammonium nitrate-diesel fuel oil bomb in a thwarted attempt to destroy the Israeli embassy in Bangkok just a few months earlier, in March 1994.
McVeigh and Nichols followed the "Turner" blueprint closely, but the choice to replace fuel oil with nitromethane was a deviation that made the bomb more powerful. The specific recipe appears to have been first used in Oklahoma City.
Subsequent to the Oklahoma City bombing, ammonium nitrate bombs became a favorite weapon of al Qaeda, and have frequently been used in attacks connected with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, one of the Manila plotters.
Yousef had arrived in Manila in November 1994, shortly before Terry Nichols, to begin planning several ambitious terror attacks against U.S. and Western interests.
The al Qaeda cell in Manila consisted of Yousef, Murad, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (now believed to be the mastermind of the September 11 attacks) and Wali Khan Amin Shah, a Malaysian al Qaeda operative who called Khalifa's cell phone several times during November, according to FBI affidavits and other trial testimony.
INS RECORD PURGED, EVIDENCE RETURNED
Prior to the Oklahoma City bombing, Khalifa had been fighting the extradition to Jordan, where he faced a death sentence related to a terror-bombing plot. In court on April 18, he continued fighting the deportation even after his in absentia conviction in Jordan had been overturned and a new trial ordered, as reported at the time in the San Francisco Chronicle.
A key witness in Jordan recanted a confession implicating Khalifa, according to court documents. Khalifa maintained his innocence throughout, saying he knew the Jordan plotters but disavowed them when he learned they were violent.
On April 26, 1995, Khalifa abruptly changed strategy and requested the deportation proceed. His lawyer blamed an "anti-alien climate" generated by the OKC attack for his change of heart.
The U.S. government not only agreed to Khalifa's request for deportation to Jordan, but in exchange for his cooperation it expunged terror-related charges from his INS record, according to contemporaneous newspaper accounts of his INS hearing in the Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner.
According to author Peter Lance, the Justice Department had wanted to hold Khalifa and investigate his alleged ties to terrorism as early as December. But Secretary of State Warren Christopher wrote a three-page letter to Attorney General Janet Reno in January urging that the deportation proceed.
The letter, a copy of which was obtained in the course of this investigation, argued that refusing to deport Khalifa could put the U.S. at a disadvantage when seeking the extradition of suspects from abroad, as well as putting pressure on American relations with Jordan.
As he fought the deportation in immigration court, Khalifa filed a separate civil court suit in March 1995 seeking the return of items seized from his luggage, including literature related to training terrorists in the Philippines, an address book and an electronic organizer listing Wali Khan Amin Shah's phone number in Manila, and immigration papers relating to his return to the Philippines. The documents are described in exhibits related to the civil suit and in a 2002 indictment related to the Benevolence International Foundation.
According to evidence presented during one of Yousef's trials, Shah called a mobile phone number for a "Mr. Jamal" on several occasions in November 1994, while Shah was in Manila making early preparation for the airline-bombing plot. Khalifa's full name was never mentioned in open court during the trial.
Despite the fact that Shah was the subject of an ongoing international manhunt at the time, and Yousef was already under indictment in America, the U.S. attorney's office wrote in late March that it had "no objection" to returning the material seized from Khalifa's luggage. The civil case was amicably closed a short time after Khalifa's deportation was completed in early May.
KHALIFA MAINTAINS INNOCENCE
Khalifa claims to be a philanthropist and businessman, and he has repeatedly and vehemently denied any involvement in terrorist activities, most recently in a September 2003 interview with Arab News.
"I spend all my life helping people," Khalifa tearfully told his immigration judge in April 1995.
While in the Philippines, he founded or directed various charitable operations, including the International Islamic Relief Organization, which has been accused by the FBI of helping fund terrorist activities. According to most accounts, IIRO did take part in some legitimate charitable activities, including funding orphanages and Islamic schools in the Philippines.
"My assessment at the time (1995) was that this was guilt by association in the basest form," Khalifa's attorney Marc Van der Hout told the Christian Science Monitor in early 2003. (Van der Hout did not return an e-mail seeking information related to this story.)
Nevertheless, Khalifa has been repeatedly charged with laundering and moving money on behalf of al Qaeda, particularly in the Philippines. The charges stem from the U.S. government as well as testimony and published accounts from leading terrorism researchers, including Peter Lance, Simon Reeve and Steve Emerson.
The FBI alleges that Khalifa is linked to Yousef, Benevolence International, the Abu Sayyaf Group in the Philippines, and al Qaeda proper. Khalifa is currently living in Saudi Arabia. According to some reports, he is living freely; others suggest he is under house arrest.
Khalifa was detained by the Saudi government after September 11, according to the New York Times, but was subsequently released.
In several media interviews given during 2003, Khalifa vociferously denied any link to his brother-in-law's terrorist activities, most recently in a Sept. 21, 2003 interview with Arab News, a English-language daily newspaper. Khalifa also claimed in 2003 to have been financially ruined by the allegations of terrorist activity.
"Why do they point at me for every terrorist operation?" he asked in September. "Osama has 29 in-laws and I am just one of them."
I don't suppose Ms. Gorelick had a thing to do with this.
I don't suppose Ms. Gorelick had a thing to do with this.
Perhaps in return for Services Rendered???
After all, as B.J.Clintooon himself noted...his comeback started after OKC and blaming it on Talk [Hate] Radio and the "Right Wing" militias.
The memo grew out of the Justice Department's prosecution of the 1993 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center -- the act that apparently gave Osama bin Laden the idea to try again in 2001.
"During the course of those investigations," wrote Gorelick in 1995, "significant counterintelligence information has been developed related to the activities and plans of agents of foreign powers operating in this country and overseas, including previously unknown connections between separate terrorist groups." But Gorelick wanted to make sure that the left hand didn't know what the right was doing. "(W)e believe that it is prudent to establish a set of instructions that will clearly separate the counterintelligence investigation from the more limited, but continued, criminal investigations. These procedures, which go beyond what is legally required, will prevent any risk of creating an unwarranted appearance that FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) is being used to avoid procedural safeguards which would apply in a criminal investigation."
The problem, of course, is that the inability to share information is precisely what hampered federal agents in tracking down the 9-11 hijackers. As Attorney General Ashcroft testified, this artificial wall impeded the investigation into Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker, who was arrested prior to the 9-11 attack, as well as Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, both of whom were identified by the CIA as suspected terrorists possibly in the United States prior to their participation in those terrible attacks. "Because of the wall, FBI Headquarters refused to allow criminal investigators who knew the most about the most recent al Qaeda attack to join in the hunt for the suspected terrorists," Ashcroft told the commission.
More on Gorelick:
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.
"Evidence strongly suggests it was Gorelick – not the ineffectual Freeh – who not only misdirected the FBI's investigation into Oklahoma City, but also the FBI investigation into TWA Flight 800. The parallels between the two cases are shocking. And in each case, the Clinton administration constrained the FBI for the same reason: to advance the re-election chances of its standard bearer. "
Although [Jayna]Davis does not document Gorelick's role in Oklahoma City, media accounts routinely describe her as the director of the Oklahoma City task force, the so-called "field commander." As Davis has told me, someone in Washington called the FBI in Oklahoma City and issued a two-word directive on its investigation into Islamic terrorism: "Kill it."
Oklahoma City, TWA Flight 800, and the Gorelick connection
Yes, Clinton and Gore did abandon airport security planning for sake of campaign cash. But worse, they concealed the real cause of the crash, in no small part to justify that abandonment.
In fact, on the same day in September of 1996 that Al Gore sent the airline's lobbyist a letter signaling his intent to roll over, the National Transportation Safety Board reversed its spin and all but ruled out a bomb or missile strike [on TWA 800].
In our book, "First Strike," James Sanders and I make this arguably prophetic comment:
John Kerry seemed to have his sights on Al Gore's Achilles' heel. After the events of Sept. 11, the story of how Al Gore helped subvert the investigation into TWA 800 and undermine airport security may yet prove to be a career-killer. Kerry's "slips" may have put Gore out of the race even before he got in.
Two weeks after advanced copies of "First Strike" started circulating around Washington, Gore withdrew from the presidential race. His withdrawal shocked Washington. It did not shock Sanders and me. We expected it. Kerry plays hardball, too.
While I have your attention, Chris, there is one other person you need to put on the spot. Her name is Jamie Gorelick, former deputy attorney general under the figurehead, Janet Reno. You probably know her. Last week, UPI reported that the high-level 9-11 panel on which she sits "was rocked Thursday by the bizarre revelation that two of its senior officials were so closely involved in the events they are investigating that they have had to be interviewed as part of the inquiry." One of the two was Gorelick.
See also:
Why John Kerry talks about TWA 800
From Clarke's Against All Enemies, p. 127 (although it is one of those "consider the source" type things):
"Another Conspiracy Theory intrigued me because I could never disprove it. The theory seemed unlikely on its face: Ramzi Yousef or Khalid Sheik Muhammad had taught Terry Nichols how to blow up the Oklahoma Federal Building. The problem was that, upon investigation, we established that both Ramzi Yousef and Nichols had been in the city of Cebu on the same days. I had been to Cebu years earlier; it is on an island in the central Philippines. It was a town in which word could have spread that a local girl was bringing her American boy friend home and that the American hated the U.S. government.
Yousef and Khalid Sheik Muhammad had gone there to help create an al Qaeda spinoff, a Philippine affiliate chapter, named after a hero of the Afghan war against the Soviets, Abu Sayaff. Could the al Qaeda explosives expert have been introduced to the angry American who proclaimed his hatred for the U.S. Government? We do not know, despite some FBI investigation. We do know that Nichols's bombs did not work before his Philippine stay and were deadly when he returned. We also know that Nichols continued to call Cebu long after his wife returned to the United States. The final coincidence is that several al Qaeda operatives had attended a radical Islamic conference a few years earliler in, of all places, Oklahoma City.
Yousef and Nichols crossed paths in the Phillipines. Mohammed was Yousef's uncle. It is interesting to note that Yousef entered the United States on an Iraqi passport and had been known among the New York fundamentalists as "Rashid, the Iraqi". Another name that could be thrown into the mix is Abdul Rahman Yasin, a U.S. citizen who moved to Iraq in the 1960's and returned to the U.S. in 1992. After the 1993 WTC bombing, Yasin fled to Iraq and was given monthly salary and housing by Saddam Hussein's regime.
Yes it does.
The only possible excuse I can come up with for a cover-up of either Iraqi or Al Qaeda complicity, is that Bill Clinton did not want to have to pursue the terrorists, as Bush has done, or he just wanted to blame the "vast right wing conspiracy".
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