Posted on 02/10/2006 7:04:06 PM PST by Fred Nerks
How US stopped Hambali Natalie O'Brien and Patrick Walters February 11, 2006 IT should have been no surprise that the Southeast Asian terror group Jemaah Islamiah and its operations chief Hambali were named by US President George W. Bush as the figures behind a 2002 plot to fly a plane into California's tallest building.
JI and Hambali, mastermind of the Bali bombing, were not only intimately connected with al-Qa'ida's chief strategist Khalid Sheik Mohammed in the plan to destroy the US Bank Tower in Los Angeles, they had been in cahoots for years, planning to blow up US airliners and fly them into skyscrapers.
As far back as 1995, Mohammed and Hambali put together a terror blueprint that has become known as Operation Bojinka. It was a three-pronged plan to assassinate Pope John Paul II during a visit to Manila, blow up 11 US planes and fly a Cessna packed with explosives into the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
But for the second wave of attacks on the US, planned for 2002, they had decided to avoid operatives with Arab backgrounds. Instead, Hambali recruited a Malaysian militant named Zaini Zakaria to head the cell responsible for flying a plane into the LA skyscraper, then known as the Library Tower. Mr Bush released details of the planned attack on Thursday, naming JI and Hambali and saying it illustrated the need to move swiftly against any suspicious terrorist activity.
"It took the combined efforts of several countries to break up this plot," the President said. "By working together, we stopped a catastrophic attack on our homeland."
While it might have come as a revelation to the Americans that a Southeast Asian terror group might be targeting US interests, it was no surprise to Australian and Asian intelligence agencies who have been hunting JI for years.
JI operates mainly in Indonesia and The Philippines and is blamed for a string of attacks including the 2002 Bali bombing, which killed 202 people, among them 88 Australians.
The terror group has also been accused of staging the October 2004 bombing of the Australian embassy in Jakarta, the Marriott Hotel bombing and three suicide bombings in Bali last October that killed four Australians.
Its former director of operations Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, was considered the link man between JI and al-Qa'ida and he had been crucial to plans by JI to set up terror cells.
Intelligence documents have revealed that JI had divided its operations into four major cells, known as mantiqis, and Mantiqi 4 covered the Indonesian province of Papua and Australia.
In preparation for his plans, Hambali had sent terrorist trainer Azman Hashim to Australia to run a paramilitary weapons training camp for Australians in the Blue Mountains.
Hambali also organised for twins Abdul Rahim Ayub and Abdul Rahman Ayub to further the JI cause in Australia. They lived in Sydney and Perth. Both brothers have since left the country. One of them is now on the Phillipine island of Mindanao training terrorist recruits.
The US Government's 2004 9/11 commission report detailed the close links that developed between Hambali and Mohammed in the late 1990s. "Hambali did not originally orient JI's operations toward attacking the United States, but his involvement with al-Qa'ida appears to have inspired him to pursue American targets.
"Hambali's newfound interest in striking against the US manifested itself in a spate of terrorist plans. Fortunately none came to fruition," the report concluded in an oblique reference to what could have been the LA plot.
The commission said Mohammed, when interrogated by US agents, had taken credit for Hambali's shift of focus, claiming to have urged the JI operations chief to concentrate on attacks on the US economy.
The al-Qa'ida-JI partnership led to a number of proposals that would marry al-Qa'ida's financial and technical strength with JI's access to materials and local operatives, with Hambali in the critical role of co-ordinator.
According to terrorism expert Rohan Gunaratna, Hambali played a key role in Operation Bojinka. He said the plot was to involve a sequence of events from the assassination of Pope John Paul II in The Philippines on January 15 to the bombing of 11 airliners on January 21 and 22 followed by the flying of a Cessna packed with explosives into CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
But the plot came undone after a fire in a Manila apartment on January 6, 1995. Police discovered evidence of the plot on a computer in the apartment and the operation was abandoned. But plans to blow up planes and fly them into buildings continued. And in the wake of the September 11 attacks, Hambali and Mohammed began hatching the Library Tower plan.
It has been revealed that they established a cell and four terrorists were being trained to carry out the attack, which included using shoe bombs to break into to an aeroplane cockpit.
The JI operatives trained in Afghanistan and met Osama bin Laden.
The head of the cell also received instructions on the use of shoe bombs from Briton Richard Reid, who in December 2001 tried to blow up an airliner with explosives planted in his shoes.
But the plan was thwarted early in 2002 when a key al-Qa'ida operative was arrested in Southeast Asia. In the subsequent debriefings of this operative, enough information was gleaned to round up the terrorists involved in the plot.
The Bush administration has not revealed the name of this al-Qa'ida operative. But The Weekend Australian has confirmed Mr Bush was almost certainly referring to Zaini Zakaria, a Malaysian recruited by Hambali and sent for pilot training by Mohammed. Zakaria was one of several Malaysians recruited to form a suicide cell for al-Qa'ida, and it is understood he and the others met bin Laden.
Zakaria, who is mentioned in the 9/11 Commission report, was key to the second wave operation against the US planned by Mohammed. The Library Tower attack was planned to follow the September 11 attacks.
Ken Conboy, whose book The Second Front is largely about Hambali, said revelations of the Library Tower plot came from several sources. "They knew about the plot well before Hambali was captured (in Thailand in 2003)," he said.
Conboy said the Library Tower plans were underway before September 11. "The first people got wind of it in late 2001. By spring the next year, the Indonesians were looking into it. It was corroborated when they got Mohammed."
Zakaria is now in detention in Malaysia. Two of the other Malaysian suicide cell recruits, Bashir bin Lap, known as Lillie, and Mohammed Farik bin Amin, known as Zubair, were arrested in Thailand with Hambali. Hambali is in US custody, in an undisclosed location, possibly Jordan.
LOL! Hambali was stopped by a Muslim street vendor in the Thai city of Ayuthaya. Hambali was buying food from the vendor and the vendor overheard him talking about a terrorist attack. The vendor called up the local cops and he was arrested. Later they found out who he was.
fyi
Interesting. One has to wonder if the CONOP for this is to leave the shoe on during detonation or plant the shoe and barefoot it out of the blast zone. With these islamist wackos, one could never tell.
Bump
There was a guy (Brian Lambert, EX- media columnist for the St. Paul Pioneer Press) on the radio last night who actually asked 1 How do we really know this happened, 2 why did they have a bomb?
AAARRRRRGGGGGGGGG
I mean (Lord knows) I'm not the brightest bulb on the tree (feel free to disagree) but it took me all of 5 seconds to figure it out.
I'm getting up in years, lad. My hair is white now, and my hands aren't as steady as they were. If my grandaddy told me truly, he could remember when journalists reported news instead of fiction. Three or four reporters still did report news when he was a youth, he said.
Dad drat the cat, Hattie, where did you put my cane and my scarf?
After they revealed this info about the shoe bombs, I have to wonder if there might have been other terrorists on Richard Reed's flight, or was he just a test to see if they could sneak the shoe bombs through security.
Maybe all the security and having people take off their shoes actually caused them to abort their plot?
BTT
"I thought the most interesting part of this story was the explanation (finally) of what the shoe bombs are for.
They are cockpit breaching devices."
Agreed.. that was never clear to me before.
What I still don't understand is why is this story breaking now - what happened to make the president reveal it now.
After all, the standard for nonfiction is pretty low . . . all a writer has to do to qualify his/her work as "nonfiction" is simply to not classify it is fiction!Who, after all, could meet the standard of "nonfiction" if everything they said had to prove true in hindsight?
Thank you, that's exactly the reason I posted it.
To get really cranky, check out some of the left's stories relating to Nuradin Abdi.
In this case maybe the shoe bombs were planned to be used to breach the cockpit but if I remember correctly Richard Reid was still sitting in his seat while attempting to detonate his shoe bomb. Which means he wasn't exactly too worried about breaching the cockpit.
If Richard Reid is the best they can do, I don't think we have too much to worry about.
I bet he was a test of getting the stuff on board.
I would agree with that statement especially considering that Reid(the failed shoe bomber) was the one instructing this cell on the use of shoe bombs.
But I think we still have to assume that even these DUmbasses are bound to get lucky once in awhile and we need to remain vigilant.
BFLR
"I am wondering, how many more have died since then as the result of the cult of muhammad?"
Far too many. Terrorist thugs like Arrafat should never be elevated to the stature of statesmen. They should me marginalized, hunted down and destroyed.
That's not how Reid tried to use his. I imagine their uses could be tailored based on the amount of explosives and potentially shaped charges.
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