Posted on 09/12/2001 5:07:27 AM PDT by mrmax
Part 2 continued!
January 14, 2001 New York Times
The Base
From Many Lands,
Under One Banner
Fired by their triumph over the Soviets, the Arabs who had fought in Afghanistan returned home, eager to apply the principles of jihad to their native lands.
The Koran sets strict limits on when and how holy war is to be undertaken. But Gilles Kepel, a leading French scholar of contemporary Islam, said the Afghan veterans were guided by their own radical interpretation of sacred Muslim texts. "Intoxicated by the Muslim victory in Afghanistan," he said, "they believed that it could be replicated elsewhere — that the whole world was ripe for jihad, which is contrary to Islamic tradition."
They called themselves the Arab Afghans.
In Jordan some founded a group, Jaish Muhammad, that officials say took aim at King Hussein, whose family claims descent from the Prophet Muhammad.
In Algeria, the Arab Afghans were among the founders of the Armed Islamic Group, the most radical to emerge after the military government canceled the 1991 elections. Known by its French initials, G.I.A, it began by blowing up military targets and escalated to wholesale massacres of Algerians who did not believe in the jihad.
According to Mr. Anas, one of its founding members was an Algerian who had initially fought with him in Afghanistan but joined Al Qaeda in the late 1980's. Mr. Anas says he has been told that Mr. bin Laden provided some of the seed money for the G.I.A.
The early 1990's proved difficult for Mr. bin Laden. He was enraged by King Fahd's decision to let American troops wage the Persian Gulf war from Saudi Arabia, site of the two holiest shrines in Islam. He began to focus his wrath on the United States and the Saudi government. After the conflict ended, he moved to Afghanistan.
But his stay was brief. Within months he fled, telling associates that Saudi Arabia had hired the Pakistani intelligence service to kill him. There is no confirmation that such a plot existed. Nonetheless, in 1991, Mr. bin Laden moved to Sudan, where a militantly Islamic government had taken power.
Over the next five years, Mr. bin Laden built a group that combined legitimate business with support for world holy war.
He also set out to accomplish his overriding goal of gathering the leading Islamic extremist groups under one banner. According to Middle Eastern officials, Mr. bin Laden and his envoys met with radicals from Pakistan and Egypt to propose an international Islamic front, led by Afghan veterans, that would fight Americans and Jews.
Al Qaeda began training its own operatives. Ali Mohamed, the government witness, who has said he arranged Mr. bin Laden's move to Sudan, told investigators that he taught group members about weapons, explosives, kidnapping, urban fighting, counterintelligence and other tactics at camps in Afghanistan and Sudan. He said he showed some of the trainees how to set up cells "that could be used in operations."
The dispatch of American troops to Somalia in late 1992 and 1993 as part of a United Nations mission was another affront to Mr. bin Laden. The Bush administration presented it as a relief operation.
American officials say a defector from Al Qaeda told them it viewed the deployment as a dangerous expansion of American influence in the region and a step toward undermining the Islamic government of Sudan.
Al Qaeda privately issued fatwas that directed members to attack American soldiers in Saudi Arabia, Yemen and the Horn of Africa, according to American prosecutors. They said he also sent his military chief, an Egyptian who had been with him at the formation of Al Qaeda, to find the vulnerabilities of United Nations forces in Africa.
Al Qaeda created a cell in Kenya as a "gateway" to its operations in Somalia, the prosecutors assert. Members of the group blended into Kenyan society, opening legitimate businesses that sold fish and dealt in diamonds, and operating an Islamic charity.
Federal prosecutors say at least five group members crossed the border to Somalia, where they trained some of the fighters involved in an Oct. 3, 1993, battle with United States special forces that left 18 Americans and several hundred Somalis dead.
The battle, one of the most widely publicized setbacks for American forces in recent memory, cast a shadow over every subsequent Clinton administration debate on the possible uses of ground troops. American intelligence did not learn of Al Qaeda's role in the ambush until several years later.
Prosecutors say the group also considered attacking Americans in Kenya to retaliate for the Somalia mission. Mr. Mohamed testified that Mr. bin Laden sent him to Nairobi in late 1993 to look over possible American, French, British and Israeli targets for a bomb attack, including the American Embassy. He said he took photos, drew diagrams and wrote a report, which he delivered to his boss in Khartoum. "Bin Laden looked at the picture of the American Embassy and pointed to where a truck could go as a suicide bomber," he said.
American prosecutors say Al Qaeda had more grandiose plans: a leading member, an Iraqi who Mr. Anas said had first gravitated to Mr. bin Laden in Afghanistan, tried to buy enriched uranium in Europe.
The Iraqi, Mahdouh Mahmud Salim, forged links between Mr. bin Laden's group and others supported by Iran. Mr. Salim met with an Iranian religious official in Khartoum, and soon afterward, the prosecutors say, Al Qaeda members got training from Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed Shiite group in Lebanon skilled in making car bombs. American officials said this alliance was notable because it marked the first time radicals from the minority Shiite branch of Islam collaborated with extremists from the dominant Sunni branch.
Mr. bin Laden's business ventures in Sudan — including a tannery, a transportation company and a construction concern — raised money and served as cover for the travels of Mr. Salim and others, according to American officials. They said that his companies cornered Sudan's exports of gum, sunflower and sesame products — and that he invested $50 million of his family money in a new Islamic bank in Khartoum.
The Network
As in Afghanistan,
So in the World
The new jihad movement was fueled by the civil war that consumed Afghanistan in the early 1990's. The training camps that had once schooled soldiers to battle the Soviet enemy now attracted militants more interested in fomenting holy war back home — in America, Europe or the Middle East — than in the struggle for control of Afghanistan.
The Office of Services, the Pakistan-based group founded in the 1980's by Mr. Azzam to recruit soldiers for the anti-Soviet cause, arranged the travels of some of these new jihadists, according to European and American officials.
Many of those associated with the office, Mr. Anas said, shared Mr. bin Laden's vision of a global movement. American officials suspect they were acting under his instructions, though this remains a subject of debate among intelligence analysts.
American investigators stumbled across the first signs of the new global phenomenon in 1993, when they began to examine the bombing at the World Trade Center.
They discovered that the four men who carried out the attack, which killed 6 and wounded more than 1,000, had ties to Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, whom they charged with leading a worldwide "jihad organization" that had begun plotting to kill Americans as early as 1989.
Mr. Abdel Rahman was later convicted of conspiring to blow up New York landmarks, including the United Nations. But in the years since, American intelligence officials have come to believe that he and the World Trade Center bombers had ties to Al Qaeda.
The evidence is suggestive, but not conclusive. Several of those convicted in the World Trade Center case were associated with the Brooklyn refugee center that was a branch of the Office of Services, the Pakistan-based organization that Mr. bin Laden helped finance and lead. The Brooklyn center was headed for a time by Mustafa Shalabi, an Egyptian murdered in 1991 in a case that remains unsolved. Federal prosecutors recently disclosed that it was Mr. Shalabi whom Mr. bin Laden called in 1991 when he needed help moving to Sudan, according to Mr. Mohamed, the federal witness.
One of the men convicted of bombing the World Trade Center, Ahmad M. Ajaj, spent four months in Pakistan in 1992, returning to the United States with a bomb manual later seized by the United States government. An English translation of the document, entered into evidence in the World Trade Center trial, said that the manual was dated 1982, that it had been published in Amman, Jordan, and that it carried a heading on the front and succeeding pages: The Basic Rule.
Those appear to be errors. Two separate translations of the document, one done at the request of The New York Times, show that the heading said Al Qaeda — which translates as The Base, the name of Mr. bin Laden's group. In addition, the document lists a publication date of 1989, a year after Mr. bin Laden founded his organization. And the place of publication is Afghanistan, not Jordan.
Steven Emerson, a terrorism expert who first pointed out the errors, said they deprived investigators of a subtle early clue to the existence of Mr. bin Laden's group.
While the trade center trial ended in 1994, federal prosecutors did not open their grand jury investigation of Mr. bin Laden and Al Qaeda until 1996.
"Had the government correctly translated the material," Mr. Emerson said, "it might have understood that the men who blew up the World Trade Center and Mr. bin Laden's group were linked."
Asked about the mistranslation, an official in the United States Attorney's office, who declined to be identified, said only that Mr. Ajaj had been carrying "voluminous material printed by various organizations." He added that their titles referred to international conspiracy, commando operations and engineering of explosives.
The jihad movement also took root in Europe. In August 1994, three young French Muslims of North African descent, wearing hoods and brandishing machine pistols, opened fire on tourists in a hotel lobby in Marrakesh, Morocco, killing two Spaniards and wounding a third. The French police investigating the attack learned that it had been planned by two Moroccan veterans of the Afghan war, who had recruited commandos for the attack in Paris and Orléans and sent more than a dozen of them to Afghanistan for training.
The indoctrination of the young Muslims began with religion, according to French court papers and testimony. An Orléans mathematics professor and interpreter of the Koran, Mohamed Zinédine, gathered around him a group of men from the slums of Orléans who wanted to learn how to pray. Later, French court papers say, he instructed them in the concept of waging jihad against corrupt governments, saying it was a higher stage of Islamic observance.
One young Moroccan testified that Mr. Zinédine — who is now a fugitive — showed him a videotape of Muslim victims of "torture in Bosnia, of babies with their throats cut, of pregnant women disemboweled, and fingernails torn off." The young man added, "He told me there was a way of helping them and that I must help them." Prayers for people like the Muslims in Bosnia, he quoted Mr. Zinédine as saying, were not enough. He must become an "armed humanitarian."
European investigators tracing the Afghan network in France, Belgium and Germany found records of phone calls between local extremists and the Office of Services in Pakistan. In March 1995, Belgian investigators came across another clue: A CD-ROM in the car of another Algerian, who had been trained in Afghanistan in 1992 and was part of the G.I.A. cell in Brussels. The CD was initially ignored, Belgian officials say.
Months later, the Belgians began translating its contents and discovered several different versions of a manual for terrorism that had begun circulating among Islamic militants in the early 1990's. The voluminous manual covered diverse subjects, from "psychological war in Islam" to "the organizational structure of Israeli intelligence" to "recruiting according to the American method."
The manual also offered detailed recipes for making bombs, including instructions on when to shake the chemicals and how to use a wristwatch as a detonator. In addition there were instructions on how to kill with toxins, gases and drugs. The preface included a dedication to the new hero of the holy war: Osama bin Laden. Versions of the manual circulated widely and were seized by the police all over Europe.
Reuel Gerecht, a former C.I.A. official, said he was told that the agency did not obtain its own copy of the manual before the end of 1999. "The truth is," he said, "they missed for years the largest terrorist guide ever written." The omission, he asserted, reflects the agency's reluctance to scrutinize the fallout from its support of the anti-Soviet jihad.
A C.I.A. official said that the agency had had "access to versions" of the manual since the late 1980's. "It's not the Holy Grail that Gerecht reports it to be," he said, adding that the terrorist-related parts were fairly recent additions.
By the mid-1990's, American officials had begun to focus on Mr. bin Laden and his entourage in Sudan. They saw him as the embodiment of a dangerous new development: a stateless sponsor of terrorism who was using his personal fortune — which one Middle Eastern official estimated at $270 million — to bankroll extremist causes.
American officials pressed Sudan to eject Mr. bin Laden, and in 1996 they succeeded, forcing him into exile. It was a diplomatic triumph, but one that many American officials would come to rue. Mr. bin Laden made his way back to Afghanistan, where a new group of young Islamic militants, the Taliban, was taking control.
American and Middle Eastern officials said some of the cash that the Taliban used to buy off local warlords came from Mr. bin Laden. Soon the new, hard-line rulers of Afghanistan allowed him to use their country to pursue his goal of creating "one jihad camp for the world," as Mr. Anas put it.
The Edict
A Sacred Muslim Duty
To Kill All Foes
Two years after he arrived in Afghanistan, in February 1998, Mr. bin Laden publicly announced his intentions. At a camp in Khost, in eastern Afghanistan, he and several other leaders of militant groups declared that they had founded the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders, an umbrella entity that included Al Qaeda and groups from Egypt, Pakistan and Bangladesh, among others.
The front issued the following fatwa: "To kill Americans and their allies, both civil and military, is an individual duty of every Muslim who is able, in any country where this is possible."
On Aug. 7, 1998, eight years to the day after the first American troops set foot in Saudi Arabia, Mr. bin Laden delivered on the threat, American prosecutors say. Bombs exploded hours apart at the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
The plot, as described by federal prosecutors, was truly international. Prosecutors assert that the attacks were carried out by Muslims from Tanzania, Saudi Arabia and Jordan, most of whom were trained in Afghanistan. The Kenyan plotters, they say, spoke directly with Mr. bin Laden by satellite telephone as they developed their plans.
The attacks were costly for Al Qaeda. Less than two weeks after the embassy bombings, the United States conducted air strikes against Mr. bin Laden's camps in Afghanistan. Over the next two years, police and intelligence agencies around the world, many prodded by the United States, arrested more than 100 militants in some 20 countries.
Almost every month, authorities detain or question people with ties to Al Qaeda. Late last year, in what American officials described as one of the more alarming cases, the Kuwaiti police arrested a local man, an Afghan veteran, who said he was associated with Mr. bin Laden's group and planning to bomb American and Kuwaiti targets. American officials say he ultimately led the police to a weapons cache of almost 300 pounds of explosives and more than 1,400 detonators.
And in addition to the two-day closure of the American Embassy in Rome, officials say, recent warnings of a possible Al Qaeda attack prompted the United States to divert an entire carrier battle group scheduled to dock in Naples.
American officials acknowledge that Al Qaeda and Mr. bin Laden have proven resourceful, resilient adversaries. Much of his personal wealth has now been spent, or is in bank accounts that are now frozen. But officials say he is raising money through a network of charities and businesses. His group reconstitutes its networks in many countries as quickly as they are disrupted.
And failure can breed success. In late 1999, American officials say, a group of Yemenis botched an attempt to blow up an American ship, The Sullivans, as it passed through Yemen. Their boat, loaded with explosives, sank a few feet off shore.
This year, American officials say, a Saudi operative of Mr. bin Laden's who helped organize that attack worked with some of the same people on the bombing of the Cole in Yemen.
Internal crackdowns on Muslim militants, like the Algerian government's largely successful attempts to stamp out the G.I.A. in the mid- 1990's, have in several instances fueled the international jihad.
American officials said the most radical Algerians were now collaborating with Mr. bin Laden. In 1999, Algerians were for the first time implicated in plots against the United States, when Ahmed Ressam was arrested crossing the border from Canada with a carload of explosives. Mr. Ressam goes on trial later this year in Los Angeles.
American and Middle Eastern officials say Al Qaeda has now expanded its jihad to include Israel, which until recently had regarded Mr. bin Laden as an American problem. The officials say Al Qaeda has financed and trained an anti-Israel group, Asbat al Ansar, that operates from a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon.
Last June, Israel charged in a sealed indictment that a Hamas member who was plotting to attack targets within Israel, including settlers and the army, had been trained in one of Mr. bin Laden's Afghan camps. "Al Qaeda wants in on the action — the new intifada against Israel," said one American official.
Olivier Roy, a French scholar who follows Islamic activities, says Al Qaeda's biggest asset is the thousands of jihadists around the world who no longer see their struggle in strictly local or even national terms, which makes them impervious to normal political or military pressure.
Mr. bin Laden's actions, he said, are "not the continuation of politics by other means."
"Osama bin Laden doesn't want to negotiate."
.
We will consider any country that helps them, even if it is through inaction, to be associated with these individuals. This was an act of WAR. We Americans will treat this as WAR.
The individuals whom did this directed this operation from a patch of land. Every patch of land is defined by a country. Once we identify that country, that country will experience the entire consequences of our anger. We will engage that country and the inhabitants of that country as enimies of the United States.
Because the United States is a member of NATO, all NATO allies are bound to participate with the United States against this country. If Congress determines that a state of war exists, the American people will support full operational activation of the nuclear weapons at our disposal.
The Premier of Russia has conviened with the President and has agreed to support the United States actions without question.
Is this shocking? haven't you heard this? Perhaps it is because you (any one not understanding the rage we Americans feel) do not understand the real consequences of this action. I don't know one American, not one, (and I live in Boston - Liberal Mecca of the Nation) who does not support Nuclear confliguration.
.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.