Posted on 02/18/2002 5:08:06 PM PST by OKCSubmariner
Abu Sayyaf bandits were involved in international terrorist operations that targeted American facilities long before the Sept. 11 attacks that sparked US President George W. Bush’s global campaign against the al-Qaida and its allies.
Philippine defense and police intelligence sources told THE MANILA TIMES that Abu Sayyaf leaders had met with terrorist masterminds of several atrocities just before US targets were hit.
Although Philippine authorities advised American authorities of the alliance between the Abu Sayyaf, Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida, and American neo-nazis, the US appeared to ignore the warnings; until Sept. 11.
Strange bedfellows
But according to the sources, who have requested anonymity, investigations have been reopened, and in silence, about the relationship between neo-nazis, right-wing Christian groups, the Nation of Islam (Black Muslims—NOI), the Abu Sayyaf, and al-Qaida.
This, the sources pointed out, was what prompted the Philippine government to accept US military aid in the form of Balikatan in Basilan.
The Abu Sayyaf and other Muslim insurgent groups are no longer just internal Philippine problems, the sources stressed. They have become part of a global terror network that includes “very strange bedfellows.”
Angeles pals
Before slain Abu Sayyaf Group (ASG) co-founder Edwin Angeles surrendered in 1994 to military authorities at the Armed Forces Southern Command (Southcom) in Zamboanga City, he met with Ramzi Youssef, convicted mastermind of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993.
That meeting, which also had four other Filipinos and foreign Muslim extremists, was unique—in that the group was meeting for the last time with Oklahoma City bombing accomplice Terry Nichols.
Nichols had married Filipino women but he was a strange ally, being a member of the American ultra-right movement.
But even before that, in 1993, when the Abu Sayyaf was in its infancy, the same group met with Nichols and another American—believed to have been executed Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh—at a Dole labeling plant near General Santos City.
Spilling the beans
According to the defense intelligence source, while under tactical interrogation, Angeles told National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) and Philippine National Police (PNP) officials that the subjects at the 1994 meeting were actual terror targets. He mentioned the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, bombed April 19, 1995, and another, more damaging attack on the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York.
It became clear that an international terror cell had been established in the Philippines.
Philippine cops arrested an accomplice of Youssef in 1995, while trying to track down members of an assassination plot on visiting Pope John Paul II. Youssef was later arrested in Pakistan, an operation that owed a lot to Philippine intelligence inputs.
Reluctance
“It took Sept. 11 to unleash a ‘no-stones-unturned’ campaign against global terrorism,” confirmed a top-ranking police officer who regularly liaisons with American anti-terrorist officers.
US officials, he added, have privately admitted they knew for sometime that the Philippines was a primary service and training area for jihad (holy war) terrorists and other terror groups, including American and European neo-nazis.
“The US knew all along that McVeigh, Nichols, and other rightists have had a tactical alliance with the Abu Sayyaf,” a confidential source in Boulder, Colorado also told the Times.
“But to go after the Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines would be a violation of your country’s sovereignty. The joint military training exercises (Balikatan) present a legitimate excuse for clandestine US operations against the Abu Sayyaf.”
Concerns
However, the US-based source said the Abu Sayyaf is only part of the problem.
“It’s only the wagging tail. The head remains hidden in Ermita, Davao City, General Santos City, and in America’s heartland. Going after the Abu Sayyaf is like cutting off a lizard’s tail. It will only grow a new one,” the source stressed.
While Philippine officials blame Americans for inaction, US authorities told THE TIMES they are bothered by the failure of the local intelligence community to conduct preemptive operations against the nests of global terrorism here.
Volumes of documents, many of which are court documents, establish enough evidence that the Philippines is a major service area for global terrorists, not all of whom are Muslim. Had both the US and the Philippines acted in preemptive operations to break the terror networks here, they could have prevented the carnage of Sept. 11, the American source admitted.
The Pentagon terror advisor, Jesse Clear told me that the Clinton administration blocked his efforts to get information out of the Phillipines linking Nichols and McVeigh to Abu Sayyaf, Bin Laden's AlQaeda terror organization in the Phillipines.
After his retirement in December of 1995, Clear worked to help defense attorney Stephen Jones. Jones filed a Writ of Mandamus before the Tenth Circuit of Appeals in March 1996 trying to force the government to release information Jones said the US government was hiding about the Phillipine connection. The Tenth Circuit rejected Jones Writ with almost no comment based on national security grounds (cover-up??)
Nichols was supposed to have been in the Phillipines at the same time and at the same airport as airline bombing mastermind Ramzi Youseff who also bombed the WTC in 1993. Youseff even was in a cell nect to McVeigh after the OKC bobming.
Last year former KFORTV reporter Jayna Davis and former OK State Representative Charles Key appeared on the O,Reilly Factor allegijg that Binb Laden's terror orgainizatiuon was involved in the OKC bombing because of the alleged meetings with Nichols and Abu Sayyaf in the Phillipines.
Last year former KFORTV reporter Jayna Davis and former OK State Representative Charles Key appeared on the O'Reilly Factor alleging that Bin Laden's terror organization was involved in the OKC bombing because of the alleged meetings with Nichols and Abu Sayyaf in the Phillipines.
The correct link is at www.manilatimes.net.
Sorry.
He was so far to the right, he circled around into a left wing anarchist. It's the left wing that's proven to be anti-American and muslim sympathetic. I wish they'd get that straight.
All this, and Clinton tried to blame right wing radio. What an idiot.
http://www.manilatimes.net/national/2002/feb/15/top_stories/20020215top1.html
He refused to fund it, and told the Philliphines to send them home, and not aid them.
I rember reading about that. I thought that was odd.
If they wanted the truth, I thought, "Why is Clinton doing this?"
Jesse Clear told Kolin Davis that the FBI had massively covered up the OKC bombing investigation and had improperly intimidated witnesses. Clear worked with FBI agents in the Pentagon and was the Pentagon advisor under William Perry at the time of the OKC bombing. Clear gave me his permission to write a letter to the editor of New American mgazine in 1998 describing the meeting with Kolin Davis and quoting Clear.
Clear made a tape recording of an interview about the OKC bombing Clear had with a counter terrorism FBI agent,Paul Geiger,in July 1996. Clear took the tape to OK Senator James Inhofe's office in 1996. Inhofe did nothing adequate with the tape and the information. Clear met with Inhofe's aide on the Senate Intelligence Committee, Ken Johnson, along with the Committee legal counsel, Joan Grimson in April 1999 to brief them on the OKC bombing and the FBI coverup. Clear told me that Johnson showed up late and showed little if no interest in the information.
Inhofe's chief of staff, Herb Johnson, wrote a letter before his death (heart attack)in 1998 for an attorney close to the investigation, stating that the DOJ and FBI had deliberately covered up the ME connection to the OKC bombing.
I personally discussd this with Inhofe at his home in Tulsa, OK in January 1999. Inhofe's response was to order his staff to ship everything out of his office connected to Clear's tape and my letters to Inhofe (his staff told me no copies were retained by Inhofe's office). The information was sent (according to what Inhof'es staff told me) to the Senate Intelligence Committee who to this day has along with the Senate Judicary Committee done nothing adequate with Clear's and my information.
Late last year, US News and World Report in its Washington Whisper's column, stated that top Pentagon officials (where Clear worked) found out that McVeigh was an Iraqi agent and that the Pentagon believed that the FBI had lied to the Pentagon about the Iraqi connection.
At the time, the author, Paul Bedard, told me that the original source of his information came out of the Assistant Secretary of Defense office for Paul Wolfowitz. Since that time, Bedard has denied telling me the part about Wolfowitz but Bedard has stuck to his story about top Pentagon officals claiming the FBI had lied to the Pentagon and that McVeigh worked for the Iraqis.
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