“Abu Bakr” (”the second of the two” in the verses surrounding the cave quoted in one of Zawahiri’s tapes this week) according to the 9-11 Commission Report, is also the name of a senior Al Qaeda leader who was at the center of a much larger attack planned as a follow-on to 9-11.
If 9-11-2001 began with Bojinka (1995) and, according to the August 2001 PDB in an earlier link, the summer threat in 2001 in the days before 9-11 had been growing for years with the the African Embassy bombings in 1998 at the Millenium plot in 1999/2000.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/04/10/august6.memo/
Then it stands to reason that if the “dots”connecting together the 9-11 operation were scattered over six years, then it is entirely likely that the “dots” connecting together the coming attack are scattered over the six years since 9-11 (which is why TM “veterans” from 2003-2006 might remember seeing some things now that are familiar from years ago).
Looking only to developments in recent days, weeks, and months can be myopic. When new information emerges, it has to be compared not only to threats from the past few weeks or the past few months, but to have any chance at putting the picture together, compared to threats/plots going back over several years.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/013/615cglnt.asp?pg=2
” . . . Tenet also discloses new intelligence about the activities of the al Qaeda leadership living under what he calls “loose house arrest” in Iran:
From the end of 2002 to the spring of 2003, we received a stream of reliable reporting that the senior al-Qa’ida leadership in Saudi Arabia was negotiating for the purchase of three Russian nuclear devices. Saudi al-Qa’ida chief Abu Bakr related the offer directly to the al-Qa’ida leadership in Iran, where Sayf al-Adl and Abdel al-Aziz al-Masri (described as al-Qa’ida’s “nuclear chief” by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) were reportedly being held under a loose form of house arrest by the Iranian regime. The al-Qa’ida leadership had obviously learned much from their ventures into the nuclear market in the early 1990s. Sayf al-Adl told Abu Bakr that no price was too high to pay if they could get their hands on such weapons. However, he cautioned Abu Bakr that al-Qa’ida had been stung by scams in the past and that Pakistani specialists should be brought to Saudi Arabia to inspect the merchandise prior to purchase.”
http://www.globalsecurity.org/security/profiles/abu_bakr_al-azdi.htm
Abu Bakr al-Azdi
Al-Qaeda Senior Operative
Narrative and Notes
Reliable
On June 26, 2003, he turned himself in at the home of Saudi deputy interior minister Prince Mohammed bin Nayaf in Riyadh.
He was initially assigned to take part in 9-11 but was held in reserve by Osama bin Laden for another, larger operation.1
Possible
He may have set out from Saudi Arabia for Chechnya but was diverted to Afghanistan for training.1
Sources
1 The 9-11 Commission Final Report, July 22, 2004, Footnotes.
http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Notes.htm
107. Intelligence report, interrogation of Khallad,Apr. 5, 2004; Intelligence report, interrogation of KSM, Mar. 20, 2004. The candidate operatives were . . .
3. Ali Abd al Rahman al Faqasi al Ghamdi. (aka Abu Bakr al Azdi) He reportedly was to have been part of the planes operation but was held in reserve by Bin Ladin for a later, even larger operation. Like other muscle hijackers, he reportedly set out for Chechnya but diverted to Afghanistan. See Intelligence reports, interrogations of Abu Bakr al Azdi, July 23, 2003; Sept. 25, 2003; Intelligence report, interrogation of Khallad, Nov. 6, 2003.
Taking with a heaping shovel of salt until there are other reports. However, they haven’t run one of these stories in quite a while. (Ironic that the first TM thread started with a Debka story that still remains very relevant.)
In any case, if true, it is another possible explanation for the surge in these tapes . . .
DEBKAfile Exclusive:
Pakistani forces backed by US special units are closing in on al Qaeda’s No. 2 Ayman Zawahiri and possibly also Osama bin Laden
July 15, 2007, 10:47 PM (GMT+02:00)
Our counter-terror sources report exclusively that a frantic effort by al Qaeda and Taliban to head off the pursuit set afoot the bloody battle in Islamabad’s Red Mosque, the attempts to shoot down President Pervez Musharraf’s plane and the suicide attacks on Pakistani military convoys, which cost 68 lives Saturday and Sunday, July 14-15.
Until the middle of last week, Zuwahiri sheltered with the local Pashtun tribes in Bannu, a town in the northwest Pakistan tribal federation of North Waziristan. The approach of Pakistani and US intelligence and special forces caused him to switch hiding places and move to Tank or Tang, a town 120 km south of Bannu.
On Saturday, two soldiers were injured by a bomb explosion in that town, having just missed their quarry.
Musharraf meanwhile decided last week to storm the Red Mosque on a tip-off from his own Inter-Service Intelligence that two of Zawahiri’s closest lieutenants, Majid Hassan al-Tawil and Mohammad Othman, were inside.
They were reported to be preparing a mega-attack in Islamabad and other important Pakistani towns to disrupt the combined Pakistani-US operation to capture their master.
At that point, Pakistani intelligence turned up a lead to the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden himself.
The Pakistani army imposed a blackout on the identities of the victims of the Red Mosque battle, estimated at around 100 dead, and the detainees captured there. Even the names of the women and children claimed to have been held hostage were not disclosed. DEBKAfile’s sources report that Pakistan intelligence, which had hoped to capture the two al Qaeda operatives alive, has not found them. They are still trying to establish if they were among the dead or managed to escape.
An oblique reference to the operation came from the US president’s national security adviser Stephen Hadley Sunday night, July 15, when he spoke on ABC television about the US fully backing a Pakistani military crackdown on hotbeds of al Qaeda and Taliban activity. ”It has not worked the way he wanted. It has not worked the way we wanted it,” he said.
According to our sources, the intense pursuit continues despite the setbacks which Hadley suggested.
The Pakistan military death toll climbed Sunday when pro-Taliban Islamists killed at least 31 in two attacks in North Waziristan. Two suicide bombers and a roadside device hit a 40-vehicle police-army convoy near the Afghan border killing 14 soldiers. In another incident, 17 police officers and new recruits died when a bomber detonated explosives at a police HQ in the town of Dera Ismail Khan.
DEBKAfile’s sources disclose that the US Senate’s decision to double the bounty for bin Laden’s capture, killing or information leading to his death or capture to $50 million, was recommended by President George W. Bush after he received an urgent message from Musharraf. The Pakistani president reported his people had picked up the trail of bin Laden’s trail in their pursuit of his deputy, but the tribal chiefs with knowledge of where the elusive al Qaeda leader was hiding were holding out for an exorbitant sum for their collaboration.
He said that Pakistani intelligence had also laid out a large sum for the information about Zawahiri’s two aides’ arrival in the Red Mosque.
His former sanctuary of Bannu is situated 150 km as the crow flies from the South Afghan town of Gardiz which is a hub of al Qaeda-Taliban activity. The connection between the two towns is a twisting road of 400 km through Parachinar in Pashtun tribal land. According to DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources, al Qaeda and Taliban leaders do not travel from place to place by road or vehicle but on horseback by night piloted by local guides.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/vicepresident/news-speeches/speeches/vp20011114.html
Interview of the Vice President
by CBS’s 60 Minutes II
November 14, 2001
Vice President Cheney on 60 Minutes II
. . . Gloria Borger: Has the likelihood of a new terror attack in this country increased or decreased, would you say, in the last couple of weeks?
Vice President Cheney: The threat level has clearly gone up in recent weeks because of reporting we’ve received that led us to believe that in fact there was the likelihood of an additional attack. You never can be certain. If nothing then happens after the threat level’s gone up, it may be that your original reporting was inaccurate. It may also be that as you raise the threat level and everybody went up on sort of all-alert kind of status that we discouraged the attack or that we did something to disrupt it or to throw off the timing and they had to back off and regroup. That happens sometimes, too. But there’s no question that the threat level is still pretty significant, especially if we come to the end of the road here for bin Laden and Afghanistan and we’re successful in wrapping him up.
That, in and of itself, could be a signal that would trigger some kind of a revenge attack, if you will, by people loyal to bin Laden. So it doesn’t end, necessarily with him. In the end, we can’t wrap it up unless we do get him. The best defense against a terrorist attack is to go destroy the terrorist. And then we’re doing that.
But there’s still going to be some period of time here, even after we complete operations in Afghanistan. And the terrorist threat is worldwide. He’s got cells all over the world. And even if we sort of chop off the head, if you will, we may still find that the al Qaeda organization is there. It’s in place. Somebody else rises to lead it and that we continue to have to deal with that threat.
Gloria Borger: So a couple of things, you’re saying that if we kill Osama bin Laden, we have to expect retaliation?
Vice President Cheney: It could happen. I don’t know. I can’t predict. But that’s certainly a possibility. . .
http://www.nysun.com/article/58507
Iran Is Found To Be a Lair of Al Qaeda
Intelligence Estimate Cites Two Councils
BY ELI LAKE - Staff Reporter of the Sun
July 17, 2007 (excerpt)
WASHINGTON — One of two known Al Qaeda leadership councils meets regularly in eastern Iran, where the American intelligence community believes dozens of senior Al Qaeda leaders have reconstituted a good part of the terror conglomerate’s senior leadership structure. . .
. . .one of the Shura Majlis for Al Qaeda meets in the federally administered tribal areas of Pakistan, one of the areas the Pakistani army this week re-engaged after a yearlong cease-fire. Both Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, participate in those meetings.
The other Shura Majlis is believed to meet in eastern Iran in the network established after Al Qaeda was driven from Afghanistan in 2001. Following that battle, a military planner trained in the Egyptian special forces, Saif al-Adel, fled to Iran. Mr. Zawahri then arranged with the then commander of Iran’s Quds Force, Ahmad Vahidi, for safe harbor for senior leaders.
The three main Al Qaeda leaders in Iran include Mr. Adel; the organization’s minister of propaganda, Suleiman Abu Ghaith, and the man who some analysts believe is the heir apparent to Mr. bin Laden — one of his sons, Saad bin Laden. The locations of the senior leaders include a military base near Tehran called Lavizan; a northern suburb of Tehran, Chalous; an important holy city, Mashod, and a border town near Afghanistan, Zabul, the draft intelligence estimate says. In 2003, Iran offered a swap of the senior leaders in exchange for members of an Iranian opposition group on America’s list of foreign terrorist organizations, the People’s Mujahadin.
That deal was scuttled after signal intercepts proved, according to American intelligence officials, that Mr. Adel was in contact with an Al Qaeda cell in Saudi Arabia.
In the aftermath of the failed deal, Al Qaeda’s Iran branch has worked closely in helping to establish the group in Iraq. The late founder of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, had multiple meetings with Mr. Adel after 2001. In the past year, the multinational Iraq command force has intercepted at least 10 couriers with instructions from the Iran-based Shura Majlis. In addition, two senior leaders of Al Qaeda captured in 2006 have shared details of the Shura Majlis in Iran. . .
I agree completely.
3. Ali Abd al Rahman al Faqasi al Ghamdi. (aka Abu Bakr al Azdi) He reportedly was to have been part of the planes operation but was held in reserve by Bin Ladin for a later, even larger operation. Like other muscle hijackers,.....
Interesting, I'm glad you pointed that out - especially "like other muscle hijackers". I hadn't remembered that Abu Bakr was groomed as a hijacker.
http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2007/07/the-nuclear-loo.html
The Nuclear Loophole: U.S. Still at Risk
July 20, 2007 6:24 PM
Brian Ross Reports:
Despite the more than $2 billion spent by the Department of Homeland Security on radiation detection devices, leading scientists tell ABC News the country remains wide open to terrorists who might try to smuggle nuclear material into the country.
In a familiar scene at the port of Los Angeles today, senior U.S. officials demonstrated yet another new, expensive machine that supposedly can detect nuclear material hidden in shipping containers.
The DHS has claimed this device is 95 percent accurate, and today Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff had high praise for it.
“This is great,” he said. “This is the wave of the future.”
Despite Chertoff’s praise, a government investigation by the Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded the new machines “fell far short of the 95 percent level of performance.”
At best, the GAO found the machines were 45 percent accurate, sometimes as low as only 17 percent accurate.
“It is very frustrating when we pour billions of dollars into our homeland security, and yet we see so many of those dollars being wasted,” Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Texas, the ranking member of the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Emerging Threats, which has been a key oversight committee for the radiation detector program, said.
That’s why Congress now wants a new round of tests before they will allow any more money to be spent on the system.
“Today we learned that in fact it is riddled with inefficiencies that could in fact make it possible for al Qaeda to bring a nuclear bomb into a post in the United States,” Congressman Ed Markey, D-Mass., said.
It has been five years since ABC News first demonstrated the ease with which uranium, shielded in lead pipes, could be smuggled into the country in a shipping container, past supposedly state-of-the-art detection machines.
But today leading scientists say the new machines are just as ineffective.
“There are many, many ways of defeating the system,” said Dr. Tom Cochran of the Natural Resources Defense Council, “and they are ways that would be known to people who know how to manufacture an improvised explosive device.”
In Los Angeles today, Secretary Chertoff acknowledged the need for more testing on this latest generation of equipment.
“As we’re entering the field testing phase, we ought to kick the tires very hard,” he said.
Scientists say about the only real proven improvement in the new machines is a lot fewer false alarms. The old ones would go off if they detected kitty litter or bananas.
That no longer happens, but they still can’t detect well-shielded nuclear bomb material.
Saudi Arabia + Egypt + Jordan = 3
http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/10/28/opinion/ediran.php
The demagogue in Iran
International Herald Tribune
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 28, 2005 (snip)
‘As the imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map.” Thus spake Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, to 4,000 students gathered for a conference on “The world without Zionism.” The imam he was citing, of course, the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, to whose immortal words Ahmadinejad added his own: “Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation’s fury.” . . .
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/886373.html
Last update - 02:43 26/07/2007
Senior gov’t official: Israel ‘not far’ from meeting with Saudis
By Barak Ravid and Shahar Ilan, Haaretz Correspondent (snip)
Israel is “not far from a photo op with the Saudis,” a senior government source said Wednesday following a historic visit to Jerusalem by the foreign ministers of Egypt and Jordan as representatives of the Arab League.
The source added that talks with the Saudis have been taking place via a third party for some time.
Egypt’s Ahmed Aboul Gheit and Jordan’s Abdelelah Al-Khatib came to promote the Arab peace initiative, which the Arab League summit in Riyadh reaffirmed earlier this year. The two met with Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and also visited the Knesset.
During the meeting, Olmert stressed the importance of other Arab countries joining the peace process, referring mainly to Saudi Arabia. . .