Abu (Sayyaf)part of Oklahoma blast

(NOTE: Basilan Provincial Information Officer, Christopher Puno was present in the ward at Basilan Community Hospital when I interviewed Elmina Abdul, less than two weeks prior to her death.)

ISABELA CITY, Basilan – Elmina Abdul, widow of one of the Abu Sayyaf co-founders, Edwin Angeles, died in the pre-dawn hours of Saturday, March 30. Ten days before she died, she talked with this writer in confidence while lying on her deathbed at Basilan Community Hospital. I was the last, if not the only reporter, to ever talk with her.

Elmina was Edwin’s fourth and last wife. She met him in 1995 while he was in the Basilan Provincial Jail. They were married in 1997, almost a year before Angeles was summarily executed in Basilan in 1998. What she told me at that final interview was at once revealing and shocking. Edwin had told Elmina the entire chronicle of his experience as a co-founder of the ASG and a deep-cover agent of the Department of National Defense, beginning in 1991. Edwin told her that he expected to be killed soon and he was.

Among the most interesting revelations that Angeles shared with Elmina was about a meeting between himself, Ramsey Yousef, Abdul Murad (both of whom are now serving multiple prison terms for terrorist activities, including the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993), Abdurajak Abubakar Janjalani, unidentified members of the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), and two men who Angeles only identified as Iraqis. The meeting, according to Elmina, was held in a warehouse near a Dole (Phil.) plant in South Cotabato, between General Santos City and Davao del Sur. There were two other men at that meeting: a man who Angeles identified as Nichols and as ‘code name Farmer,’ and another American who he did not identify by name.

(It is important to note that most Filipinos commonly describe Caucasians in the country as Americans.)

The meeting, according to Elmina took place in 1994. She could not remember the exact date.

In that meeting, according to Elmina, Angeles told her that the major topic of the discussion was the bombing of specified targets and how to build bombs. Angeles told Elmina that Nichols was later sent to a place that he (Angeles) didn’t name for more detailed instruction on how Nichols and his other ‘American’ friend could build a bomb to destroy a building in the United States. She did not specify — she could not remember — which building that was to be.

Elmina also told me that before he was gunned down, Edwin showed her documents that proved that he actually was a deep-cover agent for the Department of National Defense. He said that those documents were presented in court in his defense and that was the reason that he was acquitted of the charges against him. That is a matter of record. But since I have never seen the documents, I will not name the ‘high ranking’ Defense officials whose signatures were said to appear on those documents.

Angeles also told Elmina about Project Bojenko, an Iraqi-financed operation of terror that targeted several buildings in the US, the bombing of several US airliners, bombing US embassies overseas, and hitting other US interests. Among the buildings in the US, according to Elmina, were another attack on the World Trade Center; the Federal Buildings in San Francisco, and in “a place he called Uklahuma (Oklahoma).

When I asked Elmina why she thought that Angeles was killed, she only told me: “The traitors killed him. They used him, then they killed him.”

I asked her if she meant the Defense officials who recruited him as a deep cover agent, tears fell from her eyes. She waved her hand, indicating that she didn’t want to talk any more. She was weak. I nodded, stroked her head and left Elmina Abdul to rest. That was the last time that I saw her alive.

Was there an international conspiracy of terror forged in a meeting in an abandoned warehouse in 1994 that included Angeles and Nichols, who he referred to as ‘the Farmer?’ Did that conspiracy include members of Al-Qaeda and the Iraqi government (or at least Iraqis)? Does the ASG actually receive financial and material assistance from Al-Qaeda and Iraq in order to carry on its campaign of terror? Elmina did not give precise, clear answers to those questions. She was relating what Angeles had told her not long before he died.

There is one thing clear: Edwin Angeles did meet with Nichols and another ‘American’ along with some state-sponsored international terrorists. Elmina knew that she was dying. She knew that all our efforts to help her recover would not be enough to save her. She told me what she knew to be the truth, as her husband told it to her.

At the beginning of the interview I asked Elmina why she was willing to talk to me after such a long silence. She told me: “I am going to die soon. I want to tell the truth about my husband so that people will know.”

(Additional notes/links at end ~A)

» Published at http://www.indystar.com.

JAMES PATTERSON

Ex-CIA agent believes in a John Doe 2

March 23, 2002

Though the U.S. government clings to the notion that Timothy McVeigh, acting alone, set off the horrendous explosion on April 19, 1995, that pancaked the nine-story Oklahoma City federal building, a former high-ranking CIA official says there's solid evidence to indicate he worked with an Iraqi John Doe No. 2.

Larry Johnson, former CIA officer and deputy director of the State Department's Office of Counterterrorism, told a network news show this week the FBI had failed to properly investigate significant eyewitness accounts of McVeigh meeting with the man believed to be a former Iraqi soldier.

Johnson made those comments on The Big Story with John Gibson, a Fox news program airing nightly at 5 p.m., which delved into an extensive dossier on the case compiled by former Oklahoma TV reporter Jayna Davis. The program aired just days after a lawsuit filed by the watchdog organization Judicial Watch that alleges Iraqi involvement in the Oklahoma City bombing and seeks compensation for victims from frozen Iraqi assets.

Davis, who reported from Ground Zero in Oklahoma City for NBC-affiliate KFOR, broadcast a series suggesting a possible accomplice to the bombing who had been seen with McVeigh on the days leading up to and the day of the bombing. Gibson unabashedly reported Davis' work to a national TV audience on three consecutive days this week.

On Monday, Gibson relayed that Davis' evidence is based "on the simple proposition that Tim McVeigh's John Doe 2 was an Iraqi, a former Iraqi soldier from the Gulf War, paroled into the U.S. under a claim of political asylum, known to be in Oklahoma City as of November of '94 almost a year before the Murrah bombing, spotted with McVeigh by multiple witnesses, and who in recent years was working at (Boston) Logan airport," where the Sept. 11 hijackings originated.

On Tuesday, Gibson posed the question to Johnson about a possible link between Iraq and Oklahoma City.

"I think this woman (Davis) has done a remarkable job of finding a link that was overlooked," Johnson said. Johnson also commented on a Justice Department review of the thousands of documents that resurfaced or were destroyed, delaying McVeigh's execution for a month.

"The FBI . . ., they still have not turned over all of the documents to the defense teams that came out of Oklahoma," he said. "In particular, the information that links, shows possible links to Middle Eastern subjects."

KFOR's reports distorted the face of one of those suspects and did not name him. However, on his own volition, a former Iraqi soldier who claims he surrendered to the U.S. in the Gulf War and who was brought to the United States from a refugee camp in Saudi Arabia, stepped forward and identified himself to two other Oklahoma City TV stations and The Associated Press as the man that KFOR had implicated as John Doe No. 2.

Hussain Hashem Alhussaini sued KFOR and Davis for defamation, saying the reports falsely identified him as John Doe No. 2. But a U.S. District Court disagreed. In ruling for KFOR, U.S. District Judge Timothy Leonard found in November 1999 that the station had taken extraordinary measures to hide Alhussaini's identity.

Leonard added that KFOR's reports were either "based on fact or a matter of opinion," and not negligence or reckless disregard for the truth. Alhussaini, who went to work at Boston's Logan International Airport after leaving Oklahoma City, continues to deny any involvement in the bombing. Former CIA Agent Johnson is unconvinced.

"I compared it to all the human intelligence I've looked at," he said. "And comparing it to classified material, this is not from just one witness, this is not from two witnesses; you're talking 23 people, you're talking at least 10 people who put Tim McVeigh with Hussain Alhussaini before the Oklahoma City bombing.

"Two people who identified Hussain Alhussaini and Tim McVeigh in a bar on April 15; three people who identified Hussain Alhussaini running from the federal building early in the morning at 5:30 as if he is practicing timing himself. You have two witnesses that put Tim McVeigh with Hussain Alhussaini in the Ryder truck; you have one witness inside the Murrah Building who sees Hussain Alhussaini eating out of the truck . . .

"The point is the FBI has not thoroughly, fully investigated this. It is an outrage. I went along for many years thinking they have covered the bases. They have not, John."

You can't say Davis didn't try. She tried to give the witness statements to the FBI in the fall of '97, but it wouldn't take them.

Patterson is a Star editorial writer. Contact him at 1-317-444-6174 or by e-mail at james.patterson@indystar.com

(Note: This correlates rather nicely with this article:

OKLAHOMA BOMBING LINKED TO BIN LADEN

http://www.aim.org/publications/weekly_column/2001/11/21.html

and this:

Get Ready for Twenty World Trade Center Bombings: http://www.meforum.org/meq/june97/emerson.shtml

Excerpt:
MEQ: How did you find this topic, which, other than your efforts, has been virtually invisible to the American public?
Emerson: I actually stumbled across it quite by accident. In December 1992 I was a correspondent with CNN and on assignment in Oklahoma City to do some interviews on another subject entirely. On Christmas Day I found myself with nothing to do. While looking for a fast-food restaurant, I passed a convention center where I saw thousands of Muslims dressed in traditional garb congregating in the streets and entering the center. At first, my own ignorance led me to think they might be extras on a movie set.
When I went inside, I discovered what was really going on. Radical groups were openly declaring themselves to be Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hizbullah, and even Gama`a Islamiya (Omar Abdel Rahman's group in Egypt). They made absolutely no effort to hide their identity or their agendas. Just going to the stalls I collected a phenomenal amount of material, some of which I have subsequently showed on national television. Alarmed, I called a FBI official in Washington to see if it was aware of their existence. I was even more shocked to discover the FBI did not know this conference was taking place.

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