Former CIA Director James Woolsey visited Swansea, in Wales, shortly after 9-11 to investigate whether Ramzi Yousef is in fact the Kuwaiti-resident Pakastani, Abdul Basit, his currently accepted identity. He isn't telling what he found out. From a PBS interview:And just so that it's very clear -- what do you think happened? Iraqi intelligence went in to the Kuwaiti files, realizing they had this man, Ramzi Yousef, who they were going to use in the years to come. So therefore they were setting up a circumstance where they would create a mole, basically, whose identity would be certified by Kuwaiti files. What do you assume happened?
When Iraq occupied Kuwait in 1990 and 1991, it used some Kuwaiti files to create false identities for key agents. It tampered with those files. It tampered with Abdul Basit Karim's files to create a false identity for Ramzi Yousef.
Questions also exist about Abdul Hakim Murad, who was convicted with Yousef in the plane bombing plot [Ed. Note: a plan to bomb 12 U.S. airplanes in the Philippines] and also claims to be born in Kuwait. Questions also exist about Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, also involved in the plane bombing, a fugitive who also claims to be born in Kuwait. People should check those files to see if they've been tampered with.
There have been press reports that you've been to the United Kingdom recently.
I've been to the United Kingdom twice this year.
Where did you stay?
Various places.
Did you go for pleasure or did you go for business?
I went for my own reasons.
It's reported that this is related to your passion about the idea that there might be state involvement, particularly Iraqi involvement, in what's been happening.
You'll have to find out about that from somebody other than me.
But the press reports are true? Untrue?
I'm not going to comment on them one way or the other.
OK. Is that because there's a secrecy rule about talking about this stuff?
Because if I do anything to help me advise the U.S. government, I'm not going to talk about it. ...
But the most important evidence linking the bombing to Iraq involves the passport on which Ramzi Yousef fled on the night of the attack. Yousef left on a Pakistani passport in the name of Abdul Basit Karim. He obtained that passport by going to the Pakistani consulate in New York in December 1992 with the xerox copies of the expired (1984) passport of Abdul Basit and the current (1988) passport. Yousef, claiming to be Abdul Basit, said that he had lost his passport, and asked for a new one. The consulate did not like the documentation Yousef presented, as there was no original document, but it gave him a temporary passport in the name of Abdul Basit Karim.
There really was an individual named Abdul Basit Karim. He was born in Kuwait in 1968 and raised there, as his father worked in the Sheikhdom. After Abdul Basit graduated from high school, he went to Britain, where he studied for three years. He returned to Kuwait in June 1989, after which he obtained a job in Kuwait's planning ministry - and he was in Kuwait when Iraq invaded a year later.
As Abdul Basit was a permanent resident of Kuwait, Kuwait's Interior Ministry maintained a file on him. That file appears to have been tampered with. Information that should have been in the file is not there. A xerox copy of the front page of Abdul Basit's passport is missing. Kuwaiti authorities attributed that to the Iraqi occupation. Yet they did not consider the possibility that the entire file might have been corrupted.
Moreover, there is information in Abdul Basit's file that should not be there. Above all, there is a notation that Abdul Basit and his family left Kuwait on August 26, 1990, traveling from Kuwait to Iraq, crossing from Iraq to Iran at Salamcheh (a crossing point), on their way to Pakistani Baluchistan, where they live now.
Who put that information into Abdul Basit's file and why? It is not the kind of information a traveler gives authorities when he crosses a border. He reports where he came from and the country to which he is going. He does not give his whole itinerary.
Moreover, there was no Kuwait government on August 26, 1990, as Iraq had occupied the country three weeks earlier. Hundreds of thousands of people were fleeing Kuwait and Iraq at the time. It is doubtful than an Iraqi bureaucrat sat in Kuwait's Interior Ministry, recording the travel plans of everyone who left Kuwait.
Finally, Yousef's fingerprints are in Abdul Basit's file in Kuwait. Yousef was fingerprinted when he entered the US, and American authorities later sent his fingerprints to Kuwait. The fingerprints matched and in September 1993, Kuwaiti authorities reported that Yousef's real identity was Abdul Basit.
But Yousef does not seem to be Abdul Basit. Above all, they are of two different heights. Yousef is 6' feet tall. That is what a prosecutor, reading off the FBI arrest card, told this author.21 Yet, according to all available evidence, Abdul Basit was only 5'8."22.
Yet if Yousef is not Abdul Basit, how did his fingerprints get into Abdul Basit's file in Kuwait? The fingerprint cards must have been switched. Someone had to have taken the card with Abdul Basit's prints on it out of the file and substituted a card with Yousef's prints. And the only party that reasonably could have done so is Iraq, while it occupied Kuwait, in order to create a false identity for Ramzi Yousef. Indeed, creating a false identity for agents involved in "wet" operations is a standard practice of Soviet-style intelligence agencies.
In intelligence parlance, a "false flag" operation is one in which a party carries out an action in such a manner as to make it look like others were responsible. For example, if Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turk who tried to kill the Pope in 1981, had been recruited by a Soviet-bloc intelligence agency, as some believe, then the attempted assassination would have been a false flag operation. here
Not too difficult to connect the dots from 1993 to 2001.
It alleges that convicted terrorist Ramzi Yousef was an Iraqi government agent. After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, for which he was later imprisoned, Yousef went to the Philippines where he recruited Terry Nichols, eventually convicted as a co-conspirator in the Oklahoma City bombing, to join a plot to blow up several U.S.-bound airliners, the lawsuit alleges.
Nichols had traveled to the Philippines between 1990 and 1994 seeking help in building a bomb, the lawsuit claims.
About three months after the airline-bombing plot was foiled and Nichols returned to the United States, Oklahoma City's Murrah building was destroyed, killing 168 and wounding hundreds. The lawsuit alleges that Abdul Hakim Murad, then imprisoned in the United States awaiting trial in the airline-bombing plot, said at the time that Yousef's network was responsible.
Years later, after the convictions of Nichols and McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing, the lawsuit alleges the global law enforcement arm Interpol was still trying to apprehend at least two other bombing suspects, one a foreign national.
McVeigh lawyer Stephen Jones said before the 1997 trial and in a book written afterward that there was evidence Nichols hooked up with Muslim fundamentalists in the Philippines and set McVeigh up as "a patsy."
Before you cheer this "new information" ask yourself the following:
1) What "US security services" are involved.
2) Who are "the officials."
3) Please explain "the suspicions" that were mentioned.
4) Please name the " hawks in the Bush administration."
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- unidentified US security services
- possible new links between Iraq and the September 11 attacks.
- as being the possible mastermind of the atrocity.
- a Kuwaiti-born member of Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'ida organisation
- The officials said they believed he was at large somewhere... - there were suspicions that he was involved in the bombings
- However, it had not been known for sure that he was involved with al-Qa'ida, let alone at such a high level.
- Some hawks in the Bush administration anxious to launch a military invasion of Iraq believe that Yousef is in fact an Iraqi agent
- The new information, suggesting that Mohammed was deeply involved in both the operational and financial planning of the September 11 attacks, came largely from captured al-Qa'ida members including Abu Zubeida,
Anyone remember the interview that Bill O'Reilly did with James Woods, the actor, a few weeks after 9-11?
Woods described a trans-Pacific flight he took some time previously, where he noted some middle eastern men who looked and behaved suspiciously. He brought it to the attention of a flight attendant, and was later contacted by the FBI for an interview.
They told him (if memory serves) that he had provided a valuable lead.
Is it possible this incident is connected with the "attempted bombing of airliners over the Pacific"?
