How did al Qaeda, within two or three years, go from obscurity to becoming super-terrorists capable of blowing up U.S. embassies, warships and skyscrapers with astonishing precision?
A corollary: how did the same organization relapse into total incompetence the day after carrying out the most sophisticated terrorist attack in history?
The U.S. media and government officials describe Mohammed and Yousef as "masters of disguise," and then assume they are who they say they are this time. There is scant reason to be so trusting. When Judge Kevin Thomas Duffy sentenced Yousef to life plus 240 years in 1998, he said: "We don't even know what your real name is."
Why is the media not crawling over Chowan College and North Carolina A&T, interviewing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's former associates? Why aren't we seeing that on TV every night? Is that not an incredible human interest story, at the very least? Why did we hardly hear about KSM or the connections between 9/11, Project Bojinka and the '93 WTC bombings for eighteen months after 9/11? The media blackout is reminiscent of the situation with the anthrax attack on American Media.
Why two men from the remote and ungoverned Pakistani province of Baluchistan who grew up in Kuwait would devote their lives to killing Americans is a mystery.
Indeed. Does anybody really believe that the individual below, Ramzi Yousef, mutated from a West Glamorgan-educated computer programmer working for the Kuwaiti government to a globe-hopping, skirt-chasing explosives expert, master of disguise and terrorist organizer in the space of three years? And if not, what happened to that Kuwaiti computer programmer, Abdul Basit, between the last official record of his former life -- a notation made in his passport at the Pakastani embassy in Kuwait two months before the Iraqi invasion -- and his re-emergence as a Philippines-based uber-terrorist?
