9/11 Mysteries In Plain Sight
By Jim Hoagland
Sunday, March 9, 2003; Page B07
Analysis and commentary are my bread and my butter. But detached perspective is in short supply when it comes to Khalid Sheik Mohammed. I hate this murdering terrorist chieftain even for being captured.
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He knows the answer to these two central questions: 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? And what are the links between 9/11 and the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 by Ramzi Yousef, who authorities say is Mohammed's nephew?
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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."
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Mohammed migrated from the identity of small-time freelance terrorist to the top ranks of bin Laden's ultra-secretive band not long after the 1993 bombing resulted in the breakup of Yousef's U.S. network. Could al Qaeda have been the target of a takeover operation by an intelligence service with good legend-manufacturing skills and a great, burning desire for revenge on the United States?
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I heard on the CBC this morning that Australia is also ousting an Iraqi diplomat.
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?
See also Romania expels 5 Iraqi diplomats . Seems to be a lot of this going around?