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NEW YORK - At least 11 al-Qaida suspects have "disappeared" in U.S. custody, and some may have been tortured, Human Rights Watch said in a report issued Monday. The prisoners are probably being held outside the United States without access to the Red Cross or any oversight of their treatment, the human rights group said. In some cases, the United States will not even acknowledge the prisoners are in custody. The report said the prisoners include the alleged architect of the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, as well as Abu Zubaydah, who is believed to be a close aide...

August 7, 2004THE OVERVIEWBin Laden Sent Suspect to U.S., Officials Say By DOUGLAS JEHL and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM ASHINGTON, Aug. 6 - American intelligence officials now believe that Issa al-Hindi, the alleged Qaeda operative now in British custody, was dispatched to the United States in early 2001 by the mastermind of the Sept. 11 plot at the direction of Osama bin Laden to case potential targets in New York City, senior government officials said Friday. The officials said that Mr. Hindi was the same person as the figure identified in the Sept. 11 commission report as Issa al-Britani. The...

Media coverage of the 9/11 Commission's most-recent staff statements has centered on debunking the assertion that al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein had a working relationship. Largely lost in the debate are a number of interesting revelations. The Commission's Staff Statement No. 15 ("Overview of the Enemy"), states that one plot floated by the mujahedeen in Afghanistan involved taking over a launcher and forcing Russian scientists to fire a nuclear missile at the United States. Former presidential consultant and GeoStrategic Analysis President Peter Heussy says, "The commission's staff report gives major credence to the need for a ballistic missile defense system...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Al Qaeda had originally planned to crash hijacked planes into 10 targets in the United States and carry out simultaneous attacks in southeast Asia, the panel investigating the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks said on Wednesday. The commission issued a report saying that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, believed to be the main planner of the Sept. 11 attacks which killed nearly 3,000 people, had originally drawn up a more-extensive scheme in which he would also pilot a hijacked airplane. Al Qaeda had drawn up a list of targets that originally included the sites hit on Sept. 11 -- the...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Sept. 11 plot mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed originally envisioned an attack involving 10 hijacked planes, including one he would pilot and, after all male passengers were killed, land at an airport and make an anti-American speech, according to a report Wednesday from the commission investigating the attacks. The report, compiled by the commission's staff from interviews with government officials and documents they reviewed, said Mohammed initially proposed hitting CIA and FBI headquarters, unidentified nuclear plants and tall buildings in California and Washington state, in addition to the World Trade Center, Pentagon and White House or Capitol. Mohammed,...

WASHINGTON: Chicago's Sears Tower and Los Angeles' Library Tower were to be the next targets after the terrorist attacks on World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, Al-Qaeda's puported operations chief Khalid Shiekh Mohammed now in detention, has told US interrogators, media reports said on Tuesday. The plan for Chicago and Los Angeles were aborted because of the decisive US response to the New York and Washington attacks, Sheikh reportedly told the investigators, the Washington Times said quoting a British newspaper. The US response disrupted the terrorist organisations' plans so thoroughly that it could not proceed, he said.

<p>LONDON — Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, al Qaeda's purported operations chief, has told U.S. interrogators that the group had been planning attacks on the Library Tower in Los Angeles and the Sears Tower in Chicago on the heels of the September 11, 2001, terror strikes.</p>

'I met Osama Bin Laden in Kabul. It was at this time we discussed the Heathrow operation' It makes a chilling picture. The mastermind behind the September 11 attacks has told interrogators that he and his terrorist nephew leafed through almanacs of American skyscrapers when planning the operation. Sears Tower in Chicago and Library Tower in Los Angeles — which was “blown up” in the film Independence Day — were both potential targets, according to transcripts of interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Al-Qaeda operations chief. “We were looking for symbols of economic might,” he told his captors. He recounted...

Florida's Jihad ConferenceBy Joe KaufmanFrontPageMagazine.com | December 17, 2003 During the holiday season this year, an Islam for Humanity conference will be held near Disney World on the campus of the Universal Heritage Foundation, a 31-acre Islamic propagation center located in Kissimmee, Florida. The three day conference will commence on December 19, 2003, which “coincidentally” marks the beginning of Hanukkah. The timing is not to be confused with the objective -- highlighting peace and brotherhood will not be the conference's priorities in marking the holiday season. Originally listed as “Specially Invited Guests” were ex-Presidential candidate and Green Party leader, Ralph Nader, and Shaikh Abdur-Rahman Al-Sudais, the chief...

November 24, 2003, 8:15 a.m.“Al Qaeda Dunnit!”Think again.By Laurie Mylroie “Al Qaeda is still everywhere and nowhere," or so opined a Columbia University professor after the double pair of car bombings in Istanbul. How can that be? For more than two years, the United States has led an international Coalition in a campaign that has succeeded in detaining or killing over half of al Qaeda's leadership, cut off a significant amount of its funding, and deprived it of its territorial base.Bombing attacks south of the Turkish-Iraqi border are regularly attributed to one party, Baathist stalwarts, while bombs north of...

A NEWSWEEK article by investigative reporters Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball about the memo linking Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein dismisses a recent WEEKLY STANDARD report as "hype" and concludes, the "tangled tale of the memo suggests that the case of whether there has been Iraqi-al Qaeda complicity is far from closed." While it's refreshing to see the establishment media pick up the story, the Newsweek article is less than authoritative. The authors write: "The Pentagon memo pointedly omits any reference to the interrogations of a host of other high-level al Qaeda and Iraqi detainees--including such notables as Khalid...

The Memo and the Link Between Saddam and OsamaBy Lowell PonteFrontPageMagazine.com | November 17, 2003 "OSAMA BIN LADEN AND SADDAM HUSSEIN had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003,” reports the November 24 issue of The Weekly Standard, “that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al Qaeda – perhaps even for Mohamed Atta – according to a top secret U.S. Government memorandum….” This 16-page memo, dated last October 27, was sent from Undersecretary of Defense...

THE two main planners of the September 11 terrorist attacks have revealed details of Osama bin Laden's close involvement in organising the atrocity, according to leaked transcripts of their interrogations. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh, who were captured in Pakistan and are in US custody, have disclosed that bin Laden chose the pilots who flew the doomed jets and headed a committee that debated details of the attacks. The pair have filled in many of the gaps in knowledge about how the attacks were planned, and have named previously unknown co-conspirators and other fellow al-Qaeda members, according to...

When President George W. Bush delivered his state of the union address in January 2002, some 20 weeks after 9/11, he said North Korea, Iran and Iraq "and their terrorist allies constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world." He omitted, however, any mention of Saudi Arabia and Pakistan as members of this same axis. Since then, much more has been learned about the insidious underworld of international terrorism organized by Muslim fundamentalists. We continue to discover the extent to which Pakistanis provide organizational and logistic support to the network of terror run by Osama...

HAMBURG, Germany - A court trying a Sept. 11 terror suspect said Thursday it would seek testimony from a captured al-Qaida leader who allegedly masterminded the attacks on the United States. Presiding Judge Klaus Ruehle said the Hamburg state court had prepared a request for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to appear as a witness in the trial of Abdelghani Mzoudi, 30, who is accused of supporting the Hamburg al-Qaida cell that included three Sept. 11 pilots. He did not elaborate. Given Mohammed's alleged role, he should be able to describe where the attacks were planned, defense attorney Guel Pinar said. Mohammed,...

The recent discovery in London and Paris of small amounts of what is thought to be ricin, a lethal toxin that is one of the most deadly of natural poisons, appears to indicate that terrorists are actively preparing to cross a new threshold by using chemical and biological weapons. These developments have intensified the hunt for one of the key figures believed to be behind this threat, a Jordanian Bedouin known as Abu Masib Zarqawi (real name thought to be Ahmed Fadil Nazal al-Khalayleh). Zarqawi heads a small organisation called Al-Tawhid, which appears to have cells operating across Western Europe...

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, is a Pakistani Baluch. So is Ramzi Yousef, who masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In 1995, together with a third Baluch, Abdul Hakam Murad, the two collaborated in an unsuccessful plot to bomb 12 U.S. airplanes. Years later, as head of al Qaeda's military committee, Mohammed reportedly planned the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings, as well as the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000. Why should the Baluch seek to kill Americans? Sunni Muslims, they live in the desert regions of eastern Iran and western Pakistan. The U.S....

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- A court ordered a Pakistani man arrested March 1 with suspected Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed to remain in police custody for at least three days while police continue to interrogate him, court officials said Saturday. The anti-terrorism court in Rawalpindi, near Pakistan's capital, ruled police could continue to hold the suspect, Ahmed Abdul Qadus, until at least March 11. At that time, the court will rule again and is likely to approve his continued detention. Qadus, a member of Pakistan's hardline Jamaat-e-Islami religious party, was captured at his home in a raid by Pakistani intelligence...

A chilling inheritance of terror By Syed Saleem Shahzad KARACHI - Ever since the frenzied shootout last month on September 11 in Karachi there have been doubts over whether Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed head of al-Qaeda's military committee, died in the police raid on his apartment. Certainly, another senior al-Qaeda figure, Ramzi Binalshibh, widely attributed as being the coordinator of the September 11 attacks on the United States a year earlier, was taken alive and handed over to the US. The latest information is that he is on a US warship somewhere in the Gulf. Now it has emerged...

ASHINGTON, March 3 — The White House said today that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the suspected organizer of the Sept. 11 attacks who was captured over the weekend in Pakistan, will be interrogated humanely. "The standard for any type of interrogation of somebody in American custody is to be humane and to follow all international laws and accords dealing with this type subject," President Bush's chief spokesman, Ari Fleischer, said. "That is precisely what has been happening and exactly what will happen," Mr. Fleischer said. Mr. Fleischer was responding to a query on how much pressure and what kind of pressure...