Free Republic

Mauritanian national Mohamedou Ould Slahi has been held at Guantanamo for 12 years now without trial and despite a dearth of evidence. A diary he kept of his torture is now being published around the world. […] He was accused of having been acquainted with the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and of having provided them with support and sending them to Afghanistan to receive training. He has also been accused of involvement in the Millennium Plot, the foiled terrorist attack targeting the Los Angeles International Airport. At least that’s the claim made by Ahmed Ressam, the...

"9/11 plotter released in Syria prisoner exchange" SNIPPET: "The al-Qaeda recruiter reputed to have assembled the so-called Hamburg Cell, which planned and largely carried out the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, has been set free in a prisoner exchange between rebel and regime forces in Syria. Islamist rebel group Ahrar al-Sham has secured the release of 9/11 plotter and alleged al-Qaeda core member Mohammed Haydar Zammar, adding to concerns about the composition of the Islamic Front. A naturalized German citizen of Syrian origin, Mohammed Haydar Zammar left Germany shortly after the attacks and traveled to Morocco, where he was reportedly...

A Saudi family who “fled” their Sarasota area home weeks before 9/11 had “many connections” to “individuals associated with the terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001,” according to newly released FBI records. One partially declassified document, marked “secret,” lists three of those individuals and ties them to the Venice, Fla., flight school where suicide hijackers Mohamed Atta and Marwan al-Shehhi trained. Accomplice Ziad Jarrah took flying lessons at another school a block away. Atta and al-Shehhi were at the controls of the jetliners that slammed into the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center, killing nearly 3,000 people. Jarrah was the...

WASHINGTON - A British man whose behavior raised suspicions at a flight school in Georgia has been located in England, an FBI official said Friday. Zayead Christopher Hajaig, 35, was taking lessons at the same airport in suburban Atlanta where two of the Sept. 11 hijackers briefly trained, the official said on condition of anonymity because the matter is still under investigation. The Atlanta Joint Terrorism Task Force issued a special bulletin to law enforcement and flight schools this week after it received reports from the school that Hajaig became hostile while trying to upgrade his pilot's license, according to...

Police in Hamburg shut down the notorious al-Quds mosque, renamed the Taiba mosque in 2008, led by German-Syrian national and voluntary imam Mamoun Darkazanli. Darkazanli (a.k.a. Abu Ilyas al-Suri) has been a suspected al-Qaeda operative, primarily as a financier and logistician, in the European Union for close to two decades. Long active in al-Qaeda circles, Darkazanli first surfaced on the radar of Western intelligence agencies when he purportedly helped procure a cargo ship named “Jennifer” for Osama bin Laden as early as 1993 (Hamburger Abendblatt, October 16, 2004). Germany’s Bundeskriminalamt (BKA- Federal Criminal Police Office) admitted that it had been...

A report commissioned in mid-1999 by Rep. Curt Weldon (R) looks into possible Chinese front companies in the US seeking technology for the Chinese military. Dr. Eileen Preisser and Michael Maloof are commissioned to make the report. Dr. Preisser, who runs the Information Dominance Center at the US Army's Land Information Warfare Activity (LIWA) and will later become closely tied to Able Danger, uses LIWA's data mining capabilities to search unclassified information. According to Maloof, their results show Chinese front companies in the US posing as US corporations that acquire technology from US defense contractors. When the study is completed...

<p>November 12, 2001 -- The CIA has evidence that two more hijackers, besides terror leader Mohamed Atta, met with Iraqi intelligence officials earlier this year - bolstering arguments for a Baghdad role in the attacks, it was reported yesterday.</p> <p>The two other skyjackers were Atta's friends and co-conspirators, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Samir Jarrah, who were believed to have been at the controls of two of the pirated jets on Sept. 11.</p>

Was executed American contractor Nicholas Berg's decision to share his computer password with alleged "20th hijacker" Zacarias Moussaoui during a 1999 encounter in Norman, Okla., just a coincidence, as Attorney General John Ashcroft assured the nation last week? Or was there more to this bizarre development than meets the eye? Oklahoma City bombing investigator, former NBC reporter Jayna Davis, has been exploring some of the more troubling aspects of the Berg-Moussaoui meeting, especially in light of the role the city of Norman played in events leading up to 9/11. First, says Davis, the official story which had Berg, then a...

HAMBURG, Germany, Aug. 10 — A German court today began a retrial of Mounir el-Motassadeq, the only person convicted of involvement in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, with the disclosure that the United States will for the first time share evidence about the plot. Mr. Motassadeq's conviction was thrown out in March by an appeals court, which said that critical evidence had been withheld by American authorities. After having been sentenced to 15 years in prison, Mr. Motassadeq was freed in April. The decision by the United States to offer limited cooperation to the Germans introduces a combustible element to...

A man trained as a pilot at a Lawrenceville airport three years ago raised an international terror alert this week. He was found in Britain on Friday, the FBI said. Zayead Christopher Hajaig, a 35-year-old British national, "remains a person of interest" although he has been located, said Steve Emmett, an FBI spokesman in Atlanta. FBI officials released little information about Hajaig on Friday. They would not say whether he had been detained or how he had been located. Earlier this week, authorities issued a "special alert bulletin" warning airports about Hajaig, who took flight lessons at Astron Enterprises at...

HAMBURG - One of the 11 September 2001 suicide pilots, Marwan al-Shehhi, spoke in mid-1999 of causing "thousands of deaths" in the United States, a former librarian said on Wednesday at the Hamburg re-trial of a Morroccan student convicted for his part in the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US. Mounir al-Motassadeq was jailed for 15 years for assisting 3,000 murders and being a member of a terrorist group, but appeal judges ordered a re-trial. The ex-librarian, whose name was withheld in accordance with German court reporting practice, told the court that she thought he mentioned the World Trade Center...

<p>November 12, 2001 -- The CIA has evidence that two more hijackers, besides terror leader Mohamed Atta, met with Iraqi intelligence officials earlier this year - bolstering arguments for a Baghdad role in the attacks, it was reported yesterday.</p> <p>The two other skyjackers were Atta's friends and co-conspirators, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Samir Jarrah, who were believed to have been at the controls of two of the pirated jets on Sept. 11.</p>

<p>February 24, 2004 -- WASHINGTON - The federal commission reviewing the Sept. 11 attacks is examining whether the United States failed to aggressively track one of the hijackers after obtaining his first name and phone number more than two years before the attacks.</p>

<p>C.I.A. Was Given Data on Hijacker Long Before 9/11 By JAMES RISEN and ERIC LICHTBLAU WASHINGTON, Feb. 23 — American investigators were given the first name and telephone number of one of the Sept. 11 hijackers two and a half years before the attacks on New York and Washington, but the United States appears to have failed to pursue the lead aggressively, American and German officials say.</p>

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...

HAMBURG, Germany - A Moroccan on trial for allegedly supporting a cell of the Sept. 11 suicide hijackers was easy to get along with until he fell under the influence of a fellow countryman, who later was convicted on terrorism charges, their former landlord testified Thursday. Reinhard Martens, who rented defendant Abdelghani Mzoudi a room in his house in late 1996, remembered him as a "very good" tenant until another Moroccan, Mounir el Motassadeq, moved in at the start of 1997. "Mzoudi was quieter than before, he seemed like he could not make his own decisions," Martens testified. "Mounir was...

Hamburg: The US secret service, the CIA, had apparently been on the trail of one of the three Hamburg death pilots of 11 September since March 1999. According to ARD and Stern magazine [as of 1030 gmt on 13 August, the Stern and ARD web sites were not observed to carry this report and the hardcopy version of Stern is not yet available], it was Marwan al-Shehhi, who later piloted the Boeing that crashed into the south tower of the World Trade Centre in New York on 11 September. Yet the CIA did not take any action against the man...

A wedding video shot in a Hamburg mosque has been broadcast for the first time and shows grainy scenes of Sept. 11 al-Qaida suicide pilots celebrating with other alleged plotters, possibly including suspects still not formally identified. The video of the October 1999 wedding of Said Bahaji being celebrated in a large room at the al Quds mosque suspected as a recruiting center for al-Qaida operatives has been in the hands of investigators since shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and Washington. In the immediate aftermath of the terror attacks, the Bahaji wedding video provided investigators critical...

Two of the pilots who flew into the WTC, Atta en Al-Shehhi, were possibly prepared for their suicide-mission on September 11 2001 in the Al Fourqaan mosque in Eindhoven, a city in the Netherlands. A AIVD (Dutch security service) spokesman confirms the investigation, that was published in The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. The AIVD thinks it is too early to confirm the information published in the newspaper. 'We have the case under investigation', is the only thing the spokesman says. The Al Fourqaan mosque, located in the Otterstraat, was earlier linked to training jihadwarrios. It is the first time...