Posted on 12/10/2004 1:15:38 PM PST by genefromjersey
A CNN story on 12/08/04 noted a Postal worker (a former one,let's hope)is now on trial - along with "militant" attorney Lynne Stewart, and Arabic language translator Mohammed Yousry - on charges of providing material support to a terrorist organization.
Ahmed Abdel Sattar , who goes by the "organizational nickname" of Abu Omar (or Abu Omar al-Masri) is a 45 year old Egyptian-born veteran of the Egyptian Army (1979-1981),who emigrated to the US in 1982-a jump or two ahead of Egyptian authorities,who sought him in connection to Muslim Brotherhood-linked activities.
Sattar married a Chicago woman (her citizenship status,etc. were not shown) in 1985,and began working for the Postal Service in 1988.(Again, the CNN report is lacking in data. Which Post Office did he work out of ?It almost had to have been one in the NY metropolitan area, because:
In 1990,Sattar met and joined forces with the "Blind Sheikh" Omar Abdel Rahman,who operated out of a "storefront" mosque in Jersey City,NJ,and had ties to Brooklyn,NY.Sattar began driving the Blind Sheikh around in 1992,and, in 1993, testified at an immigration hearing on the Sheikh's behalf.
While the Sheikh's status was being debated, the first World Trade Center bombing occurred,and it was learned the bombers had operated as part of a cell centered around the Sheikh's mosque.
Sattar himself was questioned by the FBI,and "swabbed" for explosive traces soon after the bombing,but was released for lack of evidence,when the swabs came back clean.
When the Blind Sheikh was arrested ,an angry Sattar told the Media: "We will hold the American Administration responsible.Something very bad could happen."
Sattar,it is alleged,conveyed messages to cell members while serving as a "paralegal" to the imprisoned Sheikh. He is also reported to have carried out orders of the Sheikh by writing letters to contacts in Afghanistan,endorsing an associate for employment there. The associate subsequently used his position to get near an Afghan leader al-Qaeda and the Taliban wanted killed,and to murder him.
Did Sattar have some connection with the anthrax murders as well? His "alias" suggests he is the equivalent of a tribal chief-("Abu" - sometimes spelled "Abou" is an honorific,applied to leaders.)-which,in turn,suggests there are followers: in other words, a cell.
Being an "insider" at a Postal facility could have given him considerable knowledge of the probable effects of anthrax-tainted mail...if,indeed,this was an al-Qaeda operation.
ITEM TWO on my list of "Things Needing Clarification" relates to the deaths from anthrax infection of Kathy Nguyen and Ottilie Lundren.
These deaths have been ascribed to "secondary mail contamination"-although detailed and exhaustive swabbing of the victims' homes, mailboxes,etc. turned up no trace of anthrax.
One explanation I've read suggests there was a wind-borne plume of anthrax. As I recall, the writer examined wind currents prevailing at the possible times of infection and guessed there was a possibility.
One major objection to this interesting hypothesis is the apparent lack of additional victims. Shouldn't there have been more ?
My question is: How do we know there were not more victims ??
If some of the victims were homeless "derelicts" sleeping in doorways,etc. at time of exposure,who would even think of anthrax exposure when they turned up dead later on ? How about senior citizens already in poor health ? "Throw-away children" in foster care or state-run institutions ? Absent signs of foul play,would any attending physician even consider anthrax infection ?
Finally, for "conspiracy buffs": Might the government have "covered up" additional anthrax cases in order to stem the existing panic ? ( I know I would have been tempted to do so !)
Exactly. What are the odds there were only the two? One in the middle of NYC, one far out in the exurbs... the odds would seem to be astronomical.
But hey, we can be confident the government does not cover up terroist attacks. < / sarc>
Ping.
Another what 'if', and maybe, will we ever know?
What are the odds that the Feeding Frenzy Press would have missed anything that even vaguely resembled an anthrax death?
Most people can fight off anthrax infections if not given a huge exposure. It occurs naturally in soil, especially around cattle.
>>>Ahmed Abdel Sattar , who goes by the "organizational nickname" of Abu Omar (or Abu Omar al-Masri) is a 45 year old Egyptian-born veteran of the Egyptian Army (1979-1981),who emigrated to the US in 1982-a jump or two ahead of Egyptian authorities,who sought him in connection to Muslim Brotherhood-linked activities.
I didn't know this.
So does just anyone get 'addressed' by Abu, or if you are addressed as Abu, and there are people that 'come to you as an authority', this more than likely means you are, maybe a cell leader?
Do you know that the our mail is STILL going to a separate annex for screening?
Who is "Our"?
You work for any of the targeted agencies or news media?
Or is is just because a certain post office sorting plant is too expensive to de-contaminate?
>>> Who is "Our"?
New Jersey.
>>> You work for any of the targeted agencies or news media?
Self employeed.
>>>Or is is just because a certain post office sorting plant is too expensive to de-contaminate?
P.O. was fully decontaminated. This is ongoing screening and incidents have occured since.
As explained to me here of FR when I asked the same question its an honorific, meaning Father. It is used in everyday arabic, and is not a suggestion of rank in any normal sense.
Yes. For example, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (the nasty lad who likes to cut folks' heads off in Iraq) is actually "Musab, the Jordanian leader". He has taken the name Musab in honor of one of Islam's "martyrs".
Oh please. The very beginning of the anthrax attack was marked by recently departed douchebag Tommy Thompson's lame lines about how the victim was a hunter and drank from a stream etc. Of course the government was attempting to hush it all up.
If there was some wider release of anthrax, the odds that there were two widely separated victims with absolutely nothing in common is about as likely as firing a machinegun into a crowd and only hitting one person is the crowd and one person 20 miles downrange. It defies explanation. So, the answer must be: There were other victims that were undiagnosed or unreported.
How in the world did he get on with the US Postal Service. That is not an easy job to come by.
>>>when I asked the same question its an honorific, meaning Father. It is used in everyday arabic, and is not a suggestion of rank in any normal sense.
So a "man", who is the same age as another "man", in speaking 'English' addresses someone as Abu, who is not name Abu, you are telling me he is calling him Father?
Oh, yes, by all means, assume there's thousands more being covered up, and nobody reports their loved ones coughing up a lung because men in suits tell them to shut up.
And of course after 9/11 Americans are too cowed to speak up, and the press falls in line and salutes the flag in silence.
Nobody whispers a list of names on the Internet even after months, these victims just disappear, and nobody notices an empty desk, a car left parked, or little billy missing from the dinner table.
Lets also assume these terrorists managed to target only the homeless and friendless who could be conveniently shoveled under ground with nobody giving a damn. Very smart targeting. Lets take out the homeless. That will REALLY set America back on its heels. Its a blow from which they will never recover.
Oh, wait, there's Laci Peterson... I'm sure she was really an anthrax victim, and had to be done away with... And Drue Soudine, and that missing family in Tennessee, and what about that stack of bodies at the Crematorium...
Postal Worker's Letter Tied To Slaying of Afghan Leader
By Steve Fainaru and Brooke A. Masters
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, May 13, 2002; Page A01
NEW YORK -- Authorities believe a U.S. postal employee in custody here helped draft a letter of introduction that may have been used by two men who posed as journalists to assassinate a leading opposition figure in Afghanistan last fall, according to a U.S. official familiar with the case.
A summer 2001 conversation about the letter allegedly surfaced in hundreds of hours of wiretaps involving Ahmed Abdel Sattar, 42, the official said. Authorities charged last month that Sattar had served as the New York-based "communications center" for an Egyptian terrorist group directed by a blind Muslim cleric from his U.S. prison cell.
Sattar has not been charged with involvement in the Sept. 9 slaying of Gen. Ahmed Shah Massoud, leader of the Northern Alliance, which long fought the Taliban in Afghanistan. But the Egyptian national who allegedly drafted the letter with Sattar, Yassir Sirri, has been charged in London with conspiring to murder Massoud. Sirri has denied involvement.
The U.S. official said authorities remain uncertain whether Sattar knew the letter would be used in the attack on Massoud, which took place in Northern Afghanistan two days before the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes on Washington and New York.
"It's clear that this was a letter for these two guys," said the official, who asked not to be identified. "But how much Sattar knew about the mission isn't clear."
Sattar's lawyer, Kenneth A. Paul, declined to comment, citing a court order that prohibits him from discussing specific evidence. Sattar, he said, is being held in a maximum security unit at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, and has been permitted neither a family visit nor a phone call since his arrest.
The conversation about the letter, first reported in the New York Post, adds another dimension to the case against Sattar, who was described in last month's indictment as "a surrogate" for the imprisoned cleric, Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman. Abdel-Rahman was convicted in 1995 of plotting to blow up several New York landmarks, including the World Trade Center.
Sattar's arrest was overshadowed by charges filed the same day against Abdel-Rahman's lawyer, Lynne F. Stewart, but authorities regard Sattar as potentially more important to the ongoing federal terrorism probe. (A translator, Mohammed Yousry, also was arrested in the alleged conspiracyto provide material support to a terrorist organization. Sirri was indicted but was already in custody.)
Authorities believe the case of Sattar, a naturalized U.S. citizen who came here from Egypt in 1982, provides a window on the domestic activity of global terror networks and a way to understand the relationships between Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization and other extremist groups such as Abdel-Rahman's Gama'a al-Islamiyya, or the Islamic Group. Sattar has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Sattar arranged contacts with global terrorists, disseminated propaganda and helped prepare at least one fatwa, or religious edict, that offered a moral rationale for committing violent acts, the indictment alleged. "He was the IG's [Islamic Group's] point man in North America," said the federal official. "He served as a communications facility for their worldwide network. He's very important."
Friends and family of Sattar said they are anxious to hear what the tapes reveal. Up to now, they said, the charges make little sense given the U.S. government's approach to Sattar over the past decade. On more than one occasion, the FBI tried unsuccessfully to recruit Sattar as an informant, his wife, Lisa, says.
Until 1997, Sattar had government clearance as a paralegal to visit Abdel-Rahman in federal prisons. Even as the government was tapping his phone, Sattar, a 13-year veteran of the U.S. Postal Service, was drawing a $40,000 salary for a job with the main post office on Staten Island that included picking up priority mail from secure areas of John F. Kennedy International Airport. That job ended when he was abruptly transferred to a desk job at a remote branch on Staten Island after the Sept. 11 attacks.
"This is what I don't understand: If he was a suspect for this long, why did they let him go here and here and here and here?" asked Mohamed Nabeel Elmasry, a close friend of Sattar's who worked with him as a paralegal on Abdel-Rahman's defense team. "Why did they let him have access to all these sensitive areas?"
Authorities said they waited to arrest Sattar because of the vast amounts of information they were gathering -- not just about him, but also about high-level members of the Islamic Group.
"It wasn't just Sattar we were listening to," the federal official said. "We were listening to everybody. It was a gold mine."
Sattar, often described as soft-spoken and unfailingly polite, was in many ways quintessentially American. He lived in a three-bedroom apartment on Staten Island with his Chicago-born wife and their four children. He supplemented his income by selling baby formula at night.
In a used Plymouth Voyager, he took his family on post office picnics to Six Flags in New Jersey and to historic sites in Washington and Philadelphia. He went to ballgames at Yankee Stadium and pounded stainless steel pots with his wife when the Chicago Bulls won the NBA championship.
A registered independent, he voted for Ralph Nader for president, his wife said.
Paul Phillips, president of Staten Island Branch 83 of the American Postal Workers Union, said Sattar recently told him, "I've got to be innocent, because the FBI has been following me for 10 years and they've got nothing."
But even after Abdel-Rahman's conviction, Sattar never hid his devotion to the cleric, or his views on U.S. policy. A frequent spokesman for the Islamic movement, he told "Frontline" in 1999 that he viewed the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania as "part of a war" against Islam that had been "declared by the American government." He called bin Laden "an inspiration" and said he had "sympathy for people who hate, or, let's say . . . understanding of why people show their hate toward the United States."
Phillips said copies of the "Frontline" interview circulated among employees of the Staten Island post office. Even before Sept. 11, he said, some colleagues shunned Sattar while others tried to engage him. "People who worked the closest with him had the least concern," Phillips said. "He came across as a family guy who went to his mosque and did his job. If somebody needed a door opened or there was a woman on the other side of the counter who needed help with a package, he was always, 'Oh, let me help you with that.' You wanted to like him, but you always knew there was this other side."
Authorities opened a wiretap on Sattar's home phone under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows the government to monitor suspected spies and agents of foreign terrorist organizations. Paul, Sattar's lawyer, said evidence recently turned over to the defense suggests the wiretaps may go back as far as seven years.
According to Sattar's indictment, an Islamic Group leader requested Sattar's assistance in expanding the organization's presence in the United States in early 1999. The group had taken responsibility in 1997 for a massacre in Luxor, Egypt, in which 58 tourists and four Egyptian security officers were shot and hacked to death. Before fleeing, the assailants scattered leaflets demanding Abdel-Rahman's release; one was inserted into the slashed corpse of a victim, according to Sattar's indictment.
The indictment alleged several contacts between Sattar and the Islamic Group: In 1999, it said, Sattar held telephone conversations with a group leader, Rifa'i Taha Musa, debating the effectiveness of a cease-fire the organization had declared.
On Oct. 3, 2000, the indictment said, Musa called Sattar and discussed a fatwa that Musa had written in Abdel-Rahman's name.
The next day, Sattar allegedly called Sirri -- the Egyptian charged in London with conspiracy to murder Massoud -- and read him the edict, entitled "Fatwa Mandating the Bloodshed of Israelis Everywhere." It appeared the next day on a Web site run by Sirri, according to the indictment.
The edict called on "brother scholars everywhere in the Muslim world to do their part and issue a unanimous fatwa that urges the Muslim nation to fight the Jews and to kill them wherever they are."
In January, the Wall Street Journal reported that it had purchased a looted IBM desktop computer in Kabul that had apparently been used by leaders of al Qaeda. Among the documents on the computer's hard drive was a letter written last May requesting an interview with Massoud.
The request, the Journal reported, carried the name of Yassir Sirri of the Islamic Observation Center in London. But the computer indicated it had been written by a user named Mohammed Zawahiri, a possible reference to bin Laden's top lieutenant, Ayman Zawahiri, according to the paper.
The U.S. official familiar with the recorded conversations between Sirri and Sattar said "at least one" was clearly about the contents of an interview request to be sent to Massoud. On the tape, the official said, the two men "can be heard discussing in some detail how to write such a letter and how it should read," with Sattar commenting on certain passages.
Massoud was mortally wounded by a bomb hidden inside a television camera that was detonated during an interview. Many authorities believe the Sept. 9 assassination was a preemptive strike on the primary opposition leader in advance of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The U.S. official said there is no clear evidence linking Massoud's slaying to Sept. 11, nor is there evidence suggesting that Sattar or Sirri had advance notice of those attacks. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, announcing the indictments of Sattar and the others on April 9, noted that the indictment did not include information related to Sept. 11 and said, "I think it's safe to assume that there is not any that would be likely to be forthcoming."
In an interview last week, Lisa Sattar said her husband was home sleeping on his day off when the first plane struck the World Trade Center. After she woke him up, they both sat transfixed. At first, she said, Sattar screamed for the safety of his children, who were already at school, and then he merely stared.
"It was like someone turned him off," she said. "It was like there was no more Ahmed. He was like a zombie. He wasn't anything."
After it became known that the suspected hijackers were Muslim, she said, Sattar told her: "Oh my God, that's it. Do you know what's going to happen? We're going to live a life of hell."
"He was right," she said.
Sattar called work and said he was taking the rest of the week off for his safety. He told his family to stay in the apartment. When he returned to work the next week, according to Phillips, the union president, Sattar was asked by the postmaster to transfer to a remote location on Staten Island. He agreed.
"Two of the people that worked in his facility lost a brother or a son, and they felt that the emotions were very high," Phillips said. Before the transfer, Phillips said, Sattar had picked up priority mail for Staten Island at a secure location at JFK airport twice a week, but Phillips said he did not believe Sattar was allowed out on the tarmac. A spokeswoman for the U.S. postal inspector did not return phone calls.
Lisa Sattar said the FBI had followed her husband for years. But after the Sept. 11 attack, agents became a constant presence, following him even as he drove the children on their paper route.
Asked whether she believed in her husband's innocence, Lisa Sattar said: "They make it sound like he was running some kind of major operation out of my home. It's very unlikely, really unlikely." Among other things, she said, that would be illogical, because she and her husband believed for years that their phones were tapped.
On the morning of April 9, Sattar was summoned to the main Staten Island post office. He confidently told colleagues the meeting was to give him his old job back. Instead, he was arrested.
"Something doesn't click here," Lisa Sattar said. "All the clearances he had, and the way they waited. If there are conversations from 1999 and 2000, why wait so long? I don't understand it."
I asked on FR if any Arabic speakers could explain what Abo means.
The answer I got both in a post and a private FR mail from about three sources was that it is a Honorific meaning literly "Father". Similar to the Spanish (latin american) Tio (Uncle) or Poppie (daddy). When someone on the Mariners team calls Edgar Martines "Poppie" they are not implying he is their actual father.
I also heard Linda Vestor (Fox) explain in passing on her show reciently that Abo Marzen was a term of endearment meaning litterally Father Marzen. Linda speaks Arabic and spent a couple years studying in Egypt. A smart lady, not just a pretty face.
So yes, that is exactly what I am telling you, the word Abo means father, but when used as an honorific it does not literally amount to a claim that the person addressed as Abo is in fact ones Father.
As a child we had a dear friend of the family that was calld Aunt Tillie. She was no relation what so ever.
Why is this hard to understand?
Ping to help with the meaning of Abu.
>>> Why is this hard to understand?
Because it is coming from you.
Then why in hell did you ask?
You begged me to :)
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