Posted on 09/15/2001 5:00:11 PM PDT by Michael2001
Hijack suspect Mohamed Atta and his cousin Marwan Ashehri, two of the 19 hijackers named by the U.S. Justice Department, as perpetrators of the New York World Trade Center and Pentagon, Washington suicide attacks, have been variously described as Egyptian, United Arab Emirates and Saudi nationals.
Yet, according to DEBKA-Net-Weekly, they were actually Arab-Americans.
Hamburg investigators said two of the terrorists were Mohamed Atta, 33, and Marwan Alshehhi, 23, whose training at a Florida flight school has been the focus of intense FBI probes this week. The German investigators said the two were from the United Arab Emirates.
Atta, 33, was implicated in a series of bus bombings that hit Jerusalem in 1996. He evaded Israeli capture by going to ground among his relatives in America. The U.S. authorities at the time turned down Israel’s request to extradite this U.S. national. He is reportedly the scion of a prominent, affluent family in El-Bireh, Ramallah, one of whose members is a former mayor and most of whom carry American citizenship, as do many elite Palestinian families in Ramallah and its environs.
The latest information coming out of the FBI investigation traces Atta, Ashehri and another of the seven suicide pilots, Ziad Jarrah, from the Lebanese Bekaa Valley, to Hamburg four years ago, where they established an Islamic terrorist cell.
Terrorist experts note that this cell based itself on a much older German-based terrorist group – the one involved in the 1988 Pan Am 103 terrorist disaster over Lockerbie, Scotland, in which 270 died. Atta, who set up an Islamic prayer room in the local university, was known in Hamburg as “Mohamed el-Amir.” Ashihri registered for studies, but never turned up. Jarrah, who flew aboard the plane that crashed near Pittsburgh, went from Germany to Afghanistan 18 months ago and from there to Miami, Florida.
It now appears that some of the seven suicide pilots may have trained not only in private flying schools in Florida, but at U.S. military schools. That is yet another pointer to how well Islamic jihadists were able to secretly place themselves in American society and its institutions.
The most recent penetration dates back 11 years at least, although its roots go back much earlier. In 1990, when the Afghan war ended with the Red Army’s defeat, Osama Bin Laden, who led the international Islamic brigade America raised to fight the Red Army, turned coat. “Afghan Arabs” -- as those volunteers came to be known -- were allowed to settle in the United States with their families. Some stayed loyal to their former commander and enlisted to the Al Qaeda, the militant movement Bin Laden created to fight the second surviving secular superpower, America.
Those Afghan Arabs form the American-based core of Al Qaeda. A second important branch that buried its operatives inside the United States was the fanatical and violent Egyptian Jihad Islami movement, Bin Laden’s foremost ally.
In the latter half of the 1990s, those two groups working hand in glove were joined by a younger generation of Arab Moslem militants from the Middle East, brought up in the tradition of suicide for the cause.
Those three branches, numbering no more than some 2,500 activists in all, form the engine powering contemporary international terrorism. They gained entry into the United States in the last 11 years with the help of moles and agents inside America’s governing institutions, including its intelligence machinery.
Those agencies emphatically deny such penetrations. This is only partly true, according to DEBKA sources. Whereas it is inconceivable that U.S. counterintelligence would directly hire Muslim terrorists, there are known cases of U.S. double agents, who by definition serve two services, knowingly aiding an alien agency, which is close to the Bin Laden network.
Furthermore, U.S. counterintelligence has strived for two decades at least to penetrate the militant Islamic fundamentalist world by planting its own moles and double agents – with very little success. In most cases, those plants remained faithful to their religious tenets, not their American handlers, using their covert American connections to spread the fundamentalist net inside U.S. intelligence itself.
He evaded Israeli capture by going to ground among his relatives in America.
The U.S. authorities at the time turned down Israel’s request to extradite this U.S. national."
First they came for the Jews. We did nothing.
Then they came for us.
If true, remember who was running American intelligence, DOJ, and executive branch at the time. I know I will never forgive those who were "in charge" in 1996. They were either incompetent boobs or they hate this country. Since they and their party faithful consider themselves to be brilliant, I must assume it is the latter.
Is this really true, and if so how extensive?
If this is true, we need not only to look for terror cells but also terror moles within the USG and US intelligence agencies (and Congressional committees?).
Enough $$$ was given to the DNC no doubt.
Stupidity on our part. And we paid a price. Now, perhaps, we'll learn...
No. Corruption on the part of X42 and his corrupt DOJ.
But it is true that "we paid a price".
Whoever wrote this was reading my mind. What the writer is really saying is that FBI and CIA counterintelligence falsely believed that informants and provacateurs recruited and planted in the cells by these agencies (Freeh's term was "populating" the cells) deceived the agencies. The informants fed misleading and misdirecting information to FBI and CIA, took their money, some of which had to be generous for this kind of work, and then double crossed the agencies.
There is a possibility that the double agents managed to plant or recruit moles in the agencies, and that might not be as hard as it looks with the FBI, because it is hard for them to find people with even Spanish language skills. To find an Arabic speaker would be a real coup for them. So, it is possible that double agent informants managed to plant moles, and the Soviets had moles in there. The Soviets used the Islamic terrorists a lot, and there were reports that the Soviets helped with the OKC bombing.
What we are looking at is going off 10,000 miles to fight a war when the enemy has at least a brigade of soldiers already in the country, and maybe some people in the security agencies helping to hide them. Not a good way to go off to war.
OUCH!
YES! And who was the President in 1996???
Angrier by the day, I'm getting. Clinton is a traitor and should be dealt with as one!
When did Atta and Ashehri receive their citizenship? Could it have been in '95 and '96 when Clinton was pushing expedited citizenship without FBI background check?
'Hijackers may have taken Saudi identities' "
Here is your link:
Are we capable of learning? Maybe. But we have the shortest memories of any humans on the planet.
Amazing, isn't it? [
Cause and effect.
Peace
Those damn Israelis were trying to stifle his true potential. He had only killed a dozen or two in 1996. He hadn't yet hit his stride!
This needs to be publicized. It's PROOF of Clinton's failed policies. If the public knew that he was responsible for these guys becoming citizens they'd flip. However, the reports of Bush wanting to nationalize aliens are just as bad...
We don't know when they were naturalized, but it would be a good thing to find out. If it turns out to have been during the 95-96 period, we need to demand what background checks were done. There used to be procedures, including swearing that you don't have a criminal record. I don't know what recourse the government has if the applicant lies, but under Clinton, it was probably ignored.
Does David Shippers lurk? He might know how to get this information.
However, the reports of Bush wanting to nationalize aliens are just as bad...
Absolutely. I was just as angry about that.
Before Clinton, applicants had to have been in the country for several years as a legal resident alien (3 to 5 years, don't remember); have letters of referral, knowledge of civics and ability to pass a test, knowledge of English; have no criminal record; have a personal interview. Application process took about a year, which allowed time for a thorough check.
Sleepers, for sure. This is the way it's done, folks. We're talking some long-term planning.
Launching missiles and dropping bombs is fast and easy; identifying and apprehending domestic supporters of these terrorist groups is slow and hard; a body-count is needed to satisy the demand for retribution.
I'm afraid we will have to dramatically increase HUMINT capability. I have no problem with that if it is focussed entirely on collection, but there seems to be a strong tendency to morph human collection exercises and assets into operations.
Since Freeh did it I don't think it's so clear. If I did it, it would be: a) untrue, and; b) intended to sow doubt among his followers.
I think you should have at least qualified this statement with "some of those we are supposed..."
The Oklahoma City bombing middle eastern connection was also buried.And YOU guys forcefully IGNORE the McVeigh connection: "I did it, I alone did it and I'd do it again" McVeigh ...
So you had a number of idealogical recruits that didn't belong to any particular country, that had access via their purported citizenship in this country, and they pursued legal objectives (pilot training) with an ill will in their minds ...
Heck - that fits any number of people in this country on any given day.
It's the intent followed by the execution of that ill will that causes problems. Ill will in this case that evolved into a plan to plow a plane into the WTC towers ...
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