Posted on 09/30/2002 1:30:19 AM PDT by kattracks
Edited on 05/26/2004 5:09:07 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
September 30, 2002 -- A globe-trotting Iraqi, suspected of being a terrorist with ties to both al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, was arrested in Jordan after Sept. 11 and then mysteriously released, U.S. intelligence officials said.
The Iraqi, Ahmad Hikmat Shakir, 37, was picked up last October in Amman, and his passport showed he had recently traveled to Pakistan, Yemen and Malaysia, all key terror trouble spots.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Now why did he have to bring Daschle into this?
The case of Ahmad Hikmat Shakir
Ahmad Hikmat Shakir, an Iraqi citizen aged 37 years, was arrested at Amman Airport on 21 October 2001 during a transit-stop on his way from Qatar to Iraq. Ahmad Hikmat Shakir, an employee of the Qatari Ministry of Awqaf, was arrested on 17 September by the Qatar authorities and reportedly ill-treated while being interrogated. He was not charged with any offence and was released from detention. He left Doha for Iraq via Jordan on 21 October and was arrested on the same day by the Jordanian security forces. It appears that his arrest may have been in connection with suspicions on the part of the Jordanian authorities relating to visits he had made to Pakistan, Yemen and Malaysia.
Amnesty International wrote to the Minister of Interior in November seeking assurances that Ahmad Hikmat Shakir was being humanely treated and not subjected to any kind of ill-treatment or torture as well as seeking information about his whereabouts, the reasons for his arrest, and whether any charges had been brought against him. By the end of January 2002 no reply had been received.
Ahmad Hikmat Shakir was held in incommunicado detention for several weeks before being allowed access to a lawyer. Following his release on bail on 28 January, Amnesty International was not able to obtain information from him about his experiences during his detention in Jordan or about the charges which had been brought against him. However, according to reports received by Amnesty International, he had lost weight during his detention and appeared to be traumatized.
OH, POOR BABY !
Must be a Clinton hold-over.
Here's another character- notice his name was in El Hage's address book; other than that, though, there wasn't enough evidence to hold him and he was released.:
SEPTEMBER 15, 2001 : (JORDANIAN GHASSAN DAHDULI) Ghassan Dahduli, a year after being warned he would be deported from the US for obtaining a work visa fraudulently, is finally arrested from his home and then was held in solitary confinement for 65 days. Reportedly Ghassan Dahduli's name had been discovered shortly before his arrest in the US in an address book belonging to Wadih al-Hage who was sentenced to life imprisonment in the US for his role in the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Africa. Ghassan Dahduli had been a local officer for the Islamic Association for Palestine in Chicago. -Amnesty International
NOVEMBER 2001 : (JORDANIAN GHASSAN DAHDULI ) At the end of November, Ghassan Dahduli, a Jordanian residing in the US for the last 20 years, was deported to Jordan apparently in relation to an immigration offence. He was arrested in Jordan, following his deportation, on arrival at the airport in Amman and was detained for 13 days in solitary confinement by the GID. For 10 days he was held incommunicado. He was otherwise well-treated during his detention in Jordan. On his release he was informed that charges of ''terrorism'' made against him would be dropped. -Amnesty International
Presumably, that would be Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the skirt-chasing, disco-dancing "Islamic radical" who recently appeared on al-Jazeera taking credit for the planning of 9/11.
Mohammed is a close associate of Ramzi Yousef, the in-country ringleader for the original, 1993 attempt to topple the WTC. A shadowy figure with multiple identities, Yousef arrived in the United States in 1992 carrying an Iraqi passport, and quickly made contact with a rag-tag bunch of islamacist malcontents in New York and New Jersey. He steered their rather unambitious terroristic ambitions, which involved pipe-bombing Jews in Brooklyn, into a much more ambitious plot to topple both towers of the WTC, with the hope of killing 200,000 people. Yousef and the other plotters were apprehended, except for one, Abdul Rahman Yasin, who was inadvertantly released by the FBI and took the first plane to Baghdad, where he still resides.
Khalid Sheik Mohammed was never indicted in the '93 WTC bombing. His links to Yousef were discovered later, after Yousef was apprehended in the Philippines. It emerged that they had hatched a plot, "Project Bojinka," to blow up a dozen airliners in flight on the same day. The Clinton administration's focus, however, was not fighting a widening war on terror, but rather on chalking up victories against local players in court. Eight years after the failed bombing of the WTC, Mohammed got to see his dream realized, as he watched both of the hundred-story towers come crashing down in front of the eyes of the whole world last September 11.
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