Posted on 02/10/2003 6:57:46 PM PST by Ranger
In an LA Times article from December (the longest article on KSM anywhere to date), it does say that around the time they apprehended Ramzi Yousef, inquiries within Pakistan reached as far as KSM's older brother Zahed, who was living in Peshawar and who "disappeared" after being "scrutinized". Zahed was a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood (the biggest and oldest clandestine Sunni Islamist group) in Kuwait, and during the 1980s Afghan jihad he ran the Peshawar branch of a major Kuwaiti charity; probably one of those "dual-use" charities.
I am of two minds about Mylroie's theory that the real KSM and Abdul Basit Karim (Ramzi Yousef) have been replaced by others unknown. What we know about their backgrounds (see Simon Reeve's The New Jackals for Yousef, see the LA Times article for KSM) is completely consistent with a later career working for Al Qaeda; and being politicized Baluchs living in Kuwait would open channels to Iraq for them, Iraq having supported Baluchi nationalism in various ways over the years. (The Baluchs are divided between Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan, and while the USSR occupied Afghanistan it was feared that an independent, left-leaning Baluchistan would finally provide them with access to the Persian Gulf.) The business about going to discos and bragging on the phone about sexual conquests also falls within the scope of Al Qaeda tactics - blend in, act like an apostate. While in the Philippines, KSM's assumed identity was "Abdul Majid, a flamboyant Saudi businessman who lived in the top floor of Manila's Josefa Apartments with Ramzi Yousef" (Knight Ridder). "In Manila, to impress a dentist he was dating, he once chartered a helicopter and buzzed overhead while waving and chatting by cell phone." So he played the playboy to the hilt.
But then (in that last article) we have Col. Mendoza, a former Filipino intelligence chief, saying: "He behaves like he's an intelligence officer... He appears and disappears. He has safe houses. He is very, very clever." And we have the Guardian reporting inadvertently that Yousef's fingerprints don't match Abdul Basit's. So there is a continuing trickle of evidence consistent with Mylroie's view.
Something I would love to see is Al Jazeera's interview with KSM and Ramzi Binalshibh. As I understand it, this was filmed in Karachi in June 2002, aired around the first anniversary of September 11, and KSM's safehouse was raided on the day the show went to air. It was reported that KSM was killed in the raid; later, according to TIME, "a fingerprint check ... revealed that the dead man on the floor of the Karachi apartment wasn't Mohammed". For a Mylroie fan, this means that "KSM" might be dead after all! ... But you'd think that minutes of TV footage would provide ample opportunity for people who knew the young KSM to settle whether or not Al Qaeda's KSM is one and the same.
A footnote to all this: In Selig Harrison's In Afghanistan's Shadow, a book about Baluchi nationalism, I find "Prince Abdul Karim", arguably the first modern Baluchi nationalist, and "Sheikh Mohammed al-Mohammed", a Baluchi sheikh in Bahrain who claims to have sponsored Baluchistan: Land of the Arabs, a book by an Iraqi arguing that the Baluchs are really Arabs. (The full name of Ramzi Yousef's Kuwaiti identity is "Abdul Basit Mahmud Abdul Karim".) I bring this up because Mir Aimal Kasi (also spelt Kansi), the 1993 assassin of two CIA employees who was recently executed in the USA and sent home to Pakistan for a hero's funeral, appears to have come from a prominent family; a close relative is a minister in the new Pakistani government. Mylroie argues that Kasi tested an escape route subsequently used by Ramzi Yousef - and that argument for that is quite independent of the "false identity" theory. So I wonder whether Yousef and KSM might also come from prominent Baluchi families, perhaps even nobility. (I should mention that Kasi was ethnically a Pashtun, but he came from Baluchistan.) Abdul Karim is a common enough name, and perhaps it's most likely that young Abdul Basit was simply named after the Baluchi national hero, rather than being a relation; and Sheikh Mohammed in Bahrain may also be a red herring. But I've thrown this in for those who want to do their own investigation.
Hey Swarthy, doesn't this remind you of the Japanese from Canada to S. America pre 7 December, 1941.
National Security Adviser Roilo Golez, along with intelligence officials who have requested anonymity, have said Iraqi diplomats appear to have been directly involved in instigating protests and fanning anti-U.S. sentiment in the capital.
Of course our left wingers in the future and PC blinded so called conservatives will claim that all of this action by the Philipine Government was racial.
Let's roll !!
Good question. Here's one clue.
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http://www.indystar.com/library/topics/opinion/patterson/columns/2001_1201.html
Readers want bombing probe reopened
What about the latest bombshell from Davis that one of the affidavit authors recognized terrorist suspect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed as someone who was in Oklahoma City before it was bombed? Mohammed is among the 22 fugitives on the FBI's Most Wanted List President Bush announced Oct. 10.
"Sure, if she has any information on the current (World Trade Center) investigation, we would want that," Oklahoma FBI Agent Gary Johnson said Thursday. We shall see.
Tenet and the CIA tried to stall the inquiry by withholding requested intelligence documents and then fighting the declassification and public release of the investigators' findings, especially on Khalid Shaykh Mohammad, the reputed mastermind of 9/11. Until the very end, the CIA refused to allow any publication of information relating to his role in the 9/11 attacks.I'd like to see some more direct confirmation of this, but it is highly consistent with my own previous observation: the government is happy to chatter endlessly about Osama bin Laden, who was little more than an informercial spokesman, but they are very reluctant to talk about KSM, who is the actual architect of the 9/11 conspiracy, and who has been connected to every major terrorist attack against the US since the Gulf War. This in spite of the fact that KSM has been under a sealed indictment since the nineties, and despite the fact that he (or someone whose identity he appropriated) spent several years in the United States. I believe it was you, honway, who may have been the first to bring out that last fact, which was finally addressed in a heavily "spun" article that appeared in the LA Times just before Christmas -- well over a year after 9/11.
The government knows a lot about KSM that they aren't telling us. Just as they know a lot about what happened in Prague that they aren't telling us. Just as they know a lot about what happened at American Media that they aren't telling us. What is it that they know, and why won't they tell us? Given that KSM is ostensibly the uncle of Ramzi Yousef, I have my suspicions.
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