One of these other Kuwaitis was Basit's US-educated uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed ("KSM"). Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is the author of 9-11. He has also been connected with every major anti-US bombing conspiracy since the end of the Gulf War. He is the real uber terrorist of the past decade -- not Osama bin Laden, who was little more than a pitch man. KSM is Saddam's prime contractor for international terrorism, having replaced Abu Nidal, who formerly filled that slot. The administration has been very unwilling to divulge what they actually know about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. I'll give you all three guesses as to why that might be.
Post date 09.13.01 | Issue date 09.24.01
In the immediate aftermath of Tuesday's attacks, attention has focused on terrorist chieftain Osama bin Laden. And he may well be responsible. But intelligence and law enforcement officials investigating the case would do well to at least consider another possibility: that the attacks--whether perpetrated by bin Laden and his associates or by others--were sponsored, supported, and perhaps even ordered by Saddam Hussein.
To this end, investigators should revisit the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. A few years ago, the facts in that case seemed straightforward: The mastermind behind the bombing, who went by the alias Ramzi Yousef, was in fact a 27-year-old Pakistani named Abdul Basit. But late last year, AEI Press published Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America, a careful book about the bombing by AEI scholar Laurie Mylroie. The book's startling thesis is that the original theory of the attack, advanced by James Fox (the FBI's chief investigator into the 1993 bombing until his replacement in 1994) was correct: that Yousef was not Abdul Basit but rather an Iraqi agent who had assumed the latter's identity when police files in Kuwait (where the real Abdul Basit lived in 1990) were doctored by Iraqi intelligence during the occupation of Kuwait. If Mylroie and Fox (who died in 1997) are right, then it was Iraq that went after the World Trade Center last time. Which makes it much more plausible that Iraq has done so again.
According to the theory of the 1993 bombing embraced by federal prosecutors and the Clinton administration, Yousef/Abdul Basit was just another Middle Eastern student who became radicalized in his early twenties. But it is worth noting that the only two publicly reported items suggesting that Yousef and Abdul Basit are the same man could very easily have been products of Iraqi tampering with Kuwaiti police files: a few photocopied pages from earlier Abdul Basit passports that had clearly been tampered with, provided by Yousef in New York in 1992 to get a Pakistani passport in Abdul Basit's name, and fingerprints matching Yousef's found in Abdul Basit's police file in Kuwait. It is also worth noting that Abdul Basit and his family, who lived in Kuwait, disappeared during the Iraqi occupation, and the family has never reappeared. Was this a random tragedy of war or part of an effort to set up a false identity for Yousef?
Snippet: NETTAVISEN.no: "Krekar-saken NETT-TREFF: Krekar varsler hellig krig Av: Ole Berthelsen / Liv Ekeberg 11. feb 11:36, ny 12. feb 14:32 – Hellig krig, jihad, vil komme dersom amerikanerne fortsetter den politikk som landet fører i dag, hevdet mulla Krekar under Nettavisens nett-treff. Nettavisens lesere gikk mann av huse for å stille spørsmål til mulla Krekar onsdag. Under nett-treffet ble Krekar spurt om han tror på hellig krig. – Hellig krig, jihad, vil komme dersom amerikanerne (les: George Bush) fortsetter den politikk som landet fører i dag, svarte Krekar. Mulla Krekar svarte Nettavisens lesere onsdag. Foto: Liv Ekeberg/Nettavisen – Bush en full sjåfør Han kom også med harde utfall mot president George W. Bush. – George Bush er en full sjåfør som kjører en toetasjers buss over en falleferdig bro, mener han. Bin Laden Anders fra Oslo ville vite hva Krekar mener om Osama bin Laden og opptaket med al-Qaida-lederen. – Jeg tror opptaket er ekte, og at han prøver å motivere irakere for å si at de ikke skal være redde for USA, svarte Krekar. Ansar al-Islam Han benekter at han leder den kurdiske gruppen Ansar al-Islam. – Jeg har sagt til norske og utenlandske medier at jeg ikke lenger er leder for Ansar al-Islam. Det gjentar jeg også her nå, hevdet Krekar. – Men jeg er bekymret fordi den er en kurdisk-islamsk gruppe som er truet av en mulig krig, la han til. Forlater Norge med glede På spørsmål om hva han vil gjøre dersom han blir utvist fra Norge, svarte mullaen at han vil gjøre det "med glede". – Hvis norsk lov sier at jeg må forlate landet, så vil jeg gjøre det med glede og takknemlighet overfor det norske folk for hva jeg har fått gjennom 11 år i deres land. De fleste har vært høflige mot meg og min familie og har behandlet meg rettferdig." (NOTE: Click on the snippet/link to read the exact text of the interview. I have an English Language computer so this foreign language snippet may not be in its correct format on this page only.)
***INSIGHT On The News online: "AL-QAEDA OPERATIVES STILL ACTIVE IN IRAQ" by Kenneth R. Timmerman (ARTICLE SNIPPET: "An Islamic group with ties to al-Qaeda continues to operate in northern Iraq where it receives aid from Saddam Hussein's intelligence services, Iraqi opposition officials in Washington and London told Insight in recent interviews. The group, called Ansar al-Islam, is led by an Iraqi Kurd named Nejmeddin Faraj Ahmad (also known as Mullah Krekar) who trained with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in the 1980s.") (020403)
THE NEW YORKER - FACT: A Reporter At Large: "THE UNKNOWN" by Jeffrey Goldberg (ARTICLE SNIPPET: "Intelligence officials told me that the agency also takes seriously reports that an Iraqi known as Abu Wa'el, whose real name is Saadoun Mahmoud Abdulatif al-Ani, is the liaison of Saddam's intelligence service to a radical Muslim group called Ansar al-Islam, which controls a small enclave in northern Iraq; the group is believed by American and Kurdish intelligence officials to be affiliated with Al Qaeda. I learned of another possible connection early last year, while I was interviewing Al Qaeda operatives in a Kurdish prison in Sulaimaniya. There, a man whom Kurdish intelligence officials identified as a captured Iraqi agent told me that in 1992 he served as a bodyguard to Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's deputy, when Zawahiri secretly visited Baghdad.") (February 3, 2003)
***AFTENPOSTEN.no: "USA WANTS NORWAY TO WATCH KREKAR" (ARTICLE SNIPPET: "Mullah Krekar has been, and likely remains, the leader of Ansar al-Islam, a fringe Islamic group in Iranian Kurdistan accused of having connections to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network. The New York Times reported the connection last week after interviews with Ansa al-Islam members, and after finding documents in Afghanistan mentioning direct links to al-Qaeda.") (January 17, 2003)
stepping back in time...ALBAWABA.com: "EXPERTS: AL ZAWAHIRI TAPE IN AL JAZEERA TRIGGERED RECENT WAVE OF ATTACKS" (ARTICLE SNIPPET: "A tape played on the Qatar-based Al Jazeera television last week from Ayman al Zawahiri and later authenticated by the Americans seemed to have triggered the recent wave of attacks. According to the British Daily Telegraph, that has suggested to Western experts that al-Qaeda has now devolved the timing and possibly the targeting of terrorist attacks to its cells in the field.") (101402)
stepping back in time...HOUSTON CHRONICLE.com (NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE): "BIN LADEN DEPUTY, AN EGYPTIAN SURGEON, HAS LONG BACKED EXTREMIST CAUSES" (September 24, 2001) (ARTICLE NOTE: The "Bin Laden deputy, Egyptian surgeon" is identified as Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, age 50. ARTICLE SNIPPET: "The man, Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, 50, was the leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, the terrorist group blamed for the 1981 assassination of President Anwar el-Sadat. He joined in an alliance with bin Laden's group in 1998. After the American cruise missile attacks on al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan that year, it was Zawahiri who telephoned a Pakistani reporter on bin Laden's behalf and warned: "The war has started. The Americans should wait for the answer."") (September 24, 2001)
WorldNetDaily.com: "NEW EVIDENCE LINKS SADDAM, BIN LADEN" (ARTICLE SNIPPET: "Unit 999 of Iraqi intelligence has helped train both Arafat's shock troops and bin Laden's Islamists for suicide operations utilizing weapons of mass destruction. According to Bodansky's book, some of these terrorists have already "succeeded in infiltrating several Arab countries. They are provided with instructions, secret codes and advanced weapons." According to Israeli sources, the Iraqis permitted the terrorist trainees to test chemical weapons in southern Kurdistan.") (120902)
***News.TELEGRAPH.co.uk: "CHEMICAL WAR THREAT BY IRAQ'S 'TALIBAN'" (ARTICLE SNIPPET: "Mullah Mohammad Hasan is the new leader of Ansar Al-Islam, a radical Taliban-style mini-state in Northern Iraq where ricin and other chemical agents have been been tested as potential weapons. He has vowed to use his arsenal to fight America and its allies if a war is launched against Saddam Hussein. Ansar has also given shelter to Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi - the al-Qaeda quartermaster responsible for planning the terrorist group's attacks - in its camps, according to Kurdish officials in the area. The group has told recent visitors to its enclave that it holds stocks of the deadly chemical agents ricin, cyanide gas and aflatoxin.") (January 12, 2003)
stepping back in time...CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR: "TALIBAN-STYLE GROUP GROWS IN IRAQ" (ARTICLE SNIPPETS: "HALABJA, NORTHERN IRAQ - A radical Islamist group - with possible links to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein - is growing and threatening the stability of the Kurdish region in northern Iraq."..."Since, Ansar al-Islam has nearly doubled in size to 700, including Iraqis, Jordanians, Moroccans, Palestinians, and Afghans - a composition similar to the multinational Al Qaeda network. Villagers here claim it has ransacked and razed beauty salons, burned schools for girls, and murdered women in the streets for refusing to wear the burqa. It has seized a Taliban-style enclave of 4,000 civilians and several villages near the Iran border.") (March 15, 2002)