Focus: The confessions of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

Sunday Times ^ | March 28, 2004 | Christina Lamb in Kabul

[1066AD]

'I met Osama Bin Laden in Kabul. It was at this time we discussed the Heathrow operation'

It makes a chilling picture. The mastermind behind the September 11 attacks has told interrogators that he and his terrorist nephew leafed through almanacs of American skyscrapers when planning the operation. Sears Tower in Chicago and Library Tower in Los Angeles — which was “blown up” in the film Independence Day — were both potential targets, according to transcripts of interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Al-Qaeda operations chief.

“We were looking for symbols of economic might,” he told his captors.

He recounted sitting looking at the books with Ramzi Yusuf, his nephew by marriage, who was the man behind the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. In that attack Yusuf succeeded only in ripping a crater into the foundations with a van bomb. “We knew from that experience that explosives could be problematic,” said Mohammed, “so we started thinking about using planes.”

When he was captured in March last year in the house of a microbiologist in Rawalpindi, the paunchy 37-year old was unshaven and wearing a baggy vest. He looked more like a down-and-out than one of the most dangerous men in the world.

The interrogation reports make clear, however, that he was not only the chief planner for September 11 but also introduced Osama Bin Laden to Hambali, the Indonesian militant accused of the Bali bombing.

To date, Mohammed is the most senior Al-Qaeda member to have been caught. Until now there has been no word of where he is being held or what, if anything, he is saying.

Although the interrogation transcripts are prefaced with the warning that “the detainee has been known to withhold information or deliberately mislead”, it is clear that he is talking — and that the September 11 conspiracy was much more extensive than has previously been revealed.

The confessions reveal that planning for the atrocity started much earlier than anyone had realised and was intended to be even more devastating.

“The original plan was for a two-pronged attack with five targets on the East Coast of America and five on the West Coast,” he told interrogators. “We talked about hitting California as it was America’s richest state and Bin Laden had talked about economic targets.”

Bin Laden, who like Mohammed had studied engineering, vetoed simultaneous coast-to-coast attacks, arguing that “it would be too difficult to synchronise”.

Mohammed switched to two waves: hitting the East Coast first and following up with a second attack. “Osama had said the second wave should focus on the West Coast,” he said.

Zacarias Moussaoui, a French-Moroccan who had lived in London, was sent to the Pan Am international flight school in Minnesota to train for the West Coast attack, according to Mohammed. His instructor alerted the FBI, however, after the Moroccan showed no interest in landing planes — only in steering them. He was arrested in August 2001.

Until now it had been widely believed that Moussaoui was meant to have been the 20th hijacker on September 11. The revelation by Mohammed that he was part of a “second wave” is lent weight by the FBI’s recent arrest of two other men who were allegedly part of the West Coast conspirators.

Despite the setbacks, Mohammed described the September 11 attack as “far more successful than we had ever imagined”.

Mohammed, whose family came from Pakistan, was born in 1965 in Kuwait city, where his father was a preacher. He joined the Muslim Brotherhood as a teenager and went to the United States to study engineering in North Carolina.

At that time the Afghan jihad against the Russians was in full flow. After graduating, Mohammed headed for one of Bin Laden’s guest houses in the Pakistani frontier town of Peshawar. He has told interrogators that it was there that he first met Hambali.

In 1992 Mohammed moved south to Karachi. Posing as a businessman importing holy water from Mecca, he acted as a fundraiser and intermediary between young militants and wealthy sponsors in the Gulf.

Ramzi Yusuf’s attempt to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993 inspired him to conceive his own operations.

The first was Operation Bojinka (Serbo-Croat for big bang) — a plot to blow up 12 American airliners over the Pacific. Both Yusuf and Hambali were involved. It failed after the conspirators’ Manila bomb factory caught fire. The men fled to Pakistan where Yusuf was arrested.

Undeterred, Mohammed decided to start working on something “far more spectacular” for which he “hoped to persuade Bin Laden to give him money and operatives”. He also decided to introduce Hambali to Bin Laden.

Hambali — real name Riduan Ismuddin — headed Jemaah Islamiya (JI), which wanted to unite southeast Asia under an Islamic banner.

Mohammed told interrogators: “I was impressed by JI’s ability to operate regionally and by Hambali’s connections with the Malaysian government. He told me that his group had a training camp in the Philippines and a madrasah (religious teaching)programme in Malaysia on the border with Singapore.

“In 1996 I invited Hambali to Afghanistan to meet Osama. He spent three or four days with him and it was agreed that Al-Qaeda and Hambali’s organisation would work together on ‘targets of mutual interest’.”

Hambali, who had been operating on a shoestring, was provided with a new car, mobile phones and computers.

Bin Laden was apparently impressed by Mohammed’s networking and ideas and made him head of Al-Qaeda’s military committee.

From then on he was a key planner in almost every attack, including the simultaneous bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. Bin Laden dubbed him The Brain.

The big challenge was to attack Americans on their own soil. Initially Mohammed proposed leasing a charter plane, filling it with explosives and crashing it into the CIA headquarters. Then the plan became more ambitious.

Bin Laden pointed out that on a visit to America in 1982 he had been to the Empire State building in New York and was astonished by how unprotected such key landmarks were.

A committee, known as the shura, was formed comprising Bin Laden, Mohammed and four others. It met at what was known as the war room in Bin Laden’s camp outside Jalalabad in Afghanistan. The plan for a two-pronged attack was formed.

“We had scores of volunteers to die for Allah but the problem was finding those familiar with the West who could blend in as well as get US visas,” said Mohammed.

Two Yemenis and two Saudi pilots, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Midhar, were selected and given commando training in Afghanistan. “All four operatives only knew that they had volunteered for a martyrdom operation involving planes,” said Mohammed.

In 1999 the two Yemenis were refused American visas; but a few months later four jihad recruits from Hamburg arrived in Quetta, Pakistan. Led by Mohammed Atta, an Egyptian, they had originally planned to go to Chechnya to fight the Russians, but a former mujaheddin in Germany had given them an introduction to Bin Laden.

After meeting the Al-Qaeda leader in Kandahar, they delivered the baia, the oath of allegiance required to gain access to his inner circle, and were invited to his Ramadan feast. He told them that they had been selected for a top- secret mission and promised that they would enter paradise as martyrs.

They were instructed to go home and destroy their passports so their trip to Pakistan would be undetected. They should then shave off their beards, get new passports, and obtain pilots’ licences in America.

Mohammed told interrogators that he had provided them with a special training manual which included information on how to find flight schools and study timetables.

Three of the four were granted American visas. The fourth, Ramzi Binalshibh, failed and returned to Afghanistan where he communicated with them through internet chat rooms.

In the spring of 2000, after a planning meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Bin Laden scaled back the plan from two-prong to two-wave because they had been unable to get enough potential pilots into America. Moussaoui succeeded in entering the United States, but the order went out for potential recruits who were not Arab, Mohammed told his captors.

A date was set for the first wave attack, codenamed Porsche 911, and a message went round the world for followers to return to Afghanistan by September 10.

The messages were intercepted by several western intelligence agencies but none apparently realised their significance.

When the suicide planes struck on September 11, Al-Qaeda seems to have been taken by surprise — both by the success of the attacks and by the American reaction. “Afterwards we never got time to catch our breath, we were immediately on the run,” said Mohammed. He said the war on terrorism and the American bombing of Afghanistan completely disrupted their communications network. Operatives could no longer use satellite phones and had to rely on couriers, although they still used internet chat rooms.

“Before September 11 we could dispatch operatives with the expectation of follow-up contact but after October 7 (when the bombing started that changed 180 degrees. There was no longer a war room or shura and operatives had more autonomy.” He told interrogators that he remained in Pakistan for 10 days after September 11, then went to Afghanistan to find Bin Laden: “I went to Jalalabad, Tora Bora, looking for him and then eventually met him in Kabul.” The Al-Qaeda leader instructed him to continue operations — with Britain as the next target. “It was at this time we discussed the Heathrow operation,” said Mohammed.

“Osama declared (Tony) Blair our principal enemy and London a target.” He arranged for operatives to be sent from Pakistan and Afghanistan to London, where surveillance of Heathrow airport and the surrounding areas began. However, he claimed, the operation never got beyond the planning stages. “There was a lot of confusion,” he said. “I would say my performance at that time was sloppy.”

One priority was to get Hambali out of Afghanistan. In November 2001, Mohammed arranged for him to go to Karachi. There he gave him $20,000 and a false Indonesian passport with which he could travel to Sri Lanka and on to Thailand from where he would help to organise the Bali nightclub bombing the following year. They kept in touch through Hambali’s younger brother who was in Karachi. The net was closing in around Mohammed himself. Another shura member, Abu Zubayda, was arrested in Faisalabad in March 2002.

Six months later Binalshibh was seized in the Karachi apartment that he shared with Mohammed. Mohammed managed to escape, but his flight came to an end in the early hours of March 2 last year in Rawalpindi. Questioned for two days by Pakistan’s military intelligence, who say he did nothing but pray repeatedly, he was flown blindfolded to Bagram, the US base in the mountains above Kabul. It is not clear how long he was held there nor what methods were used to get him to talk.

Afghans released from Bagram claim to have been subjected to sleep deprivation and extremes of hot and cold. There have also been unconfirmed reports of truth drugs and the use of Arab interrogators so that detainees think they are in an Arab camp. Investigators have been cross-checking Mohammed's story with those of Binalshibh, Abu Zubayda and Hambali, who was arrested in Thailand in August last year. Despite the arrests and interrogations, however, Al-Qaeda lives on. Madrid has been attacked with devastating human and political consequences. And, somewhere in London, there may be “sleepers” that Mohammed has put in place, just waiting for instructions.

[xJones]

The problem is in believing anything these life-long lying murderers say. One can only guess what stories Saddam is telling the CIA....

[Capt. Tom]

To date, Mohammed is the most senior Al-Qaeda member to have been caught. Until now there has been no word of where he is being held or what, if anything, he is saying.

Still it doesn't stop this newspaper from printing this BS, and using direct quotes. - tom

[CGVet58]

There are certain things I believe completely about these creatures, and do not need proof to substantiate - they are vermin; they hate us; they will seek any edge against us, even our own code of honor and humanity to harm us; and finally, like the vermin they are... they must be completely annihilated, preferably only after we've drained their memories of every single bit of data that we can use against their kind, and before we exterminate them, wrap them up in pigskin and televise their reactions.

J

[Pan_Yans Wife]

ping

[xJones]

Well, I don't disagree with anything you said. Very eloquent and to the point.

[Cincinnatus.45-70]

Dead on!

[AFPhys]

Superb article. This really gives the flavor of how the Bush administration responded after 9/11. Whether we knew it or not, the terrorist networks really felt the pressure, and they knew they had to get on the run --- quite unexpectedly.

I guess they thought they were still dealing with Clintoon and his vaunted "anti-terrorism" staff. They rapidly discovered otherwise.

[Lawgvr1955]

I guess they thought they were still dealing with Clintoon and his vaunted "anti-terrorism" staff. They rapidly discovered otherwise.

It saddens me that many will be persuaded by Richard Clarke that Bush dropped the ball. I saw a poll on television that 53 percent of those who watched the hearings found Clark believible.

What also saddens me is the fact that all the bs going on in this campaign year is doing nothing but giving solace and strength to the terrorists.

I would hope that when they go to the voting booth, the majority of Americans will reject the libs line and vote to keep the country strong.

[MeekOneGOP]

When he was captured in March last year in the house of a microbiologist in Rawalpindi, the paunchy 37-year old was unshaven and wearing a baggy vest. He looked more like a down-and-out than one of the most dangerous men in the world.

________________________________________________________

Mark Steyn: America is winning

KSM is known in al-Qa’eda circles as ‘The Brain’, and his picture on the FBI ‘Most Wanted’ list shows a cold but dapper fellow with a trim beard — like the Westernised Arab academics who play the talkshow circuit or, indeed, an assistant choreographer on a Broadway revival. . .

By contrast, the fellow seized in Rawalpindi is a wreck — haggard, bleary, unshaven, a loser who’s run out of everything except back hair. Asked to account for the stark difference in appearance, several experts pointed out that he’s a ‘master of disguise’. In that case, the master of disguise is doing a great job of convincingly passing himself off as a guy who’s been sleeping in a hedge for a month. The state of KSM provides a glimpse of the career options available to top al-Qa’eda honchos: either, like bin Laden, you go into deep cover as a few specks of DNA discreetly sprinkled in the rubble of Tora Bora, or, like ‘The Brain’, you’ve a choice between hunkering down in a ‘safe house’ or staying on the move, never knowing, even when you’re motoring through the emptiness of the Yemeni desert, if some unmanned CIA Predator will drop the big one on you. Of course, many al-Qa’eda operatives are hoping to be on a fast track to martyrdom and the 72 virgins. But you gotta have a couple of guys who stay alive long enough to instruct the neophytes in how to kill themselves, and right now al-Qa’eda’s management structure is looking severely hobbled.

[MeekOneGOP]

ping !

[MeekOneGOP]

Focus: The confessions of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

Excerpt:

When the suicide planes struck on September 11, Al-Qaeda seems to have been taken by surprise — both by the success of the attacks and by the American reaction. “Afterwards we never got time to catch our breath, we were immediately on the run,” said Mohammed. He said the war on terrorism and the American bombing of Afghanistan completely disrupted their communications network. Operatives could no longer use satellite phones and had to rely on couriers, although they still used internet chat rooms.

Please let me know if you want ON or OFF my General Interest ping list!. . .don't be shy.

[EGPWS]

“We were looking for symbols of economic might,” he told his captors.

A statement that can be seen as destructive to ALL of humanity.

Who, other than the truly evil, could dispute "The Bush Doctrine"?

I recall seeing Zacarias Moussaoui in shackles as he was being taken from Minnesota to another location and a sympathetic air to humankind was not an expression conveyed by him.

[Alamo-Girl]

Bump!

[Victoria Delsoul]

He said the war on terrorism and the American bombing of Afghanistan completely disrupted their communications network.

Unfortunately, Kerry and the rest of the Democrats aren't aware of these facts.

[Happy2BMe]

GREAT POST MEEK!!!!!!!!!

[Happy2BMe]

"Focus: The confessions of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed"

COME SEE THIS - ping.

(This is the WORM who planned BOTH attacks on the WTC - in OUR CUSTODY NOW!)

[ALOHA RONNIE]

.

NEVER FORGET

At the very time the CLINTON White House refused the first of 3 Offers from the Sudan during the 1990's to hand over OSAMA bin LADEN to us on a Silver Platter...

MOHAMMED was getting his permission from OSAMA bin LADEN to start planning the Attacks of Sept. 11th.

NEVER FORGET

[Salem]

Listening to these killers only reiterates the importance of seeing Bush returned to the White House. With all that any could criticize him on domestic policy, his aggressively pursuing and apprehending these criminal wherever they may hide—not negotiating with them like a Democrat Administration would have done, guarantees the operational tempo against the bloodthirsty sons of Mohammad and Jihadistan.

Kerry and a Democrat Administration would guarantee an immediate U.S. acquiescence to UN control and the utopian globalist lunacy of the extremist left which has poisoned that party to the core, and surrender of U.S. uniqueness and individuality to the same.

---

AMERICA AT WAR
At Salem the Soldier's Homepage ~

[Happy2BMe]

I'm sure you've been listening to the latest Qaeda threats - the U.S.A. is the MAIN TARGET of their HATRED - even before Israel.