Posted on 06/05/2002 9:56:41 PM PDT by knak
US security services are investigating possible new links between Iraq and the September 11 attacks. They have identified a new candidate as being the possible mastermind of the atrocity.
He was named as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a Kuwaiti-born member of Osama bin Laden's al-Qa'ida organisation and a blood relative of Ramzi Yousef, the key figure behind the first attempt to blow up the World Trade Centre in 1993.
The officials said they believed he was at large somewhere in the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Mohammed had previously been implicated in the thwarted attempt by Yousef and others to blow up 12 airliners above the Pacific Ocean in 1995 and there were suspicions that he was involved in the bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998.
However, it had not been known for sure that he was involved with al-Qa'ida, let alone at such a high level.
Some hawks in the Bush administration anxious to launch a military invasion of Iraq believe that Yousef is in fact an Iraqi agent and that the man ultimately responsible for many of the terror plots of the past decade is Saddam Hussein.
The new information, suggesting that Mohammed was deeply involved in both the operational and financial planning of the September 11 attacks, came largely from captured al-Qa'ida members including Abu Zubeida, one of Osama bin Laden's closest lieutenants. ( Independent News Service)
I frankly don't care if Saddam is linked to 9-11 or not. He is a hater, a sponsor of murder, a murderer and a brutal, viscious thug of a dictator. That's makes him qualified to be overthrown in my book.
Former CIA Director James Woolsey visited Swansea, in Wales, shortly after 9-11 to investigate whether Ramzi Yousef is in fact the Kuwaiti-resident Pakastani, Abdul Basit, his currently accepted identity. He isn't telling what he found out. From a PBS interview:And just so that it's very clear -- what do you think happened? Iraqi intelligence went in to the Kuwaiti files, realizing they had this man, Ramzi Yousef, who they were going to use in the years to come. So therefore they were setting up a circumstance where they would create a mole, basically, whose identity would be certified by Kuwaiti files. What do you assume happened?
When Iraq occupied Kuwait in 1990 and 1991, it used some Kuwaiti files to create false identities for key agents. It tampered with those files. It tampered with Abdul Basit Karim's files to create a false identity for Ramzi Yousef.
Questions also exist about Abdul Hakim Murad, who was convicted with Yousef in the plane bombing plot [Ed. Note: a plan to bomb 12 U.S. airplanes in the Philippines] and also claims to be born in Kuwait. Questions also exist about Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, also involved in the plane bombing, a fugitive who also claims to be born in Kuwait. People should check those files to see if they've been tampered with.
There have been press reports that you've been to the United Kingdom recently.
I've been to the United Kingdom twice this year.
Where did you stay?
Various places.
Did you go for pleasure or did you go for business?
I went for my own reasons.
It's reported that this is related to your passion about the idea that there might be state involvement, particularly Iraqi involvement, in what's been happening.
You'll have to find out about that from somebody other than me.
But the press reports are true? Untrue?
I'm not going to comment on them one way or the other.
OK. Is that because there's a secrecy rule about talking about this stuff?
Because if I do anything to help me advise the U.S. government, I'm not going to talk about it. ...
:0)
But the most important evidence linking the bombing to Iraq involves the passport on which Ramzi Yousef fled on the night of the attack. Yousef left on a Pakistani passport in the name of Abdul Basit Karim. He obtained that passport by going to the Pakistani consulate in New York in December 1992 with the xerox copies of the expired (1984) passport of Abdul Basit and the current (1988) passport. Yousef, claiming to be Abdul Basit, said that he had lost his passport, and asked for a new one. The consulate did not like the documentation Yousef presented, as there was no original document, but it gave him a temporary passport in the name of Abdul Basit Karim.
There really was an individual named Abdul Basit Karim. He was born in Kuwait in 1968 and raised there, as his father worked in the Sheikhdom. After Abdul Basit graduated from high school, he went to Britain, where he studied for three years. He returned to Kuwait in June 1989, after which he obtained a job in Kuwait's planning ministry - and he was in Kuwait when Iraq invaded a year later.
As Abdul Basit was a permanent resident of Kuwait, Kuwait's Interior Ministry maintained a file on him. That file appears to have been tampered with. Information that should have been in the file is not there. A xerox copy of the front page of Abdul Basit's passport is missing. Kuwaiti authorities attributed that to the Iraqi occupation. Yet they did not consider the possibility that the entire file might have been corrupted.
Moreover, there is information in Abdul Basit's file that should not be there. Above all, there is a notation that Abdul Basit and his family left Kuwait on August 26, 1990, traveling from Kuwait to Iraq, crossing from Iraq to Iran at Salamcheh (a crossing point), on their way to Pakistani Baluchistan, where they live now.
Who put that information into Abdul Basit's file and why? It is not the kind of information a traveler gives authorities when he crosses a border. He reports where he came from and the country to which he is going. He does not give his whole itinerary.
Moreover, there was no Kuwait government on August 26, 1990, as Iraq had occupied the country three weeks earlier. Hundreds of thousands of people were fleeing Kuwait and Iraq at the time. It is doubtful than an Iraqi bureaucrat sat in Kuwait's Interior Ministry, recording the travel plans of everyone who left Kuwait.
Finally, Yousef's fingerprints are in Abdul Basit's file in Kuwait. Yousef was fingerprinted when he entered the US, and American authorities later sent his fingerprints to Kuwait. The fingerprints matched and in September 1993, Kuwaiti authorities reported that Yousef's real identity was Abdul Basit.
But Yousef does not seem to be Abdul Basit. Above all, they are of two different heights. Yousef is 6' feet tall. That is what a prosecutor, reading off the FBI arrest card, told this author.21 Yet, according to all available evidence, Abdul Basit was only 5'8."22.
Yet if Yousef is not Abdul Basit, how did his fingerprints get into Abdul Basit's file in Kuwait? The fingerprint cards must have been switched. Someone had to have taken the card with Abdul Basit's prints on it out of the file and substituted a card with Yousef's prints. And the only party that reasonably could have done so is Iraq, while it occupied Kuwait, in order to create a false identity for Ramzi Yousef. Indeed, creating a false identity for agents involved in "wet" operations is a standard practice of Soviet-style intelligence agencies.
In intelligence parlance, a "false flag" operation is one in which a party carries out an action in such a manner as to make it look like others were responsible. For example, if Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turk who tried to kill the Pope in 1981, had been recruited by a Soviet-bloc intelligence agency, as some believe, then the attempted assassination would have been a false flag operation. here
Not too difficult to connect the dots from 1993 to 2001.
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