| Khalid Almihdhar | Khalid Almihdhar | al-Qaeda | At Large | 20031208 |
| Home Front: WoT |
| Movement pursues the 'real story' of '28 pages' and Saudi 9/11 involvement |
| 2016-04-21 |
| Excerpt from very lengthy Washington Times article: As a Democratic senator from Florida, Bob Graham co-chaired the joint committee that wrote those 28 pages. He is one of the nation’s most outspoken critics of the commission’s Saudi conclusion and is convinced there is a direct link between the hijackers and Saudi officials. His interest focuses on several figures, including Omar al Bayoumi, who assisted hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid Almihdhar after they arrived in Southern California in January 2000. Al-Hazmi and Almihdhar were sent to California by plot leader Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to learn English, then how to pilot an airliner for what he called the "Planes Operation." Mr. Graham also concluded that Saudi diplomat Fahad al Thumairy, an official of the Islamic and Cultural Affairs section of the Saudi Arabian Consulate in Los Angeles, also helped the hijackers. The U.S. pulled Mr. Thumairy's visa and banned him from the U.S. Mr. Graham said in a sworn affidavit on Jan. 28, 2015, in a civil case: "Al Bayoumi met al Hazmi and al Mihdhar at a restaurant in Los Angeles in late January 2000, immediately following a meeting between al Bayoumi and al Thumairy at the Saudi consulate. Shortly thereafter, the two hijackers traveled to San Diego, where al Bayoumi held a dinner in their honor, helped them find an apartment, fronted the initial payments of that apartment, and provided them continuing financial assistance going forward. During the period that he supported the hijackers, al Bayoumi’s allowances from a ghost job with a Saudi private firm and contractor to the Saudi government increased eightfold. During that same period, al Bayoumi had an unusual number of telephone conversations with Saudi government officials in both Los Angeles and Washington." |
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| Science & Technology | |
| The Wikipedia way to better intelligence | |
| 2007-01-07 | |
SAN FRANCISCO; AND CAMBRIDGE, MASS. The US State Department's effort last month to issue a travel ban on 12 Iranians suspected of supporting that nation's nuclear program wasn't big news at first. Shortly thereafter, it was revealed that the analysis supporting the ban was provided not by the CIA, but by a single junior analyst using Google searches. The lesson? Advanced technology and Web-savvy citizenry now make it possible for open-source information gathering to rival, if not surpass, the clandestine intelligence produced by government agencies. Indeed, open-source methods have already proved their worth in counterterrorism. Shortly after Sept. 11, Valdis Krebs, a security expert, re-created the structure and identities of the core Al Qaeda network using publicly available information accessed from the Internet. He started with two 9/11 hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid Almihdhar, who were identified from a photograph taken while they attended a meeting with known terrorists in Malaysia in 2000. By scanning public sources for information linking these suspects to others, he re-created the social network identifying all 19 hijackers and described their relationships to their coconspirators, including the identification of Mohammed Atta as the ringleader. A US-based research center, the Search for International Terrorist Entities (SITE) Institute, monitors the public communications of terrorist and extremist websites and has successfully penetrated password-protected Al Qaeda-linked sites. SITE has successfully accessed terrorists' propaganda, training manuals, and communications, offering insight into their activities that is difficult to obtain elsewhere. According to a Marine colleague who just returned from Iraq, information on the SITE website was used within hours of posting to prevent a terrorist attack in Iraq, demonstrating that third-party analysis has become a key component of intelligence. A third example comes from a new database at the Jebsen Center for Counter- Terrorism Studies at Tufts University's Fletcher School in Medford, Mass. Researchers there have collected historical data on the life paths of hundreds of terrorists and analyzed their letters, wills, and interviews. This information, based on open-source data, is being used to identify the factors that tend to predict terrorist acts. Technology that lets anyone analyze data While motivated citizens and academics have often been able to generate analysis that rivals that of government experts, the difference today is that technology such as wikis and blogs allows thousands to contribute to an analysis. Readers can then "vote" the most accurate and relevant information to the top, giving them enough credibility to be taken seriously. Take, for example, the Wikipedia entry of Moqtada al-Sadr. Mr. Sadr's entry in this free encylopedia that anyone can edit has been modified approximately 500 times by about 50 people in the past three years. These motivated authors have expanded the entry and corrected hundreds of one another's errors and omissions. Thousands read the profile and hundreds of others have linked to it, making it the first entry in most search engines' results. Blogs are another tool for massive parallel analysis and collaboration - a search for blogs dealing with terrorism generates nearly 1 million results. While most bloggers generate little of value to intelligence analysis, the collaborative nature of the technology gives greater weight to the better analyses, pushing them to the top. Additionally, the increasing reliance of terrorist groups on the Internet provides these amateur intelligence specialists with tomes of data that will make it easier to understand terrorist goals and objectives, improving their ability to conduct pattern analysis. The result is that analysts have increasingly better access to data, and the consumers of their work have better tools for distinguishing great analyses from those that are merely good. A disconcerting fact about the Iranian travel-ban event is that the State Department had repeatedly requested that list of names from the CIA, but was refused for reasons of secrecy. How US intelligence can adapt To be fair, the US intelligence community has taken some first steps in adopting collaborative technology by creating an "Intellipedia" - a secret, internal version of Wikipedia. However, the strength of Wikipedia is not the technology, but the massively collaborative effort that the technology enables. US intelligence agencies must adopt this collaborative spirit and become more adept at incorporating the increasingly valuable analysis produced in the public domain with their internal efforts. America will be a more secure country once it discards the notion that secrecy is equal to strength and begins harnessing the power of 100,000 bloggers. Douglas Raymond is a former US Army captain, former member of the 66th Military Intelligence Group, and currently a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Paula Broadwell is a PhD student in counterterrorism policy studies at Harvard University and the deputy director of the Jebsen Center for Counter-Terrorism Studies at Tufts University's Fletcher School. | |
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| 9/11 Hijackers used NJ College Library Computers |
| 2005-04-30 |
| Two of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist hijackers used a public-access computer at a New Jersey state college library to buy tickets for the plane they helped hijack and crash into the Pentagon, a federal prosecutor said. Ken Wainstein, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, made the revelation Thursday during a congressional hearing in which the Bush administration pushed for renewal of provisions of the Patriot Act that make it easier for investigators to obtain library and other records. "Investigators tracing the activities of the hijackers determined that, on four occasions in August of 2001, individuals using Internet accounts registered to Nawaf Alhamzi and Khalid Almihdhar -- 9/11 hijackers -- used public access computers in the library of a state college in New Jersey," Mr. Wainstein testified before a House Judiciary subcommittee. "The computers in the library were used to review and order airline tickets in an Internet travel reservations site," he said. On Aug. 30, 2001, someone using Mr. Alhamzi's account logged on to a computer at the school to check on travel reservations for Sept. 11, 2001, that had already been made, he added. Mr. Wainstein didn't identify the college, but an official with William Paterson University in Wayne said that shortly after the attacks, investigators seized several public-access computers from the college's library. "The FBI, in furtherance of their investigation into 9/11, did take a number of our public access computers," Stuart Goldstein, the college's assistant vice president for institutional advancement, said Friday. "The FBI never informed us as to what they found or didn't find." William Paterson University is the closest state college to where the hijackers were living just before the attacks. Justice Department spokesman Kevin Madden said the testimony shows how important the library provision of the Patriot Act is to national security. "The more people learn about the Patriot Act, the more they learn that it is designed to protect them from harm and from terrorist acts," he said. Mr. Madden said he did not know if libraries at other New Jersey colleges were searched after the attacks. Messrs. Alhamzi and Almidhar were two of the five hijackers who helped seize American Airlines Flight 77, which took off from Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C., and crashed into the Pentagon. They were among a group of as may as six of the Sept. 11 hijackers who lived in Paterson shortly before the attacks. Two others, Hani Hanjour, who would pilot the doomed plane, and Majed Moqed, bought their tickets from a Totowa travel agency, paying with a wad of cash after their debit card was rejected less than two weeks before the attacks. House Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R., Wis.) said the testimony highlights the need to review provisions of the Patriot Act that enable the quick retrieval of library information by authorities. "We put Americans" lives at risk if we foolishly provide sanctuaries -- even in our public libraries -- for terrorists to operate," he said. |
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| Yemeni Student Says He Was Smeared by 9/11 Report |
| 2004-08-10 |
| From The Washington Post Mohdar Abdullah knows what the Sept. 11 commission says about him. That he was "perfectly suited to assist the hijackers in pursuing their mission." That he "expressed hatred for the U.S. government." Perhaps most damning, the panel's best-selling report alleges that Abdullah may have bragged to inmates that he knew about the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in advance and that he told the FBI, "The U.S. brought this on themselves." Abdullah, now 25 and back in his homeland of Yemen after his deportation from the United States in May, called the report "propaganda" and said he is the victim of U.S. investigators looking for someone to blame. He said he had no inkling in the summer of 2001 that two friends, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, were about to take part in the deadliest terrorist assault on U.S. soil. .... Abdullah was arrested as a material witness in late September 2001. He spent 32 months in U.S. jails and prisons as the FBI and the Justice Department investigated his ties to Almihdhar, Alhazmi and a network of immigrant friends, all of whom congregated around the Rabat mosque in a suburb of San Diego. Commission investigators complained that they were never able to interview Abdullah before he was deported. Abdullah refused to cooperate, and the Justice Department declined to grant him immunity from prosecution to compel his cooperation. The panel also is critical of the government's decision to allow Abdullah's deportation, arguing that unanswered questions about his case require further examination. .... According to the commission report, which cites FBI interviews and other investigative material, Abdullah admitted that he knew Alhazmi and Almihdhar were extremists and that Almihdhar had been involved with the Islamic Army of Aden, a group linked to al Qaeda. The report also says Abdullah "clearly was sympathetic to those extremist views." .... The Justice Department and the FBI take a different view, arguing that Abdullah's case has been exhaustively investigated and that the claims of the two jailhouse informants, in particular, do not check out. .... Abdullah had just transferred from Grossmont College in El Cajon, where he studied business administration, to San Diego State University, where he had planned to study information systems when he was arrested. Now he is living with his parents and attempting to find a job. Abdullah said he was brought back to Sanaa under armed guard and held in a Yemeni jail for about a month after his deportation. .... |
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| Surveillance Tape Shows 9/11 Hijackers Passing Through Airport Security |
| 2004-07-21 |
| Video at link July 21, 2004 An airport surveillance tape obtained by ABC News shows the five hijackers of American Airlines Flight 77 easily passing through security at Dulles International Airport outside Washington, D.C., in the hour before the flight took off on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. Flight 77, one of four planes hijacked by al Qaeda terrorists that day, would slam into the Pentagon later that morning about half an hour after the second plane hit the World Trade Center in New York. All 64 people on board Flight 77 and another 125 at the Pentagon were killed. The surveillance tape shows the first two of the five hijackers Majed Moqed and Khalid Almihdhar as they enter one of the security screening areas, place their carry-on bags on the X-ray machine belt and proceed through the first metal detector. Both men set off the alarm and are subsequently directed to a second detector. Almihdhar does not set off the second detector and is permitted to go through the checkpoint, but Moqed fails once more and is then subjected to a personal screening with a metal detection hand wand. He appears to pass the inspection and is allowed to pass through the checkpoint. About 17 minutes later, Hani Hanjour who is believed to have been piloting the plane in its final moments places two carry-on bags on the X-ray belt at the checkpoint, and proceeds, without setting off the alarm, through the detector. He picks up his carry-on bags and passes through the screening area. One minute later, as seen on tape, Nawaf Alhazmi and Salem Alhazmi enter the same checkpoint. Salem Alhazmi successfully clears the detector and is permitted through the checkpoint. Nawaf Alhazmi sets off the alarms for both the first and second detectors and is then screened with a hand wand before being cleared. |
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| Southeast Asia |
| Yazid Sufaat may be released |
| 2003-12-08 |
| After Yazid Sufaat was arrested crossing the Thai border into his native Malaysia nearly two years ago, U.S. officials wanted to learn all they could from him. They knew the 38-year-old former Malaysian army captain had allowed two of the Sept. 11 hijackers to stay at his condominium near Kuala Lumpur for a crucial al-Qaida meeting in January 2000. They knew he had offered similar hospitality to alleged Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui. Now, just days before Sufaat could be eligible for release under his nationâs laws, senior U.S. counterterrorism and intelligence officials say new evidence leads them to believe Sufaat may have been more than just an associate of key al-Qaida figures in Southeast Asia: They say Sufaat may have played an important role in al-Qaidaâs attempts to develop biological and chemical weapons. And they think he can answer crucial questions about how close al-Qaida was to attaining those weapons before U.S.-led forces destroyed the groupâs sanctuary in Afghanistan. Those questions grow more pressing each day, as senior U.S. counterterrorism officials now see a biological or chemical attack by al-Qaida inside the U.S. as possibly the nationâs biggest domestic terrorism threat. But U.S. access to Sufaat has been sharply limited, officials say, at least in part because of strained relations between Malaysia and the U.S. and growing tensions in the region over the war on terrorism. At the same time, U.S. officials are jittery because Sufaat will be eligible for release in a couple of days. Snip. Sufaat, who graduated from a California university with a degree in biological sciences, has been jailed by the Malaysians since attempting to return from Afghanistan via the Thai border on Dec. 9, 2001. The Malaysians had been looking for him since almost immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks. They knew Sufaat had played host to Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, two of the Sept. 11 hijackers, when they attended an al-Qaida meeting in Malaysia 20 months before the 2001 suicide hijackings. Malaysian security services had filmed and tracked the meetingâs attendees at the CIAâs request. The Malaysians also learned, based on information unearthed by the FBI, that Moussaoui, the only person charged in the U.S. as a conspirator in the Sept. 11 attacks, had stayed at Sufaatâs apartment in October 2000 before he came to the U.S. for flight training. When Moussaoui was arrested on immigration charges about four weeks before Sept. 11, the FBI found a letter signed by Sufaat among Moussaouiâs possessions, records show. It stated that Moussaoui was the U.S. marketing consultant for a Malaysian company, InFocus Tech, which was partially owned by Sufaatâs wife. Sufaat was jailed under Malaysiaâs Internal Security Act, a controversial law that has been used, much to the dismay of the U.S. and other nations, to lock up political prisoners. The law allows the Malaysian authorities to hold people without charges for up to two years if they are deemed to be potential national security threats - meaning Sufaatâs term would expire Tuesday, unless it is renewed. Sufaat has been held with other alleged militants at the Kamunting Detention Center, about 150 miles north of Kuala Lumpur. Snip. The Malaysians said Sufaat had served for about six months in a "Taliban medical brigade" in Afghanistan before returning to Malaysia, although they would later say he provided his Malaysian interrogators with some valuable information on terror operations in the region. It was nearly a year before the FBI got access to Sufaat at Kamunting. Agents were allowed to conduct a brief interview with him in November 2002, and Malaysian interrogators later provided the U.S. with some follow-up information. As limited as it was, the U.S. questioning of Sufaat drew sharp criticism from Malaysiaâs main Islamic parties. After that, Sufaat was largely forgotten - until this fall. On Aug. 12, after the bombing of a Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia, a joint U.S.-Thai operation led to the capture of Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, who was the alleged operational leader in Southeast Asia for an al-Qaida-affiliated terrorist network. U.S. intelligence officials placed Hambali at the center of the planning for the Jakarta blast, as well as a deadly October 2002 attack at a nightclub on Bali, which killed more than 200 people. After his capture, Hambali was taken into U.S. custody and whisked to an undisclosed location for interrogations. U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials said he began cooperating almost immediately, allowing them to thwart planned attacks in the region and break up terrorist cells. Within a few weeks, Hambali also allegedly began talking about al-Qaidaâs efforts to develop chemical and biological weapons, according to senior U.S. officials. Those revelations resonated with senior U.S. counterterrorism officials. At the time they were developing separate intelligence suggesting that al-Qaida had put off plans to conduct small-scale operations in the U.S., fearing they would prompt a security crackdown that would make it impossible to execute a bigger, mass-casualty attack on par with Sept. 11, according to senior U.S. officials. The biggest fear, then and now, these officials say, is that such a plan has remained undetected and would involve chemical or biological weapons. Snip. A U.S. intelligence official also said, "There is always room for us to learn more, and we believe that he can provide those answers" about al-Qaidaâs alleged chemical and biological weapons program. This intelligence official also said the notion that Sufaat played a role in al-Qaidaâs development of chemical and biological weapons "is right on." Malaysians, Indonesians and others in the region have been seeking access to Hambali, the senior U.S. official said, in exchange for more access to the information on militants theyâre holding, and neither side has been satisfied with the access theyâre getting. The U.S. has been reluctant to provide even its closest allies with access to top al-Qaida captives. |
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| The Wahabi lobby in America | ||||||||||
| 2003-10-02 | ||||||||||
| The article is too long to post in full here, edited for relevence On Aug. 20, 2001, Saleh Ibn Abdul Rahman Hussayen, a man who would soon be named a minister of the Saudi government and put in charge of its two holy mosques, arrived in the United States to meet with some of this countryâs most influential fundamentalist Sunni Muslim leaders. His journey here was to include meetings and contacts with officials of several Saudi-sponsored charities that have since been accused of links to terrorist groups, including the Illinois-based Global Relief Foundation, which was shut down by U.S. authorities last year. He met with the creators of Islamic Web sites that U.S. authorities contend promote the views of radical Saudi clerics tied to Osama bin Laden. On the night of Sept. 10, 2001, Hussayen stayed at a Herndon hotel that also housed three of the Saudi hijackers who would slam an aircraft into the Pentagon the next day, though there is no evidence that he had contact with them.
Both are also part of the âSupreme Council of Global Jihadâ. Hawali is the Security General of it, in fact. In recent months, 19 individuals who have come under investigation as part of the probe have been arrested or indicted. They include Bassem K. Khafagi, a former IANA president, who pleaded guilty two weeks ago to bank fraud in federal court in Detroit. In Syracuse, five men tied to an IANA affiliate called Help the Needy are charged by federal authorities with sending money to Iraq in violation of U.S. economic sanctions. In Northern Virginia, 11 men were indicted in June, accused of training to wage jihad with a Pakistani terrorist group. The indictment also alleged that the menâs spiritual leader, Ali Timimi, who has long been associated with IANA, told group members in September 2001 that the time had come for them "to . . . join the mujaheddin engaged in violent jihad in Kashmir, Chechnya, Afghanistan or Indonesia" and that "American troops were legitimate targets of the jihad." When Timimiâs Fairfax house was searched by the FBI this spring, items seized included Khafagiâs personal papers, which Timimi was holding for safekeeping. The two had been IANAâs representatives to the 1995 international womenâs conference in Beijing, where IANA argued against Western feminism and defended female circumcision, which is practiced in some Islamic societies.
The SAAR network was founded by a core group of wealthy Egyptians and Pakistanis who had a background in the Muslim Brotherhood and the Jamaat-e-Islami. People with a similar background also founded the World Muslim League, with the help of Saudi money. The most intriguing aspect of Hussayenâs journey may be entirely coincidental: his brief proximity in a hotel near Dulles International Airport to three of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers the night before they crashed Flight 77 into the Pentagon. On the night of Sept. 10, Hani Hanjour, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi checked into the same hotel, a Marriott Residence Inn. After the attack, an FBI agent interviewed hotel guests, including Hussayen and his wife, but did not get very far. According to court testimony from FBI agent Gneckow earlier this year, the interview was cut short when Hussayen "feigned a seizure, prompting the agents to take him to a hospital, where the attending physicians found nothing wrong with him." The agent recommended that Hussayen "should not be allowed to leave until a follow-up interview could occur," Gneckow told the court. But "her recommendation, for whatever reason, was not complied with," he said. On Sept. 19, the day air travel resumed, Hussayen and his wife took off for Saudi Arabia. | ||||||||||
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| ID artist bugs out just ahead of Feds... |
| 2002-07-31 |
| A man who allegedly sold fake IDs to two of the Sept. 11 hijackers apparently fled the country for Egypt just before authorities came to arrest him in a raid on his home and businesses Wednesday. Interpol was notified to be on the lookout for Egyptian immigrant Mohamad El Atriss. Atriss sold a fake ID card to Khalid Almihdhar, who was on the airliner that crashed into the Pentagon, and one to Abdul Aziz Alomari, who was aboard one of the planes that destroyed the World Trade Center, Sheriff Jerry Speziale said. The ID artists are an essential element of the terror network. No self-respecting jihadi ever has fewer than three identities. Authorities raided his home and business Wednesday afternoon and were told Atriss had taken a flight from Newark to Egypt. Five minutes before the raid, Atriss called a New Jersey phone number from somewhere outside the country. "Weasel? Dis is uh... y'know. Me. Are they there yet?" "Obviously, its very disappointing," the sheriff said. You might say that... Authorities were unsure if the flight he took left on Tuesday or Wednesday. Atriss was last seen by authorities in New Jersey on Monday. Who's investigating this? Inspector Closeau? Wednesday's raids followed a four-month investigation by sheriffs in northern New Jersey, the Paterson police and the FBI, Speziale said. Atriss had not been under round-the-clock surveillance, sheriff's Lt. Robert Weston said. Jimmy the Weasel, back at HQ, sez he don't have no idea how this guy got tipped, y'know? |
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| The Investigation |
| 9-11 thug was involved in two other bombings |
| 2001-10-06 |
Khalid Almihdhar, one of the hijackers who crashed a jetliner into the Pentagon, was involved in the 1998 U.S. embassies bombings in East Africa and the attack on the destroyer Cole in Yemen last year, sources say. The embassy bombings killed 224 people. Seventeen sailors died when the Cole was attacked by suicide bombers, and 189 died in the rubble of the Pentagon. Evidence connecting Almihdhar to the three acts of terror first showed up in a British report released Thursday that said at least three of the hijackers were associates of Al Qaeda, the confederacy of terrorist groups run by Bin Laden. The report without naming names said one of the associates played "key roles" in the three attacks. Sources familiar with the investigation of the Sept. 11 terror attacks identified the suspect as Almihdhar. The British report also said investigators had evidence that one of Bin Laden's top lieutenants was responsible for the "detail planning of the attacks." U.S. News and World Report stated yesterday that intelligence sources identified the bombing mastermind as Mohammed Atef. Atef, formerly a member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, helped Bin Laden create Al Qaeda. The two men are so close that their children recently married and Atef is considered to be Bin Laden's successor if something happened to him. |
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