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by William F. Jasper
Journalists and congressional
investigators are beginning to trace the terror trail backward from 9-11
to Oklahoma City and the earlier World Trade Center bombing.
Ramzi Yousef, the reputed
mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, sits in a federal
maximum-security prison in Florence, Colorado, serving a life sentence.
Terry Nichols, the convicted co-conspirator of Timothy McVeigh in the
Oklahoma City bombing, is incarcerated in the Oklahoma County Jail. He
faces a life sentence without parole for the deaths of eight federal law
enforcement agents in that 1995 bombing, as well as an upcoming state
trial for the deaths of the 161 men, women, children, and unborn baby
not named in the federal indictment. Osama bin Laden, the alleged
instigator of the September 11th holocaust, is on the run (if alive)
with a $25 million bounty on his head.
This terrorist trio has more in common than shared infamy; evidence
indicating that they are actual co-conspirators in a global terrorist
network continues to mount. At long last, journalists and congressional
investigators are beginning to connect the dots and trace the terror
trail backward from last year’s 9-11 attack to Oklahoma City and the
earlier World Trade Center bombing. The Dallas CBS television affiliate,
Insight magazine, the Toronto Star, the Village Voice,
FOX TV’s Bill O’Reilly, the Indianapolis Star, the Manila
Times, and other media channels have begun to tread where previously
only The New American had dared to go. Some even suggest that 9-11 might
have been prevented if officials had fully investigated the Oklahoma
City bombing conspiracy.
Even the Establishment press is coming
close to breaking out of its self-imposed muzzle on this subject.
The lead story in the major broadcast and
print media for June 4th announced that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, already
one of the FBI’s 22 "Most Wanted" for earlier terrorist acts, is now
also being sought by U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials as
a key operative in the Black Tuesday attacks on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon. A federal jury has charged Mohammed, a 37-year-old
Kuwaiti, for collaborating with Yousef on both the 1993 World Trade
Center bombing and a failed 1995 terror plot to bomb multiple airliners
in a single day, or, as an alternative, to hijack and crash airliners
into famous U.S. buildings. Both Yousef and Mohammed have
long-established ties to Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorist
organization.
According to the New York Times’
James Risen, a detailed financial investigation of the money trail from
the 9-11 plot over the past few months has led officials to believe that
Mohammed played a far more prominent role than they had earlier
suspected. The developing evidence, said Risen, "could also help explain
why Al Qaeda decided to attack the trade center again, to try to finish
the job that Mr. Yousef started nearly nine years earlier."
The growing media acknowledgment that the
1993 and 2001 World Trade Center (WTC) attacks are directly connected is
a major development; the same trail of evidence will lead honest
inquirers to realize that the OKC bombing and other major attacks are
also part of an ongoing, coordinated terror offensive. All of which is
immensely pertinent to the current hot debate over who knew what and
when they knew it, concerning our incredible 9-11 intelligence failures.
Answering these questions is essential not only for establishing
accountability for these deadly failures, but, more importantly, for
averting future terrorist events. They are crucial to fixing the
policies allowing the terrorist networks to enjoy easy access to, and
operational freedom within, the United States.
Bojinka: The Manila Connection
The trails of Yousef, Nichols, and bin
Laden converge in the Philippines as early as 1991. Bin Laden and his
brother-in-law, Mohammed Khalifa, set up al-Qaeda operations in the
Philippines in the early 1990s, working closely with the terrorist Abu
Sayyaf Group.
Intelligence experts believe Yousef, an
Iraqi, is an operative for Saddam Hussein’s intelligence service. Yousef
and his co-conspirators are not "Islamic fundamentalists"; they
were known for being very secular: drinking alcohol, partying,
frequenting night clubs, "shacking up" with women, and using profanity.
Dr. Laurie Mylroie, perhaps the leading authority on Yousef, writes in
her book, The War Against America, that "Yousef is definitely not
a radical Muslim.... If Yousef ever spent any time [fighting] in
Afghanistan, he would have been in Najibullah’s [Communist] camp rather
than with the Islamic mujahedin."
According to the signed statement of
confessed Abu Sayyaf terrorist Edwin Angeles, he met in Davao City on
the Philippine island of Mindanao in 1991 with Nichols, Yousef and other
co-conspirators in the 1993 WTC bombing. Angeles, aka Ibrahim Yakub, a
co-founder and second-in-command of the Abu Sayyaf Group, said in his
handwritten statement:
I certify that Terry Nichols was known to
me personally during our meeting with Abdul Hakim Murad, Wali-Khan and
Ahmed Youssef [Ramzi Yousef] in [unintelligible] Davao City on Nov.
1991; Aim to establish a group and organize a Muslim and non-Muslim
youth for a cause; we will also to [sic] plan for following: bombing
activities; providing firearms and ammo; training in bomb making and
handling....
Abdul Hakin Murad and Wali-Khan Amin Shah
were convicted along with Yousef on September 5, 1996 in the so-called
Bojinka Plot, and presently reside in American prisons. Bojinka
(Serbo-Croatian for "loud bang") was Yousef’s code name for his terror
scheme to blow up 11 U.S. jetliners in a single day. A variation of the
plan called for crashing or "dive-bombing" planes into U.S. buildings,
as Yousef’s al-Qaeda comrades did last September 11th. The plot was
foiled when the Manila apartment Yousef and Murad shared caught on fire
from chemical bomb components they were mixing. Murad was captured in
the Philippines following the apartment fire, but Yousef escaped, as he
did following the 1993 WTC bombing. With cooperation from Murad and
Shah, Yousef was later tracked down and captured in Pakistan, where he
was hiding in a guest house rented by a bin Laden company.
Murad’s statements to Philippine police
and to U.S. officials have been largely ignored, but have huge
significance for the OKC and 9-11 attacks, as well as potential future
attacks. Important information in Murad’s file statements include:
Suicide hijackings.
A January 20, 1995 Philippines police report tells of the Yousef/Murad
plot presaging the 9-11 attack, in which Murad said he had planned to
"hijack said aircraft, control its cockpit and dive it at the CIA
headquarters. There will be no bomb or any explosive that he will use in
its execution. It is simply a suicidal mission that he is very much
willing to execute." Another hijacker was to fly a second plane into the
Pentagon or the World Trade Center.
Hijacker pilot training.
Murad detailed his pilot training instruction at several flight
academies in the United States. The importance of this could not have
been lost on federal authorities. In 2001, in the months preceding the
9-11 attacks, U.S. prosecutors focused on al-Qaeda use of U.S. flight
schools in their high-profile trial of four men charged in the 1998
bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Essam al-Ridi, an
Egyptian trained at a Texas flight school, was one of their star
witnesses. Ihab Ali Nawawi, identified by prosecutors as a member of
Egyptian Islamic Jihad and a bin Laden confederate, had received pilot
training at the same school in Norman, Oklahoma, near Oklahoma City,
where some of al-Qaeda’s 9-11 hijackers were trained.
Shoe bombs.
The world was introduced to shoe explosives when passengers aboard
American Airlines Flight 63 from Paris to Miami on December 22, 2001,
subdued Richard Reid, a British al-Qaeda recruit, while he was
attempting to ignite his shoe bomb. Abdul Hakim Murad’s Philippine
police report for March 4, 1995 notes that Yousef "taught Murad how to
smuggle chemicals and explosive devices inside the airport passing
through several [of the] airport’s security arrangements," and that
Yousef would hide detonators and timing devices inside his shoes. Yousef
used these methods on December 11, 1994 to smuggle a bomb on board
Philippines Airline Flight 434. On this practice run for the
multiple-flight Bojinka plan, the bomb detonated, killing a Japanese
passenger, but did not destroy the jetliner.
The Philippine police officials most
closely involved in the Bojinka investigation have expressed shock at
the failure of U.S. officials to apply the lessons of that case. "It’s
so chilling," says Senior Inspector Aida D. Fariscal, the policewoman
who uncovered the plot at Yousef’s smoking apartment. "Those kamikaze
pilots trained in America, just like Murad." "The FBI knew all about
Yousef’s plans," she said, in an interview with former Wall Street
Journal reporter Matthew Brzezinski for the Toronto Star.
"They’d seen the files, been inside 603 [the apartment bomb factory].
The CIA had access to everything, too.... This should have never, ever
been allowed to happen. All those poor people dead."
General Avelino "Sonny" Razon, one of the
lead investigators in the Bojinka case, was so shocked at what he saw on
September 11th, reported Brzezinski, "that he jumped on a plane in Cebu,
where he was now police chief, and flew to Manila to convene a hasty
press conference." Razon stated that there was simply "too much
coincidence" between 9-11 and Bojinka, particularly since the attacks
had occurred within one week of the anniversary of Yousef’s conviction
for the Bojinka plot on September 5, 1996.
"We told the Americans about the plans to
turn planes into flying bombs as far back as 1995," Razon complained to
reporters. "Why didn’t they pay attention?"
There was much, much more that U.S.
officials had not paid attention to. On April 19, 1995, Abdul Hakim
Murad sat in jail in New York awaiting trial on the Bojinka plot when
news of the Oklahoma City bombing reached him via radio. Murad
reportedly told prison guard Lt. Philip Rojas that the bombing was the
work of the "Liberation Army." Sufficiently concerned about this
statement, prison officials notified the FBI, which sent two agents to
investigate. The standard FBI report on the incident, known as a "302,"
states that "Murad responded to the guard’s question by stating that the
Liberation Army was responsible for the bombing." The FBI 302 then
notes: "A short time later, Murad passed a note to the guard, again
claiming that the Liberation Army was responsible for the bombing in
Oklahoma City."
According to Edwin Angeles — who,
remember, was a leader of the Abu Sayyaf Group in the Philippines and a
co-conspirator with Yousef, Nichols, Murad and Shah — the "Liberation
Army" Murad referred to was the Palestine Liberation Army,
working with Islamic Jihad. And according to the U.S. Justice
Department, Islamic Jihad and al-Qaeda have virtually merged into one
group. Adding to the significance of all this is Oklahoma bombing
co-defendant Terry Nichols’ role.
Tying In Terry Nichols
In addition to the testimony of Edwin
Angeles, considerable circumstantial evidence exists linking Nichols to
the Bojinka plot. There is even more evidence tying the Oklahoma City
bombing to Middle Eastern terrorist elements. Consider:
• Nichols made many trips to the
Philippines, sometimes staying for weeks or months, without any known
means of support. Some of these trips coincided with the period during
which Yousef was operating out of the Philippines. Moreover, the areas
in which Nichols chose to stay were remarkable for an American because
they were areas of the Philippines known for strong Islamic activism and
Abu Sayyaf activity.
• Nichols renounced his U.S. citizenship
and married a Filipina whose family was known to have connections to Abu
Sayyaf.
• Nichols’ Filipino father-in-law,
Eduardo Torres, stated that he had seen a book in Nichols’ luggage on
how to build bombs.
• The Justice Department’s star witness
in the OKC bombing trial, Michael Fortier, testified that a few months
before the Oklahoma bombing Nichols had been unable to detonate even a
small milk carton of ANFO. Yet Nichols and McVeigh were credited with
constructing and detonating an ANFO bomb, not only bigger than anything
ever previously set off in the U.S. by terrorists, but one also nearly
100 percent efficient in burning all of its explosive components. A more
likely explanation is that they had help from experts like Yousef.
• Nichols made many unexplained telephone
calls to the Philippines, including some to untraceable numbers. This
would seem to fit Yousef’s modus operandi of using rental cellular
phones to avoid surveillance.
• Nichols was in the Philippines when the
apartment fire foiled the Bojinka plot. Like Yousef, he fled, breaking
the excursion ticket he had purchased earlier and booking a one-way
ticket back to the United States.
• U.S. federal undercover informant Cary
Gagan has stated that Nichols was present at a meeting in Henderson,
Nevada, involving Iranian or other Middle Eastern individuals, where
some of the plans for the OKC bombing were made.
There is also the matter of Nichols’
strange behavior, as reported by his ex-wife, Lana Padilla, in her book,
By Blood Betrayed: My Life With Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh.
Lana Padilla recounts an incident which occurred on November 22, 1994,
before Nichols took off on his final trip to the Philippines. He had
just spent two weeks at her home in Las Vegas visiting their son Josh.
Padilla explains that she had allowed him to stay there because she
believed him to be broke. She drove him to the airport for a flight
going first to Los Angeles, and then on to Cebu City. Before he left,
Nichols gave her a folded brown paper bag and told her, "If I’m not back
in sixty days, open it and follow the instructions." Those ominous
words, together with Nichols’ melancholic behavior and Josh’s reaction
as they drove away from the airport, caused alarm. "I’m never going to
see my dad again," Josh sobbed.
Figuring that her ex-husband might be
contemplating suicide, she opened the package. It contained a sealed
letter to Timothy McVeigh’s sister Jennifer, Nichols’ life insurance
policy, a key chain with nearly a dozen keys, and two hand-written lists
of things for Padilla to "Read and Do Immediately."
On the "Do" list were instructions to
find a plastic bag hidden behind a drawer in Padilla’s kitchen.
Following Nichols’ directions, she was astonished to find a plastic bag
stuffed with $20,000 in twenties and hundreds. Nichols’ list also
referred to a storage unit rented under the alias of Ted Parker which
would yield even more surprises: "… wigs, masks, panty hose,
freeze-dried food, and various gold coins … along with gold bars and
silver bullion stacked neatly in boxes. There were also some small green
stones that appeared to be jade. I estimated at least $60,000 street
value in precious metals!"
Inside the letter to Jennifer McVeigh was
another sealed and stamped envelope addressed to Timothy McVeigh
containing two hand-printed notes. One read: "If you should receive this
letter then clear everything out of CG 37 by 01 Feb 95 or pay to keep it
longer, under Ted Parker.... Your [sic] on your own. Go for it!!" A
postscript said, "Also liquidate 40," and, "This letter would be for
purpose of my death."
Others Unknown
In the immediate aftermath of the April
19, 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, The
New American began reporting on the extensive eyewitness testimony and
law enforcement documentation concerning the involvement of Middle
Eastern individuals. Regular readers of The New American will recall
that shortly after the explosion an "all points bulletin" went out over
the Oklahoma City Police radio band. The APB told law enforcement
officers to be on the lookout for a "late model, almost new, Chevrolet,
full-size pickup. It will be brown in color with tinted windows,
smoke-colored bug deflector on the front of the pickup." The APB also
stated that the vehicle was occupied by "Two Mideastern males, 25 to 28
years of age, six feet tall, athletic build, dark hair and a beard...."
In its 11-count indictment handed down on
August 10, 1995, the federal grand jury in Oklahoma City charged that
Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols "did knowingly, intentionally,
willfully and maliciously conspire, combine and agree together and with
others unknown to the Grand Jury to use a weapon of mass
destruction … resulting in death, grievous bodily injury and the
destruction of the building." (Emphasis added.) A multitude of credible
witnesses had reported seeing Timothy McVeigh on the morning of the
bombing or in the days immediately before it with individuals other than
Terry Nichols. Some of those witnesses described the individuals as
appearing to be of Middle Eastern or Arabic ethnicity.
One individual identified by witnesses as
a suspect seen fleeing from the immediate vicinity of the Murrah
building right after the blast was Hussain al-Hussaini, a former Iraqi
soldier who had entered the U.S. after the Persian Gulf War as a
refugee. Al-Hussaini was the subject of a series of investigative
reports on the OKC bombing by KFOR-TV, the NBC affiliate in Oklahoma
City. We do not know if al-Hussaini, or other former Iraqi soldiers with
whom he associates, were involved in the bombing, but, as we have
reported previously, strong evidence supports that conclusion. It is
obvious that additional accomplices assisted McVeigh and Nichols. The
extensive evidence reviewed and uncovered during our seven-year
investigation of the bombing points to the involvement of a network of
Middle Eastern terrorist cells. President Clinton and Attorney General
Janet Reno, however, were determined to pin the blame on their political
opposition, the "anti-government" forces of the "radical right." They
went to extreme lengths to twist, cover up, and destroy any evidence and
exclude all witnesses that might contradict this thesis. The OKC bombing
terrorists they allowed to escape very likely played a role in the even
more monstrous 9-11 attacks. And they will strike again, if they are not
rooted out.
What You Can Do
Congress is now holding hearings on the
U.S. intelligence and counter-terrorism failures surrounding the 9-11
terrorist attacks. The hearings, which will continue for the remainder
of 2002, are being conducted jointly by the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence, chaired by Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), and the House
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by Rep. Porter J.
Goss (R-Fla.). Urge them, as well as other committee members and your
own representative and senators, to investigate the evidence connecting
the 9-11 attacks to the terror networks that were also responsible for
the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
Senator Graham and other senators may be
contacted by mail by writing to:
The Honorable __________
Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510
Rep. Porter J. Goss and other House
members may be contacted by mail by writing to:
The Honorable __________
House Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20515
To e-mail your senators and
representative, as well as members of the committees investigating the
9-11 attacks, go to:
Click Here
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