[iwar] [fc:Intelligence-Points-To-Bin-Laden-Network]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-09-12 03:15:16


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Subject: [iwar] [fc:Intelligence-Points-To-Bin-Laden-Network]
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Intelligence Points To Bin Laden Network


The following flights are believed to have been affected in today's attacks:
€ American Airlines Flight 11: A Boeing 767 en route from Boston to Los
Angeles. 
€ American Airlines Flight 77: A Boeing 757 en route from Dulles Airport
near Washington to Los Angeles.
€ United Airlines Flight 93: A Boeing 757, crashed southeast of Pittsburgh
while en route from Newark, N.J. to San Francisco.
€ United Airlines Flight 175: A Boeing 767. The flight was bound from Boston
to Los Angeles. 

            
By Dan Eggen and Vernon Loeb
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, September 12, 2001; Page A01

The U.S. government has strong evidence from multiple sources that the
suicidal terrorists who carried out yesterday's catastrophic attacks in New
York and Washington are connected to Saudi fugitive Osama bin Laden, who
previously was linked to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, senior
officials said yesterday.

One senior official said the probability that bin Laden is behind the deadly
assaults is in "the high 90s," while another U.S. official said
investigators gathered evidence yesterday "strongly suggesting" that bin
Laden's organization, al Qaeda, was involved.

The evidence pointing to bin Laden was gathered following yesterday's
attacks in a joint effort by the CIA and the FBI, with information from both
domestic and overseas sources, a senior official said.

"It is more than just the analytical surmise that it would take an
organization with incredible command and control capability, which bin
Laden's has, to stage an attack like this," one U.S. official said. "There
is other information that has been obtained after the attack against the
World Trade Center pointing in the direction of bin Laden."

Unprecedented in scope and sophistication, the coordinated assault on the
world's financial and political capitals caught the United States completely
off guard -- despite a massive intelligence and law enforcement network
devoted to detecting and thwarting such attacks. Focused largely on guarding
against bombing threats to overseas targets, U.S. authorities concede they
were ill-prepared for hijacked jetliners purposely crashed on American soil.

Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah), a member of the Senate intelligence committee,
said he was told in a briefing that electronic intercepts yesterday showed
"representatives affiliated with Osama bin Laden over the airwaves reporting
that they had hit two targets." A senior intelligence official, who said bin
Laden is a prime suspect, would not confirm Hatch's report of intercepts.

A U.S. official said efforts are being made to carefully scrutinize the
passenger manifests on four airliners hijacked yesterday in Boston, Newark
and Washington's Dulles International Airport. The official said that
analysts had concluded that after an initial review, "there may be
information linking some of the names on the manifests to bin Laden's
organization."

Several U.S. officials said there was no warning in the days before the
attacks that a major operation was in the works. "In terms of specific
warning that something of this nature was to occur, no," one official said.

But journalists with access to bin Laden said he and his followers openly
boasted in recent months that they were preparing for attacks against the
United States in retaliation for American support of Israel. Abdel-Bari
Atwan, editor of al Quds al Arabi newspaper in London, said he was convinced
that Islamic fundamentalists aligned with bin Laden were "almost certainly"
behind the attacks.

"Personally, we received information that he planned very, very big attacks
against American interests," Atwan said, referring to conversations about
three weeks ago. "We received several warnings like this. We did not take it
so seriously, preferring to see what would happen before reporting it."

Bin Laden, 44, an extremist Islamic militant from a wealthy Saudi Arabian
family, has been defying U.S. efforts to capture or kill him for years.
Since 1996, he has been living under protection of the fundamentalist
Taliban regime in Afghanistan in a remote mountain redoubt. He has
previously been linked to terrorists who attempted to destroy the World
Trade Center in 1993. He has also been indicted for the deadly 1998 bombings
of the U.S. embassies in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Nairobi, Kenya, and
was linked to last October's attack on the USS Cole in Aden, Yemen, which
killed 17 American servicemen.

A videotape has been circulating in the Middle East for several months in
which bin Laden recites a victory poem about the Cole bombing, then issues a
call to arms: "To all the Mujah: Your brothers in Palestine are waiting for
you; it's time to penetrate America and Israel and hit them where it hurts
the most."

The assaults reignited a long-running debate over how far the United States
should go in its pursuit of terrorists, who are often protected by
sympathetic governments in countries such as Afghanistan.

President Bush, addressing the nation last night, said the United States
will make "no distinction" between terrorists and countries who harbor them
in its hunt for those responsible in the attacks.

In Kabul, the Taliban's foreign minister swiftly condemned yesterday's
attacks and rejected suggestions that bin Laden could be behind them.

"We have tried our best in the past and we are willing in the future to
assure the United States in any kind of way we can that Osama is not
involved in these kinds of activities," Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil told
reporters.

Some U.S. officials and terrorism experts noted that other suspects were
possible, most notably Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed guerrilla force based in
southern Lebanon that is suspected of involvement in the 1983 bombings
against the U.S. Embassy and the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon. Bremer
noted that Hezbollah hijacked a TWA airliner in 1986 with the intention of
crashing it into buildings in Tel Aviv.

The leaders of several other potential suspect organizations denied
involvement with the assaults. The spiritual leader of the Islamic
Resistance Movement, or Hamas, denied any connection with the attacks,
saying, "Our battle is on the Palestinian land." Two other radical
Palestinian groups, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and
the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, said they had nothing
to do with the tragedies.

Instead, U.S. officials said, most signs quickly pointed to bin Laden. In
addition to being a suspect in the Cole bombing, bin Laden was indicted in
New York in December 2000 in connection with the bombings of the U.S.
embassies in Africa on Aug. 7, 1998, in which 224 people were killed and
more than 4,000 injured.

Yesterday's attacks came one day before a bin Laden associate was scheduled
to be sentenced in New York for his role in the Tanzanian bombing. The
federal courthouse is in lower Manhattan, near the World Trade Center.

The embassy bombings, like yesterday's attacks in New York and Washington,
were well-coordinated, occurring minutes apart. Bin Laden is on the FBI's 10
Most Wanted List, and the U.S. government has offered a $5 million reward
for information leading to his capture and conviction.

Most terrorism experts said that only bin Laden and al Qaeda have the
resources and organization to pull off coordinated attacks like those
mounted against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

"He's declared war on the United States," said L. Paul Bremer III, chairman
of the National Commission on Terrorism and former ambassador at large for
counterterrorism in Reagan administration. "He is suspected of being
involved in a number of attacks on the U.S., going all the way back to
Mogadishu [Somalia, in 1993]. . . . At a certain point, somebody's public
statements deserve to be taken at face value. Bin Laden means what he says
-- he's declared war with the United States."

Ruth Wedgwood, a Yale University law professor and terrorism expert, said
yesterday's attacks are "not just an act of war, these are war crimes. No
one has declared martial law, but it is a state of emergency. . . . We
cannot stop until we stop this man. He knows no limits."

In June, U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf region were put on the highest
security alert, "Threatcon Delta," after Western intelligence agencies
received what they called "credible" information of a possible attack by bin
Laden operatives.

That threat coincided with an interview top bin Laden aides gave to a
London-based, satellite television station, the Middle East Broadcasting
Center.

Bakri Attrani, the reporter for the story, said in an interview with The
Washington Post in July that he had met with bin Laden outside Kandahar, a
rugged frontier town in southern Afghanistan that is the headquarters of the
spiritual leaders of the Taliban, Afghanistan's ruling Islamic militia.
Attrani recounted that bin Laden's aides "said there would be attacks
against American and Israeli facilities within the next several weeks."

No attack occurred in that time frame, but the threat forced a Marine Corps
contingent in Jordan to cut short its training session and return to its
ships, while the U.S. 5th Fleet steamed out of port in Bahrain.

In February 1998, bin Laden issued a fatwa, or religious order, calling for
attacks on Americans. A translated text of the document, issued by a newly
formed coalition called the International Islamic Front for Jihad Against
Jews and Crusaders, identified bin Laden as a sheikh.

U.S. officials believe this order culminated in the embassy bombings in
Kenya and Tanzania. They are also now trying to determine whether bin Laden
has a definitive relationship to those responsible for bombing the Cole.

In the recent video, bin Laden comes close to admitting a role in the Cole
bombing, without ever actually mentioning it. He recites a poem that
includes the line "And in Aden, they charged and destroyed a destroyer that
fearsome people fear, one that evokes horror when it docks and when it
sails," according to numerous news reports of the tape.

The poem recital is followed by images of the bombed ship. Rebels filmed at
a training camp at one point in the video chant, "We thank Allah for
granting us victory the day we destroyed the Cole in the sea."

According to the U.S. State Department's April 2001 report on global
terrorism, bin Laden uses a $300 million family inheritance to finance his
terrorist organization, al Qaeda, which has "several hundred to several
thousand members" and "a worldwide reach." Some analysts claim his group has
access to about $3 billion in funding, although others have said such
estimates are overstated.

According to the report, bin Laden founded the group in the late 1980s to
bring together Arabs who had fought against the Soviet Afghanistan, and it
now works to "overthrow regimes it deems non-Islamic" and expel Westerners
and non-Muslims from Muslim countries." In February 1998, the group issued a
statement saying "it was the duty of all Muslims to kill U.S. citizens
civilian or military and their allies everywhere," the State Department
report said.

Correspondents John Ward Anderson in Istanbul and T.R. Reid in London and
staff writers Nora Boustany, Walter Pincus, George Lardner Jr. and Bob
Woodward in Washington contributed to this report.

© 2001 The Washington Post Company

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