[iwar] [fc:Trial.Spotlights.America's.Top.Terrorist.Threat]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2001-12-15 17:32:41
Next message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:Americans.'covered.up.massacre.of.280.Taliban']"
Previous message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] Bin Laden's voice detected (fwd)"
Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ]
Message-Id: <200112160132.fBG1Wfn02007@red.all.net>
To: iwar@onelist.com (Information Warfare Mailing List)
Organization: I'm not allowed to say
From: Fred Cohen <fc@all.net>
Mailing-List: list iwar@yahoogroups.com; contact iwar-owner@yahoogroups.com
Precedence: bulk
Date: Sat, 15 Dec 2001 17:32:41 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [iwar] [fc:Trial.Spotlights.America's.Top.Terrorist.Threat]
Reply-To: iwar@yahoogroups.com
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Trial Spotlights America's Top Terrorist Threat
by Phil Hirschkorn

Submitted to: Counterterrorism &amp; Security International Vol. *, No. *, 2001


The Path to Court

On August 7, 1990, five days after Saddam Hussein's army invaded Kuwait, President 
George H.W. Bush announced American troops would be deployed to Saudi Arabia to deter 
further Iraqi aggression, especially into the oil-rich Saudi kingdom.

Exactly eight years later, a pair of truck bombs exploded in synchronized attacks 
on two American embassies in Africa -- in the capitals of Nairobi, Kenya and Dar 
es Salaam, Tanzania, killing 224 people, including 12 Americans, and injuring more 
than four thousand other innocents.

Claims for the bombings in Arabic faxed that morning from a nondescript London grocery 
store to media outlets in Qatar, United Arab Emirates, and France, stated the twin 
bombings were carried out primarily to force the "evacuation of all American and 
Western forces, including civilians, from the land of the Muslims in general, and 
the Arabian Peninsula in particular."

The FBI deployed more agents to the bombing scenes than any other overseas investigation 
in its history.  Within a week, agents, working with Kenyan police, arrested two 
suspected Nairobi bombers, both connected to Saudi exile Osama bin Laden, the wealthy 
Muslim extremist with a professed hatred of the U.S.  Bin Laden, who had declared 
war against the U.S. is a series of "fatwahs," or religious decrees, was already 
secretly indicted with terrorism charges in June 1998 by the U.S. Attorney for the 
Southern District of New York.  Now he was about to become a household name.

On August 20, 1998, President Clinton ordered retaliatory missile strikes on bin 
Laden's purported base inside Afghanistan.  The target -- camps where Islamic militants 
learned how to use guns and explosives and bin Laden's brand of religious ideology. 
 By June 1999, the government offered a $5 million reward for information leading 
to bin Laden's arrest and placed him on its 10 Most Wanted list.   Meanwhile, federal 
prosecutors moved forward with their cases against a handful of underlings in custody.

The six-month embassy bombings trial completed this summer in U.S. federal court 
revealed the fullest picture to date in a public forum of bin Laden's organization, 
its motives, and how it planned and carried out its conspiracy to kill Americans 
and destroy U.S. property.   But it left many unanswered questions.  How does bin 
Laden pay for these operations? How many followers does he really have? Why can't 
national intelligence or military assets locate and grab him?

The bombings forced the U.S. to reexamine embassy security abroad, just as the World 
Trade Center and Oklahoma City bombings forced the U.S. to fortify government buildings 
at home.   The Clinton and Bush administrations temporarily closed dozens of embassies 
and allocated billions of dollars to upgrade them.   But three years later, the bombings' 
expressed purpose appears unfulfilled-- 5,200 troops are still stationed on Saudi 
soil -- and little that offends bin Laden about U.S. foreign policy -- support for 
Israel, sanctions against Iraq -- has changed.

The trial marked the first time the U.S. prosecuted terrorists for crimes committed 
off American soil.  The guilty verdicts bolstered investigators' resolve to capture 
and convict culpable terrorists wherever they might be found.  But the American pursuit 
of the death penalty, especially against foreign nationals, complicates this global 
law enforcement effort.

The four men convicted in New York included the pair of Nairobi embassy bombers 
quickly arrested in August 1998 -- Mohamed Rashed Daoud al-'Owhali, a 24-year-old 
Saudi, and Mohamed Sadeek Odeh, a 36-year-old Jordanian -- plus one Dar es Salaam 
embassy bomber, Khalfan Khamis Mohamed, a 28-year-old Tanzanian arrested ten months 
later in Cape Town, South Africa, where he had fled and lived incognito.  The last 
defendant, Wadih el Hage, a 40-year-old naturalized American of Lebanese heritage, 
had the longest association with bin Laden and facilitated his East Africa cell with 
fake travel documents and business covers.  But el Hage was living in the U.S. with 
his wife and seven children for nearly a year before the bombings occurred. 

Though three of the men -- all but el Hage -- stand convicted of mass murder, none 
were high-ranking players in bin Laden's Islamic militant group, al Qaeda, meaning 
"the base."  The top associates yet be captured and tried include bin Laden's' top 
adviser, Ayman al-Zawahiri, his military commander, Mohamed Atef, the East African 
cell leader, Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, the ground coordinators of the two bombings, 
Fazul Abdullah Mohammed and Mustafa Fadhil, and of course, bin Laden himself, who 
still lives in Afghanistan with the approval of the ruling Taliban regime.


The Organization

U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White and her staff won their case by presenting a coherent 
narrative to twelve jurors with superficial knowledge of the bombings and largely 
ignorant of Islam, bin Laden, and the four defendants.  There were thousands of pieces 
of evidence -- documents, photographs, videotapes, phone records, letters, computer 
files, bomb debris, recovered truck parts -- and testimony from nearly 100 witnesses. 
 Prosecutors described a decade-long plot sparked the end of the war in Afghanistan 
and by the Gulf War.  They placed bin Laden among the thousands of Arabs who volunteered 
to fight Soviet troops that occupied the Muslim nation, the American-backed  mujahedeen, 
who were supported by CIA trainers and covert arms shipments.

"He talk about the Soviet Union army come to Afghanistan and kill people and we 
have to help them, we have to make jihad out of them," government witness Jamal Al-Fadl 
recalled bin Laden saying at the time.  Bin Laden's main contribution was not in 
combat but in donating resources from his family construction business to build roads 
and defensive tunnels.

The seeds of al Qaeda were planted after the Soviet defeat, as bin Laden supported 
mekhtab al khidemat, or "the services office" in the border city of Peshawar, Pakistan 
as a way for the mujahedeen to keep in touch.  A branch office opened in Brooklyn, 
New York to reach out to American recruits.

"When the Russians decide to leave Afghanistan, bin Laden, he decide to make his 
own group," testified Al-Fadl, who became the third rank and file member to swear 
a loyalty oath, or bayat. 

"Bayat means you swear you going to agree about the agenda and about jihad, listen 
to the emir, outstanding from any order and do -- whatever work they ask you in group, 
you have to do it," Al-Fadl said.

The government has relied heavily on Al-Fadl -- a confidential source in court papers 
until the trial -- information ever since the 38-year-old Sudanese man split with 
bin Laden after embezzling over $100,000 from him.  Court artists were not permitted 
to draw his face.  On the run in fear for his life, Al-Fadl went to a U.S. embassy 
in the summer of 1996, offering information on bin Laden's group.

"They train very hard, they do their best to make war against your country," Al 
Fadl warned, according to his testimony.  "They try to do something inside the United 
States and they try to fight the United States Army outside, and also they try to 
make a bomb against some embassy," he said.

Al-Fadl was one of two al Qaeda defectors in the witness protection program who 
brought an insider's account al Qaeda to court.  He depicted al Qaeda as a pyramid 
with bin Laden, the emir, on top.  His closest advisers formed the majlis al Shura, 
or "consultation council," and headed committees that implemented religious teachings 
and military training, and managed diverse businesses that financed operations.  


Starting in 1991, from his headquarters in a building in a commercial section of 
the Sudanese capital of Khartoum, bin Laden successfully engaged in road and bridge 
construction - completing an 83-mile highway for the government.  He ran a trucking 
service, exported farm products, exchanged currency, and operated a leather tannery, 
according to Al-Fadl, who managed the al Qaeda payroll until he trained el Hage to 
take over that job.  Al Qaeda salaries ranged from $200 to $1,500 a month.

If any financial records exist of bin Laden's business activities during his five 
years in Sudan, the government did not produce them, including the bank accounts 
Al-Fadl said existed in five countries.  Besides the $10,000 paid for a used Toyota 
Dyna truck in Kenya and $6,000 paid for a used Nissan Atlas refrigeration truck in 
Tanzania, the trial offered scant evidence of financial transactions that led to 
the bombings or any other terrorist activities.

The second al Qaeda insider who testified, L'Houssaine Kherchtou, a 36-year old 
Moroccan, suggested bin Laden was once tight for cash.  Kherchtou, who trained in 
Kenya to become an al Qaeda pilot, lent his Nairobi apartment to fellow conspirators 
conducting surveillance on the U.S embassy.  

"There is no money," a bin Laden aide told Kherchtou at the end of 1995.  Al Qaeda 
cut salaries and travel and wouldn't pay a $500 to renew Kherchtou's pilot's license 
or settle a maternity ward bill for his wife's C-section delivery.

Both Kherchtou and Al-Fadl broke with bin Laden by 1996, when he relocated to Afghanistan. 
  Only al-'Owhali and el Hage had any direct contact with him since then, according 
to prosecutors.  The trial thus failed to shed any light on bin Laden's money flow 
or organizational changes during the past five-years.

While the trial suggested estimates of bin Laden's multimillion dollar worth may 
be overstated, it's clear the defendants didn't require much to support themselves. 
 Odeh, who ran a small fishing boat on Kenya's Indian Ocean coastline, lived with 
his wife and child resided in a mud-walled hut with no plumbing or telephone.  El 
Hage traded gemstones and explored numerous moneymaking schemes while living with 
his family in Nairobi, recording expenses as minuscule as vitamins and dog collars 
in his personal planner.  K.K. Mohamed found it necessary to retrieve a rug, a child's 
toilet seat, and a ceiling fan from the Tanzania bomb-making house.  These objects, 
laced with explosive residue, were later found by investigators and used to convict 
him.


The Operatives

In proving the defendants guilty of joining bin Laden's conspiracy, the government 
showed each man's ties to the alleged terrorist mastermind.   El Hage served as bin 
Laden's personal secretary in the Sudan years and admitted conducting business transactions 
for him even after his move to Kenya.   Al-'Owhali and K.K. Mohamed trained in his 
military camps, learning how to use guns and explosives, and absorbing bin Laden's 
brand of extreme Islamic ideology.  So did Odeh, who engaged in military operations 
as early as 1993 in Somalia, where bin Laden opposed U.S. troop presence.

Odeh and el Hage knew each other, according to Kherchtou, but none of the other 
men on trial were acquainted.  For example, Odeh, a technical adviser to the Kenya 
bombing, never met al-'Owhali, who helped prepare the Nairobi bomb truck and rode 
in it to the embassy.  That's because, as Odeh told his FBI interrogaters, al Qaeda's 
cells are split into planning and execution phases, with members of one group not 
necessarily knowing the other.   

FBI agent John Anticev said Odeh told him in a post-arrest interview that the cell's 
planning group assesses a target's construction and vulnerabilities, probes for security 
weaknesses, and determines what kind of explosives could reduce it to rubble.  If 
proper on site surveillance cannot be conducted, operatives might set up a food cart, 
taxi stand, or barbershop as a covert observation post, Odeh told Anticev.
            
Al Qaeda recruits non-members to assist in low-level logistical tasks, which is 
how K.K. Mohamed became ensnared in the Tanzania bomb plot, his first jihad job, 
three years after he completed training in Afghanistan.

Operatives are taught surveillance techniques and clandestine behavior, for example, 
how to obtain a legal job as a cover, and to communicate through mail drops. British 
police discovered a lurid instruction manual during a search of a Manchester, England 
residence used by Anas al Liby, an al Qaeda leader who conducted cased the Kenya 
embassy as early as 1993.
  
This 18-chapter, 180-page opus called "Military Studies in the Jihad Against the 
Tyrants," covers everything from writing in code to assassination--with a knife, 
a blunt object, rope, or bare hands-to poison techniques.

"The substance Ricin, an extract from Castor beans, is considered one of the most 
deadly," the manual says in one excerpt, suggesting an injection.  Prosecutors quietly 
entered the manual into evidence and never elaborated on who wrote it or who may 
have followed its guidelines.

Bin Laden's cells have received orders from satellite phone.   For two years leading 
upto the embassy bombings, evidence showed bin Laden used 2,200 minutes of time on 
a laptop-sized phone purchased through intermediaries from a New York telecommunications 
firm.

His London cell leader, Khaled al-Fawwaz, a fellow Saudi dissident who distributed 
bin Laden statements, got the most calls.  including a flurry of calls preceding 
the publication of bin Laden's February 1998 fatwah targeting all Americans published 
in the Arabic newspaper, al Quds. Bin Laden or his associates placed more than 50 
calls to Kenya, including four to the wiretapped Nairobi home phone of el Hage, and 
dialed dozens of times to Yemen, Sudan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Azerbaijan.


Unanswered Questions

While bin Laden publicly stated his intent to kill Americans, beginning with U.S. 
soldiers in 1996, the government has not made clear what lethal actions he took before 
August 1998--other than arming himself and training followers.

During the trial, government witness Essam Al Ridi, an Egyptian mujahedeen who sold 
bin Laden an American-made private jet in 1993, described a planned shipment of Stinger 
anti-aircraft missiles.  That shipment did not occur.  

The government alleged bin Laden sought components of chemical and nuclear weapons, 
and Al-Fadl described a $1.5 million uranium buy in 1994, but that deal apparently 
fell through.

Bin Laden is not accused of directing two earlier bombings of U.S. bases in Saudi 
Arabia.  Instead, U.S. has indicted 13 Saudis for the June 1996 truck bombing of 
the Khobar Towers military complex in Dharan that killed 19 soldiers and a Lebanese 
chemist suspected of building the bomb, and is investigating an Iranian link.  As 
for the November 1995 attack on Riyadh complex that killed seven people, four Saudis 
were beheaded after confessing to the crime.  In his 1996 fatwah and his televised 
interview with CNN, bin Laden referred to these attackers as "heroes" saying "what 
they did is a great job and a big honor I missed participating in."

Somalia seemed to be the place where the U.S. claimed bin Laden first struck with 
lethal results.  The embassy bombings indictment blamed bin Laden for the deaths 
of 17 U.S. Army Rangers who died in the infamous October 3, 1993 battle in Mogadishu 
- training Somalis who did the killing.  The jury heard how American forces had been 
sent to Somalia to assist a United Nations mission to distribute food and supplies 
to the starving nation torn by civil war.  After the humanitarian crisis ended, troops 
remained to shore up the nation's political and economic structure.

"The snake is America and we have to stop them.  We have to cut off the head of 
stop them, what they are doing now in the Horn of Africa," bin Laden told his followers 
at the time, according to Al-Fadl.

Al Qaeda aspired to "kick out the United States by military force" because it considered 
the presence "colonization" of the predominantly Muslim nation of 8 million, according 
to defendant Odeh's statement to the FBI.   Ancticev said Odeh was among the al Qaeda 
members who ventured into Somalia to train tribes to defend themselves.

Kherchtou added, there had been a plan to bomb the Mogadishu building the UN used 
as its headquarters, but that never went forward.

Over time, the U.S. military mission shifted to suppressing the faction led by Mohamed 
Farrah Aidid, the militia leader whose seasoned fighters had helped overthrow longtime 
dictator, Mohamed Siad Barre.  After the July 1993 missile attack aimed at Aidid's 
men killed dozens of Somali civilians in Mogadishu, many Somalis saw themselves in 
a state of war with U.S.

Three months later, during an October 3 raid to capture Aidid and two of his top 
lieutenants, Somalis shot down four Black Hawk helicopters.  Angry mobs assaulted 
the U.S. casualties, took one hostage, and paraded dead bodies through the streets. 
US Army helicopter pilot James Yaccone, the government's sole witness on the Somalia 
battle, said Arabic radio transmission intercepted by intelligence officers suggested 
a possible bin Laden presence.  

A Somalia expert for the defense pointed out Arabic is the country's second language, 
especially among Somalis with an army background.   That army, before the nation's 
civil unrest, was armed and trained alternately by US and Soviet advisers fighting 
the Cold War.

By the time the embassy bombings jury got the case, the government had retreated--claiming 
bin Laden only trained Somalis, but was not responsible for the US killings.  Portraying 
the deaths of US soldiers pinned down in combat as a terrorist act did not pass muster 
with the jury.  In its verdict form, the found the accused guilty of a conspiracy 
to use weapons of mass destruction against U.S. nationals, but only with respect 
to the bombings, not against U.S. troops in Somalia, Yemen, or Saudi Arabia.


Training Camps

The three men convicted for bombing the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania - Odeh, 
al-'Owhali, and Mohamed - admitted learning how to make explosives at bin Laden's 
camps inside Afghanistan.  But the most vivid depiction of what goes on inside them 
came from Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian whose plan to detonate a suitcase bomb at Los 
Angeles International Airport around New Years 2000 was foiled by alert border guards 
near Seattle, Washington.   Those inspectors stopped him from driving his rented 
sedan packed with explosives and timing devices into the U.S.

Ressam , 34 convicted in April in Los Angeles, testified against an alleged accomplice, 
fellow Algerian Mokhtar Haouari, in the Southern District of New York just as the 
embassy bombings penalty phase against Mohamed was winding down.
Ressam spent six months in Afghanistan firing handguns, machine guns, and rocket 
propelled grenade launchers and assembling bombs from TNT and the plastic explosive 
C4 - the same regimen the embassy bombings trio underwent.

The camp was called Khaldan, where it turns out, al-'Owhali also trained just a 
year before Ressam, and just months before he was asked to participate in the Nairobi 
attack.  Al-'Owhali, interrogated by FBI agent Stephen Gaudin in a Kenyan jail after 
his arrest, made no secret who the camp's leader was.
      
"Al-'Owhali heard statements from Osama bin Laden and that these statements further 
solidified his religious feelings," Gaudin said.  
      
"Bin Laden had spoke to the group in general and he impressed upon them the need 
to fight the Americans and to cast them out of the Arabian peninsula," he said.
After six months at Khaldan, Ressam and al-'Owhali went to other camps for more 
advanced intelligence training and to develop assassination techniques, urban warfare, 
and sabotage skills. 
      
"How to blow up the infrastructure of a country," Ressam said.  "Such installations 
such as electric plants, gas plants, airports, railroads, large corporations...and 
military installations also," he said.

They practiced poison techniques by administering cyanide to dogs.
 
Ressam said the training camps purchased supplies of weapons from Afghanistan's 
ruling Taliban, which denied any connection to the camps or its recruits.


At Death's Door

Though the U.S. sought the death penalty against the two trial defendants with the 
most direct roles in the embassy bombings -- al-'Owhali in Kenya and Mohamed in Tanzania 
-- the same jurors that convicted these men rejected a death sentence.  Among their 
reasons -- not wanting to make them martyrs, thus inspiring more terrorist acts, 
and viewing execution by lethal injection as less suffering than life behind bars. 
   

The death penalty option hangs over most of the 13 fugitives in the case, including 
bin Laden.  U.S prosecutors may continue to find capital punishment a stumbling block 
toward bring the alleged conspirators to justice, depending on the where they are 
caught.

South Africa's highest court ruled the country erred in handing over K.K. Mohamed 
to the U.S. without receiving assurances he would not face capital punishment.  South 
Africa, like two-thirds of the world's nations, has outlawed the death penalty.  
The UK is seeking the same "no death penalty" assurance before it hands over its 
trio of suspects.  Germany obtained such an assurance before Salim was extradited 
from there.

There are only two foreign nationals on federal death row -- two Colombian men convicted 
in the 1998 killing of a Kansas City drug dealer.   The only other time foreign nationals 
were subjected to federal execution in the United States was August 8, 1942, when 
six Nazi spies were electrocuted for a plot to sabotage American infrastructure.

Since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment 25-years ago, a total of 15 
foreign nationals have been among more than 725 state executions, according to the 
Death Penalty Information Center-all carried out in the past eight years.


What's Next?

Beyond the pending embassy bombings case, bin Laden is suspected for ordering the 
October 2000 suicide boat bombing of the navy ship U.S.S. Cole that killed 17 sailors 
in a Yemen harbor.

"In Aden, the young men rose up from holy war and destroyed a destroyer for injustice 
that had sailed itself into its own doom," bin Laden said in remarks videotaped at 
the January 2001 wedding of his son in Khandahar, Afghanistan.

The men convicted in the embassy bombings trial -- al-'Owhali, Odeh, K.K. Mohamed, 
el Hage -- are only four of  26 alleged bin Laden conspirators who've been indicted 
by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

Three men -- Al-Fadl, Kherchtou, and Ali Mohamed pleaded guilty and are cooperating 
with the government.   At the outset of the trial, the government was expected to 
call Ali Mohamed testify, but never did.  He would still be instrumental in convicting 
bin Laden, if captured, for ordering the bombings.  Entering his plea last year, 
Mohamed told the court the result of his Kenya surveillance: "Bin Laden looked at 
the picture of the American embassy and pointed to where a truck could go as a suicide 
bomber."

Six other men are in U.S. or U.K. custody and awaiting trial.
Only one of them is likely to be tried this year: Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, arguably 
the most important bin Laden associate behind bars.  Prosecutors depict Salim, a 
43-year-old Sudanese man reared in Iraq,  as someone who oversaw management of bin 
Laden companies when they were based in Sudan.  Before Salim is tried on terror conspiracy 
charges, he faces a September trial in U.S. federal court for the attempted murder 
of a jail guard he allegedly stabbed and permanently disabled in November 2000.

A trio of alleged London cell operatives -- al-Fawwaz plus the Egyptians Ibrahim 
Eidarous, and Adel Abdel Bary -- in British jail since 1998, continue to fight extradition 
to the U.S.  

Another Sudanese man in U.S. custody, Mohamed al-Nalfi, faces terror conspiracy 
charges for  supporting al Qaeda in early 1990's when it was based in Khartoum.  
Al Nalfi allegedly helped bin Laden relocate there, established his umbrella company, 
Taba Investments, and led a "jihad" group that merged with al Qaeda.

Finally, a naturalized American from Egypt, 38-year-old Ihab Ali, has been incarcerated 
in the U.S. for more than two years for allegedly lying to a grand jury about his 
bin Laden connections and for refusing to complete his testimony.  Evidence in the 
embassy bombings trial showed Ali, last employed as an Orlando, Florida taxi driver, 
passed messages for al Qaeda and once trained to be bin Laden's pilot.

Phil Hirschkorn, CNN Correspondent

 
For additional information and other informative articles Click Here! 
to become a member of the IACSP

------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Need new boots for winter? Looking for a perfect gift for your shoe loving friends?
Zappos.com is the perfect fit for all your shoe needs!
http://us.click.yahoo.com/ltdUpD/QrSDAA/ySSFAA/kgFolB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->

------------------
http://all.net/ 

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
Next message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] [fc:Americans.'covered.up.massacre.of.280.Taliban']"
Previous message: Fred Cohen: "[iwar] Bin Laden's voice detected (fwd)"
Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ]
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : 2001-12-31 21:00:00 PST