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IV. Modus Operandi: "Pouring Musk On Barren Lands" a. Targeted Assassination of Individuals in Symbolic Positions Contrary to the pundits who just associate Al Qaeda with a "big bang," a key modus operandi of the Vanguards of Conquest was targeted assassination and it was widely known known that Zawahiri was seeking to weaponize anthrax for use against US targets. The Egyptian Islamic Jihad group specializes in armed attacks against high-level Egyptian government officials, including Cabinet ministers. The group had a "hit list" that included tens of Egyptians to be killed by the group, including journalists. In May 1987, a Major General was shot outside his home in Cairo. Several EIJ members and two Islamist Group members were arrested in connection with the attack. In November 1990, six members of EIJ were arrested in connection with the murders of People’s Assembly Speaker and five security men on October 12, 1990. The EIJ's military wing, the Vanguards of Conquest, launched a violent campaign in March 1992. Of 223 killed in the first year or two, 67 were policemen, 76 were Islamic militants, 36 were civilian Christian Copts, and three were foreign tourists. Prosecutors and policemen would be targeted to avenge torture. By April 1995, 700 had been killed. Al-Jihad has had a role in most foreign terrorist attacks against the United States and its allies over the past 20 years. The group is most well known for its first, the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. In August 1993, the same year as the bombing of the World Trade Center, al-Jihad attempted to assassinate Egyptian Interior Minister by firing on his motorcade and detonating a homemade bomb. The group also made an attempt that year against Prime Minister with an explosion which occurred about 500 yards from his home as his motorcade passed. A 15-year-old girl standing at a nearby bus stop was killed. EIJ issued a statement claiming the action was to avenge the recent death sentences. In 1992, Islamic Jihad activists murdered an author, Faraj Fodah, who had openly supported Israeli-Egyptian peace. The secular columnist in his last article had suggested that the militants were motivated by sexual frustration more than politics. In March 1994 Egypt’s higher military Court passed death sentences in absentia that included Tharwat Salah Shehata, Yasser al-Sirri, ‘Isam Muhammad ‘Abd-al-Rahman for the assassination attempt on Prime Minister Sedki on November 25, 1993. In 1994 al-Jihad militants were linked to two unsuccessful attempts to bomb the Israeli and U.S. embassies in Manila. In June 1995, the Vanguards of Conquest claimed responsibility for a failed assassination attempt on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to kill Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. In November 1995, an EIJ suicide car bombing of the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan killed 17 and injured 59. An Egyptian with Canadian citizenship, Ahmad Saeed Kadr (Khadr), was charged in connection with the bombing. Kadr worked as the regional director of Human Concern International, a Canadian relief agency in Peshawar, and was alleged to have moved money through the aid agency from Afghanistan to Pakistan to pay for the operation. In December 1995, the Vanguards of Conquest sent a communiqué warning Pakistan to stop extraditing militants to Egypt, or “it will pay a heavy price.” That month, Egyptian Security forces arrested 56 terrorists after being tipped off by an EIJ informer. The group was accused of planning to assassinate President Hosni Mubarak on 1995 using 550 pounds of explosives to blow up the President’s motorcade. In November 1997 after the killing in Luxor, Egypt, of 58 tourists by Al Gamaa Al Islamiyaa, the Vanguards of Conquest warned that orders had “already been given for attacks on Americans and Zionists not only in Egypt but elsewhere.” In February 1998 Al Jihad was one of the founding signatories involved in the creation of the World Islamist Front for the Jihad against Jews and the Crusaders (World Islamist Front). The Front subsequently issued a fatwa calling for the killing of Americans worldwide and the expulsion of Americans from the holy land and Jews from Jerusalem. Egyptian Islamist sources declared that the release of the statement marked Al Zawahiri’s, and Al Jihad’s, return to the field of active terrorist groups. In June 1998 Egyptian security authorities arrest seventeen members on charges of forming an Al Jihad cell in east Cairo. Resulting confessions revealed that Al Jihad was planning to assassinate a number of public figures and security officers. That month, Jihad members al-Najjar (head of Al Jihad in Albania), and Majed Mustapha were arrested in Albania, reportedly with the aid of the Central Intelligence Agency, and extradited to Egypt in late June 1998. An August 1998 Statement issued by the Information Office of the Jihad Group in Egypt vowed revenge on the United States for the extradition of three Al Jihad members from Albania to Egypt. In September 1998, a number of senior EIJ and IG leaders in London were arrested, including the EIJ cell members who had faxed the claim of responsibility for the embassy bombings. In April 1999, after verdicts in the “Returnees from Albania,” the Vanguards of Conquest and Al Jihad issue separate threats of retaliation. Of the 107 accused, 87 defendants were found guilty, including Canadian Mahmoud Mahjoub. The day of the bombing, shortly after the explosions, EIJ military commander Mabruk called Canadian VOC member Jaballah and told him to call the London cell members and tell them he could be reached at Shehata's residence. Shehata was Jaballah's brother-in-law. The London cell members then issued a claim of responsibility for the blasts. That year, the group also planned an unsuccessful attack on the U.S. Embassy in Albania. Throughout these years, an estimated 70 Egyptian militants were rendered by the US to Cairo prior to 9/11 and the anthrax mailings. The fact that targeted assassination was the modus operandi of the US-based islamists -- and that the motivation was retaliation for the detention of senior leaders and to create leverage aimed at their release -- was established by the first of a series of terrorist attacks in the US -- the assassination of radical rabbi Meir Kahane by Egyptian Nosair, who had emigrated from Egypt in 1981. In his address book, Nosair had written the names of some Jewish officials, to include two judges who recently had extradited an Arab terrorist. Nosair's job had been to protect the blind sheikh in the US. He was a friend of Ali Mohammed who stayed with him when he came to New York. The commentators who argued that Al Qaeda just goes for the "big bang" were overlooking the modus operandi of the Vanguards and what was known about Ayman's biological program through "open source" materials. In his March 2007 confession to a military tribunal, KSM admitted to having been involved in a plot to assassinate a number of former American presidents (including Jimmy Carter), Pope John Paul II and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. In December 2007, Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. In January 2008, it was revealed that Jabarah, the go-between KSM and Hambali had vowed to avenge the death of a friend by killing FBI agents and prosecutors he knew and apparently intended to use some steak knives he had secreted. To suggest that Zawahiri and his colleagues do not use targeted assassination as their modus operandi -- indeed, to not appreciate that it is the EIJ's key modus operandi -- totally misses the mark. b. "[Cairo] Medical School" (1979-1982): Recruitment By Ayman Zawahiri The following is a lengthy excerpt from Inside Jihad: Understanding and Confronting Radical Islam (2007) by Dr. Tawfik Hamid.
c. The Cairo Medical School Dropout Trained To Recruit US Operatives And Make Booby-Trapped Letters (1989-1998) Lance Williams of the San Francisco Chronicle wrote an eye-opening profile of Khalid Dahab, a Cairo Medical School drop-out who recruited US operatives for Al Qaeda. He was trained by Bin Laden's head of intelligence, former US Army Sergeant Ali Mohammed. Ali Mohammed had recruited him while he was student at Cairo Medical in the early 1980s. The article was based on statements made in a Cairo court proceeding. Williams reports that Bin Laden personally congratulated Dahab, an Egyptian- born US Citizen, a Silicon Valley car salesman and member of Zawahri's Egyptian Islamic Jihad/Vanguards of Conquest, for recruiting Islamist Americans into al Qaeda. The account of Dahab's confession was first published in the October 10, 2001 edition of the London-based Arabic language newspaper Al-Sharq al-Awsat. Dahab said he and Bin Laden's head of intelligence, former U.S. Army Sgt. Ali Mohamed. Ali Mohamed was also a Silicon Valley resident. Ali Mohamed had traveled to Afghanistan in the mid-1990s to report to bin Laden on the success the two were having in recruiting Americans. Bin Laden told them that recruiting terrorists with American citizenship was a top priority. Ali Mohamed has admitted role in planning the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya, killing more than 200 people. Williams wrote: "Dahab's confession supports the view of many terrorism experts that al Qaeda has "sleeper" operatives on station in the United States for future terrorist attacks." Khaled Duran, an author and terrorism expert who has written about the Silicon Valley cell, said the recruits would be expected to "fade into the woodwork" until the organization needed them, he said. Williams continues: "His story, obtained from accounts of Egyptian court proceedings and interviews with people who knew him, is entwined with that of Mohamed, a former Egyptian military officer and aide to bin Laden who recruited Dahab into al Qaeda, brought him to America and became his handler." Handsome and outgoing, Dahab spoke excellent English. He said he was from a wealthy Alexandria family. His mother was a physician and he was planning a career in medicine. "But Dahab told acquaintances he had been radicalized by a tragedy that happened when he was a schoolboy: his father, he claimed, had been among 108 people killed in the 1973 crash of a Cairo-bound Libyan Arab Airlines plane that was shot down by Israeli fighter jets when it strayed over the Sinai Peninsula, which at the time was occupied by Israel. He claimed that his father's death -- and Egypt's failure to avenge it -- had turned him against the Egyptian government and against Israel and the United States, as well. He said he was drawn toward Islamic Jihad, a radical movement that had assassinated President Anwar Sadat in 1981 in an effort to remake Egypt into a fundamentalist Muslim state." Williams reports that it was while a medical student i in about 1984, according to his confession, that Dahab met Mohamed, who then was an officer in the Egyptian commando forces and a Jihad operative planning to emigrate to the United States. Dahab came to the United States in 1986, obtaining a student visa by saying he wanted to study medicine. He rented an apartment in Santa Clara, where Ali Mohamed now lived with his American wife. He dropped the name Dahab, calling himself Khaled Mohamed or Ali Mohamed, the same name used by the man who had recruited him. "He sometimes claimed, falsely," Williams explains, "that he had been a physician in Egypt, said people who met him." "In 1992, Dahab married a junior college student from a tiny town in South Dakota whom he met while lawn-bowling in Santa Clara. His third wife converted to Islam. They had four children, and the marriage helped him win citizenship, acquaintances said. The family settled in a duplex near Santa Clara High School. Dahab struggled to support his family, court records show. He worked as a maintenance man at Kaiser Hospital in Santa Clara, then at National Semiconductor, then as a $30,000-per-year car salesman in San Jose." In the mid-1990s, despite financial problems, "[h]e was often abroad, traveling extensively in the Middle East, vacationing in Pakistan, telling associates he was starting a chemical business in Egypt." "In 1995, using a fake passport and identity documents, Dahab and Ali Mohammed smuggled Zawahiri into the US from Afghanistan for a covert fund-raising tour. Dahab reports that part of the money financed the bombing of the Egyptian Embassy in Pakistan. Dahab also said that at Mohamed's direction he had gone to terrorist camps in Afghanistan in 1990 and trained guerrilla fighters to fly hang gliders. He said Islamic Jihad was planning a hand-glider assault to liberate imprisoned Jihad leaders, some of whom had been locked up since the assassination of Sadat." A former friend remembers that Dahab turned up in the parking lot at the Al- Noor Mosque in Santa Clara, driving a station wagon with a hang glider in the back and saying he was bound for Afghanistan. "He said, 'I am going to take (the aircraft) to Afghanistan and help the mujahedeen -- I am going to take it over there and train people to fly it,' " the friend said. "People said, 'Oh, you crazy guy -- they thought he was joking.' " Jihad later canceled the attack, Dahab said in his confession." Williams continues: "Meanwhile, Dahab said Mohamed gave him military training and taught him how to make letter bombs. Dahab said he had also worked as an al Qaeda communications specialist, aiding terrorists inside Egypt by patching through their calls to other operatives in Afghanistan and the Sudan. This helped the terrorists plan operations while avoiding electronic surveillance by Egyptian security forces who routinely wiretapped calls between Egypt and countries that harbored jihad terrorists. Also in the 1990s, Dahab said, he and Mohamed were told to begin recruiting U.S. citizens of Middle Eastern heritage. Dahab said the recruitment project had first been outlined to him by an al Qaeda fighter named Abdel Aziz Moussa al Jamal, who, according to Arabic press accounts, recently surfaced in Islamabad, Pakistan, serving as translator for Taliban envoy Abdul Salam Zaeef. On another visit to Afghanistan, Dahab said, he and Mohamed discussed the project with Zawahiri and bin Laden." "Dahab told Egyptian authorities he and Mohamed had found 10 recruits, all of them naturalized U.S. citizens who had been born in the Middle East. The account of the confession did not name the recruits or provide other details about them." Williams explains that Dahab was arrested and sent to an Egyptian prison. "By 1998, Dahab was spending more and more time abroad, and he told a family law judge in San Jose that he intended to move his family back to Egypt. In August 1998, while Dahab was in Egypt, al Qaeda mounted suicide attacks on the embassies in East Africa. Within weeks Ali Mohamed was arrested for complicity in the attack. He pled guilty. . In October 1998, the Egyptian military moved to crush Islamic Jihad by arresting more than 70 of the organization's leaders. Dahab decided to flee, and on Oct. 28 booked a flight to the United States. According to Dahab acquaintances, Egyptian security police boarded the plane shortly before takeoff and took him away in handcuffs. Dahab confessed his involvement with al Qaeda and was sentenced to 15 years in prison." Sleepers, the former head of Bin Laden's intelligence (and a former US Army sergeant) Ali Mohammed testified, "don't wear the traditional beards and they don't pray at the mosques." An Al Qaeda encyclopedia, Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants, advises sleepers to "have a general appearance that does not indicate Islamic orientation," and for men not to wear a beard. The book also instructs sleepers not to denounce unjustice faced by the ummah, and not to use common Islamic expressions such as "peace be on you," nor to go to Islamic locations, such as mosques. Consider the example of another "sleeper" or operative, Tarik Hamdi of Herndon, Virginia. ABC News employed him to help secure an interview with bin Laden in early 1998. ABC News transported Hamdi to Afghanistan, unaware that his real purpose in going there was to carry a replacement battery to bin Laden for the satellite telephone he would later use to order the embassy bombings in East Africa. ABC was also unaware that the CIA had planted a listening device in the phone. The successful CIA operation, however, did not serve to prevent the planning of the embassy operation. Ironically, it facilitated it. If we don't learn from history, we are bound to repeat it. d. The Cairo Medical School Alum Who Was Zawahiri's Tour Guide On His Last US Tour In 1995, Ayman came once again to the United States where he was accompanied by US Army Sergeant Ali Mohammed on his travels to California, then Brooklyn, then the Washington, D.C. area. Who did he visit in Washington, D.C.? Zawahiri traveled to the US in 1991 and 1995 under an alias (though the dates are disputed). Zawahiri sometimes was accompanied by two brothers, a New Jersey pharmacist and a California doctor, Ali Zaki (a fellow Cairo Medical alum who denies knowing who Zawahiri was). They were joined by a former US Army sergeant and key Al Qaeda operative, Ali Mohammed. In Santa Clara, Ayman reportedly stated at the home of Ali Mohammed, even though Mohammed had recently been subpoenaed to testify about what he knew about Bin Laden's activities. Dr. Zaki says he was a good friend of Ali Mohammed and that it was widely known that Ali Mohammed was a liaison between the islamists in Afghanistan and the CIA. In one of his trips, he also reportedly went to Texas. One of the most important starting points of the FBI's Amerithrax investigation should have been to trace the contacts that al-Zawahiri made on his last trip to the United States. He met with supporters associated with the Maktab Khidmat al-Mujahidin (the Al-Mujahidin services office) in the US. The troubles of Cairo Medical School graduate ('71), San Jose physician Ali Zaki, over taking Ayman Zawahiri and Bin Laden's head of intelligence around the US in 1995 had just about faded from memory. In January 2000, a new problem then reared its head. In 1999, he had prescribed $164,000 in prescriptions for Viagara, a syringe of a drug for renal insufficiency and a vial for hypogonadism. (Bin Laden suffered from renal insufficiency.) The California Board governing physicians found that Dr. Zaki violated regulations because no patient was named and he had kept no records. The drugs were ordered ostensibly for a fictitious business MedChem. When an investigator went to check out the listing it was the address at 550 Bevans Drive it turned out to have been a recently closed deli called Landmark Gourmet Delicatessen. Owned by Hasan Ibrahim, the business had been evicted. According to the decision, the drugs reportedly were for resale abroad. If they were intended for Afghanistan, someone must have expected a lot of action with some virgins. Perhaps erectile dysfunction was common there because of the cold, harsh conditions and the stress in that line of work. One of the allegations in the January 21, 2000 "Accusation" alleged that "On or about June 15, 1999, respondent ordered 100 bottles of Viagara, 30 tablets per bottle, at 100 milligram strength." Cost: $164,000. Memories: Priceless. The public reprimand issued in August 2001 and is available online at the State agency's website. e. Hallmark Greetings: Egyptian Islamists' Earlier WTC Letter Bombs To Washington DC And New York City Newspapers And Symbolic Targets A memo seized in the 1995 arrest proposed flying an explosive laden plane into CIA headquarters. Anyone reading the Washington Post in the mid-1990s read about the plan to fly a plane into CIA headquarters over their morning coffee. The earlier plot to fly an airliner into the Eiffel tower by some Algerians connected to Bin Laden was also notable. Condi Rice professes not to have imagined the threat even though it was publicly known and even a threat at the G-8 conference.It's important that as a country we learn from our mistakes and not pay short shrift to the evidence on the issue of modus operandi relating to Zawahiri's planned use of anthrax. This was not the first time the Egyptian islamists sent letter bombs to newspaper offices in connection with an attack on the World Trade Center. NPR set the scene. It was January 2, 1997, at 9:15 a.m. at the National Press Building in Washington, D.C. The employee of the Saudi-owned newspaper Al Hayat began to open a letter. It was a Christmas card -- the kind that plays a musical tune. It was white envelope, five and a half inches by six and a half inches, with a computer-generated address label attached. It had foreign postage and a post mark -- a postmark appearing to be from Alexandria, Egypt. It looked suspiciously bulky, so he set it down and called the police. Minutes later they found a similar envelope. These were the first two of four letter bombs that would arrive at Al Hayat during the day. A fifth letter bomb addressed to the paper was intercepted at a nearby post office. They all looked the same. Two similar letter bombs addressed to the "parole officer" (a position that does not exist) arrived at the federal penitentiary at Leavenworth. It seemed evident how some Grinch had spent the holidays in Alexandria, Egypt. Egyptian Saif Adel (Makawwi), thought to be in Iran, was involved in military planning. Adel was a colonel in the Egyptian Army's Special Forces before joining Al Qaeda. He helped plan the 1998 attacks on the US embassies in Africa. He was also a planner in the attack on the USS Cole and has served as the liaison officer between Hezbollah and Al Qaeda. Adel assisted Atef, who had overall responsibility for Al Qaeda's operations. According to Cairo Attorney Al-Zayyat, Makkawi had many times claimed responsibility for operations that were carried out inside Egypt but when the perpetrators were arrested, it would be al-Zawahiri's name whose name they shouted loyalty to from the docks. After the letter al-Hayat letter bombs were sent in January 1997, Saif Adel (Makawwi) gave a statement denying responsibility on behalf of the Vanguards of Conquest. On January 7, 1997 Saif Adel purporting to be speaking for the Egyptian Vanguards of Islamic Conquest said: "Those are messages of admonishment. There is no flirtation between us and the Americans in order for us to send them such alarming messages in such a manner." Adel said that "the Vanguards of Conquest "are heavyweight and would not embark on such childish actions." US press and political commentaries had hinted at the Vanguards of Conquest organization's involvement in these attempts. In his statement to Al-Hayat, perhaps referring to the Egyptian Islamic Group, Adel added "I am surprised that we in particular, and not other parties, should be accused of such an operation." He got admonished by the unnamed but official spokesman for the Vanguards organization. This other spokesmanchastisied him as not being authorized to speak for the organization (or even being a member). "We welcome any Muslim who wants to join us, and if Makkawi wants to [join us], he will be welcomed to the Vanguards march, but through the organizational channels. But if words are not coupled with actions, we tell him: Fear God, and you can use a different name other than the Vanguards to speak on its behalf." The spokesman denounced Makkawi's authority to speak for the group, referring to the January 5th statement it had made denying responsibility. The spokesperson for the Vanguards of Conquest apparently was Post Office employee Sattar's friend, Al-Sirri, based in London. The FBI would not speculate as to who sent the letters or why. But this was your classic "duck that walks like a duck" situation. As NPR reported at the time, "analysts say that letter bombs are rarely sent in batches, and when they are it's generally prompted by politics, not personal animus." Al Hayat was a well respected and moderate newspaper. It was friendly to moderate Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt. That, without more, was accurately discerned by observers at the time as sufficient to make the newspaper outlet a target of the militant islamists. The newspaper, its editor explained, does not avoid criticizing militant islamists. The Al Hayat Editor-in-Chief explained: "We've been opposed to all extremists in the Arab world, especially the fundamentalists." Mohammed Salameh, a central defendant in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, was sent to Leavenworth in 1994. The other three Egyptian extremists convicted in the bombing were sent to prisons in California, Indiana and Colorado. Like the blind sheik Abdel-Rahman, Salameh had complained of his conditions and asked to be avenged. The Blind Sheik was particularly irked that the prison officials did not cut his fingernails. Abdel-Rahman was convicted in 1995 of seditious conspiracy, bombing conspiracy, soliciting an attack on an U.S. military installation, and soliciting the murder of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. His followers were indicted for plotting to bomb bridges, tunnels and landmarks in New York for which Rahman allegedly had given his blessings. The mailing of deadly letters in connection with an earlier attack on the World Trade Center was not merely the modus operandi of militant islamists, it was the group's signature. It's their calling card. Khaled Abu el-Dahab, a naturalized American, from Silicon Valley, in a confession detailed Egyptian defense ministry document dated October 28, 1998, explained that he was trained to make booby-trapped letters to send to important people, as well as asked to enroll in American aviation schools to learn how to fly gliders and helicopters. He was a friend of Ali Mohammed, the former special forces officer in the Egyptian army and former US Army Sergeant. The modus operandi of these militant supporters of the blind sheik was known to be planes and booby-trapped letters. The Al Hayat reporters and editor were not expressing an opinion -- though the owner did lay out various possibilities (e.g., Iraq, Iran etc.). The owner of the paper had commanded Saudi forces during the Persian Gulf War, when Bin Laden was so upset about American troops on the Arabian peninsula. Moreover, al Hayat had recently opened up a Bureau in Jerusalem, giving it a dateline of Jerusalem rather than al Quds, which some thought blasphemous. But none of the possibilities would plausibly explain why the letter bomb was sent to Leavensworth where three of the WTC 1993 defendants were imprisoned, including Ramzi Yousef's lieutenant who had asked that his mistreatment be avenged. (That was the criminal genius who returned to Ryder to reclaim his deposit after blowing up the truck at WTC). Egyptian security officials argued that the letters were sent from outside of Egypt, the stamps were not available in Egypt, and that the postmark was not Alexandria as reported. Whatever the place of mailing, the sender likely was someone who was upset that KSM's and Ramzi Yousef's associates had been imprisoned, to include, most notably, the blind sheik. Whoever is responsible for the anthrax mailings, it is a very good bet that they are upset the blind sheik is detained. That should be at the center of any classified profile of the crime. On December 31, 1996 Mohammed Youssef was in Egypt -- having gone to Egypt months before. The al Hayat letter bombs related to the detention and alleged mistreatment of the blind sheikh and the WTC bombers were sent 10 days earlier -- on the Day of Measures. In 2006, he was named as co-defendant with Hassoun, Daher, Padilla and Jayyousi. Youssef was born in Alexandria. Do authorities suspect the "Florida cell" of being involved in the al Hayat letter bombs? Kifah Jayyousi's "Islam Report" over the years -- distributed by Adham Hassoun in Florida and Kassem Daher in Canada -- expressed outrage at detention/extradition due to terrorism law and also what he perceived as attacks on his religion by some newspapers. His headlines on the internet groups blazed "Just In! First Muslim Victim of New Terrorism Law!: US Agents Arrest Paralegal Of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman Without Charge Prepares To Hand Him To Egyptian Regime," soc.religion.islam, dated April 27, 1996 and "Islam Report (Newspaper Attacks Our Religion! Act Now!," soc.religion.islam, Apr. 16, 1996 In connection with the January 1997 letter bombs, Ayman got the know-how to send sophisticated electronic letter bombs from Iraqi intelligence according to one item from the highly controversial Feith memo. In the al Hayat letter bombings, Ayman allowed the finger to be pointed at Libya. In the Amerithrax letters, he allowed the finger to be pointed to a United States biodefense insider by the prosecutor who would have presented to any indictment to the grand jury. Born in Haifa in 1948, the man's daughter then came to represent microbiologist Al-Timimi pro bono. After the Al Hayat letter bombs to newspapers in DC and NYC and people in symbolic positions, in January 1997, both the Blind Sheikh and his paralegal, Sattar, were quoted in separate articles in Al Hayat (in Arabic) denying that they or their supporters were responsible. The Blind Sheikh commented that al Hayat was fair and balanced in its coverage and his supporters would have no reason to "hit" them. The same sort of counterintuitive theory was raised in connection with the earlier letter bombing of newspapers to DC and New York City and people in symbolic positions. Sattar noted that the bombs were mailed on December 20, one day before the brief in support of the blind sheik on appeal. He questioned whether someone (like the FBI) was trying to undermine the appeal's prospects. This time, Mr. Sattar did not need any help making the argument with respect to the anthrax letters. Numerous people with political agendas rushed to do it for him to include counsel for Bosnia and Herzogovina and legal advisor to the PLO, professor Francis Boyle. In accusing Dr. Ivins on the occasion of his death, the FBI embraced the same sort of theory -- that is, when it was not grasping at other untenable theories relating to college sororities, incorrectly perceived anti-abortion news, or perceived financial motive. In September 2006, in a Sahab Media production called "Knowledge is for acting," there is a clip in which Al Quds editor Atwan refers to his visit with Bin Laden in 1996 (see also his 2006 book The Secret History of al Qaeda). He says that Bin Laden was planning to attack America "and America prisons in particular." That was an apparent reference to the Al Hayat letter bombs sent to newspapers and prisons in January 1997. There were recurrent references to Abdel-Rahman in the tape. f. Requirement Under Laws Of Jihad Of Warning Before Use of Biochemical Weapons "Fight in the cause of Allah those who fight you, but do not transgress limits; for Allah loveth not transgressors... ," says the Koran (2:190). Post office employee and blind sheik spokesman Abdel Sattar has explained that Mustafa Hamza, who took over from Taha as Islamic Group leader after the Luxor debacle in which in 58 tourists were murdered, was asked how can you explain killing tourists. Mustafa Hamza answered in every moment and action, the group starts off by consulting with the righteous Olama. No action is initiated without fatwas from our trusted Olama -- meaning scholars in the plural. In other words, before carrying out an operation, they get a fatwa. He confirmed that fatwas are important because they are authoritative statements by religious leaders declaring what is and is not Islamically permissible. Sattar had a copy of the book written by former Islamic Group leader Taha justifying the attacks that had been committed, to include Luxor. The book had been uploaded at the website maintained by London-based Vanguards of Conquest publicist Al-Sirri. The Koran and hadiths provide extensive guidance on the honorable conduct of warfare. One of the leading non-muslim expert on the subject was Princeton's Bernard Lewis. For years, Princeton University Middle Eastern history Professor Emeritus Bernard Lewis' writing on the clash between islam and the west would be translated by the Muslim brotherhood and handed out as pamphlets outside of mosques. After the 1998 "Crusaders" statement by Bin Laden and Zawahiri, Lewis wrote a Foreign Affairs article "License to Kill, Usama Bin Ladin's Declaration of Jihad." "Obviously, the West must defend itself by whatever means will be effective. But in devising strategies to fight the terrorists, it would surely be useful to understand the forces that drive them." After 9/11, Lewis admonished the Pentagon Defence Policy Board to consider how much worse the devastation could have been on Sept. 11 if the terrorists had used a weapon of mass destruction —such as Iraq was said to possess. In a September 27, 2001, in an Op Ed in the Wall Street Journal, the 87 year-old historian explained the use of biochemical weapons by Al Qaeda: "the laws of jihad categorically preclude wanton and indiscriminate slaughter. The warriors in the holy war are urged not to harm noncombatants, women and children, 'unless they attack you first.' Even such questions as missile and chemical warfare are addressed, the first in relation to mangonels and catapults, the other to the use of poison-tipped arrows and poisoning enemy water supplies. Here the jurists differ-- some permit, some restrict, some forbid these forms of warfare. A point on which they insist is the need for a clear declaration of war before beginning hostilities, and for proper warning before resuming hostilities after a truce. As Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman once said in the context of criticizing Sadat's peace with Israel: "Believers govern according to God's laws and do not change or replace a single letter or word of them." In an essay “Islam and Terrorism,” Bilal Philips, a key religious mentor of GMU microbiology grad Ali Al-Timimi, explained the principles of islamic jurisprudence of islamic warfare:
As Ali Al Timimi once explained: "Modern warfare did not exist during those times when they wrote those classical books of fiqh." The old principles therefore must be relied upon to guide the issue in new times. Spokesman al-Kuwaiti was giving a plain warning in the Fall 2001 threat letter -- not disclosed until 2006 -- that the green light had been given for US -bio attack (1) from folks that were US-based, (2) above suspicion, and (3) with access to US and UK government and intelligence information. "The Truth about the New Crusade: A Ruling on the Killing of Women and Children of the Non-Believers," Ramzi bin al-Shibh, argues that "the sanctity of women, children, and the elderly is not absolute" and concludes that "in killing Americans who are ordinarily off limits, Muslims should not exceed four million noncombatants, or render more than ten million of them homeless." Spokesman Abu Ghaith used the same figure in June 2002 in arguing in favor of the moral right to use biological or chemical weapons. A book commemorating the September 11 "raid" was published by Majallat al-Ansar and consisted of four essays. It addresses the importance that any attack comply with the laws of Sharia. "Some people see fit to raise the issue of Islamic principles of warfare. They claim that the raid does not observe those principles and that Sharia errors occurred. Some 'modern' legal scholars see the raid as a violation of the Sharia." The book continued: "Everyone knows that the groups in the traditionalist mujahid movement are more committed than anyone else to Sharia in their actions. After all, their actions can cost them their dearest possession after their faith -- their souls." While purporting not to want to get entangled in a discussion of the legal technicalities, the author then addressed at length why the attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon was justified under the laws of sharia. Vince Cannistraro, a former chief of CIA counter-terrorist operations, discussed the requirement of warning under the laws of jihad on NPR in connection with the Al Qaeda audiotape by Bin Laden that aired shortly before the November 2004 election. In the case of anthrax, Ayman Zawahiri likely considers that the warning required under the laws of jihad has been given. Zawahiri is the grandson of the well-known “Pious Ambassador,” who was President of Cairo University. Dr. Zawahiri is reserving himself a spot in a bad place by reason of his botched analysis of the hadiths and teachings of Mohammed governing warfare (no women, children, noncombatants etc.) The same principles prohibit attacking livestock, crops or wells. Judging by the interpretive texts, it would seem that Al Qaeda and the anthrax mailer have violated the Quran and hadiths by killing noncombatant women and children, and even the aged. It cannot be persuasively argued that those noncombatant women and children and the aged attacked the jihadists first. An infant visiting ABC was infected by the anthrax. Before the military tribunal, KSM says the koran forbids killing children. He noted that warfare is guided by the koran and hadiths. The head of Egyptian Islamic Group, who approved of Sadat's assassination and was released after a quarter-century in prison, said of 9/11:
Thus, the harshest judgment may await true believers in another world. g. "Set our brothers free. Bastards": Continuing Practice of Sending Poisonous Letters as Threats Sending poisonous letter bombs is also fairly understood as consistent with Al Qaeda's modus operandi in that the Al Qaeda operations manual, the most recent version on CD-ROM, had a chapter on "Poisonous Letter." As with the insertion of biologicals into food, the key is mass panic, not mass casualty. The Belgian Prime Minister and the US, British and Saudi Arabian embassies have been sent letters containing hydrazine and an arsenic derivative used in nerve gas in May 2003. This bears on modus operandi. Some argue that islamists would never merely send lethal substances through the mail (though the risk of significant casualty is low) to send a message or warning. One of the ingredients is hard to obtain, suggesting one Health Ministry spokesman to remark that "We're not dealing with a small-time joker." A trial of 23 suspected al-Qaeda members was in its third week. "Set our brothers free. Bastards." Couldn't be a threat by islamists because they only go for mass casualties -- not threats. Right? One of the defendants in that trial allegedly sought hydrazine for use in producing a bomb. A 45- year old Iraqi man was arrested. A similar modus operandi was followed in New Zealand with cyanide in early 2002 and early 2003 by a sender purporting to be islamist. A December 2004 report on terrorism in the European Union noted that in July 2004, eight letters arrived at several official locations in Brussels that contained an ochre-coloured chemical substance that caused itchy eyes and breathing problems. Tests indicated that the substance was adamsite (phenarsasine). Some of the letters included "a threat letter written in (very poor) English, demanding that two recently convicted Islamic extremists are released within that month." Zawahiri feels that in the usual case, the best way to get a lot of people watching is to kill the maximum number of people. But he wouldn't disagree with the comment by Brian Jenkins that "Terrorism is theater." Just those 10 grams cost an estimated $6 billion and have been the subject of thousands of news stories and the focus of widespread bioterrorism preparations. They were fully adequate to do the job even within the constraints of small batch production. The anthrax sender may not have intended to harm anyone. Stevens' death was reported late on October 5. Whether the mailer knew of the death might depend on whether the mailing was made Saturday, October 6 -- or whether it was made as late as Tuesday, October 9, the day it was postmarked after a long holiday weekend. Al Qaeda's shura or policy-making council is concerned with handling its efforts in such a way as to develop and maintain the Arab hatred of the US and Israel. That requires a delicate balance and choice of suitable targets and methods. For example, as explained by the spokesperson in mid-February, Abu al Bara’a Al-Qarshy, Al Qaeda will not use WMD in a muslim country, particularly the home of Mecca and Medina. Zawahiri divines from his religious texts that it is moral to kill American civilians on the grounds that they stood silent as taxpayers while US-bought weapons were used on Palestinians. In 1998, in an interview that appeared in TIME Magazine, Bin Laden himself explained that it was Al Qaeda's "religious duty" to obtain chemical and biological weapons, but it was up to them how to use them. As Dr. Jane A. Alexander of DARPA once explained at DARPA Tech, 1999:
The Ann Arbor NanoBio researchers thanked Dr. Alexander for her support of the DARPA research they were doing involving the Ames strain supplied by USAMRIID's Bruce Ivins. The al Qaeda shura (policy-making council) may deem that Al Qaeda needs to choose the methods of attack carefully so that they are both are effective and calculated to gain the support of others. (Gassing the Kurds ultimately was a public relations debacle for Saddam once the world stopped looking the other way). Suleiman Abu Ghaith claimed that Al Qaeda has the right to murder four million Americans, in a three-part article "In the Shadow of the Lances," posted in June 2002 on the web-site of the Center for Islamic Research and Studies, Abu Ghaith wrote:
In planning 9/11, Atta used code in instructing Ramzi Binalshibh to send “the skirts” to “Sally”. The 9/11 Commission Staff explained that the coded reference to “Sally” referred to sending money to Zacarias Moussaoui. (Ramzi then sent Zacarias $14,000). Former CIA Director Tenet in his 2007 book Center of the Storm included Ramzi Binalshibh along with KSM and Hambali as among al-Qa’ida’s leadership “linked to the group’s highly compartmentalized chemical, biological, and nuclear networks.” Atta and Ramzi Binalshibh used coded phrases as they approached 9/11 to include: Faculty of Fine Arts/arts = Pentagon Faculty of Town Planning/architecture = World Trade Center Faculty of Law / law = The Capitol politics = White House White Meat = Americans Terminal = Indonesia Market = Malaysia Hotel = Philippines Village = Egypt
The CSIS has explained that EIJ operative Jaballah used code in discussing operational or sensitive matters. For example, in a discussion with a Pakistan-based contact, with whom he was discussing acquring false documents, he requested help in acquiring a "green outfit." In describing Mabruk's detention in Dagestan, and seeking funds to get him out, he told Florida cell member in Alberta, Canada, that the "medicine" needed was expensive and that it would cost $15,000. Daher commented that when the "patients" were Arab it seemed a lucrative trade. Similarly, US supporters of Abdel-Rahman in the 1990s used “Food and Beverage Industry” to refer to the FBI. It is worth considering, then, whether code was used in the anthrax letters. In the conversations that the blind sheikh’s spokesman, Sattar, had with people like the blind sheik’s successor Taha, EIJ/Vanguards of Conquest al-Sirri, and the blind sheikh’s son, they used the same language found in emails between Zawahiri and the Yemeni cell in email. If a brother was in the hospital, it meant he was in prison. If he had an accident, it meant perhaps that Egyptian security services had killed him. The letter sending the first anthrax reportedly had clouds pictured on it. The flagship of American Media, Inc., National Enquirer, described the letter sent AMI as follows: “Bobby Bender came around the corner with this letter in the upturned palms of his hands,” said photo assistant Roz Suss, a 13-year Sun staffer.
In admitting that he had taken over supervising the development of anthrax for use against the US upon Atef’s death (in November 2001), KSM separately noted that “I was the Media Operations Director for Al-Sahab or ‘The Clouds,’ under Dr. Ayman Al-Zawahiri.
Jennifer Lopez Letter and Atta’s “Jenny” Code The letter sent to AMI in Florida sought to dissuade Jennifer Lopez from a planned marriage. A wedding or marriage is well-known Al Qaeda code for an attack. The sender said how much he loved her and asked her to marry him. Stevens noted at the time it was especially off the wall given that the Sun did not deal with celebrities, which was the subject of the sister-paper Globe. Stevens’ fellow photo editor Roz Suss was looking over his shoulder: “With that Bob says to me,” Hey, I think there’s something gold in here. It looks like a Jewish star sticking out of the powder.” I walked up behind him and reached over his shoulder. I pulled this little star out of what looked like a mound of powder in this letter. I remember it as a fine white powder.” “It looked like something from a Cracker Jacks box,” she says. She picked it out of the powder and tossed it in her wastebasket. Stevens’ colleague Bobby Bender has a different recollection. He says he opened a letter to Jennifer Lopez, recalls handling a large envelope to Jennifer Lopez, care of the Sun. In it was a cigar tube containing a cigar, a small Star of David charm, and something that seemed like soap powder. Hambali and two al-Qaeda minions considered attacking an Israeli restaurant, with a Star of David above it, in the Khao San Rd. backpacker area in Bangkok. A December 1998 Presidential Daily Brief to President Clinton explained: “An alleged Bin Ladin supporter late last month remarked to his mother that he planned to work in ‘commerce’ from abroad and said his impending ‘marriage,’ which would take place soon, would be a ’surprise.’” The December 1998 PDB continued: “‘Commerce’ and ‘marriage’ often are code words for attacks.” Of course, sometimes, a young man just wants to tell his mom he’s got a job or warn her that she may not approve of the woman he intends to marry. Similarly, sometimes folks who write to tabloids are merely commenting on JLo’s impending nuptials. Jennifer Lopez’s fame had withstood a number of under performing movies, to include the movie “The Cell” in the year 2000. In the movie, following a trail of bodies, an FBI agent tracks down and captures a disturbed serial killer. Before the killer can reveal the whereabouts of his next victim (a woman trapped in a cell on the verge of drowning), he falls into a coma. Enter beautiful FBI psychologist Lopez, who uses a radical link to the killer’s brain that could destroy her own sanity. “Her mission: Find the cell’s location before time runs out, and avoid getting trapped inside the killer’s head.” According to an early National Enquirer, Stevens held it up to his face and then put it down on the keyboard (where traces of anthrax were found). The publisher’s wife was the real estate broker who rented to two of the hijackers. The heaviest concentration was in the mailroom on the first floor, with positive findings in many cubicles throughout the first floor. The second floor had positive traces mainly in the hallways. The third floor had the fewest positive traces. The FBI has a theory that the spores were distributed on copy paper, perhaps having fallen onto an open ream of paper in the mailroom where it was stored. Perhaps instead spores could have been spread by a vacuum cleaner and collected at copier machines because of the electrostatic charge and the fans on the machines. Mrs. Stevens recently explained: “They get strange letters sometimes, and the consensus seems to be that if Robert wasn’t wearing his glasses and if it was something funny, he would hold the letters up to his face. They think perhaps that’s how he got it. Just bad luck.” The key expert evidence on this issue of the Jennifer Lopez letter thus far is the New England Journal of Medicine in which Stevens’ doctor concludes that the letter, opened 9/19 and resulting in symptoms appearing 9/30, evidenced an incubation period consistent with inhalational anthrax. (He refers to the 1979 accidental release in Russia). A recent CDC report discusses a second letter of possible interest thought to have been opened on September 25 by a different woman who was exposed. The jury will have to remain out unless and until there is more information on the letter(s) that transmitted the anthrax to AMI. The FBI went back to AMI in August 2002A February 2003 article in Esquire says the “cops and the doctors” have concluded that there were two letters, following two different paths, with one having been mailed to an old address of the National Enquirer before being forwarded. If there were two different letters, were they to two different AMI publications? That would make sense — with one directed to the Sun and one directed to the National Enquirer. What does the J.Lo letter tell us about the sender, or senders? J.Lo is what they used to call a “sex bomb” — and the biggest one at the time. She had international fame. The vehicle had a “weird” love letter, a Star of David, maybe a cigar. Who had “issues” and weird obsessions with women, sex (with a cigar being a crude symbol) and Jewish symbolism? Atta, for example, had strict instructions in his will about what women would be allowed to do at his funeral. Follow the anomalies.
Two of the hijackers had subscriptions to AMI publications, as did Al Qaeda operative al-Marabh. Boston cab driver Al-Marabh had been in contact with the hijackers, to include Alghamdi who rented an apartment from the wife of the AMI publisher. Atta was seen at the apartment of Al-Marabh and his uncle (the co-founder with Jaballah of an islamic school in Toronto in the Spring of 2001. After coming to Canada in 1996, Jaballah spoke with Ayman regularly on Ayman's satellite phone. ”In The Hearts Of Green Birds” (Inside Green Birds) It was widely published among the militant islamists that martyrs go to paradise “in the hearts of green birds.” The stamp’s image of a green-blue colored bird was designed by artist Michael Doret. Mr. Doret provided me “a file made directly from the original art [he] created, so the color is an accurate representation of the printed envelope.” Michael advises me that the color of the eagle is a “teal” or greenish-blue. In the very interview with Al-Jazeera in which they admitted 9/11, and described the codes used for the four targets for the planes, KSM and Ramzi Binalshibh admitted to the Jenny code, the code for representing the date 9/11, and used the symbolism of the “Green Birds.” Osama Bin Laden later invoked the symbolism in his video “The 19 Martyrs”, describing a hijacker as “A man of worship who enjoined good and forbade evil. His body was on earth but his heart roamed with the green birds that perch beneath the Throne of the Most Merciful.” Isn’t “green birds of paradise” discussed in Abdel-Rahman’s 2,000 page PhD thesis on the chapter in the Koran called “Repentance,” which addresses the foreign policy and military affairs of the Islamic state? A FAQ on Al Qaeda’s website, the Azzam Publications website, explained that “In the Hearts of Green Birds” refers to what is inside. The actual Arabic word used in the Hadith is not Qalb (heart) but it is Jowf which can mean any of interior, inside, or heart (as in center). There was a video based on the hadith with the title In The Hearts of Green Birds about foreign mujahideen that had been martyred in Bosnia. The audiocassette was created in August 1996 and its 3rd edition was released in January 1997. The azzam.org website selling the “In the Hearts of Green Birds” audiocassette was shut down after 9/11 because authorities thought it might contain codes and instructions to militants. British and US intelligence sources reportedly suspected that some of Azzam.com’s jihad photos and graphics contain messages embedded with a technology known as steganography. The code instead perhaps was there for all to see on the stamps of the lethal missives being sent.
In early Fall 2001, the Azzam.com website was mirrored by someone who lived 6 miles from the mailbox where the anthrax was mailed. He was indicted in Spring 2007 for income tax invasion. To the left of the advertisement for the “Green Birds” video, you’ll see the description of al-Hawali’s imprisonment. The imprisonment of al-Hawali and certain other scholars was the “Cover Theme” (which includes a related article on the torture of prisoners in Saudi prisons). GMU microbiology grad al-Timimi drafted a letter for al-Hawali and had it hand-delivered to every member of Congress on the first anniversary of the anthrax mailings. Of course, given that the symbolism used in this regard in the anthrax mailings had an origin in religious writing, there is no direct tie with the website — the tie could be with the hadith. The London webmaster once said that the FBI allowed it to remain up (while it moved from server to server) for another year hoping to get leads on supporters. Even Zarqawi invoked the imagery in a 60-minute audio message: “The martyrs rejoice in the bounty provided by God. Their souls are inside the bodies of green birds that fly in heaven.” Bin Laden was using “Green Birds” in the same way he used the repeated phrase “Looming Tower” to hint of what was to come with the planes attack on the World Trade Center. He would say: “Wherever you are, death will find you, even in the looming tower.” In a prerecorded tape aired October 7, 2001, at the time of the anthrax mailing to the Senators, Bin Laden said “The winds of faith have come.” An advertisement for “In The Hearts of Green Birds” sold by Al Qaeda’s website read: “In the Summer of 1996, Azzam Recordings released the first audio tape of its kind to be produced in English. The name of this tape was: ‘In the Hearts of Green Birds.’ It outlined some of the stories of these men. This tape was so successful, that it spread, by the Will of Allah, throughout many Muslim homes in the UK, North America and Australia. Due to popular demand, in the Summer of 1997, Azzam Recordings produced the sequel to this tape: ‘Under the Shades of Swords.’ We ask Allah to accept the Shuhadaa’ and shower His Mercy upon them.” (It appeared in the 21st issue of Nida’ul Islam magazine (http://www.islam.org.au), December-January 1997- 1998). The Virginia Paintball defendants really liked videos like “In the Hearts of Green Birds” and “Russian Hell” and found them inspirational. In July 2002, the President of the Help The Needy (a medical technologist who was president in name only) posted a story titled: "Raising Mujaahideen" on an Islamway bulletin board (noted to be an IANA subsidiary) which invoked the "green bird" imagery. On 9/11, under the screen name islam_1981, she had posted an IANA announcement deploring the unfair suspicion fundamentalists might come over. Soon afterward, she posted an explanation that killing civilians was absolutely forbidden by the koran and that upon acceptance of a visa (and accepted in the country as a guest) a person is forbidden from attacking his host. In July 2002, however, she posted a story titled "Raising Mujaahideen" that (apparently consistent with the earlier posts) celebrated raising children to be martyrs -- in the story the martyr's "soul gently leaves his body to reside in the heart of a green bird in Jannah." These positions were the same as Al-Timimi's position. She was President and the Vice-President was Idris Palmer of Northern Virginia, who had co-founded the Society for the Adherence of the Sunnah with Ali Al-Timimi. ”Greendale School" is the return address of the anthrax letters to Senators Daschle and Leahy. In December 2002, the Arabic paper London Al-Sharq al-Awsat reported that correspondence on Zawahiri’s computer (which was obtained by the Wall Street Journal) shows Zawahiri uses “school” as code for Egyptian Islamic Jihad. The letter was found on Al Zawahiri’s computer. The letter was designed to look innocent. It was dated 3 May 2001 and signed “Dr. Nour, Chairman of the Company.” Nour is one of Zawahiri’s aliases. In this context, it was Egyptian Islamic Jihad, not Al Qaeda, of which he was Chairman.
The letter read:
The full message, decoded, is thought to say:
In December 2002, the Arabic paper London Al-Sharq al-Awsat reported that correspondence on Zawahiri's computer (which was obtained by the Wall Street Journal) shows Zawahiri uses "school" as code for "Al Qaeda." Dr. Jean Rosenfeld, a researcher associated with the UCLA Center for the Study of Religion, and an expert on the symbolism of religious extremist movements, wrote me: “Greendale’ to me signified a conscious choice to use the symbolic color of Islam.” She continued: “The franked eagle on the envelope of the anthrax letters was identical to the one I caught on a documentary that showed a one-second shot of the site where Sadat was assassinated –- the huge eagle above the podium where he was when he died. That assassination was of great significance to Egyptian Jihad and produced the pamphlet by Faraj that justifies “fard ‘ayn”/individual duty as the basis of jihadist doctrine.” She explained that Al Qaeda "is rooted in Egypt and Salafism, not Saudi Arabia and Wahhabism. Al-Zawahiri, I believe, is intensely nostalgic for the Nile Valley.” The CIA factbook explains that the color green — such as used by anthrax lab technician Yazid Sufaat in naming his lab “Green Laboratory Medicine,” and by the mailer who used the return address “Greendale School” – is the traditional color of islam. Green symbolizes islam, Mohammed and the holy war. In its section on Saudi Arabia, and the “Flag Description,” the CIA “Factbook” explains that the flag is “green with large white Arabic script (that may be translated as There is no God but God; Muhammad is the Messenger of God) above a white horizontal saber (the tip points to the hoist side); green is the traditional color of Islam.” An intelligence document first released in 2007 involves an operation by EIJ members headed by Atef and including Saif Adel in which the group headed to Somalia to work at developing a new base of operations. The group was called The Green Team. “Greendale School” was used as the return address in the letters and likely is code referring to the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. The stamp on the prestamped envelopes was of a green bird. For a video depicting the Green Bird’s point of view and invoking Allah’s guidance to “the straight path,” see this video “The 3D Kabah - A green birds eye view.” The koranic “Green Birds” reference is from the sentence relating to being set on “The Straight Path.” Timimi, the graduate student who had access to the Alibek/Bailey patent about concentration using hydrophobic silica, advised the EIJ founder Kamal Habib in writing for the publication called Assirat Al-Mustaqeem (“The Straight Path”). Likely for the same reason, Al Qaeda anthrax lab technician Yazid Sufaat and Zacarias Moussaoui used the name Green Laboratory Medicine as the name of the company that he used, for example, to buy 4 tons of ammonium nitrate, and that he used to cover his anthrax production program. Green dale refers to green “river valley” — Egypt, Cairo, Egyptian Islamic Jihad and/or Egyptian Islamic Group. Put it all together and you have their new official name (though the American press does not use it) — Qaeda al Jihad. At the Darunta complex where jihadis trained, recruits would wear green uniforms, except for Friday when they would be washed. Given that using the same address helps the second recipient receiving the letter to identify it and avoid opening it, the perp would have no reason to use the same address unless he was communicating something and wanted to draw attention to it. Adham Hassoun and Kassem Daher used “school” as code. Canadian businessman Daher is an associate of EIJ member Jaballah, who was detained in Canada and had maintained regular contact with Ayman by satellite telephone after coming to Canada in 1996. “Is there a school over there to teach football?” Hassoun asked, using what the FBI says is code for jihad. The Amerithrax Task Force explanation of Greendale is as follows:
The logical fallacy is Ivins would have had no reason to use the same address unless he was sending a message he wanted to be received. There was no audience that reasonably would have perceived the message being sent. He had no reason to send such a message. The theory was fine for an affidavit in support of a search of a residence -- but not on which to close a case. On the return address, Greendale School purported to be in Franklin Park. Padilla, the former Broward man suspected of plotting to explode a ‘’dirty bomb'’ to spread radiation in the United States, worshipped at a Broward County mosque, Masjid Al-Iman, in Fort Lauderdale. That mosque was across the street from Franklin Park. It’s address was 2542 Franklin Park Drive. Padilla was a former gang member who converted to islam while in South Florida and became an extremist while in Egypt beginning in 1998. He attended al Azhar University in Egypt and started a family there after leaving his American wife. In 1999, Padilla left for Pakistan. Authorities detained him May 8, 2002 when he got off a plane at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. The FBI has found no ties between Padilla and the September 11 hijackers, even though several of them had lived in Broward County.
While in Pakistan, Padilla had reported to KSM, the al Qaeda’s No. 3 leader who had anthrax production documents on his laptop when he was arrested. It appears that in April 2002, Khalid Mohammed dispatched Padilla to the United States, with several thousand dollars for a mission to disperse a radiological device that was still in the thinking stage. He was placed in a military brig in North Carolina and was held incommunicado for years, forbidden from contacting his family or attorney. A Padilla acquaintance, Adham Hassoun, was detained in June 2002 in Sunrise by federal agents. His home had been searched in November 2001 but authorities laid back, not arresting him and hoping surveillance would lead to insights. Hassoun once served as distributor of a magazine published in Australia advocating Muslim holy war and was associated with one or more charities accused by the Bush administration of funding terrorists. Padilla reportedly had contacted Hassoun from overseas and was apparently en route to meet Hassoun when he was arrested. Investigators monitored the communication between Padilla and Hassoun and arrested Hassoun after he was called by a reporter from Miami about his acquaintanceship with Padilla. State records indicate that he was the Florida registered agent of the Chicago-based Benevolence International Foundation. The leader of the mosque across from Franklin Park was Awad, the Florida representative of Holy Land Foundation. Hassoun had established Benevolence International Foundation in Plantation, Florida in 1992. In 1993, the headquarters was moved to Chicago area. A man named Mohammed Loay Bayazid was its president in 1993 and 1994. He was arrested while visiting Northern California in December 1994 along with Osama Bin Laden’s brother-in-law. Bayazid, according to authorities, had been looking to purchase enriched uranium for Bin Laden. On his driver's license, his listed address was BIF headquarters. Thus, things had quickly come full circle for BIF to once again be involved in an investigation relating to Al Qaeda’s attempt to obtain weapons of mass destruction. In late 2002, it was announced that authorities were urgently seeking a Florida pilot El Shukrijumah, who worshipped at this same Fort Lauderdale mosque across from Franklin Park and had possible ties to Adham Hassoun. The pilot El Shukrijumah is said to be at the level of Mohammed Atta and is thought to have been associated with Aafia Siddiqui, an MIT-trained biologist. Aafia Siddiqui reportedly also has a yet-undisclosed connection to Adham Hassoun. Mohammed Atta lived 11 miles away from this mosque across from Franklin Park, where these members of the Egyptian Islamic Group worshipped. Holy Cross hospital –where Dr. Tsonas treated Flight 93 hijacker Ahmad al-Haznawi for a suspicious leg lesion that he and other experts think was due to cutaneous anthrax — is only 7 miles from the mosque. Is it all a coincidence? Possibly. Remember: Given that using the same address helps the second recipient receiving the letter to identify it and avoid opening it, the mailer would have no reason to use the same address unless he was communicating something and wanted to draw attention to it. There was a detailed description at a June 1, 2004 press conference of Padilla’s plot and his relationship with Jafar the Pilot by a senior DOJ official. The official also described Padilla’s relationship with Atef, Zubaydah, KSM, and Ramzi Binalshibh. He emphasized that there is an urgent need to find Adnan (Jafar). Ali Al-Timimi’s mentor, Bilal Philips, was a good friend of Jafar the Pilot’s father. Allusion to Both Atta and Genomic Sequencing of Ames Strain The writing of the text of the letter is also interesting in that the “As” and “Ts” are double-lined — to suggest ATTA, the lead hijacker. When the US Centers for Disease Control first identified that the Ames strain had been used in the mailing to Florida in October 2001, Keim and his colleagues at The Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR) had nearly finished a project to sequence Bacillus anthracis— specifically, the chromosome of an anthrax isolate from a laboratory in Porton Down, U.K. Ayman had a microbiologist attending Porton Down-sponsored conferences at which presentations were made about the sequencing of Ames. The letter writer appears to have even double-lined A’s and T’s in the letters accompanying the anthrax possibly to simultaneously allude to Atta and the genomic sequence. For an enlarged image of the letter with the A's and T's underlined, click here. As explained at the Porton Down conferences attended by Ayman’s operative Rauf Ahmad, Keim’s research team eventually discovered 60 new ‘markers’ in the Bacillus anthracis genome—DNA sequences that may vary from one isolate to another. These include insertions or deletions of DNA, and short sequences that are repeated at different lengths in the genome known as VNTRs (variable-number tandem repeats). A decade earlier, it had been determined that one of three proteins comprising anthrax toxin, and the first nucleotide sequence to be reported from B. anthracis (by USAMRIID authors no less), had a consensus TATAAT sequence located at the putative -10 promoter site. It is greek to us but apparently something with meaning to the person who drafted the letter. Perhaps the sender was saying that the bacteria was pathogenic unlike what had been sent to the Canadian immigration minister six months earlier. You can just imagine the same fictional CIA or FBI agents, or Postal Inspectors, plugging the underlined letter from the anthrax letters and wondering whether it pointed to the 1988 article “Sequence and analysis of the DNA encoding protective antigen of Bacillus anthracis” in the journal Gene by USAMRIID authors. The authors were from the Bacteriology Division at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases. The abstract reads: “The nucleotide sequence of the protective antigen (PA) gene from Bacillus anthracis and the 5’ and 3’ flanking sequences were determined. PA is one of three proteins comprising anthrax toxin; and its nucleotide sequence is the first to be reported from B. anthracis. A consensus TATAAT sequence was located at the putative -10 promoter site.” When authorities determined that the anthrax had not been genetically modified so as to be resistant to antibiotics, Condi Rice told the President: “That’s the best news you’ve had as president.” Years later, at trial for sedition, GMU microbiology grad student Ali Al-Timimi read “Genome Technology.” *** The coded e-mail Faris wrote back to KSM suggesting that the idea of removing bolts from the span of the Brooklyn Bridge was not a viable idea was but one of many examples of the simple codes used by Al Qaeda operatives. Sometimes the code might be as simple as Adham Hassoun’s “stuff” for the local soccer team in places like Bosnia or his references to a young man who wanted to go out and get some “fresh air” [go join the jihad]. Sometimes it might be Iyman Faris’ reference to the weather or Ramzi Binalshibh’s “shirts” for Sally. Sometimes it might be a reference to Greendale School or a marriage proposal to Jenny such apparently in the case of the anthrax mailings. The CIA reports that wedding is Al-Qaeda-speak for an event. That, according to New York Times journalists, is why the CIA got so anxious to have the Buffalo boys arrested. Apart from an email about a “big feast,” the young men from Buffalo had started talking about a planned wedding. Interpreting such code is not without risk. The CIA kicked down the door in Bahrain and dragged him away from the altar to the horror of his bride-to-be. But putting aside this question of nuptials, impending or annulled, the fact remains that the sender of the anthrax letters would have had no reason to use the same address on the second letter unless he was communicating something. That identical return address, in fact, helped authorities locate and intercept the letter to a Senator. All of the coding together may have served to tell the world, for example, that Mohammed Atta and the others were going to fly to paradise in a green bird and that the anthrax was courtesy of the Vanguards of Conquest. If you mistreat our prisoners or continue appropriations to Israel and Egyptian regimes, we may attack Washington, D.C. and New York City with aerosolized anthrax. You act at your peril. Zawahiri simultaneously framed the US Army by using the “Ames strain” while telling them who did it. i. Summer 2001 Inquiries About Cropdusters and Helicopters Expert Kohlmann reports that "The LeT [Lashkar-e-Taiba] has also displayed persistent efforts at aimed at obtaining remote control drone aircraft, presumably in order to gather reconnaissance on enemy positions. Kohlman quotes a November 2000 Taiba Bulletin that quotes a LeT representative boasting "Lashkar-e-Taiba also made a remote control aeroplane that was caught in Occupied Kashmir. We are developing the modern technology." Evan Kohlman reports that "one of the best accounts of the jihad in Kashmar is the book Army of Madinah in Kashmir written by "Esa al-Hindi". He quotes Al-Hindi: "Running ... straight into the enemy ranks on a well-worn battlefield is a noble and admirable action, but it needs to be complemented by all other fields of the battle arena for a successful operation... [including] Physical warfare, Drug warfare, Germ warfare, Chemical warfare, [and] Sabotage warfare.' " Authors Schwartz and University of Minnesota Professor Osterholm explained in December 2000:
It was no small irony that by the time the paperback version came out in September 2001 just a few miles away Zacarias Moussaoui had in fact downloaded such materials onto his laptop. Attorney General Ashcroft, on October 1, 2001 explained:
President Bush, at a press conference on October 11, 2001 said:
Mohammed Atta and Zacarias Moussaoui reportedly made inquiries about cropdusters and a cropdusting manual was found among Moussaoui's belongings. Ahmad Ressam, an Al Qaeda terrorist caught in the United States, revealed that Bin Laden was personally interested in using low flying aircraft to disperse biological agents. In early June 3, 2003, a CIA report concluded that the reason for Atta's and Zacarias Moussaoui's inquiries into cropdusters was in fact for the contemplated use in dispersing biological agents such as anthrax. Moussaoui, however, has confessed only to a plot to fly a 747 into the White House if the United States government refused to free the blind sheikh. On August 13 and 15, 2001, Moussaoui was getting practice on a 747 simulator in Minneapolis and thus the evidence has always remained ambiguous. In an interview with ABC News, Johnelle Bryant, a USDA employee, provided this very dramatic account of a meeting with Atta in connection with a loan he wanted for $650,000 to start a cropdusting business. Anthrax likely can be delivered using the nozzle setup that some USDA official says Atta imagined (as explained by Secretary Cohen some years ago). Secretary Cohen's remarks were found in the Kabul home with papers relating to the aerial delivery of anthrax. Some investigators on the team prosecuting Zacarias Moussaoui thought he wasn't expected to take part in the 9/11 plan as such or fly into the White House as prosecutors would allege in January 2003, but was expected instead to use a cropduster. In an e-mail dated July 31, 2001, after receiving $14,000 from Ramzi Binalshibh, Moussaoui inquired of a Minnesota school concerning a 6 month or year long cropdusting course. Although French intelligence suggests instead that there was a separate hijacking plot (of an international airline) to occur later, in light of the e-mail, use of a cropdusting plane may have been an alternative plan at least as of the end of July 2001. Khalid Mohammed reportedly has told his interrogators that Moussaoui was to be part of a second wave of attacks. He said that Moussaoui's interest in cropdusters may have related to Yazid Sufaat's work on anthrax. In a coded communication in the summer of 2001, KSM told Ramzi Binalhibh to send the "skirts" to "Sally", apparently referring to sending funds to Zacarias Moussaoui. Moussaoui may have been considered as a substitute if one of the pilots, who had developed a strained relationship with Atta, dropped out. They were referred to as the "unhappy couple" and it was said that a divorce would be expensive. Was Moussaoui really slated for a "second wave" of similar attacks on California targets that merely involved the same modus operandi? In an email dated July 31, 2001, he was inquiring about a cropdusting course. Was this just a means of avoiding the need for "muscle hijackers?" (After the first "wave", it likely would be more difficult for such muscle to get into the country.) Relatedly, it's unknown what role Atta's roommate, pilot Ramzi Binalshibh, would have played if he had succeeded on one of his four attempts to get into the country. Ramzi Binalshibh was Atta's former roommate in Germany and was captured in Karachi, Pakistan on September 11, 2002. The government deleted the two allegations regarding cropduster inquiries from the indictment of Moussaoui. Although the move was never explained, it was likely because in his defense he was relying on a July 31, 2001 e-mail seeking to sign up for a cropdusting course that would take 6 months to a year. Moussaoui was attempting to use the e-mail to argue that it demonstrated that he was not part of the 9/11 conspiracy. On September 19, 2001, an FBI agent asked a federal judge in Colorado for permission to search an e-mail account named "greenlab@usa.net" that Sufaat had given Moussaoui to use. Perhaps the cropdusters related to a chemical or nerve agent. Based on the interrogation of Ramzi Binalshibh, it now appears that the 9/11 planners lost confidence in Moussaoui's discretion, and intended to use him only as a fallback. Whatever the reason for any inquiries, perhaps they ran out of pilots (due to Zacarias Moussaoui's arrest and Ramzi Binalshibh's inability to get into the country). The prosecution team in the Moussaoui case at one point, in January 2003, argued there was to be a fifth plane targeting the White House. Bin Laden wanted the White House to be targeted. Atta thought it would be too difficult. Or perhaps cropdusters will be used in the future. The FBI is currently looking for a diminutive Saudi Arabian, Adnan Shukrijumah, who, at least according to some reports, was trained as a pilot and was last known to have been in Miami in late 2001. The Saudi Arabian from Florida is said to be at the level of Atta. Jdey, also hotly sought by the FBI, was one of two other pilots who for unknown reasons were not still candidates for the first wave. A Somali college student who knew Moussaoui, Mohammed Warsame from Canada, was detained. In recent years, before being detained, he lived in Minneapolis. Initially, he was arrested as a material witness. Like Moussaoui, Warsame attended Khalden Camp at the Darunta complex the same time as Ahmed Ressam. He reportedly roomed with Moussaoui at one point. U.S. Attorney in Minneapolis declined to comment on the case and said he would seek to prosecute any federal law enforcement officials who provided information to the media. Warsame's wife said that FBI agents had entered their apartment, given him $100 and had money for her too. The agents wanted her husband's cooperation, told him to tell his wife not to worry and said they would bring him back in two days. Warsame was indicted in the end. A superseding indictment in June 2005 alleges that Mohammed Warsame provided false statements to the FBI when he claimed that since 1995 he had traveled only to Saudi Arabia and Somalia. The indictment alleges that from 2000 through 2001, Warsame traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan to attend military training camps and participate in combat. Relatedly, the indictment alleges he also made false statements about his frequent contact with associates he met while attending Afghanistan military training camps. Those associates, according to the indictment, have since relocated to Canada, Pakistan and elsewhere throughout the world. As part of "Operation Tripwire," the FBI has asked crop-dusting companies to make sure they alert the bureau if they detect suspicious activity. The FBI has reached out to various industries and institutions, such as prisons and crop-dusting companies, to alert the FBI of suspicious activity. "We are not looking at just the obviously dangerous activity but looking at terrorist fund raising, terrorist recruiting efforts, training efforts, maybe logistical support efforts, and .. signatures," FBI official Larry Mefford said. Might Al Qaeda plan on coming in under the FBI's radar -- under the tripwire -- by using ultra lights? KSM had Ohio truck driver Faris researching ultra lights at an internet cafe. There was a suggestion that leaders would use them for escape. Variations of the threat that should be encompassed within the FBI's "Operation Tripwire" include ultra lights, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles ("UAV") of all types including small planes and helicopters, balloons, and gliders. What the FBI was being told by other detainees and learning from arrests in the US did nothing to assuage the concern that an attack was being planned to disperse anthrax aerially. For example, Moazzam Begg, a man from Great Britain arrested in Islamabad in February 2002, allegedly confessed to being involved in a plot to use weaponized anthrax using a remote controlled drone over the London parliament. A Pakistani court had ordered his release. Before the order was executed, however, he had already been transferred to Afghanistan. He was then flown to Guantanamo Bay in February 2003. The 35-year-old father of four from Birmingham had gone to Afghanistan via Iran in the summer of 2001 and then in November or December went to Pakistan. In Afghanistan, he had been outside of Kabul. He told his father that he hoped to open two small schools to promote literacy -- one for girls taught by his wife and one for boys he would teach. MI5 and MI6 had known of him. Three years earlier in Birmingham there was a raid on his book shop but no arrests. The Maktabah al Ansar book shop in Birmingham, England sold al-Hindi's autobiographical account of fighting in Kashmir, Army of Madinah in Kashmir. In addition to books, Begg sold items such prayer beads and clothing. Begg may have come to be of interest to MI5 after Yemen jailed a friend of his in 1999 for plotting terrorism with the son of Abu Hamza, the extremist cleric based at the Finsbury Park mosque. Then authorities raided again in the summer of 2001. In the last raid, a computer, five floppy disks and two CD-roms were taken. Neither raid resulted in any charges. Begg was arrested in 1994 for alleged benefit fraud, but the charges were dropped. Night vision goggles and a flak jacket were found at the time. The authorities say that his name appeared on documents of the Taliban and on a photocopy of a payment transfer at an Afghanistan camp. The money transfer directed the London branch of Pakistan's Habib Bank AG Zurich to credit the account of an individual identified as Moazzam Begg in Karachi for an unspecified sum of money. It was found in Abu Khabab's chemical bunker. His family says it must be a case of mistaken identity. The British MP's had joined together to insist that Begg and other British citizens be returned from Guantanamo, where he had been after his first year at Bagram. He reportedly confessed to a plot to use a drone dispersing anthrax to kill those same MPs. He and others apparently were given the choice of choosing between a 20 year sentence in a plea or risk receiving a death penalty in a military tribunal. His lawyer says the confession was not admissible as it was coerced. MI5 officers interviewed him at Camp X-Ray five times. Gareth Peirce, who has acted for Moazzam Begg, said: "Anything that any human being says or admits under threat of brutality is regarded internationally and nationally as worthless. It makes the process an abuse. Moazzam Begg had a year in Bagram airbase and then six months in Guantanamo Bay. If this treatment happened for an hour in a British police station, no evidence gathered would be admissible," she said. After being released, Mr. Begg contemplated a run for MP himself. The interest in ultra lights is not new and dates back to the hang glider purchased in 1995 or so when one was purchased and shipped to Afghanistan by a US doctor named Zaki. The doctor was a friend of Bin Laden's chief of security in Sudan, former US Army sergeant Ali Mohammed. Dr. Ali Zaki (along with his brother, a NYC/NJ pharmacist) traveled with Ayman but claimed not to know the real identity of his fellow alum from Cairo Medical school. Dr. Zaki graduated from Cairo Medical School in 1971. Zawahiri would speak at the room established at the Cairo University Medical School for the Egyptian Islamic Group, which had not yet been banned. The group during this time was extremely influential with the student body. Dr. Zaki is a gynecologist and prominent civic leader in San Jose, CA. He disputes the date of Zawahiri's visit, claiming it was years earlier, when the jihadists were our friends. A used car salesman from Silicon Valley was going to train on the hang glider and train others. The plan was to break imprisoned islamist leaders out of an Egyptian prison, according to the US doctor. Other official intelligence reporting, in contrast, suggests the plan was to assassinate Mubarak at one of his palaces. When a friend of the respected Dr. Dhafir, the leader of an Albany mosque, Aref, who had arrived in the states in 1999, was convicted in 2006 of supporting terrorism, the jury never heard about his 14 phone calls to a Syrian number the FBI linked to Osama bin Laden. An FBI informant claimed that only weeks after the 9/11 attacks, a messenger from al-Qaeda approached him delivering a message: Bin Laden was looking for information about flight schools and "how close the individual could get to an (redacted) aircraft." The messenger gave the informant two fax numbers in Damascus, Syria, one of which Aref contacted 14 times between November 1999 and October 2001. Prosecutors argued that a senior IMK leader, Mullah Krekar, formed Ansar-al-Islam in 2001. Subsequently, when Aref was convicted, the 30 guilty counts included lying to FBI agents about knowing Krekar. In targeting Aref, the government also had evidence showing that his name, address and telephone number were found in a notebook when U.S. forces raided a suspected Ansar-al-Islam facilities in Iraq in the spring and early summer. An Iraqi Kurd, Aref's grandfather had been a well-known imam. What word, beginning with a vowel apparently, might be redacted in this alleged message shortly before 9/11 to an Albany, NY imam : "how close the individual could get to an (redacted) aircraft." In 2002, a man named Singh tried to purchase over the internet a wireless video module and a control module for use in an unmanned aerial vehicle ("UAV"). He chose an airborne video system with a camera and transmitter able to transmit video images from a UAV back to a receiver from as far as 15 miles away. The video camera could be used in military reconnaissance and in helping aim artillery and other weaponry across enemy lines. Singh placed his order from England, but the company was unable to confirm Singh's overseas credit card. Two young men from Northern Virginia, among the group later known as the "Virginia Paintball Defendants," assisted him in completing the purchases. In the summer of 2002, Singh visited Virginia, staying first with one of them and then with another. In December 2003, it was announced that a suburban Chicago woman had been pled guilty to lying about her involvement with an attempt to export remote-controlled aircraft to Pakistan. The shipment of radios, modems and auto pilot systems to a company in Pakistan apparently was confiscated. The relative whom she was doing a favor fled the country. Such a plane reportedly cost $12,000 and could carry a 220 lb. payload. In late May 2004, Great Britain's Tony Blair got hit by purple powder thrown from the balcony from area where guests sit. The bioshield covered only where members of the public sit. Blair now may be skittish about pigeons flying overhead, particularly given MI5 once considered the feasibility of dropping small anthrax bombs using pigeons during WW II. It was not until August 2004 that we learned about casing of helicopters in the Spring of 2001 by Jafar the Pilot, Al Hindi, and Al-Marri -- who had been sent by anthrax plotters KSM and Hambali. Condoleezza Rice says no one ever imagined (at least she didn't imagine) that Al Qaeda would fly planes -- first into the World Trade Center and then into Pentagon. Let's hope it is within her imagination of future national security advisors that Al Qaeda may be planning to disperse weaponized anthrax aerially -- for example, by a remote controlled airplane, a cropduster, or even a hang glider. Or, yes, maybe even by carrier pigeons. j. Choice of the Mailbox at 10 Nassau St. in Princeton The EIJ and Muslim Brotherhood intellectuals have long had a running debate with a guy named Bernard Lewis. In 2001, Princeton University Middle Eastern history Professor Emeritus Bernard Lewis, an associate of both James Woolsey and Ahmed Chalabi, still had an office on campus. He has been much in demand as an expert on islam after 9/11 and before. Historically, dating back to the 1950s, Princeton professors often met in the Gun Room of Princeton's Nassau Club. The meetings of such consultants traditionally were held in two-day blocks, four times a year. Their estimates would be in support of the CIA's National Board of Estimates. The Nassau Club is located at 6 Mercer Street, Princeton, between Alexander St and University Place. The letters containing anthrax spores were mailed from the mailbox directly across from the Nassau Club -- a distance of 100 feet. Not only did Ayman provide a warning of a biochemical attack as Professor Lewis has written is required by the laws of jihad, but the warning ironically was sent from the mailbox used by one of the CIA's most notable brain trusts. Lewis' pamphlets would be distributed outside mosques in the Middle East. He and Chalabi met with Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld while smoke rose from the Pentagon ruins and plotted an invasion of Iraq given the consequences if Saddam gave Al Qaeda technical help relating to WMD. Assuming familiarity with the area proved sound in the case of Kaczynski. He had been an assistant professor at Berkeley 25 years earlier near where the bombs were mailed. All one needs is a mailbox, however, and it takes no familiarity with an area to find a mailbox. When Special Agent Fitzgerald and his colleagues came up with that element in the profile in early October 2001, although perfectly reasonable, it was partly due to the lack of anything more to go on. They perhaps was picturing Ted Kaczynski traveling on a bus -- not an anthrax perp driving to wherever he wanted by car aided by mapquest. k. Target Acquired: Al Qaeda's Spymaster on Amerithrax As explained by author Peter Lance in Triple Cross, after the 1998 embassy bombings, a ten-member federal team secretly entered the California residence of Ali Mohamed, Zawahiri's former head of intelligence.' They copied Mohamed's hard drives and removed a series of CD-ROM and floppy disks. A memo titled "Cocktail" appeared to be a draft manual on sleeper cell structure.
Mohammad Hasan Khalil al-Hakim took on Ali Mohammed's role. His alias is easier to remember -- Abu Jihad al-Masri. Al Masri means the Egyptian. Also known as Al-Hukaymah, he was the author of the description of the Amerithrax investigation in 2002. Born in 1961, Abu Jihad al-Masri joined the Egyptian Islamic Group in 1979. He was arrested in 1981 after Sadat's assassination. He once was arrested alongside the blind sheik Abdel-Rahman. Hukaymah is reportedly connected to the blind sheikh's successor Taha, the Islamic Group head who was in close touch in 1999 and 2000 with the NY-based US postal employee Sattar, the blind sheik's "surrogate.". Al-Hukaymah dedicated the treatise "[t]o the pious and the hidden who are not known when they come and who are not missed when they disappear -- To those whom their God will answer when they pray to Him. To all the eyes that are vigilant late at night to bring victory to this religion." The introduction of the 152-page book starts: "The Manhattan raid led to a radical change in the perception of American Security. After the northern half of the continent had been isolated from the rest of the world and its threats by two oceans, it now came from inside. The surprise hit the symbols of American power in its economic and security dimensions." Published at al-Maqreze Center for Historical Studies website (www.almaqreze.com) by the one-time EIJ shura member al-Sibai, the section on the anthrax investigation appears to have been written in 2002.
Al-Hukaymah pointed to the Aldrich Ames incident and the FBI's inability to find the perpetrator of the anthrax mailings as evidence that U.S intelligence can be defeated. Aldrich Ames, head of counterintelligence relating to the Russians, had a different rolex for different days of the week. He drove a new jaguar to work. Aldrich told the CIA that his money came from his wife's foreign inheritance, and the CIA never required meaningful corroboration. So we should not be that surprised when someone known, to borrow Dr. Alibek's description to me, as an "Islamic hardliner," is given access to Center for Biodefense and ATCC facilities, to include a program funded by DARPA's $13 million during the relevant period. Perhaps the focus should not be on more money for biodefense but on doing a better job at maintaining security. Perhaps focus should be on avoiding proliferation of know-how. Al-Hukaymah reportedly was Ayman's connection to Mamdouh Ismail, an Egyptian defense attorney and a former member of "the Jihad group" who since the 1980's has represented various Egyptians accused of terrorism offenses in Egypt. Mamdouh Ismail represented al-Nashar, the biochemist who was an expert on polymerization and had a key to the 7/7 bomber's flat. Ismail was one of several hundred rounded up following the assassination of Anwar al-Sadat in 1981. He served three years. Ismail was arrested on March 29, 2007. In 1999, Ismail was refused permission to establish an Islamist political party with the help of fellow lawyer attorney al-Zayyat. After the blind sheik said in March 1999 that an attempt through a political party should not be attempted, Al-Zayat and Mamdouh Ismail deferred and Attorney Ismail has publicly objected to a reconciliation between Cairo and Egyptian Islamic Jihad. The two had worked with EIJ shura member al-Sibai before he took refuge in the UK. Mamdouh Ismail now is accused of complicity in an "Egyptian project" of al-Qaeda, taking his orders from Ayman al-Zawahiri via al-Qaeda propaganda chief al-Hukaymah and the UK-based EIJ publicist Hani al-Sibai. Both al-Hukaymah and Al-Sibai deny the charge. Al Sibai considers himself historian of the movement and published his diaries in Al Hayat in 2004. He is at al-Maqreze Center for Historical Studies website that published the treatise that included the discussion of Amerithrax. Al-Hukaymah was apparently killed at the end of last month in a missile strike in late October 2008. Cairo-based IANA writer Kamal Habib says that the man was a member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad that had assassinated Sadat but was part of a second generation, not part of the first generation responsible for the assassination. Abu Jihad al-Masri was said by US authorities to operate in Iran as the head of media and propaganda for al-Qaeda, and "may also be the Chief of External Operations for al Qaeda". The name Abu Jihad assumed name meaning roughly "father of the holy war." Al-Hukaymah appeared in an August 2006 as-Sahab (al-Qaeda) video to announce the merger of al-Qaeda with part of the Egyptian Islamic Group. Ayman al-Zawahiri introduces him.. The video claims that al-Hukaymah joined al-Gama'a al-Islamiyya in 1979 and was arrested in connection with the assassination of Egyptian president Anwar Al Sadat in 1981, and subsequently rearrested several times in various countries. Zawahiri claims in that video that Muhammad al-Islambouli (brother of assassin Khalid al-Islambouli) had joined al-Qaeda with al-Hukaymah. In addition to the analysis of the American intelligence community, the next month he wrote a short piece entitled Towards A New Strategy in Resisting the Occupier that appeared on a jihadist website. Abu Jihad Al-Masri emphasized the need to consider public opinion in planning operations. He discouraged beheadings or operations that can cause large scale casualties to innocent Muslims. l. Zawahiri's Booklet On "Covert Operations" Mark A. Gabriel, PhD, once taught at Al-Azhar in Egypt. He wrote a very lucid book Journey Into The Mind Of An Islamist Terrorist. He discusses a booklet Zawahiri wrote titled COVERT OPERATIONS which is available online in Arabic. If you want to know how Zawahiri views deceit on such issues as battle plans and spying, read his own words online. Gabriel explains:
The entire book by al-Zawahiri is posted in the Arabic language website for al-Tawheed Jihad (The Pulpit of Monotheism and Jihad). Zawahiri concluded that “hiding one’s faith and being secretive was allowed especially in time of fear from prosecution of the infidels.” Indeed, his student group in Cairo in the 1970s was known as the “shaven beards.” The founder of one of the cells merged with Ayman’s to form the Egyptian Islamic Jihad then wrote for Al-Timimi’s charity IANA. Al-Zawahiri discussed two specific ways Muhammad used deceit in battle: (1) keeping battle plans secret, and (2) spying. The author writes: “Al-Zawahiri specifically gave radicals permission not to pray in the mosque or attend Friday sermons if it would compromise their position.” He noted that Al-Zawahiri sealed his argument with a very important quote from Ibn Taymiyyah (who was quoted by Al-Timimi upon his his indictment). Ever the practical man, Muhammad approved lying in three circumstances (1) during war, (2) to reconcile between two feuding parties, and (3) to a spouse in order to please her. Many Salafist Jihadis have more than one wife and so lying to your spouse -- not telling you have another wife -- might come in handy. m. Poisoned Penpal: The Murder of Chechen Rebel Leader Ibn Khattab An April 1, 2001 note to FBI Director Freeh, titled "Bin Laden/Ibn Khattab Threat Reporting, read:
Ibn Khattab was killed by a poisoned letter in 2002. The trusted courier had retrieved the contents of a post office box in Baku, Azerbaijan, to include some small presents and money. The man, named Ibragim, brought a coded Sony video-camera, a watch and a letter. After Ibn Khattab opened the envelope, he went into his tent. He came out a half hour later. His face was pale -- he was, rubbing his face with the stump of his arm. He then fell into the arms of his bodyguards. Feeling temporarily better, Khattab gave an order to let Ibragim, who, along with five others, had been put under arrest, could go. "He has to get back to Baku." An hour later Khattab fell ill again. He fell into some bushes, and a short while later was dead. Khattab's people searched for Ibragim in Baku for a month. His bound body was found in the city outskirts with five bullets in the head. In an interview with the Prima News Service, Shamil Basaev, who reportedly had personally ordered Ibragim's execution, confirmed his opinion that Khattab had been poisoned by the Russian special services: "They slipped him a poisoned letter," Basaev told the interviewer. What was the motive of the islamist who delivered a poison letter to Bin Laden's friend, Khattab, in March 2002? The letter was delivered by a messenger who he knew -- someone he trusted who had was delivering mail from a P.O.E. Box in Baku, Azerbaijan sent from the Middle East. Was the islamist who carried the letter that killed Khattab working for the Russian intelligence services? Was he an unwitting dupe? Or was it all an internal feud such as when Zawahiri (some speculate) killed Azzam years ago? If so, that would be even more interesting evidence on the question of modus operandi. Given Khattab's connection to the same EIJ folks at charities in places like in Albania and Azerbaijan, it might it be directly relevant to Ayman's Zabadi program and his choice of means of delivery. V. Opportunity: Tracking Potential Al Qaeda or Egyptian Islamic Jihad Supporters
-- Sept. 7, 2007 Email by Dr. Bruce Ivins to himself from an email screen name "KingBadger7" a. Sailing The Good Ship Anthrax USAMRIID released some emails by Bruce Ivins discussing the difficulties of planning the Fourth International Conference on Anthrax in Annapolis. The first of the emails was from September 1998, upon his return from the conference at Plymouth. In June 2001, the good ship anthrax sailed in Annapolis, Maryland, the “sailing capital of the world.” The 4th International Conference on Anthrax was held at St. John’s College in historic Annapolis, Maryland, June 10 - 13, 2001. The conference was organized by the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases and managed by the American Society for Microbiology. The 74-foot classic wooden schooner was named WOODWIND. Martin Hugh-Jones had convened the conference along with Peter Turnbull, the Porton Down scientist who had led the UK conferences attended by Ayman Zawahiri’s scientist, Rauf Ahmad. Reports of livestock and national park outbreaks were followed by a summary by Dr. Turnbull. Other anthrax notables who spoke included senior USAMRIID scientist Dr. Ezzell, who had one of the first looks at the Daschle product, and Dr. Paul Keim, who would play a key role in the genetic investigation. Other talks focused on cell structure and function such as the S-layer, exosporium, and germination. Theresa Koehler from the Houston Medical School gave a talk titled “The Expanding B. anthracis Toolbox” while Timothy Read from The Institute of Genome Research summarized research on The B. Anthracis Genome. Houston Medical School, the UK’s biodefense facility Porton Down, and Pasteur Institute each fielded three presenters. UK scientists presented on the characteristics of the exosporium of “the highly virulent Ames strain.” Researchers from Columbus, Ohio and Biological Defense Research Directorate (BDRD) of the Navy Medical Research Institute in Bethesda, assisted by Porton Down scientists from the UK, demonstrated that inoculated mice survived a challenge with b.anthracis spores. Researchers used b.anthracis containing a plasmid with a mutated lethal factor. The mice were “immunized via gene gun inoculation with eucaryotic expression plasmids encoding either the protective antigen (PA), a mutated form of lethal factor (LF) or a combination of the two.” Dr. Phil Hanna from University of Michigan was there and presented, as he had been in the UK at the conference attending with Rauf Ahmad. A Kazakhstan Ministry of Health scientist presented on the re-emergence of anthrax in Kazakhstan. Upon the break-up of the Soviet Union the first job offer Ken Alibek fielded was the position of Minister of Health in Kazakhstan. He protested when he realized that his new employer’s job description shifted to “you know the job,” and he realized that they just wanted to do what the Soviets had been secretly doing in an illegal and massive bioweapons program he had supervised as its First Deputy. After the KGB asked to meet with him, he asked to schedule the meeting in two weeks, so that he might visit his parents, and then found a secret expedited way of coming to the United States. Pakistan Rauf Ahmad had been the predator looking for the Ames strain and consulting on weaponization techniques at the UK conference. Did the Amerithrax perp attend this conference or work on any of the research presented? Ali Al-Timimi had a high security clearance for mathematical support work for the Navy. Why? When? What did his work involve? In January 2002, FBI Assistant Director Van Harp told the 40,000 members of the American Society for Microbiology that it was “very likely that one or more of you know this individual.” They very likely did.
Raymond Zilinskas, who was researching a history of the Soviet bioweapons program, told The Baltimore Sun a couple years ago that “his sources now say that Soviet intelligence routinely obtained details of work at USAMRIID that went beyond the descriptions in scientific journals.” The Sun quoted him saying: “It was clear there was somebody at Fort Detrick” who worked for Soviet intelligence. Alexander Y. Kouzminov, a biophysicist who says he once worked for the KGB, had first made the claim in a book, Biological Espionage: Special Operations of the Soviet and Russian Foreign Intelligence Services in the West. Initially, Dr. Zilinskas had dismissed the memoir because the Russian had made separate fanciful inferences about the US program being offensive and some bizarre specific claims unrelated to infiltration of the US program. The Sun article explained that then “another former Soviet scientist told The Sun that his lab routinely received dangerous pathogens and other materials from Western labs through a clandestine channel like the one Kouzminov described.” A second unnamed “U.S. arms control specialist” told the Sun he had independent evidence of a Soviet spy at Fort Detrick.” The Baltimore Sun, in the 2006 article, also relied on Serguei Popov, who was “a scientist once based in a Soviet bioweapons lab in Obolensk, south of Moscow.” Dr. Popov “said that by the early 1980s his colleagues had obtained at least two strains of anthrax commonly studied in Detrick and affiliated labs. They included the Ames strain, first identified at Detrick in the early 1980s.” Ames was used for testing U.S. military vaccines and was the strain used in the 2001 anthrax letters that killed five people and infected 23 in the U.S. Dr. Popov is now at George Mason University’s National Center for Biodefense and Infectious Disease in Fairfax, Va. “If you wanted ’special materials,’ you had to fill out a request,” he said. “And, essentially, those materials were provided. How and by whom, I can’t say.” One colleague, Popov told the Sun, used this “special materials” program to obtain a strain of Yersinia pestis, a plague bacterium being studied in a Western lab. But he didn’t know whether that particular germ came from Ft. Detrick. Former KGB operative and author Kouzminov says the KGB wanted specific items from Western labs — including Detrick — that were closely held and were willing to pay for the privilege. The Soviets also wanted the aerosol powders U.S. scientists developed for testing during vaccine tests. Raymond Zilinskas, the bioweapons expert with the Monterey Institute of International Studies, and two colleagues wrote a scathing review of Biological Espionage in Nature, a British scientific journal. But Zilinskas later told The Sun “that his sources now say that Soviet intelligence routinely obtained details of work at USAMRIID that went beyond the descriptions in scientific journals.” Expert William C. Patrick III, a retired Ft Detrick bioweapons expert, and famed Russian bioweaponeer Ken Alibek agree. Patrick’s suspicions arose when he debriefed defector Alibek in the early 1990s. Alibek emigrated to the U.S. upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 1991. Patrick and Alibek both recognized that the Soviet and American programs had moved in a curious lock step during the 1950s and ’60s. “Anything we discovered of any import, they would have discovered and would have in their program in six months,” Patrick told the Sun. After his talks with Alibek ended, he told the Sun: “For the next two weeks I tried to think, ‘Who the hell are the spies at Detrick?’” Both former Russian bioweaponeers Ken Alibek and Serge Popov worked with Ali Al-Timimi at George Mason University. Dr. Al-Timimi has been convicted of sedition and sentenced to life plus 70 years. Popov and Alibek worked at the Center for Biodefense funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (”DARPA”). At one point, Al-Timimi worked not much more than 15 feet from both Dr. Alibek and former USAMRIID head Charles Bailey, who has been a prolific author and listed on a number of publications involving the virulent Ames strain. Neither Dr. Alibek nor Dr. Popov knew Ali to ever have worked on a biodefense project. He had a high security clearance for some work for the government, involving mathematical support work for the Navy, but no one seems to be able or willing to say what it involved. In the Fall of 2006, the Washington Post reported that when they raided his townhouse in late February 2003, two weeks after the capture of the son of blind sheik Abdel-Rahman, they suspected Al-Timimi of being somehow involved in the anthrax mailings. Mohammed Abdel-Rahman was on Al Qaeda’s 3-man WMD committee and had spoken alongside Ali Al-Timimi at conferences of the Islamic Assembly of North America in 1993 and 1996. d. Know Not Just Your Enemy, But Who He Knew Given that the documentary evidence establishes Ayman Zawahiri's central and key role, the individuals with the closest connection to him are the strongest candidates for co-conspirators in the anthrax mailing. Analysis of who Ayman Zawahiri might have recruited can start with these known associates that Zawahiri had known for a quarter century. Through the 1990s, there was an ongoing debate among these associates over tactics. A friend of mine from Cairo has offered to arrange an interview with any of the "old guard" in prison that I like. But someone already beat me to it -- the fascinating June 2002 "Makram Mohammed Ahmed interviews the historic leadership of al-Gama'a al-Islamiya inside the Scorpion prison" in al-Mussawar (English translation by Lisa Blaydes). As a general matter, Ayman commanded the loyalty of members of the Vanguards of Conquest, which was an offshoot of Egyptian Islamic Jihad once led by Agiza. Agiza, one of the main EIJ intellectuals, was extradited from Sweden after 9/11. He broke away from Zawahiri due to disagreements in 1993 but Bin Laden helped the Egyptian islamists reconcile their differences in the mid-1990s. Al Zayat argued in his book that the Vanguards of Conquest was not a separate group, and that Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the Vanguards of Conquest were "two names for the same group led by Zawahiri." Attorney Al Zayat says in his book: "This was clear from the fact that the four accused in the Vanguards of Conquest cases that were tried by a military court were shouting their allegiance to Zawahiri from behind bars." The August 6, 2001 PDB to President Bush explained: "Al-Qaida members -- including some who are US citizens -- have resided in or traveled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure that could aid attacks. Two al-Qa'ida members found guilty in the plot to bomb our Embassies in East Africa were US citizens, and a senior EIJ member lived in California in the mid-1990s." (The reference was to Ali Mohamed with no mention that he trained US Special Forces on matters relating to jihad at Ft. Bragg and had been Ayman Zawahiri's head of intelligence). In a study of 400 terrorists, University of Pennsyvlania professor Marc Sageman concluded that 70 percent of terrorists were recruited outside their native country, having traveled abroad in the hope of improving their livelihood through jobs or education. Separation from their families and a feeling of alienation from their host countries prompted many to seek companionship at mosques. Friendship constituted 70 percent of recruitment, kinship 20 percent and discipleship only 10 percent. Social networking continues to be relied upon by the Muslim Brotherhood as a means of recruitment. Who did Ali Mohammed and Ayman Zawahiri meet in their travels? Who donated to the Red Crescent in 1995? Just as interesting as the question who Ayman Zawahiri knew is who Ali Mohammed, Ayman's head of intelligence and cell recruitment, knew. Zawahiri traveled to Malaysia, Singapore, Yemen, Iraq, Russia, Great Britain and United States. In March 1995, Zawahiri reportedly met with Taha (who at the time was based in Peshawar, Pakistan), Egyptian Islamic Group leader Mustafa Hamza (who at the time was based in Sudan), and Sudanese leader Turabi. Zawahiri traveled to Sudan and Ethiopia in mid-June. According to his former friend and EIJ's spiritual advisor, Al-Sharif, Zawahiri was paid $100,000 by Sudanese intelligence to attempt to kill the Egyptian prime minister on a visit he made to Ethiopia. Zawahiri went to Russia in 1996 where he was imprisoned for 6 months. (Zawahiri was arrested in Dagestan after he tried to enter Chechnya; the Russians apparently never learned his real identity.) Two men joined the local islamists in urging the release of the three. One was Shehata, who would later serve briefly as head of al Jihad. Shehata was in charge of "special operations." As in life, it's who you know that is important. What mosques did Zawahiri visit when he came to the United States in 1995? In an article that reconstructed his travels of his travels between April 1995 until December 1996, Andrew Higgins and Alan Cullison of the Wall Street Journal described some of the contents of his computer: “visa application for Taiwan; details of a bank account in Guangdong, China; a receipt for a computer modem bought in Dubai; a copy of a Malaysian company’s registration that listed Dr. Zawahiri, under an alias, as a director; and details of an account in a bank in St. Louis, Mo.” The St. Louis bank account related to reimbursement of expenses of the satellite phone used in planning the 1998 embassy attacks. Purchase was made by a charity worker in Columbia, Missouri. (The Saudi dissident in London who was a friend of Bin Laden and the Egyptian London cell members were complicitous in the purchase). The father of Al-Timimi's friend Royer rented a room to Khalil Ziyad in his St. Louis-area home in 2000.
In 1997, back in Afghanistan, after his imprisonment in Russia, al-Zawahiri and Bin Laden plotted their strategy as to the United States. Bin Laden was able to convince Al-Zawahiri to discontinue the military operations inside Egypt and, instead, focus on the common enemies America and Israel. They had concluded that it was United States' appropriations that propped up the regimes of Islamic countries such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt that had prevented the islamists from toppling those regimes. In 1996, Bin Laden announced war against America to the extent of its presence in the Middle East region. By the end of 1997, Bin Laden had determined to openly declare war against America and urge that Americans be killed everywhere. Bin Laden issued a fatwa on February 23, 1998 announcing the creation of "The World Islamic Front for Jihad against Jews and the Crusaders [Christians]." Along with Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri, it was signed by Taha, the man in charge of the Advisory Council of the Islamic Movement in Egypt. Taha was the blind sheik's successor in the Egyptian Islamic Group. At the end of July 1998, Taha signed a statement saying he had never signed the fatwa. Al-Zayat, who had remained in touch with Taha until he was detained while transiting Syria, reports that Taha said that he was asked on the phone whether he would sign a statement to support the Iraqi people who were under American air strikes and he agreed. Taha explained that he had agreed to join in the 1998 "Crusaders" statement because he was told it was in opposition to the bombing strikes in Iraq. "He was surprised to discover later that the statement referred to the establishment of a new front, and that it included a very serious fatwa that all Muslims would be required to follow." Taha emphasized that this all happened without "any clear approval" from the Egyptian Islamic Group "regarding participation in the Front. [The group] found itself a member of a front that they knew nothing about." Attorney al-Zayat notes that when Mabruk, a long-time confidante of Zawahiri and the head of military operations, was captured in Albania in 1998, "[i]n his possession, the authorities found a laptop that had many names of the members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. This led to the arrest of more than a hundred members, who were tried in one case." As a general rule, however, organizational security was very strict. "Any arrest of members is an opportunity for information to be extracted through torture. This is why each member knows only his role. When the members pledge their obedience and loyalty to the leader of the group, they are aware that they are not supposed to ask any questions about things that are not directly related to their role." For example, Ramzi Binalshibh and Zubaydah knew only the limited operation they were engaged in. Such adherence to cell security makes piercing a conspiracy and proving it beyond a reasonable doubt very difficult. Islamic Group military commander Mustafa Hamza, who reportedly supported a cease-fire, and Islamic Group leader Taha, who supported a return to violence, apparently had a falling out after the Luxor debacle. In 1998, following Taha's resignation as Islamic Group's head, Hamza took over as its head. But after Taha was rendered to Egypt while in transit through Syria in 2001, Islamic Group leader Taha's wife and children lived with Hamza's family in Mashhad, Iran. Thus, the alleged falling out perhaps had not caused too great a rift. They both remained in contact with the blind sheik and his paralegal Sattar in 1999 at a time there was talk of a need for a second Luxor. Zawahiri kept in touch with Mahmoud Jaballah, who had emigrated to Canada in 1996, by satellite phone. EIJ shura member Mahmoud Mahjoub was also in Canada. Mahmoud Mahjoub was second in command of the Vanguards of Conquest, after Agiza (who later was succeeded by Zawahiri) In seeking refugee status in Canada, Mahjoub claimed that the persecution in Egypt was the result of a brief association with a suspected member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Mahjoub said that he was arrested several times while in Egypt and claimed to have experienced torture at the hands of the civilian authorities. He reports that two brothers, one a doctor and the other a teacher, were detained because of his activities. In June 2000, Zawahiri visited Hambali in Indonesia with al-Qaeda military chief Mohammed Atef. Hambali the next year would attempt to reestablish Sufaat's anthrax lab in Southeast Asia. Another friend and colleague of Ayman, Kamal Habib, was playing a prominent role in Egyptian politics. Kamal Habib had graduated from Cairo University in 1979 in political science. Twenty years later, he wrote for the Islamic Assembly of North America ("IANA") quarterly magazine. The Cairo-based publication Al-Manar Al-Jadid was sponsored by the Ann Arbor-based charity, Islamic Assembly of North America. The 1999 website announced:
Habib was a key founding member of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and spent 1981-1991 in jail for the assassination of Anwar Sadat. Like Abdel-Bari, al-Zayat and Taha, he was critical of Ayman's tactics, though not his goals. In the late 1970s, the cell ran by the young doctor Zawahiri joined with three other groups to become Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) under Habib's leadership. The blind sheik was their spiritual adviser. In a 2002 New Yorker article, Lawrence Wright wrote in "The Man Behind Bin Laden: How an Egyptian doctor became a master of terror," that "[l]ike Zawahiri, Habib, who had graduated in 1979 from Cairo University's Faculty for Economics and Political Science, was the kind of driven intellectual who might have been expected to become a leader of the country but turned violently against the status quo." The editor-in-chief of the IANA quarterly journal Al Manar Jadeed was Gamal Sultan, who had also been a member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. When Mr. Sultan traveled to Pittsburgh in 2000, Mr. Sultan recalls other islamists remarking it was the Kandahar of the US, given its rolling hills. Kamal Habib and Jamal (Gamal) Sultan also wrote for Assirat Al-Mustaqeem, an Arabic-language magazine embracing radical, anti-U.S. views that was published in Pittsburgh from 1991 to 2000. Mr. Sultan's brother Mahmoud did also. Unlike Zawahiri, Kamal Habib and Gamal Sultan believe in achieving shariah law through democracy. Microbiologist Al-Timimi was on the Assirat Advisory Board. Al-Timimi was sentenced to life plus 70 years for exhorting young men to jihad. A prominent IANA speaker, he shared a fax in the summer of 2001 with former Russian bioweaponeer Ken Alibek and former USAMRIID head and Ames researcher Charles Bailey. Al Timimi met government agents regularly for more than a year before his indictment. The indictment against the paintball defendants alleged that that at an Alexandria, Virginia residence, in the presence of a representative of BIF, the defendants watched videos depicting Mujahadeen engaged in Jihad and discussed a training camp in Bosnia. Al-Timimi had asked the FBI to hold off on the indictment until he received his degree. His defense lawyer says that the FBI searched Al-Timimi's townhouse "to connect him to the 9/11 attacks or to schemes to unleash a biological or nuclear attack." Former Russian bioweaponeering program head Ken Alibek told me that he would occasionally see in the hallways at George Mason, where they both were in the microbiology department. Dr. Alibek was vaguely aware that he was an islamic hardliner but considered him "a numbers guy." When what his defense counsel claims was an FBI attempt to link him to a planned biological attack failed, defense counsel says that investigators focused on his connections to the men who attended his lectures at the local Falls Church, Va. The IANA webmaster Al-Hussayen from Moscow, Idaho complained in a Sept. 8, 2002, phone conversation that "we have to have control over our projects," saying operators of the Islamway Web site, the Al-Manar magazine and the Alasr Web site were doing whatever they wanted, then sending IANA the bills. At the IANA publication Alasr, he complained, "Khalid Hassan puts in it what he wants, with some of the articles being sensitive causing us some problems at the present time. .. They don't think, for example, what you might face being here." Four fatwas justifying suicide attacks -- including flying a plane into a tall building -- that were posted on the Alasr's Web site were central to the allegations against Sami Al-Hussayen. Al Qaeda military commander and former Egyptian police sergeant commander Atef, a key anthrax planner, was killed in November 2001. Taha was rendered transiting Syria in 2001. Canadian Khadr was killed. In 2005, Iran reportedly turned Mustafa Hamza over, where he was tried and convicted for assassination and attempted assassination of various high Egyptian government officials. In 2006, Zawahiri's chief aide al-Hadi was captured. Cairo attorney Mamdouh Ismail, al-Zayat's co-founder of the Islamic party, was arrested in late March 2007. He allegedly was serving as a conduit with jihadis in Egypt, Yemen and Iraq. In short, it's not been a good decade for Friends of Ayman. Any compartmentalized cell in which Ayman operated in his anthrax program is getting mighty tight indeed. Based on the isotope ratios of the anthrax culture, the roots of the Amerithrax likely grew in the United States rather than a faraway place like Egypt, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indonesia or Malaysia. Although the seeds were planted in Cairo, the tree took root not only in Brooklyn and in many places in the US. Buffalo-operative Jaber Elbaneh reportedly was recaptured after having escaped a year ago from a prison in Yemen. Now who is a better candidate for mailer? Elbaneh? Jdey? Elzahabi? Mohammed Junaid Babar? Can any of them be excluded? They all seem like fine candidates, each interesting for different reasons -- connections to different players. Elbaneh was connected to Khallad Attash, Bin Laden's bodyguard, who attended the January 2000 planning meeting in Malaysia. The dominant consensus seems to be that Elbaneh never returned to the United States in 2001 and so can be excluded as a candidate for mailer. In June 2001, he had sold property he owned at 20-24 Wilkesbarre Ave., Jaber Elbaneh to Ahmed Umar for $15,000. The week before 9/11 (ending September 7, 2001), Jaber Elbaneh sold the property he co-owned a 28 Wilkesbarre Ave to a relative for $20,000. (He may have acted through his wife and apparently was not present for the closing.) Jdey was part of KSM's "second wave" and disappeared from Montreal about the time of the mailing. Is he in Turkey with his friend Boussara with the prominent ears? Elzahabi was coming from Ibn Khattab in mid-August 2001 and had not started his school bus job yet. He filled out the application on September 11, 2001. Mohammed Junaid Babar knew the folks in London , such as the one-eyed sheik Abu Hamza, and had arrived from Queens to Lahore by October 30, 2001. But the feds may even offer him witness protection and a new identity, and so they perhaps can exclude him based on his outbound flight. Former CIA Director Tenet Tenet says Ayman's anthrax program was highly compartmentalized at the highest levels. None of these last candidates fit well with this -- with compartmentalization over even KSM's or Hambali's head. e. The FBI Letter to Membership of the American Society for Microbiology And The September 26, 1998 Presentation About A Biocidal Agent For Which USAMRIID Scientist Bruce Ivins Supplied Virulent Strains
In a presentation at the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy (ICAAC) on September 26, 1998, Michael Hayes, a research associate in the U-Michigan Medical School, presented experimental evidence relating to work done by USAMRIID scientist Bruce Ivins establishing BCTP's ability to destroy anthrax spores both in a culture dish and in mice exposed to anthrax through a skin incision. "In his conference presentation, Hayes described how even low concentrations of BCTP killed more than 90 percent of virulent strains of Bacillus anthracis spores in a culture dish." Its website explains that the Interscience Conference on Antimicrobial Agents and Chemotherapy is the "[p]remier meeting on infectious diseases and antimicrobial agents, organized by the American Society for Microbiology." Tarek Hamouda made a similar presentation to the American Society of Microbiologists presentation in Atlanta, Georgia. Neither has responded to emails or provided a copy of their respective presentations. f. The Egyptian Connection: The Path of Jihad Begins and Ends in Cairo
Thirwat Shehata, according to a "Most Wanted" listed posted by the Egyptian State Information website, faces two death sentences in Egypt. According to the information posted by the Egyptian government, Shehata went to Afghanistan in 1995 with Zawahiri and Bin Laden, where he was put in charge of EIJ's "security committee which provides logistics to the military wing, the special operations, and the individuals involved in terror attacks. He is a key figure in Bin Laden's organization." Thirwat Shehata had been one of the ones to go to Russia and get Ayman and Mabruk out of jail. Born in 1960, Shehata briefly took over for Ayman as head of EIJ. He, in another life, was Montasser al Zayat's law partner. Al-Zayat was the Cairo lawyer who announced Zawahiri's plan to use anthrax against US targets. Shehata was a member of the 9-member shura council of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service notes that within the ruling council, he was "head of the Security Committee and in charge of collecting intelligence on Egypt's leading civilian and military figures and on Egyptian interests abroad." The CSIS has noted that he "also oversaw counter-espionage and organized logistical support for [EIJ] militants and sympathizers in Egypt." Shehata maintained regular contact with Mahmoud Jaballah in Canada. His wife is Jaballah's sister. The CSIS alleges that "Jaballah provided Shehata with regular updates on his activities in Canada, as well as financial support." In December 1997 and throughout 1997, Al Sibai in London relayed information between Shehata and Jaballah. The London islamist al-Sibai assisted in coordinating financial collection efforts to help get Mabruk out of jail in Dagestan. Al Sibai, according to reports, like Shehata, was an EIJ shura member. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service alleges that Shehata left Azerbaijan on or about August 8, 1998. According to some reports, he has been in Iran in recent years. The London-based Vanguards of Conquest spokesman Yasir Al-Sirri was alleged by the US to have financed the public relations efforts of the Blind Sheik's Lynne Stewart and US Postal employee Ahmed Abdel Sattar. In an April 2002 indictment, the United States alleged that the Egyptian Islamic Group has an active membership in the United States, concentrated in the New York City metropolitan area. Al-Sirri certainly might have been acutely affected by the detention of other London EIJ cell members in the late 1990s.
An equally good guess, however, is Mohammed Islambouli, Sadat's assassin's brother: Islambouli was in a cell with KSM planning attacks on the United States using aircraft and other means. Zawahiri recently revealed him to be the leader of the IG members who have joined Al Qaeda. He was head of the blind sheik's Makhtab Khidmat al-Mujahiden in Peshawar (which had a branch in Brooklyn). The blind sheik stayed with him when he visited Peshawar in 1990. There are the strong pointers to the Sadat assassination. In a December 4, 1998 Presidential Daily Brief to President Clinton, the CIA noted that it was expected that Mohammed Islambouli the brother of Sadat's assassin, was expected to travel to the United States to meet with other Egyptian Islamic Group members to discuss options regarding planned attacks on the United States. The planned attacks included attacks involving the hijacking of aircraft in an attempt to free the blind sheik Abdel-Rahman and an imprisoned dissident Saudi sheik who was allied with Bin Laden. Islambouli had headed Khidmat Services in Peshawar and an Al Qaeda training camp. Washington Times reporter and author Bill Gertz reports in the book Breakdown that in 1996, KSM was in a cell with Islambouli in Qatar, where they were given safe harbor by a high level minister of religious affairs. Bin Laden visited Doha, Qatar in 1994 and again sometime within the next couple years. The 1994 Qatar trip, according to the Egyptian weekly, Al-Ahram, involved a meeting between Zawahiri, bin Laden, Islambouli and Mustafa Hamza. In the Amerithrax investigation, the FBI should have given priority to establishing who the man expected to be sent by Mohammed Islambouli, met with when he traveled to the United States. According to Egyptian intelligence officials, Islambouli himself reportedly had two Egyptian passports, a Qatari passport and an Algerian passport in the name Mahmoud Youssef. But certainly there are other persons of interest. EIJ founder Kamal Habib and former EIJ member Gamal Sultan had the strong connection with the US-based IANA and Ali Al-Timimi. Kamal Habib knew Ayman well and was in the middle of the attempt to have political parties formed in the Spring of 1999. Saif Adel was on Tenet's list of those involved in CBRN. Saif Adel, taking his comments about the December 1996 mailings to newspapers in New York and DC at face value, might not want to be involved in any operation that seemed mere "flirtation." At the time, he seemed to hint that Egyptian Islamic Group, rather than EIJ, was responsible for the al Hayat letter bombs to newspapers in DC and NYC and people in symbolic positions. Taha and Hamza both have a strong Sattar/Blind Sheik connection. Hamza is in Egyptian custody. Hamza became head of the Gama’a al-Islamiya group’s shura council in 1998 after an internal split over responsibility for the Luxor massacre of 1997. Iran reportedly handed him over to Egypt as part of trade for information an an exile group living in Egypt. Mustafa Hamza and Jihad leader Ahmed Salama Mabruk had graduated from the same Cairo University class. (Mabruk was the former EIJ military commander who had been Ayman Zawahiri's confidante and who had known about Ayman's plan to weaponize anthrax upon Mabruk's capture in Baku, Azerbaijan in 1998.) Jailed after Sadat's assassination, after his release from prison, Hamza went to Afghanistan, from where he paid frequent visits to other countries such as Pakistan, Sudan and Iran. Rifa’i Taha Musa (Taha) favored a return to armed operations. Taha sets forth his views in an article published in the May 1997 issue off Nida'ul Islam magazine titled "The Islamic State in Egypt is Approaching." Taha in early 2001 published a book in which he attempted to justify terrorist attacks that would cause mass casualties. Like Mustafa, he was in close telephone contact with Sattar, who in an indictment announced in April 2002 was described as a "surrogate" for the blind sheik. In her webblog, former blind sheik attorney Lynne Stewart says U.S. Postal employee Sattar came to favor Taha's view. When the blind sheik's' US attorney, radical Lynne Stewart, announced in a press release in mid-June 2000 that Abdel-Rahman was withdrawing his support for the cease-fire, Taha said: "Stopping operations [attacks] is a human decision that can be canceled if a majority of the Gama'a finds this to be in its interest, especially after the sheikh's latest instructions, in which he withdrew his support for the initiative." Taha argued that militant groups were never given the opportunity to become political parties. "I have repeatedly said the government will never allow the Islamist trend to play an effective political role through recognised parties." "It will not let anyone else share in the power game." He continued: "When the Gama'a announced a halt of armed operations, it did not say it would give up its opposition of the Egyptian government. In my view, the only way for the Islamist movement to achieve victory is for Islamist factions to unite and mobilize the Egyptian people, led by the army, clerics and university professors, in a revolution that should not stop until the regime is overthrown." In December 1999, the Associated Press reported that Taha threatened in an e-mail published by the Arabic-language newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat ``The Egyptian government commits a grave mistake if it believes that the Luxor operation is unrepeatable.'' Taha had grown closer to Bin Laden and Zawahiri while in Afghanistan in the 1990s and also had a close connection to the Taliban. In Fall 2001, Ayman had sent him with several others to form Ansar Al-Islam in Kurdish controlled territory of Iraq. He lived for a time in a suburb of Tehran. Taha was rendered to Egypt while in transit through Syria in 2001, at which time Taha's wife and children lived with Hamza's family in Mashhad, Iran. Al-Zayat / Mamdouh Ismail have an Al-Nashar connection. Al-Zayat explained at the time that the blind sheik's US attorney Lynne Stewart announced he had withdrawn his support for the cease-fire, Abdel-Rahman's statement should be viewed merely as a request for the Gama'a to "reevaluate" its decision of maintaining a unilateral cease-fire with the government. He said it was a personal message sent to him via e-mail to be delivered to the Gama'a's imprisoned leaders. (There is no disputing, however, that his US attorney issued a press release and the blind sheik later instructed that he did not want anyone denying that he had issued the press release). While Zawahiri has suggested that Montasser Al-Zayat has too cozy a relationship with Egyptian security services, explaining his access to imprisoned IG leaders, someone else knowledgeable about the movement assures me that is not true. In his letter, Abdel-Rahman criticized the Egyptian government for maintaining its policy of putting Islamist militants on trial before military courts, conducting mass arrests and imposing death sentences against them. Al-Zayat argued that it was in light of these charges that Abdel-Rahman called on the group's leaders to "reevaluate the policies of the Gama'a." Al-Zayyat urged that the Blind Sheik's position was only that the group assess the "positions that best serve the interests of the group." Al-Zayyat said that Gama'a leaders imprisoned inside Egypt had responded to Abdel-Rahman's letter by a letter of their own in which they asked him to clarify his position on the cease-fire in order to clear up the controversy. The blind sheik's son called Sattar and urged the same so as to smooth things over. In a letter to Abdel-Rahman, the jailed shura members informed him that the government had halted extra-judicial killings, mass arrests and military trials and that it had released some 2,500 militants. Al-Zayat basically was in the role of the great negotiator, announcing his prediction that weaponized anthrax would be used against targets in the US because of the detention of senior Egyptian militants, while at the same time, negotiating the release of many hundreds of those militants. The anthrax appears to have served its purpose while the FBI seemed fixated on panty raids and anthrax smelling bloodhounds. Al-Zayat's partner in attempting to form a political party, fellow islamist attorney Mamdouh Ismail, was arrested in late March 2007 and alleged to be the chief conduit between Ayman Zawahiri and jihadists in Egypt, Iraq and Egypt. The government alleges he took his instructions, in part, from intermediary al-Sibai based in London. Both he and al-Zayat had worked closely with fellow attorney Shehata, head of the EIJ civilian branch in charge of special operations. Mahmoud Mahjoub was second in command of the Vanguards of Conquest, after Agiza (who later was succeeded by Zawahiri). Mahjoub worked at the Alternar Almubarakah Agricultural Company as Deputy Director General and Supervisor in the agricultural project at Damazin, Sudan, starting February 1992 until May 1993. A letter confirming the employment was provided by Mamdouh Mahmoud Salim has been described in government documents as a manager of finances for Bin Laden and an intermediary in the group's efforts to buy arms and material for nuclear weapons. He had met with Bin Laden for about 1-2 hours in interviewing for the job. Bin Laden told him to take a week to study the project. At the end of the week, Mahjoub met with the General Manager of Bin Laden's company and accepted the position. He reports he met with Bin Laden only on three occasions during his employment. He decided to leave the job because he was offended that people with a lower job title and level of responsibility were being paid more. In the late 1990s, authorities kept Mahjoub under surveillance. In December 1998, he looked over his shoulder three times for no apparent reason before making a call. In January 2000, Mahjoub's associate asked Mahjoub whether he had any news and Mahjoub said he wanted to talk face to face. His associate asked whether Mahjoub was referring to the civil or the military "Moukhabarat." Mahjoub replied, "both." Mahjoub had lived with Khadr's in-laws for 3 weeks when he first arrived in Canada -- which was before he met his wife. Both his wife and Jaballah's wife were close to Khadr's in-laws, the Elsamnahs. Jaballah said his wife visited them often. When Mahjoub was arrested, he had the telephone and address "Abu Ahmed 289-2361", the telephone number associated with Jaballah. Mahjoub had initially denied knowing Essam Hafez Marzouk but his address was found in Mahjoub's belongings and he eventually admitted knowing him. Telephone records reportedly show several calls in 1997 and 1998 between Mahjoub's home number and Marzouk. Marzouk was involved in the planning of the 1998 embassy bombings. Marzouk was a veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, where had fought alongside bin Laden. Stationery from Marzouk's British Columbia "U-Enterprises" turned up in Kabul. In 1997 to fight against the Serbs in Kosovo. Marzouk was arrested in Azerbaijan in August 1998 and handed over to Egyptian authorities. Former Silicon Valley car salesman Dahab and former US Army Sergeant Ali Mohammed went to get Marzouk out of jail when he was stopped trying to cross the border into the US. By the time the anthrax planning got underway in earnest, Mahjoub had been detained. After coming to Canada in 1996, Mahmoud Jaballah, was in regular contact with al Zawahiri. He would call Zawahiri on the latter's Inmarsat satellite phone." Jaballah's conversations were recorded. He referred to Ayman as "the father." Jaballah was a communications hub re planning the 1998 embassy bombings. In Peshawar, another doctor from University of Cairo Medical School was the leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad before Zawahiri -- although he argues he was merely providing shariah guidance. Al-Sharif became furious at Zawahiri over editing of a book he wrote and they parted company. He settled in Yemen and was detained in Yemen for 3 years after 9/11 before being transferred to a prison in Cairo. Dr. Sharif now condemns terrorism against innocents. Al-Sharif criticizes the hijackers of 9/11 on the grounds that they “betrayed the enemy,” because the visas to the U.S. they received were a kind of contract of protection. The followers of bin Laden entered the United States with his knowledge, and on his orders double-crossed its population, killing and destroying. The Prophet — God’s prayer and peace be upon him — said, ‘On the Day of Judgment, every double-crosser will have a banner up his anus proportionate to his treachery.’ For 7 years now, the FBI and CIA's focus should have been on figuring out how an associate of one or more of these men gained access to virulent Ames. g. Chasing Islambouli's Ghost: A Tree Grows In Brooklyn When dealing with Ayman Zawahiri, it never pays to underestimate the importance to him in the 1990s of the terrorist infrastructure in Brooklyn. In the late 1990s, Steve Emerson traced the development of the "Mekhtab Al-Khidemat Al-Mujahideen," or the "Office of Services of the Mujahideen," from its formation in Pakistan and Afghanistan in the early 1980's to the Al Kifah Refugee Centers which spread throughout the United States and internationally. Zawahiri visited Brooklyn's al Farouk mosque, which was part of Khidmat Services in Peshawar and was used to funnel jihadists and funds to Afghanistan. The blind sheik's lawyer, Montasser al-Zayat, visited in 1990. Islambouli was head of the office in Peshawar. In a 1990 documentary by SBS-TV "Cutting Edge" series entry called "Sword of Islam," Islambouli said: "Islam grows on the severed limbs and blood of martyrs. Islam will be back, and take over the world." The CIA’s December 4, 1998 PDB to President Clinton explained that Mohammed Islambouli, the brother of Sadat’s assassin, was planning an attack using aircraft and other means on the United States. After Bojinka, which can be thought of as the origin for the 911 planning, Islambouli had been in a cell with KSM in planning the attacks. KSM came to be head of the cell planning to use weaponized anthrax on the United States. Therefore, it is important to understand who Islambouli knew and consider his historical connection to the al-Farook mosque in Brooklyn, New York. Now the surest way to know who Islambouli knew would be to go back to the late 1970s leading up to Sadat’s assassination and study membership in the Egyptian Islamic Jihad cells at the universities. But the story also can fruitfully be picked up a decade later in the context of Islambouli’s ongoing connection to al-Farook. The Al-Kifah Refugee Center had found its home in the early 1990s at the Al-Farooq mosque on Atlantic Avenue. Some of the men convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing worshipped at the mosque, as did the blind sheik's bodyguard El-Sayyed Nosair, who killed the radical Israeli Rabbi Meir Kahane. The Brooklyn office of Makhtab Khidmat al-Mujahiden was staffed by Egyptian Islamic Jihad operative Khaled Dahab, a used car salesman from Santa Clara. Dahab handled the logistics for terrorists out of his home. He patched through calls for Egyptian Islamic Jihad members and transferred money. Ayman called Dahab periodically -- once to price telephone surveillance equipment. Dahab at last report was in jail in Egypt. Dahab had been recruited by Ali Mohammed, the former US Army sergeant who was Bin Laden's chief of security during the move from Afghanistan to Sudan. Ali Mohammed helped conduct the surveillance leading much later to the embassy bombings. He trained Dahab on how to make letter bombs. When Ali Mohammed would visit Brooklyn, he would stay with a fellow Egyptian Nosair, who assassinated Meir Kahane. Nosair had been one of the men practicing with the men at the Calverton shooting range in Long Island under Mohammed's instruction (along with some of the WTC 1993 bombers). In 1992, Mohammed Islambouli, was in regular fax contact from his Peshawar Mujahedeen Office in Peshawar, Pakistan and the Brooklyn Al-Kifah office. One 1992 memo from Islambouli's Peshawar office read: “The military wing of the Jihad seals its news with success everywhere. However, the matter is the hands of the leadership to form the Islamic government to manage the country." Sheik Abdel-Rahman would lecture regularly at al-Farook. He would visit Islambouli in Pakistan from Brooklyn in 1989 and during the early 1990s. It was not until April 1993, upon a crackdown on the foreign fighters, that Islambouli and Zawahiri had to move their operations into Afghanistan. Islambouli moved a scant 100 miles. Before disappearing into Afghanistan, Islambouli told the press the group would continue its holy war against the Egyptian government. In 1993, after he had to leave Peshawar, Islambouli lived at the Samarkhiel Guest House in Jalabad, a town in eastern Afghanistan three hours by road from the Pakistan border. In April 1993, a fax to Western news media threatened American interests if anything happened to Abdel-Rahman. At the time, Egyptian Islamic Group had about 200 members in Jalabad. Even back then, moreover, there was a connection between Brooklyn and the Moro National Liberation Front in the Philippines. For example, a 1992 memo read:
By 1995, Nosair was in prison and a defendant in a trial for sedition along with the Blind Sheik. The father of Adnan El-Shukrijumah ("Jafar the Pilot") once translated for the Blind Sheik and was a character witness for Clement Rodney Hampton one of the defendants in the 1995 sedition trial. Jafar's father was Bilal Philip's mentor. Bilal Philips in turn was Al-Timimi's mentor (and he continued to be in contact with him). Hampton-El testified that Philips was the head of "Project Bosnia." He explained that Philips funneled money from Saudi Arabia to pay for noncombatant support services for the mujahideen in Bosnia. Project Bosnia also recruited combatants and men for paramilitary training. Numerous cities would come to have subsidiary Al Kifah offices. Aafia Siddiqui would be associated with the one in Boston, which after WTC 1993 was renamed Care International. The Care head was MIT MSA Imam Suheil Laher. He worked with Aafia in fundraising. In 2003, prosecutors alleged in a complaint unsealed in Brooklyn federal court that a Yemeni cleric raised millions, some of it through Al-Farooq mosque, that was then funneled to al-Qaida terrorists. Prosecutors alleged that Sheik Mohammed Al Hasan Al-Moayad used the mosque to raise money for Osama bin Laden's terrorist network in 1999. He allegedly told an FBI informant that he supplied al-Qaida with more than $20 million, recruits and weapons in the years leading up to the 9/11 attacks. The government sought to extradite Al-Moayad and his assistant. The complaint said much of the money came from contributors in the United States, including the Al-Farooq mosque. Also indicted that year was Damrah, who had headed al-Farook in the late 1980s. He moved to Cleveland in 1990 where he would become head of the largest mosque in Greater Cleveland. He was indicted in 2003 for failing to disclose, among other things, his association with al-Kifah on a 1993 citizenship application. The former President and the former Treasurer of the al-Kifah branch in Boston, Care International, were indicted in May 2005 and charged with lying to authorities investigating the charity's alleged ties to terrorist organizations. (The organization, now defunct, is not affiliated with the global relief group CARE International.) Muntasser was from Braintree (Boston) and Mubayyid, treasurer until 2003, is from Shrewsbury, about 6 miles from Worcester. Care raised $1.7 million in donations from 1993 to 2001. Care published a pro-jihadist newsletter, al-Hussam, or The Sword. The early April 1993 issue of Al-Hussam was published explaining that it was was the newsletter of Al-Kifah. Care published its first issue of Al-Hussam a couple weeks later, three days after Muntasser signed Care's Articles of Incorporation. A 1996 newsletter exhorts: "And Time Went By O' Muslims: Rise!" The group didn't reveal the funding of mujahidin on its tax forms filed with the government, and did not reveal its links to Al-Kifah. The former President, Muntasser, allegedly failed to tell the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force in a 1999 interview about the group's support for jihad, and did not disclose that on a trip to Pakistan several years earlier, he also traveled to Afghanistan. Care published and distributed an English translation of "Join the Caravan," a pro-jihad book. Muntasser and Mubayyid were convicted in January 2008, with the judge noting that they were not charged or convicted of a charge relating to terrorism. Shortly after 9/11, investigators raided a storage facility and confiscated 18,000 pages of material, 40 videotapes, four computer hard drives, and 100 computer diskettes. When Muntasser applied for permanent U.S. residency in April 1992, he listed the organizations he'd been involved with - groups like the Graduate Student Organization at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, his alma mater, and the Islamic Society of Greater Worcester, and "Alkifah Refugee Center, Boston Chapter." In a superseding indictment filed in March 2007, Al-Monla, president of Care from 1996-98, was similarly accused of lying to federal authorities about the nature of the charity, specifically that it solicited money for jihadists involved in armed conflict overseas. Court records indicate checks deposited into Care International accounts had phrases such as 'for jihad only' and 'Bosnia Jihad fund' and 'Chechen Muslim Fighters' handwritten on the memo lines of donors’ personal checks." The indictment alleged that the IRS would not have granted nonprofit status had the organization's true nature been disclosed. The government alleges that Care sent money to several overseas organizations," such as "Global Relief Foundation, Benevolence International Foundation, Help the Needy and the Holy Land Foundation. Al-Monla was also accused of lying to the FBI about his relationship with Bassam Kanj, a Boston cabdriver who knew fellow Boston cabdrivers and Al Qaeda operatives, al-Marabh and Elzahabi. If the federal investigative interest was any indication, it appears that authorities perceived that a tree grew in Brooklyn. h. When Insiders Go Postal: US Postal Employee Ahmed Abdel Sattar Ahmed Abdel Sattar told Frontline in a 1999 interview: "As a younger man growing up in Egypt in the seventies [and] in the '80s, looking around me, hav[ing] no hope in a country where I was born and raised, seeing things deteriorating to a level that will not be acceptable by anybody. There was no other way except [turning] to Islam ideology, to believe in it and to try to change things through it." He told of the hardship: "People graduating college cannot find a job. Hundreds of thousands, even millions. People who reach the age of thirty, thirty-five cannot find an apartment to rent. Poverty was everywhere." Sattar was discharged from the Egyptian army in January 1981. After Sadat's assassination, his family pressured him to leave Egypt for fear that the government would pursue him for islamist activities. He came to New York in July 1982 on a tourist visa. He did not speak much English when he arrived. Settling in Brooklyn, he worked as a busboy and waiter. He met his wife, a Roman Catholic, in November 1984 and they married on Valentine's Day 1985. He went to work for the Post Office in 1988. The couple had four children. She was not a practicing Christian when they married and did not adopt islam for nearly a decade. Sattar first saw Abdel-Rahman in 1990 when he came to the United States. In the Summer of 1990 when he visited Sattar's Abu Bakri mosque as a guest speaker. Abdel-Rahman had been famous in Egypt after the Sadat assassination trial in which he was acquitted. Abdel-Rahman's attorney Al-Zayat also was at the mosque in 1990. Sattar was introduced to him on another occasion when Abdel-Rahman spoke at the mosque in 1991 and then came to know him in 1992. Beginning in October 1992, when Sattar became a member of the Board, he would see Abdel-Rahman regularly, whenever he spoke at the mosque. The blind sheik spoke twice a week. Mr. Sattar describes Abdel-Rahman's as fiery, anti-Jewish, anti-Christian, and anti-American policy. Sattar explained at trial that "90 percent of his sermons were about Egypt, what's gone on in Egypt, how the government is treating the citizens of Egypt, what the people should do, how the people should react to the treatment by the government." In January 1993, about 2,300 people attended a hearing on the attempt by the government to deport Blind Sheikh Abdel-Rahman and he arranged media interviews. During this period, he was questioned three times by the FBI -- the first was in August 1992. He was questioned again in September 1992. Then in April or May 1993, two FBI agents came to his workplace with a subpoena seeking a hand swabbing. In June 1993, 10-15 were arrested for conspiracy to engage in a war of urban terrorism. Abdel-Rahman was indicted later that summer. The blind sheik was at the mosque and Sattar drove to the mosque to tell him the news. After sending out a "fake Abdel-Rahman" intended to distract media, , he says, he negotiated for a surrender to made at the firehouse across the street. Over the years, Sattar would "sit in the kitchen away from everybody and smoke -- and he recognized smoking was sinful -- and read relevant newspapers to Abdel-Rahman. He read various Arabic papers including Al Hayat. He read all the major New York newspapers but did not like the New York Post. He is pictured alongside Abdel-Rahman in 1993 leaving the courthouse with the blind sheik followers. They lived in Brooklyn until 1995 and then moved to Staten Island. After a few months as a letter carrier, he started his job as a special delivery working messenger. At trial, he explained that he would deliver to the Coast Guard and until 1995, he would deliver to high security Navy installations where nuclear submarines would load and unload. He worked at the Post Office until the day of his arrest on April 9, 2002. In addition to his post office job, he helped a friend in his baby formula business -- his friend bought wholesale and sold retail. Sattar made hundreds of phone calls from his family's small apartment to fundamentalist followers of the sheik across the globe -- from Britain to Egypt to Afghanistan. HOver the years, in the course of the calls he arranged, Mr. Sattar eventually joined their debates about using violence. Senior IG leaders began calling in late 1998. Sattar's hundreds of telephone calls to Egypt cost him thousands of dollars a year. The government tapped 90,000 calls as part of the major intelligence effort. The wiretapped calls show a tense dispute over whether to continue a cease-fire in their long war against the Egyptian government or return to violence. On the subject of the cease-fire, at trial , Sattar explained that Taha was the "bad cop" to the "good cop" played by Hamza, Montasser Al-Zayat and the imprisoned IG leaders. Egyptian Islamic Group founder Salah Hashim was the architect of the peace initiative. Al-Zayat's codename was Zarzur meaning "little bird" (and he's not little). In one call, Taha asked that Abdel-Rahman confirm he had "no objection to the formation of a team that calls for cancellation of the initiative or makes threats or escalates things." Sattar's comments suggest he came to favor the view of those who wanted to abandon the truce. Mr. Sattar's phone calls show the debate between Sheik Salah Hashim, the Islamic Group's group's leader in Egypt, an outspoken proponent of the cease-fire and Taha, who opposed it. Taha was close to the Taliban and drawing ever closer to Bin Laden and Zawahiri. It was public outrage over those killings that led the Islamic Group to announce the cease-fire later that year and prompted Taha to step down as IG head in favor of Mustafa Hamza. Hamza would call Sattar every three weeks or month. Taha called more often. Sattar used to speak with Rifa'i Taha all the time. In 2002, Taha wrote a book found in the search of Sattar's apartment and garage. As Sattar explained at trial, in the book "Basically Taha was trying to justify all the violence that took place in Egypt from 1990 until 1997 and to just make a justification for those things." The book was uploaded to London-based Al-Sirri's website. In his opening argument, the federal prosecutor explained:
In 1999, Sattar emphasized in a Frontline interview that reaction to what he perceived as a war against Islam was inevitable. "You're going to see the same feeling everywhere in a Muslim country toward Americans right now. In Syria, in Lebanon, in Palestine, in Egypt, in Saudi Arabia, in Morocco, everywhere you go, you're going to have the same feeling that there is a war declared by the West on Islam, and in particular, the United States of America on Islam. And something has to be done about it. [The] reaction could be like the bombing in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam. It could be some demonstrations in front of American embassies throughout the Islamic world that we saw before. Could be kidnapping of Americans." In 1999, US Postal employee Sattar explained his admiration for Bin Laden. "I have an admiration for anybody who will stand up to a tyrant and tell him, "You are a tyrant" whether this tyrant [is a] man named [Mubarak] or [the] government of the United States of America." Sattar described the Blind Sheik as "My friend, my mentor, my sheik, my imam, my father." He recognized that it made him a suspect. He explained that he had been followed days and nights, under surveillance 24 hours a day sometimes. He said he had been visited by FBI agents at his Staten Island Post Office job in an attempt to prejudice my coworkers against me. He said "To me, am I a terrorist? Nope. I am a father. I am a man who believes in his religion." When the Frontline interviewer in 1999 suggested that the NYC joint terrorism task force likely thought he knew a lot of people who know a lot, he said he did. But he explained that an act like the World Trade Center or Oklahoma City bombing or the 1998 embassy bombings does not need many people to do it. As the result of this operational security and compartmentalization, he is not in a position to know. "Could be four or five people like in the World Trade Center." He continued: "I'll tell you something. When the World Trade Center occurred here, the American government released a list. 173 names. And they called them coconspirators of people who were living in this country, and people living abroad. 173 names. So, let's not just jump to conclusions because the American government, you know, released a name that he must be a part of it. 173." Sattar also put another islamist lawyer in touch with Islamic Group leader Taha. Attorney Saad Hasaballah announced a proposed cease-fire by some members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, following the example of Egyptian Islamic Group two years earlier. The attorney, like Montasser Al-Zayat, had represented defendants in the Albanian Returnees trial resulting in the sentences in March 1999. The attorney for imprisoned EIJ leaders made the announcement along with an EIJ leader Osma Ayoub Sidiq, who was living in Germany. Before 2000, Mr. Sattar seemed to stay aloof from the group's internal feuds, simply connecting phone calls among its members after finishing his work at the post office. But he began to change in June of that year after Mr. Abdel Rahman issued a statement, announced by Attorney Stewart in a press release in defiance of formal prison restrictions on communication. The Blind Sheik withdrew his support for the cease-fire. Sattar rushed the news of the cleric's new view in calls to Islamic Group members overseas. Islamic Group military leader Hamza, who was in Afghanistan at the time as was Taha, protested the sheik's change and pleaded with Mr. Sattar not to release it to the press. The federal prosecutor explained in his opening argument before the jury: "[A]ll the secret messages back and forth between Abdel Rahman and his terrorist network culminate in the spring of 2000, when a public announcement is made by Abdel Rahman, courtesy of these defendants, saying that Abdel Rahman no longer supported a cease fire by this terrorist organization, the cessation of terrorist violence between his organization and the Egyptian government. In essence, these defendants helped Abdel Rahman break out of jail to inspire his terrorist group to return to terrorism. They allowed Abdel Rahman to tell his followers, 'Fire.'" After the press release by Attorney Stewart announcing the blind sheik's new position, Mr. Sattar set up conference calls and then remained on the line while Mr. Hashim spoke from Egypt and Mr. Taha spoke from Afghanistan argued angrily. Mr. Taha said the Egyptian government of President Hosni Mubarak "must be removed, and will not be removed except by using armed force." "We are in a difficult stage; we can't use force at all," Mr. Hashim insisted. Many hundreds of IG members were still in jail and negotiations were underway with the government for their release. At the time of these exchanges, Taha appeared with Bin Laden on a videotape that was broadcast on September 21, 2000, by Al Jazeera. They called for violent worldwide jihad to free Mr. Abdel Rahman from jail. A couple days later Mr. Taha called Mr. Sattar to get his reaction. "The words caused such an impact," Mr. Sattar exclaimed. In late September 2000, during an upsurge of violence between Israelis and Palestinians, Sattar came home from the post office each day, immediately going to monitor Arab news Web sites and television. The images all look to him like Israeli attacks on innocent Palestinian civilians, according to the transcripts. "Animals, animals, I swear by God the Almighty," Mr. Sattar said, referring to the Israelis. When Mr. Taha called, Mr. Sattar urged him to compose a religious decree that they could attribute to the sheik. Later he edited Mr. Taha's draft. "Kill the Jews wherever they are found," it says. On the day after the fatwah was published Sattar read a newspaper article to Taha. That article identified a man named Atia as the leader of the Islamic Group military wing in Egypt. Taha commented to Sattar that the writer of the article had really good information. Three days later, Taha called Sattar and told Sattar that he should contact Atia and tell them about the fatwah they had issued, the one demanding the murder of the Jews. Sattar agreed to do so and called Atia in early October 2000. In his opening argument, the federal prosecutor explained: "Using the pretext of attorney-client visits and telephone calls, these defendants were able to break Abdel Rahman's message of terror out of jail and deliver it to the very people who never should have heard it, other terrorists who still walk the streets and were still able to follow his instructions." Separately, Taha wrote a legal justification for killing innocents and Sattar had a copy of the book. Sattar helped Islamic Group leader Taha, who was in Afghanistan with the IG military commander Mustafa Hamza, compose a religious edict and release it under the sheik Abdel-Rahman's name. He arranged for it to be uploaded to the internet and released to the press. He coordinated with Vanguards of Conquest spokesman Yasir Al-Sirri, based in London. Sattar says he was moved to order the killing of jews after the visit of Ariel Sharon to the site of the Al Aqsa mosque in September 2000. At trial, he lamented Mr. Sharon's visit as a "violation of that holy place." His fatwa urged young Muslims to fight Jews "by all possible means of jihad, either by killing them as individuals or by targeting their interests and their advocates, as much as they can." The blind sheik did not see the fatwa issued in his name until the next week but approved it after the fact. The sheik had signed a power of attorney for Mr. Sattar and trusted his judgment completely. There were about 90,000 intercepted conversations from Sattar's home phone made between March 1995 and March 2002, as part of a federal foreign intelligence investigation. The Assistant United States Attorney explained at trial that the "criminal investigation and any consideration of charges were put on hold due to a fear that the criminal investigation could possibly blow the intelligence investigation." The coincidence that anthrax would be delivered by a postal worker, however, likely did not go unnoticed by those pursuing the theory that US-based supporters of Al Qaeda were responsible for the anthrax mailings. Sattar put Taha in direct contact with the head of the Islamic Group in Egypt, Atia, who was hiding in southern Egypt. On October 11, 2000 Sattar told Taha that he had spoken with Atia. He told Taha that he believed that Atia was eager ready and able "to do things," and that he had to warn Atia repeatedly during their telephone call that his telephone was "not safe." Atia then was killed in a raid a week later. In early November, Taha gave Sattar the news that Atia had been killed. Taha in the calls set up by Sattar was urging Atia to conduct operations. Then Atia was caught and killed. Sattar said at the time: "I feel guilty, guilty. I am telling you I suspect it is 90 percent my phone." The expert on functionalized polymers, Magdy al-Nashar, was connected to the people who did Luxor, according to the biochemist's brother. Al-Nashar arranged for the London flat used by the 7/7 bombers is represented by Mamdouh Ismail (allegedly Zawahiri's chief conduit to jihadis). Sattar said at the time The Washington Post reported in May 2002 that investigators had heard a summer 2001 conversation about a letter of introduction from Al-Sirri relied upon by the two who concealed a bomb in a camera that purportedly was going to film Northern Alliance leader. Massoud was killed two days before 9/11. A draft of the letter was found on Ayman's computer in Kabul. Perhaps Taha wrote the letter on the computer in Ayman's office after a conference call with Sattar and Al-Sirri. Britain has a very lengthy and inefficient extradition process -- the original request has been withdrawn and the US now has renewed its request Al-Sirri be transferred to the US under a new treaty. On October 25, 2000, Taha told Sattar that an Egyptian male was involved in the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole and that Sattar should help in delivering a message to the US government suggesting that similar attacks would occur unless Abdel Rahman were freed. If we do not learn from history, we are bound to repeat it. If the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency and Postal Inspectors failed to catch the Amerithrax killer(s), then the Defense Intelligence Agency should succeed where the other agencies failed. Our troops depend on the DIA to keep them safe. If the DIA isn't up to the challenge of dealing with the conclusion of bureaucrats at a politicized Department of Justice, then how will they prove themselves a match for Zawahiri?
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