'9.11' SURPRISE: NEW PLOT DETAILS EMERGE WHICH SHOW THAT THE 9/11
ATTACKS WERE DESIGNED TO WEAKEN SUPPORT OF ISRAEL BY U.S POLICYMAKERS / KHALID SHAIKH MOHAMMED – NOT OSAMA BIN LADEN – CAME UP WITH THE IDEA OF HIJACKING PLANES SIX YEARS PRIOR TO 9/11 / BIN LADEN FINANCIALLY SUPPORTED HIS 9/11 PLOT –
By Terry McDermott,
L. A. Times Staff Writer,
6:00 AM PDT, Friday, July 23, 2004

FLASH: 9/11 Commission Report finally lays to rest the false claim of the Bush neocons that there was a tie between the 9/11 hijackers and Hussein's government and the hijackings being state sponsored by Iraq or any other country.

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the man who conceived and directed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, was motivated by his strong disagreement with AMERICAN SUPPORT OF ISRAEL, according to the final report of the Sept. 11 commission.

Mohammed conceived the initial outline of the attack SIX YEARS BEFORE ITS EXECUTION and brought the plan to al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden because he thought he did not have the resources to carry it out on his own.

The Sept. 11 report, released Thursday, largely reaffirms what has been known about the basic overview of the attacks -- much of it first revealed by the commission's interim reports -- and contains no revelations about the plot to attack the World Trade Center and government buildings in and around Washington. But it ADDS FRESH DETAILS about the people who conceived and executed it.

The report contains the fullest accounting of Mohammed's overarching role from original conception to supervision of details. Bin Laden, too, was fully involved, selecting all or most of the participants, ordering the substance and the location of their training, and contributing to the timing of the attacks and the selection of targets, the report says.

The report makes a strong case that al-Qaida accomplished the attacks WITHOUT any hint of STATE SPONSORSHIP. The report also appears to LAY TO REST THE NOTION -- long alluded to by administration officials including Vice President Dick Cheney -- that hijacker Mohamed Atta traveled to the Czech Republic to meet an Iraqi intelligence operative in the spring of 2001. In addition to repeating evidence that Atta was in the United States at the time, the report revealed that the Iraqi agent was not in Prague either when the meeting was alleged to have occurred.

Much of the report's detail comes from interrogations of al-Qaida operatives in U.S. custody, including Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh. Some of that information is contradictory; much of it is difficult to corroborate. One CIA analysis cited in the report, for example, is titled "Khalid Shaykh Muhammed's Threat Reporting -- Precious Truths, Surrounded by a Bodyguard of Lies."

The report -- in particular, its depiction of Mohammed's role -- argues against the view that al-Qaida was a huge, sophisticated organization with boundless resources and skills. The report instead depicts it as a relatively small core of men, headed by bin Laden, at the center of a large web of sometimes competing and sometimes cooperative smaller organizations and individuals throughout the world.

This reinforces an early view of al-Qaida by a former State Department analyst, Stephen P. Cohen, who characterized it as the Ford Foundation of terrorism -- an organization that, at least in its formative period, sat back and listened to proposals from individuals and organizations for terrorist attacks.

One organization with which al-Qaida came to work closely was Jemaah Islamiah, a terrorist group in southeast Asia. Al-Qaida provided funding and training for the group and in return was given access to its membership and logistical bases. Among the results of that cooperation was an ultimately unsuccessful research program into the development of anthrax weapons conducted by bin Laden's second in command, Ayman Zawahiri, and an American-educated Jemaah Islamiah chemical engineer.

Initially, Mohammed was among those freelance petitioners. Mohammed was born in Kuwait to parents who had emigrated from Baluchistan, a sprawling, rugged region that lies across the intersection of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan. He came to the United States for college, earning an engineering degree from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in 1986.

After he was captured in Pakistan in early 2003, he told his interrogators that although he had developed no special complaint about America in his years here, he felt strongly that U.S. support of Israel was wrong and could be corrected by attacking the United States. Soon after graduating, Mohammed joined the Afghan fight against the Soviet Union, working first with Afghan warlord Abdul Rasul Sayyaf and then with Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian intellectual who was bin Laden's mentor. Mohammed first met bin Laden during the Afghan war but did not have a special relationship with him, the report said.

After the war, Mohammed was inspired by the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. That mission was led by Mohammed's nephew, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, with whom Mohammed later allied in a plan to blow up as many as a dozen American airliners over the Pacific Ocean. The failure of that plan led Mohammed, who had been working as a mechanical engineer in a government ministry of the Persian Gulf sheikdom of Qatar, to take refuge in Afghanistan in 1996. It was then that he first sought to interest bin Laden in an operation to attack the United States from the air.

In his interrogations, Mohammed styled himself as a sort of freelance entrepreneur of terror, seeking venture capital to fund his plans. In an early version of the Sept. 11 plot, he proposed flying one of the hijacked planes himself, landing it in the United States and, after killing all the men aboard, making a speech urging America to change its Middle Eastern policies. Bin Laden himself eliminated that flourish from the attack plan.

Even after bin Laden approved funding for Mohammed's plot in late 1998 or early 1999, Mohammed resisted invitations to swear loyalty to bin Laden and formally join al-Qaida. He resisted in part, he told interrogators, because he had a prior allegiance to Sayyaf, the Afghan warlord, who was in turn allied with the Northern Alliance, led by Ahmed Shah Massoud.

Bin Laden was allied with the ruling Taliban, which was actively at war with Massoud. In fact, to aid that war, al-Qaida plotted the assassination of Massoud, which occurred just two days before Sept. 11. Mohammed ventudally did join al-Qaida, Mohammed told interrogators. The report offers little new on the men who led the hijackings within the United States -- pilots Mohammed Atta, Ziad Jarrah, Marwan al-Shehhi and Hani Hanjour -- but does provide information on the 15 other hijackers, the men who supplied the muscle to physically take over control of the planes.

All but one of the muscle hijackers were from Saudi Arabia and were chosen from among volunteers at al-Qaida's Afghan camps. When they left Saudi Arabia, almost all told their families or friends that they were going to fight in Chechnya, but many were diverted to Afghanistan because they were warned routes to Chechnya were more difficult to traverse. Men who attended the al-Qaida Afghan camps, who numbered in the thousands, were required to fill out questionnaires on their personal histories, skills and willingness to take part in suicide operations, according to the report.

Once planning for the plot was under way in 1999, al-Qaida operatives checked these questionnaires for potential suicide volunteers. They were singled out for special attention in the camps, often including meetings with bin Laden himself. Mohammed told his interrogators that bin Laden chose the muscle hijackers in these meetings, sometimes making a decision on a potential hijacker in as little as 10 minutes. Bin Laden's seeming seat-of-the-pants decision-making was in keeping with his organization's lack of sophistication.

The report describes how Mohammed trained recruits on how to operate in the United States by teaching them basic English phrases and showing them how to use the Yellow Pages. He also screened Hollywood movies that featured aircraft hijackings and bought flight simulation software games for them to practice on.
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