9-11 Files
edited by Paul Grignon
From my e-mailConfused? Having difficulty telling the good guys from the bad guys? Use this handy guide to differences between Terrorists and the U.S. Government:
TERRORISTS: Supposed leader is the spoiled son of a powerful politician, from extremely wealthy oil family
US GOVERNMENT: Supposed leader is the spoiled son of a powerful politician, from extremely wealthy oil family
TERRORISTS: Leader has declared a holy war ('Jihad') against his 'enemies'; believes any nation not with him is against him; believes god is on his side, and that any means are justified.
US GOVERNMENT: Leader has declared a holy war ('Crusade') against his 'enemies'; believes any nation not with him is against him; believes god is on his side, and that any means are justified.
TERRORISTS: Supported by extreme fundamentalist religious leaders who preach hatred, intolerance, subjugation of women, and persecution of non-believers
US GOVERNMENT: Supported by extreme fundamentalist religious leaders who preach hatred, intolerance, subjugation of women, and persecution of non-believers
TERRORISTS: Leadership was not elected by a majority of the people in a free and fair democratic election
US GOVERNMENT: Leadership was not elected by a majority of the people in a free and fair democratic election
TERRORISTS: Kills thousands of innocent civilians, some of them children, in cold blooded bombings
US GOVERNMENT: Kills thousands of innocent civilians, some of them children, in cold blooded bombings
TERRORISTS: Operates through clandestine organization (al Qaeda) with agents in many countries; uses bombing, assassination, other terrorist tactics
US GOVERNMENT: Operates through clandestine organization (CIA) with agents in many countries; uses bombing, assassination, other terrorist tactics
TERRORISTS: Supposed leader has extensive financial ties to Supposed leader of US GOVERNMENT
US GOVERNMENT: Supposed leader has extensive financial ties to Supposed leader of TERRORIST
TERRORISTS: Supposed leader invested heavily in US bio-chemical companies
US GOVERNMENT: Supposed leader invested heavily in US bio-chemical companies
TERRORISTS: Using war as pretext to clamp down on dissent and undermine civil liberties
US GOVERNMENT: Using war as pretext to clamp down on dissent and undermine civil liberties
Source Bill Moyer Speaks OutAs the country continues to reel from the attacks of September 11, evil and greed seems to have gained the upper hand under the smokescreen of patriotism. Decades of gains in social progress are threatened, fear is pervasive, and hypocrisy has taken center stage.
Many of us have been torn, concerned about terrorism and have giving our government the benefit of the doubt, as it struggled to responded to our biggest crisis in 60 years. But the opportunity for smart and humane leadership is being squandered.
It is time to draw the line and say not in our name. If we are not vigilant, democracy will be the victim, and many millions more people at home and across the globe will suffer. The biggest crisis of our lifetimes requires the largest organizing effort we have ever contemplated. It's time to push aside our confusion and pain, and rally the tens of millions of us who want a better and safer world, not one made more unstable and oppressive, not one turned into a profit opportunity for giant corporations and the most wealthy in the country.
At times like this, we look to leaders to step up and articulate in clear, fundamental ways what is happening and what is at stake. Call them our Paul Reveres warning of the dangers ahead, or our Tom Paines, insisting that dissent is American, or our Sojourner Truths, telling us what it takes to be free, or our Martin Luther Kings, speaking truth to power.
Many men and women are saying and writing extraordinary things at this crucial moment in history. Increasingly, citizens of America and the world are listening. One of those leaders is Bill Moyers, who has a special talent to frame the essence of powerful truths and have millions of Americans listen carefully.
On October 16, 2001 in Brainerd, Minnesota Bill Moyers gave the keynote address to the Environmental Grantmakers Association. In that speech he captured the moment at hand. Here are several excerpts from that lengthy and extraordinary presentation.
My friend, Thomas Hearne, the president of Wake Forest University, reminded me recently that while the clock and the calendar make it seem as if our lives unfold hour by hour, day by day, our passage is marked by events -- of celebration and crisis. We share those in common. They create the memories which make of us a history, and make of us a people, a nation.
Pearl Harbor was that event for my parents' generation. It changed their world, and it changed them. They never forgot the moment when the news reached them. For my generation it was the assassinations of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, the dogs and fire hoses in Alabama. Those events broke our hearts. We healed, but scars remain.
For this generation, that moment will be September 11, 2001 -- the worst act of terrorism in our nation's history. It has changed the country. It has changed us.
That's what terrorists intend. Terrorists don't want to own our land, wealth, monuments, buildings, fields, or streams. They're not after tangible property. Sure, they aim to annihilate the targets they strike. But their real goal is to get inside our heads, our psyche, and to deprive us -- the survivors -- of peace of mind, of trust, of faith; they aim to prevent us from believing again in a world of mercy, justice, and love, or working to bring that better world to pass.
We have also been reminded that despite years of scandals and political corruption, despite the stream of stories of personal greed and pirates in Guccis scamming the treasury, despite the retreat from the public sphere and the turn toward private privilege, despite squalor for the poor and gated communities for the rich, we have been reminded that the great mass of Americans have not yet given up on the idea of "We, the People." And they have refused to accept the notion, promoted so diligently by our friends at the Heritage Foundation and by Grover Norquist and his right-wing ilk, that government -- the public service -- should be shrunk to a size where they can drown it in the bathtub (that's what Norquist said is their goal) ...
It didn't take long for the war time opportunists -- the mercenaries of Washington, the lobbyists, lawyers, and political fundraisers -- to crawl out of their offices on K street determined to grab what they can for their clients. While in New York we are still attending memorial services, while everywhere Americans' cheeks are still stained with tears, while the President calls for patriotism, prayers and piety, the predators of Washington are up to their old tricks in the pursuit of private plunder at public expense ...
This is their game: they are counting on your patriotism to distract you from their plunder. They are counting on you to be standing at attention with your hand over your heart, pledging allegiance to the flag, while they pick your pocket. If, in the name of the war on terrorism, President Bush hands the state over to the energy industry, it's every patriot's duty to join the loyal opposition.
The playwright Tony Kushner wrote more than a decade ago, "There are moments in history when the fabric of everyday life unravels, and there is this unstable dynamism that allows for incredible social change in short periods of time. People and the world they're living in can be utterly transformed, either for the good or the bad, or some mixture of the two."
He's right. This could go either way.
Let's face it: they present citizens with no options but to climb back in the ring. We are in what educators call "a teachable moment." And we'll lose it if we roll over and shut up. What's at stake is democracy. Democracy wasn't cancelled on the 11th of September, but democracy won't survive if citizens turn into lemmings.
I know you see the magnitude of the challenge. I know you see what we're up against. I know you get it -- the work that we must do. It's why you mustn't lose heart.
Your adversaries will call you unpatriotic for speaking the truth when conformity reigns. Ideologues will smear you for challenging the official view of reality. Mainstream media will ignore you, and those gasbags on cable TV and the radio talk shows will ridicule and vilify you. But I urge you to hold to these words: "In the course of fighting the present fire, we must not abandon our efforts to create fire-resistant structures of the future."
Those words were written by my friend Randy Kehler more than ten years ago, as America geared up to fight the Gulf War. They ring as true today. Those fire-resistant structures must include an electoral system that is no longer dominated by big money, where the voices and problems of average people are attended on a fair and equal basis. They must include an energy system that is more sustainable, and less dangerous. And they must include a media that takes its responsibility to inform us as seriously as its interest in entertaining us.
Don Hazen is the executive editor of AlterNet.org. © 2001 Independent Media Institute.
Source “Oh Lucy! – You Gotta Lotta ‘Splainin To Do” IF CIA AND THE GOVERNMENT WEREN’T INVOLVED IN THE SEPTEMBER 11 ATTACKS WHAT WERE THEY DOING? Bin Laden Met with the CIA in July and Walked Away by Michael C. Ruppert [ COPYRIGHT 2001, All Rights Reserved, Michael C. Ruppert and From The Wilderness Publications, www.copvcia.com. May be copied and distributed for non-profit purposes only.]
FTW, November 2, 2001 -- 1200 PST -- On October 31, the French daily Le Figaro dropped a bombshell. While in a Dubai hospital receiving treatment for a chronic kidney infection last July, Osama bin Laden met with a top CIA official - presumably the Chief of Station. The meeting, held in bin Laden's private suite, took place at the American hospital in Dubai at a time when he was a wanted fugitive for the bombings of two U.S. embassies and this year's attack on the U.S.S. Cole. Bin Laden was eligible for execution according to a 2000 intelligence finding issued by President Bill Clinton before leaving office in January. Yet on July 14th he was allowed to leave Dubai on a private jet and there were no Navy fighters waiting to force him down.
In 1985 Oliver North -- the only member of the Reagan-Bush years who doesn't appear to have a hand in the current war - sent the Navy and commandos after terrorists on the cruise ship Achille Lauro. In his 1991 autobiography "Under Fire," while describing terrorist Abu Abbas, North wrote, "I used to wonder: how many dead Americans will it take before we do something?" One could look at the number of Americans Osama bin Laden is alleged to have killed before September 11 and ask the same question.
It gets worse, much worse. A more complete timeline listing crucial events both before and after the September 11th suicide attacks, which have been blamed on bin Laden, establishes CIA foreknowledge of them and strongly suggests that there was criminal complicity on the part of the U.S. government in their execution. It also makes clear that the events which have taken place since September 11th are based upon an agenda that has little to do with the attacks.
One wonders how these events could have been ignored by the major media or treated as isolated incidents. Failing that, how could skilled news agencies avoid being outraged, or at least even just a little suspicious?
1. 1998 and 2000 - Former President George H.W. Bush travels to Saudi Arabia on behalf of the privately owned Carlyle Group, the 11th largest defense contractor in the U.S. While there he meets privately with the Saudi royal family and the bin Laden family. [Source: Wall Street Journal, Sept. 27, 2001. See also FTW, Vol. IV, No 7 -- "The Best Enemies Money Can Buy," - http://www.copvcia.com/members/carlyle.html. ]
2. Feb 13, 2001 -- UPI Terrorism Correspondent Richard Sale -- while covering a trial of bin Laden's Al Q'aeda followers - reports that the National Security Agency has broken bin Laden's encrypted communications. Even if this indicates that bin Laden changed systems in February it does not mesh with the fact that the government insists that the attacks had been planned for years.
3. May 2001 -- Secretary of State Colin Powell gives $43 million in aid to the Taliban regime, purportedly to assist hungry farmers who are starving since the destruction of their opium crop in January on orders of the Taliban regime. [Source: The Los Angeles Times, May 22, 2001].
4. May, 2001 -- Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, a career covert operative and former Navy Seal, travels to India on a publicized tour while CIA Director George Tenet makes a quiet visit to Pakistan to meet with Pakistani leader General Pervez Musharraf. Armitage has long and deep Pakistani intelligence connections and he is the recipient of the highest civil decoration awarded by Pakistan. It would be reasonable to assume that while in Islamabad, Tenet, in what was described as "an unusually long meeting," also met with his Pakistani counterpart, Lt. General Mahmud Ahmad, head of the ISI. [Source The Indian SAPRA news agency, May 22, 2001.]
5. July, 2001 -- Three American officials: Tom Simmons (former U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan), Karl Inderfurth (former Assistant Secretary of State for South Asian affairs) and Lee Coldren (former State Department expert on South Asia), meet with Taliban representatives in Berlin and tell them that the U.S. is planning military strikes against Afghanistan in October. Also present are Russian and German intelligence officers who confirm the threat. [Source: The Guardian, September 22, 2001; the BBC, September 18, 2001.]
6. Summer 2001 - According to a Sept. 26 story in Britain's The Guardian, correspondent David Leigh reported that, "U.S. department of defense official, Dr. Jeffrey Starr, visited Tajikistan in January. The Guardian's Felicity Lawrence established that US Rangers were also training special troops in Kyrgyzstan. There were unconfirmed reports that Tajik and Uzbek special troops were training in Alaska and Montana."
7. Summer 2001 (est.) -- Pakistani ISI Chief General Mahmud (see above) orders an aide to wire transfer $100,000 to Mohammed Atta, who was according to the FBI, the lead terrorist in the suicide hijackings. Mahmud recently resigned after the transfer was disclosed in India and confirmed by the FBI. [Source: The Times of India, October 11, 2001.]
8. June 2001 -- German intelligence, the BND, warns the CIA and Israel that Middle Eastern terrorists are "planning to hijack commercial aircraft to use as weapons to attack important symbols of American and Israeli culture." [Source: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, September 14, 2001.]
9. Summer 2001 -- An Iranian man phones U.S. law enforcement to warn of an imminent attack on the World Trade Center in the week of September 9th. German police confirm the calls but state that the U.S. Secret Service would not reveal any further information. [Source: German news agency "online.ie", September 14, 2001.]
10. August 2001 -- The FBI arrests an Islamic militant linked to bin Laden in Boston. French intelligence sources confirm that the man is a key member of bin Laden's network and the FBI learns that he has been taking flying lessons. At the time of his arrest the man is in possession of technical information on Boeing aircraft and flight manuals. [Source: Reuters, September 13.]
11. Summer 2001 -- Russian intelligence notifies the CIA that 25 terrorist pilots have been specifically training for suicide missions. This is reported in the Russian press and news stories are translated for FTW by a retired CIA officer.
12. July 4-14, 2001 -- Osama bin Laden receives treatments for kidney disease at the American hospital in Dubai and meets with a CIA official who returns to CIA headquarters on July 15th. [Source: Le Figaro, October 31st, 2001.]
13. August 2001 -- Russian President Vladimir Putin orders Russian intelligence to warn the U.S. government "in the strongest possible terms" of imminent attacks on airports and government buildings. [Source: MS-NBC interview with Putin, September 15.]
14. August/September, 2001 -- The Dow Jones Industrial Average drops nearly 900 points in the three weeks prior to the attack. A major stock market crash is imminent.
15. Sept. 3-10, 2001 -- MS-NBC reports on September 16 that a caller to a Cayman Islands radio talk show gave several warnings of an imminent attack on the U.S. by bin Laden in the week prior to 9/11.
16. September 1-10, 2001 -- 25,000 British troops and the largest British Armada since the Falkland Islands War, part of Operation "Essential Harvest," are pre-positioned in Oman, the closest point on the Arabian Peninsula to Pakistan. At the same time two U.S. carrier battle groups arrive on station in the Gulf of Arabia just off the Pakistani coast. Also at the same time, some 17,000 U.S. troops join more than 23,000 NATO troops in Egypt for Operation "Bright Star." All of these forces are in place before the first plane hits the World Trade Center. [Sources: The Guardian, CNN, FOX, The Observer, International Law Professor Francis Boyle, the University of Illinois.]
17. September 6-7, 2001 -- 4,744 put options (a speculation that the stock will go down) are purchased on United Air Lines stock as opposed to only 396 call options (speculation that the stock will go up). This is a dramatic and abnormal increase in sales of put options. Many of the UAL puts are purchased through Deutschebank/AB Brown, a firm managed until 1998 by the current Executive Director of the CIA, A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard. [Source: The Herzliyya International Policy Institute for Counterterrorism, http://www.ict.org.il/, September 21; The New York Times; The Wall Street Journal.]
18. September 10, 2001 - 4,516 put options are purchased on American Airlines as compared to 748 call options. [Source: ICT -- above]
19. September 6-11, 2001 - No other airlines show any similar trading patterns to those experienced by UAL and American. The put option purchases on both airlines were 600% above normal. This at a time when Reuters (September 10) issues a business report stating, "Airline stocks may be poised to take off."
20. September 6-10, 2001 -- Highly abnormal levels of put options are purchased in Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, AXA Re(insurance) which owns 25% of American Airlines, and Munich Re. All of these companies are directly impacted by the September 11 attacks. [Source: ICT, above; FTW, Vol. IV, No.7, October 18, 2001, http://www.copvcia.com/members/oct152001.html. ]
21. It has been documented that the CIA, the Israeli Mossad and many other intelligence agencies monitor stock trading in real time using highly advanced programs reported to be descended from Promis software. This is to alert national intelligence services of just such kinds of attacks. Promis was reported, as recently as June, 2001 to be in Osama bin Laden's possession and, as a result of recent stories by FOX, both the FBI and the Justice Department have confirmed its use for U.S. intelligence gathering through at least this summer. This would confirm that CIA had additional advance warning of imminent attacks. [Sources: The Washington Times, June 15, 2001; FOX News, October 16, 2001; FTW, October 26, 2001, - http://www.copvcia.com/members/magic_carpet.html; FTW, Vol. IV, No.6, Sept. 18, 2001 - http://www.copvcia.com/members/sept1801.html; FTW, Vol. 3, No 7, 9/30/00 - www.copvcia.com/stories/may_2001/052401_promis.html.
22. September 11, 2001 -- Gen Mahmud of the ISI (see above), friend of Mohammed Atta, is visiting Washington on behalf of the Taliban. [Source: MS-NBC, Oct. 7.]
23. September 11, 2001, For 35 minutes, from 8:15 AM until 9:05 AM, with it widely known within the FAA and the military that four planes have been simultaneously hijacked and taken off course, no one notifies the President of the United States. It is not until 9:30 that any Air Force planes are scrambled to intercept, but by then it is too late. This means that the National Command Authority waited for 75 minutes before scrambling aircraft, even though it was known that four simultaneous hijackings had occurred -- an event that has never happened in history. [Sources: CNN, ABC, MS-NBC, The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times.]
24. September 13, 2001 -- China is admitted to the World Trade Organization quickly, after 15 years of unsuccessful attempts. [Source: The New York Times, Sept. 30, 2001.] 25. September 15, 2001 -- The New York Times reports that Mayo Shattuck III has resigned, effective immediately, as head of the Alex (A.B) Brown unit of Deutschebank.
26. September 29, 2001 -- The San Francisco Chronicle reports that $2.5 million in put options on American Airlines and United Airlines are unclaimed. This is likely the result of the suspension in trading on the NYSE after the attacks which gave the Securities and Exchange Commission time to be waiting when the owners showed up to redeem their put options.
27. October 10, 2001 -- The Pakistani newspaper The Frontier Post reports that U.S. Ambassador Wendy Chamberlain has paid a call on the Pakistani oil minister. A previously abandoned Unocal pipeline from Turkmenistan, across Afghanistan, to the Pakistani coast, for the purpose of selling oil and gas to China, is now back on the table "in view of recent geopolitical developments."
28. Mid October, 2001 -- The Dow Jones Industrial Average, after having suffered a precipitous drop has recovered most of its pre-attack losses. Although still weak, and vulnerable to negative earnings reports, a crash has been averted by a massive infusion of government spending on defense programs, subsidies for "affected" industries and planned tax cuts for corporations.
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Now, let's go back to the October 31 story by Le Figaro -- the one that has Osama bin Laden meeting with a CIA officer in Dubai this June.
The story says that, "Throughout his stay in the hospital, Osama Bin Laden received visits from many family members [There goes the story that he's a black sheep!] and Saudi Arabian Emirate personalities of status. During this time the local representative of the CIA was seen by many people taking the elevator and going to bin Laden's room.
"Several days later the CIA officer bragged to his friends about having visited the Saudi millionaire. From authoritative sources, this CIA agent visited CIA headquarters on July 15tth, the day after bin Laden's departure for Quetta...
"According to various Arab diplomatic sources and French intelligence itself, precise information was communicated to the CIA concerning terrorist attacks aimed at American interests in the world, including its own territory."...
"Extremely bothered, they [American intelligence officers in a meeting with French intelligence officers] requested from their French peers exact details about the Algerian activists [connected to bin Laden through Dubai banking institutions], without explaining the exact nature of their inquiry. When asked the question, "What do you fear in the coming days?' the Americans responded with incomprehensible silence."...
"On further investigation, the FBI discovered certain plans that had been put together between the CIA and its "Islamic friends" over the years. The meeting in Dubai is, so it would seem, consistent with 'a certain American policy.'"
Even though Le Figaro reported that it had confirmed with hospital staff that bin Laden had been there as reported, stories printed on November 1 contained quotes from hospital staff that these reports were untrue. On November 1, as reported by the Ananova press agency, the CIA flatly denied that any meeting between any CIA personnel and Osama bin Laden at any time.
In the most ironic twist of all, FTW has learned that Le Figaro is owned by the Carlyle Group, the American defense contractor which employs George Bush Sr., and which had as investors -- until they sold their stake on October 26 - the bin Laden family.
Who do you believe? In coming stories FTW will prove to you that this war, which according to Dick Cheney, may not end in out lifetimes, has been in the works for at least four years.
Mike Ruppert
www.copvcia.com
Michael C. Ruppert
P.O. Box 6061-350, Sherman Oaks, CA 91413
(818)788-8791 * fax(818)981-2847
mruppert@copvcia.com
COPYRIGHT 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001 MICHAEL C. RUPPERT. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
Source U.S. Protects Al-Q'aeda Terrorists in Kosovoby Umberto Pascali
Executive Intelligence Review
1-888-347-3258
While the United States is relentlessly bombing Afghanistan with the official aim of getting Osama bin Laden, one of bin Laden's top collaborators is running a terrorist training camp in an area of Kosovo that is {under U.S. control.} The shocking revelation has been confirmed by multiple sources: Macedonian intelligence agencies, as reported by several Macedonian media, including the leading daily {Dnevnik}; Russian press agencies, including Novosti and ItarTass; and the London {Independent}. This intelligence coheres with Lyndon LaRouche's assessment of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, as a strategic covert operation by an enemy {within} the U.S. and "allied" security services, for geopolitical purposes.
The Russian media quoted, as the source of their detailed revelation, the Russian troops stationed not far from the reported terrorist training camp. This is in itself exceptional, in the sense that there is hardly a precedent of the Russian military in Kosovo reporting events of such gravity to the leading news agencies. These revelations, and the clear position taken by Macedonian intelligence in confirming and expanding them, are now reopening the explosive question of the protection and sponsorship granted to the narco-terrorists by Anglo-American agencies. But this is only a small part of the new strategic geometry opened up by the revelations. The red-hot political point concerns the very basis for the "war against terrorism" launched after the war-like attacks of Sept. 11, and the immediate concentration on bin Laden and Afghanistan as the perpetrators of those attacks--and the threatened extension of the "infinite war" to Syria, Iraq, and so on. If the Anglo-Americans are at "war" with bin Laden's terrorism, why are bin Laden operatives active in Kosovo in an area totally controlled by NATO? Furthermore, in the U.S. zone in Kosovo? Investigations on the bin Laden connection into the Balkans and Kosovo could, according to experts, lead to even more explosive truths in a very short period of time.
- Keep The Clash Going -
On Oct. 16 Novosti reported: "A training camp of Albanian militants functions near the village of Ropotovo, close to Kosovska Kamenica, in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo, which is controlled by the American force, sources from the Russian peacekeeping force in Kosovo reported on [Oct. 16]. According to [the sources], the camp is now training 50 Afghan and Algerian mujahideen, led by Zaiman Zawahiri. He is reportedly the brother of one of the closest associates of international terrorist Osama bin Laden. This camp prepares militants for terrorist formations in Kosovo and Macedonia. Their `instructors' are former [ethnic] Albanian officers who, in 1991-92, deserted from the Yugoslav Army." The {Independent} reported on Oct. 21 that Interpol has linked bin Laden to Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) crime gangs, and that he "supplied one of his top military commanders for an elite KLA unit" in Kosovo. That was only the beginning. The target of the terrorist gangs' deployment into Macedonia: to prevent, by violence, the return of Macedonian refugees into the villages "cleansed" by the KLA during this year; and to take over the water reserve on which the Macedonian capital, Skopje, depends.
Beyond that, these extremists are out to re-ignite the ethnic "Clash of Civilizations" in the Balkans, to crush the escalating resistance of Macedonia--which has been actively playing the LaRouche card in response to its national crisis (see {EIR,} Oct. 19)--and to continue the march of destruction, possibly triggering in the near future, an ethnic upheaval in Greece or Bulgaria.
The fact that such an operation is taking place in the middle of the "war on the Taliban and al-Qaeda"--the fact that NATO's Lord George Robertson, U.S. Ambassador James Pardew, and the European Union's Javier Solana insist, to this very day, that Macedonia has to surrender to the KLA ultimata, including the subversion of the Macedonian Constitution, opens up a dramatic contradiction. That contradiction throws light on the virtual reality the world has been propelled into after the Sept. 11 attacks.
- Who Runs Al-Zawahiri? -
The Macedonian daily {Dnevnik} reported on Oct. 19 that the group led by the brother of Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the closest associate of bin Laden, had crossed the border from Kosovo into Macedonia. Quoting intelligence sources, {Dnevnik} wrote: "The younger brother of the chief of the Balkan headquarters of al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, with around 50 mujahideen, has entered Macedonia and has started building fortifications in the Skopska Crna Gora region. The aim of the terrorist group is to attack the water supply" for Skopje.
The newspaper reported that the gang had been stationed earlier in the training camp near the village of Ropotovo, Kosovo--as Novosti also reported--and received orders to enter the Macedonian town of Matejce. On Oct. 16, a convoy of refugees, who were previously expelled by the KLA, were supposed to visit their destroyed houses.
However, the observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe entered the village first, and reported that at least 50 armed men had communicated they were going to fire on the convoy if they dared to enter Matejce. The OSCE order to the heartbroken refugees was: Go back, we cannot guarantee your security!
But who is Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, whose brother Zaiman is running terrorist camps under NATO protection in the U.S. zone in Kosovo? As the London {Guardian} wrote recently, "Even to say he is bin Laden's right-hand man may understate his importance." He is considered by many to be the real head of what is known as the bin Laden group. "Some analysts believe that in his current role in Afghanistan, al-Zawahiri has taken over control of much of bin Laden's terrorist finances, operations, plans, and resources," wrote the {Guardian}.
His known terrorist career started no later than 1981, with his involvement in the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat; it includes the massacre of 70 people on a tourist bus in 1997 Luxor, Egypt, and the assassination attempt against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak in 1995. Strangely enough, according to January 2000 U.S. Congressional testimony, al-Zawahiri was granted U.S. residence by the Immigration and Naturalization Service--something almost impossible for many legitimate immigrants to obtain. Should we be surprised that one of the centers of operation for al-Zawahiri was London, where one of his closest relatives resided? President Mubarak is believed to have referred to him when, after the Luxor massacre, he stated: "There are people who carried out crimes and who were sentenced [in Egypt] and live on British soil." 30-30
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