A rchive Date
[ 22-09-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/NewsStand/TorontoSun/News/2003/09/22/199100.html
Road to 9/11
Interrogation reports show attacks mastermind began plotting with Osama in '96
By JOHN SOLOMON, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Mon, September 22, 2003
WASHINGTON - Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, has told U.S. interrogators he first discussed the plot with Osama bin Laden in 1996, according to interrogation reports reviewed by The Associated Press. Mohammed also divulged that the hijacking plan called for as many as 22 terrorists and four planes in a first wave, followed by a second wave of suicide hijackings that were to be aided possibly by al-Qaida allies in southeast Asia.
Over time, bin Laden scrapped various parts of the Sept. 11 plan, including attacks on both coasts and hijacking or bombing some planes in East Asia, Mohammed is quoted as saying in reports that shed new light on the plot of Sept. 11, 2001.
Mohammed claims he did not arrange for anyone on U.S. soil to assist hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi when they arrived in California. The men were on the plane that was flown into the Pentagon.
INTERNET CHATS
Mohammed portrays those two hijackers as central to the plot, and even more important than Mohammed Atta, initially identified as the likely hijack ringleader. Mohammed said he communicated with al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar while they were in the U.S. by using Internet chat software.
Mohammed said al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were among the four original operatives bin Laden assigned to him for the plot, a significant revelation because those were the only two hijackers whom U.S. authorities were frantically seeking for terrorist ties in the final days before Sept. 11.
U.S. authorities are still investigating the statements Mohammed has made in interrogations. But they have been able to corroborate with other captives much of his account of the Sept. 11 planning.
Mohammed said the hijacking teams were originally made up of members from different countries but, in the final stages, bin Laden chose instead to use a large group of young Saudi men for the hijacking teams.
As Sept. 11 neared, Mohammed learned "there was a large group of Saudi operatives that would be available to participate as the muscle in the plot to hijack planes" in the U.S., one report says Mohammed told his captors.
Saudi Arabia was bin Laden's home, though it revoked his citizenship in the 1990s, and he reviled its alliance with the U.S. Saudis have suggested for months that bin Laden has been trying to fracture the alliance between the U.S. and their kingdom.
U.S. intelligence has suggested Saudis were chosen because there were large numbers willing to follow bin Laden and they could more easily get into the U.S. because of the countries' friendly relations.
Mohammed was captured in a March 1 raid by Pakistani forces and CIA operatives in Rawalpindi.
He is being interrogated by the CIA at an undisclosed location.
The reports make dramatically clear that Mohammed and al-Qaida were still actively looking to strike U.S., western and Israeli targets across the world as of this year.
Mohammed told interrogators he'd worked in 1994 and '95 in the Philippines with Ramzi Yousef, Abdul Hakim Murad and Wali Khan Amin Shah on the foiled Bojinka plot to blow up 12 western airliners simultaneously in Asia.
After Yousef and Murad were captured, foiling the plot in its final stages, Mohammed began to devise a new plot that focused on hijackings on U.S. soil.
In 1996, he went to meet bin Laden to persuade the al-Qaida leader "to give him money and operatives so he could hijack 10 planes in the United States and fly them into targets," one of the interrogation reports state.
Mohammed told interrogators his initial thought was to pick five targets on each coast, but bin Laden was not convinced such a plan was practical, the reports stated.
Mohammed said bin Laden offered four operatives to begin with - al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi as well as two Yemenis.
"All four operatives only knew that they had volunteered for a martyrdom operation involving planes," one report stated.
Mohammed said the first major change to the plans occurred in 1999 when the two Yemeni operatives could not get U.S. visas. Bin Laden then offered him additional operatives.
Mohammed said through the various iterations of the plot, he considered using a scaled-down version of the Bojinka plan that would have bombed commercial airliners.
The plot, he said, eventually evolved into hijacking a few planes in the U.S. and East Asia and either having them explode or crash into targets simultaneously, the reports state.
KEY MEETING
By 1999, the four original operatives picked for the plot travelled to Afghanistan to train at one of bin Laden's camps. The focus, Mohammed said, was on specialized commando training, not piloting jets.
A key event in the plot, Mohammed told his interrogators, was a meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in January 2000, that included al-Mihdhar, al-Hazmi and other al-Qaida. The CIA learned of the meeting and had it monitored by Malaysian security, but it did not realize the significance of the two eventual hijackers until just before the attacks.
The interrogation reports state bin Laden further trimmed Mohammed's plans in spring 2000 when he cancelled the idea for hijackings in East Asia, thus narrowing it to the U.S.
Mohammed said around that time he reached out to an al-Qaida-linked group in southeast Asia known as Jemaah Islamiyah. He began "recruiting JI operatives for inclusion in the hijacking plot as part of his second wave of hijacking attacks to occur after Sept. 11," one summary said.
One of those who received training in Malaysia before coming to the U.S. was Zacarias Moussaoui, the Frenchman accused of conspiring with the Sept. 11 attacks. Moussaoui has denied being part of the Sept. 11 plot.
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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