!!! CIA,FBI,WTC FACTS.
adrian
March 3rd 1997
Enemies and "Assets"
by William Norman Grigg
The World Trade Center bombers had some curious connections
Following the outbreak of communist revolutions across Europe in 1848,
Frederic Bastiat, a French champion of free enterprise, took note of
the fact that many of his government's supposedly anti-communist
policies were actually creating communist-style controls over the
economic and political life of his country. As a member of the French
Assembly, Bastiat chided his government for "concocting the antidote
and the poison in the same laboratory" and for devoting "half of its
resources to destroying the evil it has done with the other half."
Our own federal government's ever-escalating "war" on terrorism
displays similar dynamics. The same Clinton Administration that urges
the expansion of federal power -- and the contraction of personal
liberties -- in the struggle against terrorism has eagerly courted the
Syrian terror regime and has played host to representatives of the
IRA, the Russian mafia, the Red Chinese arms-smuggling industry, and
Muslim terrorist factions. This same bizarre duality is apparent in
the Administration's domestic "anti- terrorism" initiatives. As the
November 11th Washington Post reported, "Since the Oklahoma City
bombing [of] April 19, 1995, the FBI, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and
Firearms (ATF), and other federal law enforcement agencies have
embarked on a preemptive strategy to uncover domestic terrorist
conspiracies while they are in the planning stages. This strategy
requires aggressive and potentially controversial tactics as
investigators infiltrate groups and bring charges on the basis of
allegedly criminal plans that are conceived but not carried out."
Federal Entrapment
The new federal anti-terrorism strategy has resulted in the arrest,
prosecution, and (in some cases) conviction of militia members on
conspiracy charges in Georgia, Arizona, Washington, and West Virginia.
However, it has also produced convincing evidence that the federal
informants have acted as agents provocateurs, urging militia members
to undertake potentially criminal actions.
In the case of the "Viper Team" in Phoenix, for example, it was a
"confidential informant" who infiltrated the militia and suggested
that the group rob banks in order to finance its activities. (For more
on the "Viper" case, see page 19.) In the Georgia militia case,
federal informants who had infiltrated the militia urged its leaders
to manufacture pipe bombs; after failing to win support for their
idea, the informants planted pipe-bomb components on property
belonging to the militia group's leaders.
In the more recent case of the Mountaineer Militia in West Virginia,
an FBI informant -- posing as an arms dealer -- asked militia leader
Floyd Ray Looker to sell him plans of a local FBI computer facility
for $50,000. Although U.S. Attorney William D. Wilmoth has
acknowledged that "the facility itself was never in any direct danger"
from the Mountaineer Militia, seven members of the group were arrested
on terrorism charges on October 11th in what the Washington Post
called an "unprecedented use of a new anti-terrorism law...." None of
the militias targeted for "preemptive" federal action has a track
record of violence. What would happen if federal agents were to use
the same tactics on an authentic terrorist cell -- one composed of
genuinely ruthless people possessing both the will and the means to
carry out lethal acts of political violence?
Bungling or Abetting?
One answer was provided by the February 26, 1993 bombing of the World
Trade Center in New York City, an attack that killed six Americans,
wounded more than a thousand others, inflicted $500 million in damage,
and dispelled America's sense of immunity to international terrorism.
The leaders of the radical Islamic network responsible for the
bombing, who later planned a campaign of urban terrorism which could
have claimed the lives of thousands of Americans, were given financial
aid and training by the CIA. Furthermore, at several critical
junctures where the conspiracy could have been exposed and its leaders
arrested, federal law enforcement either ignored that network or
actually provided crucial help to it.
The central figure of that terrorist network was Sheik Omar
Abdel-Rahman, the "spiritual leader" of the Egyptian extremist group
Gama al-Islamiya. In January 1996, Sheik Omar was convicted of
"seditious conspiracy" and sentenced to life in prison for his part in
planning the bombing; his nine co-conspirators were handed sentences
ranging from 25 years to life. The sheik's defense team attempted to
depict the prosecution of their client as an instance of anti-Muslim
persecution. However, Sheik Omar's religious vocation, unlike that of
the vast majority of devout, peaceful Muslims, was steeped in violence
and hatred.
Sheik Omar and his followers were arrested in June 1993, six months
after the Trade Center bombing; at the time of the arrest, some of the
plotters were literally mixing chemicals to manufacture bombs.
Following the January 1996 convictions of Sheik Omar and his
disciples, Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew C. McCarthy declared, "There
is a support system for terrorism in the United States whose designer
is Sheik Abdel-Rahman.... [It would be] naive to think it has been
destroyed." According to Two Seconds Under the World, an account of
the Trade Center bombing by New York Newsday's Pulitzer Prize-winning
investigative team of Jim Dwyer, David Kocieniewski, Deidre Murphy,
and Peg Tyre, Sheik Omar's followers have established cells in Texas,
California, Illinois, and Michigan. Although Sheik Omar may have been
the "designer" of this terrorist network, its "support system," as we
will see, included the CIA, the U.S. Army, and -- arguably -- federal
law enforcement agencies.
CIA Connection
Sheik Omar, who was accused of complicity in the plot to assassinate
Anwar Sadat, has devoted his adult life to the overthrow of the
secular Egyptian government and the propagation of his variety of
Islam. In 1987, the U.S. State Department placed Sheik Omar's name on
its "watch list" of non-Americans believed to be involved in
terrorism. However, this did not prevent the CIA from enlisting Sheik
Omar as a "valuable asset" in covert operations involving the Afghan
mujahideen during the 1980s.
Between 1980 and 1989, the CIA pumped more than $3 billion in aid into
the mujahideen, the Islamic resistance to the Soviet occupation of
Afghanistan. The mujahideen's rank and file was composed of brave and
motivated men who displayed astonishing courage in their effort to
evict the Soviets from Afghanistan. However, as veteran foreign
correspondent Kurt Lohbeck documented in his study Holy War, Unholy
Victory: Eyewitness to the CIA's Secret War in Afghanistan, the CIA
invested most of its aid in the least combat-worthy and most
anti-American factions of the mujahideen. Among the CIA's dubious
beneficiaries was Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman.
Writing in the May 1996 issue of The Atlantic Monthly, foreign
correspondent Mary Anne Weaver pointed out that it was in Peshawar,
Pakistan in the late 1980s that Sheik Omar "became involved with U.S.
and Pakistani intelligence officials who were orchestrating the war"
against the Soviets, and that the "sixty or so CIA and Special Forces
officers based there considered him a 'valuable asset' ... and
overlooked his anti-Western message and incitement to holy war because
they wanted him to help unify the mujahideen groups."
Sheik Omar and his associates created an institution in Peshawar,
Pakistan called the Service Office, which recruited Muslims from
around the world as volunteers to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan.
However, as Weaver pointed out, "Money flowed into the Service Office
from the Muslim Brotherhood" -- one of the most radical and violently
anti-Western factions of the Pan-Islamic movement. Along with hundreds
of millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia, Muslim Brotherhood money was
distributed through branches of the Service Office in Europe and the
United States, thereby providing a ready slush fund for terrorists and
anti-Western agitators. While the Service Office sluiced money into
the coffers of terrorists, Sheik Omar preached his gospel of jihad in
Pakistan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, and in Islamic population centers
in Turkey, Germany, England, and even the United States -- despite his
listing on the State Department's "watch list." Sheik Omar's CIA-aided
access to the United States continued after the Soviets vacated
Afghanistan in 1989.
On May 10, 1990, Sheik Omar was granted a one-year visa from a CIA
agent posing as an official at the U.S. Consulate in Khartoum, Sudan,
and he arrived in New York in July 1990. In November of the same year
Sheik Omar's visa was revoked, and the State Department advised the
Immigration and Naturalization Service to be on the lookout for him.
So attentive was the INS to this advisory that it granted Sheik Omar a
green card just five months later.
Terrorist Network
The American-based radicals who sponsored Sheik Omar's 1990 trip to
the U.S. included Mahmud Abouhalima, a member of the Muslim
Brotherhood and a CIA-supported veteran of the Afghan campaign.
Abouhalima had networked with radical Muslims and American Black
Panthers since the mid- 1980s. Also helping to make arrangements for
the sheik's visit was Mustafa Shalabi, the Brooklyn-based director of
Alkifah, a support fund for mujahideen fighters. Another leader of
Sheik Omar's American network was El Sayyid Nosair, an Egyptian
expatriate who was later acquitted of the 1990 murder of Jewish
militant Rabbi Meir Kahane.
Abouhalima and Nosair were eventually among those convicted of
conspiring with Sheik Omar to wage urban warfare in the United States,
and in that campaign they made use of skills imparted to them by the
CIA and the U.S. military. During the conspiracy trial, attorneys for
Sheik Omar and his disciples introduced a file documenting that in
1989, the U.S. Army had sent Special Forces Sergeant Ali A. Mo hammed
to Jersey City to provide training for mujahideen recruits, including
Abouhalima and Nosair. But even as Abouhalima and Nosair underwent
that training, according to Two Seconds Under the World, the FBI had
them under surveillance as possible terrorists. Although Sheik Omar
provided "spiritual" guidance to his network, the Abu Nidal-trained
Nosair was the conspiracy's field commander, and Abouhalima was his
most important lieutenant.
The FBI engaged in a curiously timed fit of incompetence when the
opportunity arose for a preemptive strike against Sheik Omar's
network. Following the shooting of Rabbi Meir Kahane in November 1990,
the FBI seized and impounded 49 boxes of documents from Nosair's New
Jersey apartment; the cache included bomb-making instructions, a hit
list of public figures (including Kahane), paramilitary training
materials, detailed pictures of famous buildings (including the World
Trade Center), and sermons by Sheik Omar urging his followers to
"destroy the edifices of capitalism."
But the FBI made none of the evidence available to New York City
Assistant District Attorney William Greenbaum, who prosecuted the
case. In fact, the FBI ignored the material until after the Trade
Center bombing in 1993. Veteran radical lawyer William Kunstler
offered his services as Nosair's defense attorney. Kunstler deployed
his entire arsenal of sophistries, and presiding Judge William
Schlesinger of the New York State Supreme Court granted Kunstler
extraordinary procedural latitude (including the privilege of
dismissing white potential jurors on racial grounds). Schlesinger's
penchant for Kunstler was so pronounced that he invited the notorious
Marxist barrister to a Christmas party in his chambers during jury
deliberations.
Hamstrung by the FBI's decision to withhold the evidence collected at
Nosair's apartment, and stymied by Judge Schlesinger's visible
partiality toward the defense, prosecutor Greenbaum was unable to
secure a murder conviction against Nosair. When the verdict was
announced on December 20, 1991, Kunstler was carried triumphantly away
from the courtroom on the burly shoulders of Muslim Brotherhood
terrorist Mahmud Abouhalima. Nosair, who was convicted on lesser
firearms-related charges, began a seven-year term in Attica prison,
where he continued to direct the affairs of Sheik Omar's terrorist
network.
The violence pulsating through Sheik Omar's network was not directed
solely at predictable enemies like Kahane. By March 1991, Sheik Omar
and his associates had seized control of the Alkifah fund, which had
by then swollen to an estimated $2 million -- and Shalabi, the fund's
manager, was found murdered shortly after a confrontation with three
of Sheik Omar's disciples. The CIA-originated fund helped finance
Nosair's trial defense. It was also used to procure many of the bomb
components that were assembled under the expert supervision of Afghan
terrorist Ramzi Yousef, who was imported by the Sheik Omar network in
late 1992.
FBI Foreknowledge
Yousef was convicted on September 8, 1996 of plotting a 48-hour
campaign of bombings against American commercial flights over the
Pacific Ocean. The campaign would have targeted a total of 12
jetliners and as many as 4,000 passengers. Yousef is also accused of
carrying out the December 11, 1994 bombing of a Philippine jetliner
that killed a Japanese passenger, as well as plotting to assassinate
Pope John Paul II. Yousef met Abouhalima in Afghanistan in 1988, and
it was Abouhalima who brought the Afghan terrorist to the United
States in September 1992 on behalf of Sheik Omar's network.
Shortly after Yousef's arrival, the FBI subpoenaed two dozen of Sheik
Omar's followers and questioned them about the sheik, Nosair, and
Abouhalima. However, no arrests were made, no grand jury investigation
was launched, and the FBI chose to downgrade its scrutiny of Omar's
network -- just as plans were being finalized for the Trade Center
bombing. This curious decision is even more peculiar in light of the
fact that the FBI had obtained intelligence on the network's
capabilities and intentions from Emad A. Salem, a former Egyptian Army
officer and FBI informant who served as Omar's security guard.
Salem's relationship with the FBI was turbulent, and there were
suggestions of impropriety in his personal contacts with FBI handler
Nancy Floyd. However, he had repeatedly warned the FBI that Nosair was
running a terrorist ring out of his prison cell, and he had supplied
detailed descriptions of the Sheik Omar network's plans. But the FBI
was doubtful of Salem's reliability and severed its contacts with him
seven months before the bombing.
In the aftermath of the Trade Center bombing, the FBI renewed its
association with Salem, paying him a reported $1 million to infiltrate
Sheik Omar's group once again. Salem secretly recorded many of his
conversations with law enforcement agents, including exchanges in
which it was revealed that the FBI had detailed prior knowledge of the
Trade Center bomb plot. According to Salem, the FBI had planned to
sabotage the Trade Center bomb by replacing the explosive components
with an inert powder. The October 28, 1993 New York Times reported
that in one conversation Salem recalled assurances from an FBI
supervisor that the agency's plan called for "building the bomb with a
phony powder and grabbing the people who [were] involved in [the
plot]." However, the supervisor, in Salem's words, "messed it up."
Salem recalled that when he expressed a desire to lodge a protest with
FBI headquarters, he was told by special agent John Anticev that "the
New York people [wouldn't] like the things out of the New York office
to go to Washington, DC." Unappeased, Salem rebuked Anticev: "... you
saw this bomb went off and you ... know that we could avoid that....
You get paid, guys, to prevent problems like this from happening."
Perhaps the most remarkable illustration of the depth of the FBI's
knowledge of the Sheik Omar network came after the World Trade Center
bombing, when the Bureau employed Salem's services as an informant
once again. As the Wall Street Journal reported, from March to June
1993 Salem "helped organize the 'battle plan' that the government
alleged included plots to bomb the United Nations and FBI buildings in
New York, and the Holland and Lincoln tunnels beneath the Hudson
River. Working with a charismatic Sudanese man named Siddig Ali, a
follower of Sheik Omar, Mr. Salem recruited seven local Muslims to
scout targets, plan tactics and obtain chemicals and electrical parts
for bombs...." By the time the FBI closed in on the plotters on June
23rd, it had literally hours of videotapes documenting the conspiracy
in intimate detail -- including footage of conspirators mixing
fertilizer and diesel fuel to build a bomb.
Predictably, defense attorneys for Sheik Omar and his followers
insisted that Salem's actions amounted to entrapment. While the court
rejected this defense, the FBI's proficiency at using Salem to
assemble a radical Muslim terrorist cell is unsettling, to say the
least. Clearly, Salem knew his way around the sheik's network, and was
well-versed in the techniques of terrorism; just as clearly, the FBI
knew how to make use of Salem's abilities. It is difficult to believe
that the FBI was incapable of cracking down preemptively on the
sheik's followers before the Trade Center bombing.
Poison and Antidote
However, the fact that Sheik Omar's network consistently benefited
from the actions of the federal government -- from direct CIA aid to
instances of peculiar neglect by the FBI -- suggests that the cabal
should be considered as much a creature of our federal government as
it was a creation of a particular strain of Muslim extremism.
Furthermore, the influence and activities of Sheik Omar's
co-conspirators are not limited to the United States.
As Mary Anne Weaver pointed out in The Atlantic Monthly, "the CIA
helped to train and fund what eventually became an international
network of highly disciplined and effective Islamic militants -- and a
new breed of terrorists as well." According to Weaver, the CIA's
handiwork is on display across the Middle East -- in the December 1995
car bomb attack in a crowded market in Peshawar, Pakistan that killed
36 people and wounded 120 more, and also in two nearly identical car
bombings in November 1995 that targeted U.S. military advisers in
Saudi Arabia and the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan. The same
network could also be considered a prime suspect in last summer's
unsolved terrorist attack on U.S. troops in Daharan, Saudi Arabia,
terrorist bombings in Algeria and the Philippines, and perhaps even
the downing of TWA Flight 800. Weaver quoted a former U.S. diplomat
who told her, "The common element in all these attacks -- whether in
Cairo or Riyadh, Islamabad or Algiers, Europe or New York -- is
today's equivalent of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade" -- namely, a
CIA-trained terrorist network.
Some intelligence analysts describe the emergence of that network as
an example of "blowback" -- unintended negative fallout from a covert
operation. However, a more accurate analysis might make use of
Frederic Bastiat's metaphor of government creating the poison and the
antidote in the same laboratory. The same power elite that created the
"poison" of the post-Afghanistan terrorist network stands poised with
an equally dreadful "antidote." As Richard Haass, director of national
security programs at the influential Council on Foreign Relations,
asserted in a Washington Post op-ed column, the war against terrorism
will require "a willingness to compromise some of our civil liberties,
including accepting more frequent phone taps and surveillance. Those
who would resist paying such a price should keep in mind that
terrorism could well get worse in coming years."
In such fashion, American citizens will pay the price for evils
nurtured by a government that poses as their protector.
.