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III. Motive: Reason Senators Leahy And Daschle And The US Media Were Targeted a. The Anthrax Letters: "Written In Language You Can Understand" An October 2007 affidavit in support of a search of the home of Ft. Detrick microbiologist Bruce Ivins states:
The Postal Inspector fails to disclose that Bin Laden had decreed that and that Dr. Ivins was merely accurately describing a well- publicized news event. Just before the 1998 embassy bombings, Zawahiri and his Vanguards of Conquest had said that the rendering of the senior EIJ leaders would be answered in "language you can understand." Before the military tribunal, in March 2007, KSM talked of the language of war -- deaths. "Same language you use, I use. That is why the language of any war in the world is killing." Here, the lethal letters were plainly worded. The letter postmarked September 18, 2001 read: "09-11-01 THIS IS NEXT TAKE PENACILIN NOW DEATH TO AMERICA DEATH TO ISRAEL ALLAH IS GREAT." From the streets of Cairo to Tehran to Jakarta, on historic anniversaries (such as Jerusalem Day in Iran, the day the Israeli state was created) protesters have gathered on the streets and shouted "Death to America!" and "Death to Israel!" For the talking heads to profile it as a non-Islamist awkwardly trying to sound muslim is odd. It is in fact the common protest slogan. What surer way to avoid giving away clues than to use common short phrases or short sentences using common words. Egyptians such as Islamic Group leader and soft-spoken accountant, Taha -- and Egyptian Islamic Jihad #2 Shehata and Shawqi Islambuli, brother of Sadat's assassin -- may very well have watched these protesters shouting these very chants while living in Iran after 9/11. The next month, the letter arriving one Friday afternoon at Senator Daschle's office at Room 509 of the Hart Office Building had garnered little notice. It was routed up to the sixth-floor mailroom. No one opened the letter that afternoon. They were all at a talk on the threat of biochemical attacks sent through the mail. On Monday morning, however, an intern found the innocuous looking letter, postmarked October 9, 2001, at the top of a pile of a stack of mail waiting to be opened. The intern made a slight cut and immediately a small amount of powder spilled out on her skirt, shoes and the floor, as well as an intern standing next to her. She froze. The Capitol Hill officers arriving at the scene opened the letter and read it aloud: "09-11-01 YOU CAN NOT STOP US. WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX. YOU DIE NOW. ARE YOU AFRAID? DEATH TO AMERICA. DEATH TO ISRAEL. ALLAH IS GREAT." Among the piles of papers of documents relating to anthrax in a house associated with a Pakistan charity was a drawing of a jet shooting down a balloon. (There were 10 copies each as if a seminar or brainstorming session was being conducted). The words "YOU ARE DEAD, BANG." Thus, although some pundits argued that "YOU DIE NOW" in the anthrax letters does not sound like a militant islamist, the physical evidence relating to Al Qaeda's anthrax planning suggests otherwise. Indeed, "WE HAVE THIS ANTHRAX" was starkly threatening, just like Atta's "We have some planes" to the passengers of AA Flight 11 over the intercom. It turns out that Mohammed Islambouli, the brother of Sadat’s assassin, may be the final key that unlocks the Amerithrax mystery. Islambouli was part of a cell with KSM. KSM took over from the Al Qaeda military head Atef as head of the anthrax weaponization operation. The Al Qaeda spymaster, Egyptian al-Hakaymah, who wrote about Amerithrax announced Islambouli was leading those Egyptian Islamic Group members who have joined Al Qaeda to seek the release of their leader blind sheik Abdel-Rahman. Islambouli was expected to send someone from Saudi Arabia to the US to plan the next attack, as described in the December 4, 1998 Presidential Daily Brief to President Clinton that warned of a planned attack involving airplanes and other means. The 9/11 Commission Report contains a copy of the declassified December 1998 PDB which discusses Islambouli. Everyone focuses on the PDB in the summer of 2001 directed to President Bush while forgetting that there was a PDB with the same substance from December 1998 to President Clinton. We need to learn from history or we are doomed to repeat it. b. Profile Of An Angry Man: Ayman Given the importance of knowing your enemy, it is important to walk in his shoes and come to know the man. It's part of what is known as "Red Teaming." Tenet in his memoirs said that after 9/11, they set up a small team of analysts -- he wanted them not to think just "out of the box." He wanted them to do their thinking from an entirely different zip code. It was called the "red cell." One of their first challenges was to figure out who Ayman would have recruited to send mailed anthrax to US newspapers and Senators. Al-Zawahiri's family has its roots in a small town in Saudi Arabia "where the first battle between Prophet Muhammad and the infidels was fought and won by the Prophet." With 9/11 and the anthrax mailings, he essentially is seeking to recreate the taking of Mecca by a small band. Al-Zawahiri's great grandfather came to the Nile Delta in the 1860s to a city where there is a mosque that still bears his name. His grandfather on his mother's side was president of Cairo University and the Egyptian ambassador to Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. His grandfather was known for being pious and nicknamed "the devout ambassador." Two of Ayman's sisters are on the faculty at Cairo University Medical School. His uncle was the Dean of Cairo's medical school at one point. His father, who passed away in 1995, was Profesor of Pharmacy. Including in-laws, he has 40 doctors of various sorts in his family. Born June 1, 1951, he grew up in Cairo's Al-Ma'adi neighborhood. He graduated cum laude from Cairo University's medical school in 1974 with an MD degree. He received a master's degree in surgery in 1978 and was married the next year to Izzat Ahmad Nuwair who had graduated with a degree in philosophy from Cairo University. His wife and children were killed in a bombing raid in Afghanistan and an obituary mourning their loss appeared in Cairo. He has a younger brother Hassan, an engineer, and had an older brother Muhammad. (Muhammad was in Al Qaeda until being extradited to Egypt pursuant to a death sentence imposed in the "Albanian returnees" case; Hassan was once extradited but released). Without his family, Zawahiri is a fanatic guided only by his faith and his literal interpretation of a book written many years ago that he memorized as a child. Al Qaeda's spymaster al-Hakaymah wrote "The History of the Jihadist Movements in Egypt." When asked why Al-Zawahiri started his group, he explained that Al Zawahiri thought of Sayyid Qutb as a coroner who dissects a body with a high degree of professionalism and talent that suits someone who knows it inside out. In his youth, Zawahiri was influenced by Sayyid Qutb, one of the spiritual leaders of Islamic religious groups. After a two year stay in the United States where Qutb gained a contempt for American culture, the secular writer Qutb returned to his religious roots and wrote extensively supporting violence against Christians and Jews, and even muslim leaders deemed infidel. The introduction of Milestones linked at IANA's Islamway website states: "I have written Milestones for this vanguard, which I consider to be a waiting reality about to be materialized." Zawahiri traces the origin of the modern islamist movement to the hanging of Qutb in 1966. (It was Sayyid Qutb's brother, Muhammad, who supervised the research of the masters thesis of Saudi dissident sheik Safar Al-Hawali. Al-Hawali wrote a book on secularism as part of his master thesis at Umm Al-Qura University.) Ayman and his young colleagues would go to the Al-Kikhya mosque in Abidin area in Cairo and read books from the Salafist library at the mosque, such as books by Ibn Taymiyah, whose religious rulings greatly influenced him. The group felt ashamed by Egypt's defeat in the 1967 war with Israel and attributed the defeat to Egypt's failure to follow Shariah rule. George Mason University microbiology grad student Al-Timimi years later would invoke both Sayyid Qutb and Ibn Taymiyah in an eloquent speech upon his indictment for sedition. Mohammad Qutb spoke alongside GMU microbiology graduate Al-Timimi at the 1993 conference along with the blind sheik's son Mohammad Abdel-Rahman (from Afghanistan). Former EIJ member and current Cairo activist Gamal Sultan was also a speaker. Al-Hawali was Al-Timimi's religious mentor at university. In 1968, his group in high school brought together Nabil al-Bura'i, Ismail Tantawi, Dr. Sayyid Imam and others. They were all in the last year of high school in the Cairo suburb of Maadi. Sayyid Imam, who issued revisions in November 2007, was thought to be more charismatic than Ayman, who tended to be shy. Zawahiri later would form a military wing under the guidance of Al-Qamari, an Egyptian army officer. Zawahiri formed his first cell from students at Maadi High school and other schools. By 1974, the year he graduated from medical school, it had 40 members. Ayman deemed infiltrating the military the most effective and least costly means of seizing power. Known for their extreme secrecy, the group avoided growing beards like most Islamists and were thus known as "the shaven beards." Ayman's friend Kamal Habib, who later would contribute to the quarterly journal of the Ann Arbor-based Islamic Assembly of North America, explained to CNN through a translator: "We thought at the time that the goal to apply the laws of Islam can't be achieved with ways other than violence." It would remain Zawahiri's tactic to recruit members of the Egyptian army because of their training and expertise. After graduating medical school in 1974, he served three years as a surgeon in the Egyptian Army, at a base outside Cairo, before establishing a clinic at the same duplex he shared with his parents. He got his masters in surgery in 1978 based on book learning, according to his mentor Sayyid Imam. At a Saudi clinic, Sayyid Imam reports that he needed to cover for his friend and colleague's lack of clinical experience. During the 1975-1979 period, radical but not revolutionary study groups spread quickly through the Cairo, Ayn Shams and al-Azhar universities and elsewhere. Al-Jihad began as such a student organization. The student groups were one of the main targets of Sadat's crackdown in 1979. Hundreds were arrested and their campus groups dissolved. The revolutionary ideas of Qutb influenced these student groups, which were known as jam'iyat. Courses of study in Egyptian universities are narrow, preventing many from acquiring a liberal education as they acquired technical skills. Thus, many fundamentalists are highly educated in technical fields but do not have a broader educational background. Life as a student in Egypt is hard and job prospects are poor. In the late 1970s, an estimated 85% of al-Jihad's members were students. At Cairo Medical School, Ayman, while a postgraduate, Ayman spoke fervently to members of Islamic Group, which operated openly within the school and had great influence among the students. A former student there, Tawfiq Hamid, explains that Jamaah Islamiyah, then approved by both the Egyptian government and the university, was not classified as a terrorist organization until a few years later. The group "built a small prayer room in our medical school that later developed into a mosque with an associated library." He reports that "The mosque was behind the physiology and biochemistry departments, and members of Jamaah came there daily before science classes to lecture us on Islam. They warned us about the punishments awaiting us after death if we did not follow Islam strictly and were effective in advancing Islamism among many of the students, including me. He continued: "Our fear of being punished after death was exacerbated by our work in the cadaver room, where we dissected dead bodies. Seeing death regularly during anatomy and physiology courses made us feel that the life of this world was meaningless compared to 'real' life after death." Dr. Hamid met Zawahiri, "Dr. Ayman" as he was known, at an afternoon prayer session. He was one of the fiercest speakers he had ever heard. Ayman fervently condemned the West for the freedom of its women. Ayman, Dr. Hamid explains, was exceptionally bright, one of the top postgraduate students in the medical school. When they met him, Zawahiri greeted him warmly through his coke bottle glasses. Dr. Hamid explains that one of Ayman's achievements was to personalize jihad—that is, to have transformed it from a responsibility of the Umma, the Islamic collective, to an individual duty of Muslims. Within several months of meeting Dr. Ayman, he was invited to travel to Afghanistan to join other young Muslims in training for jihad. It was fairly common, he said, to be recruited after the end of Friday prayers. Dr. Hamid explains: "We viewed both the Soviets and the Americans as enemies." "The Soviets were considered infidels because they did not believe in the existence of God, while the Americans did not follow Islam. Although we planned to fight the Soviets first, our ultimate objective was to destroy the United States—the greatest symbol of the infidel’s freedom. " Prophet Mohammed served as their role model. The harshest edicts of the koranic verses were to be followed and criticism of those verses was punishable by death. Dr. Hamid explains: "I passed through three psychological stages to reach this level of comfort with death: hatred of non-Muslims or dissenting Muslims, suppression of my conscience, and acceptance of violence in the service of Allah." In 1979, while working at a Muslim Brotherhood clinic, Al-Zawahiri was asked if he wanted to go to Afghanistan and he jumped at the opportunity. Even then, Afghanistan represented a possible secure base from which to wage jihad. He would later write: "It is as if 100 years were added to my life when I came to Afghanistan." He spent 4 months in Peshawar, Pakistan. Three hundred al-Jihad activists were arrested after Sadat's assassination. Almost all of those arrested were between the ages of 20 and 28. Most were medical, law or pharmacy students at either the Universities of Asyut or al-Minya. Of those prosecuted for Sadat's assassination, five were sentenced to life, twelve were given long prison terms and two were acquitted, including the blind sheik, who had purported to authorize the assassination on the basis of Islamic doctrine. According to Professor Fawwaz Gerges, who conducted extensive interviews with Mr. Habib, IANA writer Kamal Habib played a key operational role in the assassination of Anwar Sadat. Zawahiri was imprisoned for a few years after Sadat's assassination in 1981 and allegedly tortured. Attorney Al-Zayat maintains that after his arrest in connection with the murder of President Sadat, Al-Zawahiri was tortured by the Egyptian police, and disclosed where his close friend and ally Al-Qamari was hiding. Zawahiri has burned with bitterness over the humiliation ever since. In the long run, torture merely tends to lead to more terrorism. "They don't seem to understand the cult of pain they're creating," al-Zayat has said. After being released from prison in 1984, he went to Saudi Arabia in 1986, returning to Pakistan by the next year. One co-defendant who said of him: "While in prison, I used to meet him in court during the trial sessions. He is a very calm person and polite and has more of a strategic thought than being an intellectual or the owner of jurisprudence interpretations or even a student in search of knowledge." Attorney al-Zayyat, who was in prison for three years along with Ayman, had a similar view. Even back then, Zawahiri placed great weight on the religious authority of the blind sheikh, Abdel-Rahman. A powerful 5 minute excerpt from the PBS/Frontline, "Looking for Answers" shows Zawahiri delivering an impassioned speech (in English) from jail. His statement sheds light on the motive underlying the anthrax mailings (and the reason the two dates of mailing were chosen). The choice of targets related to US appropriations to Egypt and Israel, the extradition or "rendering" of Egyptian Islamic Jihad members pursuant to the "Leahy Law," retaliation for the detention and alleged mistreatment of the Blind Sheikh and others, and what Ayman views as "lies" about these issues in the media. The two mailing dates were (1) the signing of the agreement between Egypt and Israel and (2) the assassination of Sadat for signing the agreement. The choice of mailing dates was not surprising when one realizes that the subject of the December 4, 1998 Presidential Daily Brief to President Clinton was Islambouli, the brother of Sadat's assassin. The PDB described the plan to attack the US using aircraft and other means. Islambouli was part of a cell with Khalid Mohammed who not only led the "planes operation," but would come to lead the effort to attack the US with weaponized anthrax upon Atef's death in November 2001. Al-Zayyat writes of Ayman:
Al-Zayyat continues:
After he was arrested on October 15, 1981, Zawahiri informed the authorities of Qamari's whereabouts. He had taken a refuge in a small mosque where he used to pray and meet Zawahiri and other members of the group. It was this painful memory which was at the root of Zawahiri's suffering, and which prompted him to leave Egypt for Saudi Arabia. He stayed there until he left for Afghanistan in 1987. During the three years following his arrival in Afghanistan, his leadership among jihadi Islamists became more prominent, as he worked to regroup the disoriented group members. Zawahiri left Egypt in late 1985 after he filed a lawsuit and obtained a stay of a decision of the minister of interior banning his travel. He spent a year working at a medical clinic in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Al-Zawahiri started the Islamic Jihad Bureau in 1987. He published a monthly magazine called "al-Fath" [conquest]. When Bin Laden's spiritual leader Azzam was assassinated, al-Zawahiri assumed the role. In Afghanistan and later Sudan, Zawahiri would control Bin Laden by surrounding him with members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad group. As a result, Bin Laden's financial support flowed to Egyptian Islamic Jihad but not the Egyptian Islamic Group. Zawahiri opposes democracy because then people could choose their own religion rather than adhere to the religious beliefs he was taught as a young boy before he reached the Age of Reason. He thinks democracy must be overcome through violence. He knows best based on words written many years before -- words he learned by rote memory. Although soft-spoken and outwardly calm, he is a fanatic. The humiliation he felt upon betraying his former mentor al-Qamari still rages within him. He is not constrained by what most would view as ethical limits. Beware the quiet, deep thinker who thinks he knows best, particularly after you've killed his wife and child. In Bitter Harvest, he was very critical of the Muslim Brotherhood for its growing accommodation of secular rulers, though he softened his views somewhat in Prophets under the Banner. Zawahiri's friend, IANA magazine writer Kamal Habib, says that, in contrast to Zawahiri, he has renounced violence and embraced democracy as a pragmatic means of establishing sharia law. In the mid-1990s, Al-Zawahiri sought to coordinate the activities of the various Islamic terrorist movements to carry out sabotage activities against the United States. A series of meetings included representatives of Hamas and Hezbollah. In a meeting held in Khartoum in April 1995, one direction Al-Zawahiri charted was to develop the effectiveness of the Islamic networks in London and New York, especially Brooklyn, where he visited the Blind Sheik's Services Organization. Zawahiri visited the US in 1995 and visited mosques with Ali Mohammed and San Jose physician Ali Zaki. Apparently, however, it was the planned visit by a representative from Saudi Arabia sent by Mohammed Islambouli several years later that more recently was key to laying groundwork for the planned attacks using aircraft and other means. The planned visit was the subject of the CIA's December 4, 1998 Presidential Daily Brief to President Clinton. Islambouli, brother of Sadat's assassin, was in a cell with KSM, who upon Atef's death assumed leadership of the cell planning to attack the US with weaponized anthrax. Islambouli was head of the blind sheik's Services Organization in Peshawar. In addition to his numerous videotaped messages and his October 2001 book "Knights Under the Banner of the Prophet," Zawahiri in 2003 wrote "Loyalty to Islam and Disavowal to Its Enemies." Perhaps the best measure of a man's anger and intention to seek revenge is his own words. Zawahiri announced in 2007 that Islambouli was head of the Islamic Group members who had joined Al Qaeda. Islambouli may know the identity of the mailer even though KSM does not. c. FBI Director Mueller: Remember the anthrax mailings. Remember Oklahoma City. An FBI Special Agent in the Minneapolis, MN Field Office, Harry Samit unsuccessfully appealed to his superiors for a FISA warrant that would permit him to view the contents of Moussaoui’s computer in the weeks leading up to 9/11. He wrote an August 18, 2001 email: “What does everyone think of calling in the NSDA Behavioral Assessment quacks? They probably have a psyche profile for an Islamic Martyr and could tell us if our 747 guys fit.” Samit’s memo had explained that Moussaoui was connected to a radical fundamentalist group in Chechnya, whose leader Ibn Khattab had ties to Bin Laden. “For this reason, it is imperative that his effects be searched in order to gather intelligence relating to these connections and to any plans for terrorist attacks against the United States or United States Persons to which he may be a party.” He wrote: “I am so desperate to get into his computer, I’ll take anything.” A colleague emailed Samit: “ thanks for the update. Very sorry that this matter was handled the way it was, but you fought the good fight. God Help us all if the next terrorist incident involves the same type of plane. take care Cathy.” The emails were dated September 10, 2001. Quoted in a June 2002 Wall Street Journal column titled "The "lone wolf" theory is evidence of the Bureau's ineptitude," FBI Special Agent Rowley was highly critical of the FBI in "chalking this all up to the '20-20 hindsight is perfect' problem." The Minneapolis agents who arrested Zacarias Moussaoui before September 11 had quickly identified him as a terrorist threat and identified the legal grounds on which he has since been indicted. Agents in Phoenix had sounded an alarm about suspicious Arabs taking flight training. So she argues that "this is not a case of everyone in the FBI failing to appreciate the potential consequences." Authors John Schwartz and Minnesota University Professor Michael Osterholm in a book Living Terror published in December 2000 explain that bioweaponeer Ken Alibek and William Patrick each believed “he was working to match a threat from a resourceful and brilliant enemy. I keep that in mind when people ask me how anyone could do such a terrible thing: how anyone could contemplating creating chances that you could kill so many. The answer makes me terribly uncomfortable — it could be anyone, even the nicest guy you ever met.” The FBI’s stock profile concerning a biological agent was a lone, unstable individual. In October 2001, the profilers pretty much just reached into the filing cabinet. One Special Agent involved in profiling such incidents explained in a conference, at which Dr. Steve Hatfill was also a presenter: “The closest I’ve ever come to biological-chemical issues is when the toilet on the 37th floor gets backed up *** It isn’t the Middle Eastern people. It isn’t white supremacists. It is the lone individual, lone unstable individual. That statistically, from the cases that we have, is the biggest threat right now.” Clint Van Zandt, former FBI profiler when asked, “Do I think this case will be solved?,” said “Yes, I do. I think there will be something scientific or something behaviorally that will break this case. But Ted Kaczynski took 18 years.” Ted Kaczynski’s brother turned him in after his wife urged that his brother's writing and views matched Ted's writing on the subject of technology and society. As Roscoe Howard, U.S. Attorney for Washington, DC, said of Amerithrax: “You always need a break” whether Kaczynki’s brother coming forward or “John Wilkes Booth breaking his leg.” Dr. Cyril Wecht poses some of the the questions presented by Amerithrax: "What was the intended message? Why were those victims selected? Why did these acts of malevolence cease?" FBI Special Agent Fitzgerald, who had some early involvement in Amerithrax in issuing the "profile," years earlier had special responsibility for scrutinizing the language of the manifesto in UNABOM. In late September 2001, his colleague from UNABOM, Kathleen Puckett turned in her study of "lone wolves" to include Kaczynski and others. Dr. Puckett sees “howling loneliness” as the key characteristic of a “lone wolf.” Before turning to work on domestic terror cases of the 1990s, her counterintelligence work typically involved Soviet spies. She would go and kibbitz the local agents on what she perceived as the personality of the subject. She retired on September 30, 2001 and handed in her study on lone wolves on her way out the door. By October, her colleague Fitzgerald was turning in a “lone wolf” profile for his assignment in Amerithrax. Judging from his comments to the media, he was one of those who was swayed based on the fact that Daschle and Leahy were Democrats. Hunting the American Terrorist (2007), by History Publishing is dedicated in part to the victims of the anthrax mailings. Dr. Terry Turchie and Dr. Kathleen Purkett appear to agree with the Special Agent Fitzgerald’s profile from October 2001. (Fitzgerald was their former team member) They write:
One person's lonely lone wolf is another man's US-based dedicated islamist operating under strict principles of cell security. It seems that the FBI was making the same mistake it made in the case of the assassination of Rabbi Kahane 10 years earlier by the blind sheik's bodyguard Nosair. Inexplicably, the profilers do not seem to have been persuaded after 9/11 by the open source intelligence that Zawahiri had obtained anthrax for the purpose of weaponizing it for use against US targets. If intelligence analysis is an art, criminal profiling is drawing with crayons. A “profile” in connection to a person’s facial features might refer to what they look like in the dark. But, here, war had been declared. A weapon had been used by the enemy it had previously said it would use that specific weapon. Intelligence analysis, not profiling, was what was needed. The profilers apparently did not take to heart or learn the lesson of the al Hayat letter bombs in December 1996. James R. Fitzgerald, head of the FBI Behavioral Analysis Unit, told an interviewer: “The attacker appears to be an opportunist [who] took advantage [of the terrorist attacks]." He continued "The rhetoric [in the letters] is made to sound like what a nonterrorist thinks a terrorist sounds like. The perpetrator was probably a right-winger with an ax to grind. It’s no secret that they [the intended recipients] are Democrats. People, including the Unabomber, have used representational targets for years.” Alluding to the mistaken notion that security guard Richard Jewell was responsible for the Olympic Park bombing, Vincent Cannistraro, formerly of the CIA, explained of the profile that the FBI are “intellectually convinced they’re on the right track, but they don’t want to come up with a janitor theory that’s wrong again.” The vague profile was fine but Agent Fitzgerald's expanded comments to the press about the profile missed the mark. FBI profiler Fitzgerald, however, can be forgiven his early miscalculations. Such a profile likely was useful in supporting warrants in the US in connection with a variety of leads that prudently needed to be pursued. The forensics, without more, tended to point to a "domestic" source. The official published profile was very vague and spoke of a nonconfrontational loner carrying a grudge. Malcolm Gladwell, author of the acclaimed Blink, in his New Yorker article concludes that criminal profiling is no different than a parlor trick known by astrologers for years.
It is unlikely that profiling will be a particularly significant portion of any prosecution. It was not in the Unabom case. Kaczynski fit the profile relied upon by the Task Force in many (if not most) respects — but he differed from the profile in several important respects. Kaczynski was not among the top 200 suspects primarily because of his age. He was 13 years older than the age in the profile being relied upon by the Task Force. At the time of the first bomb in May 1978, he was 36. Significantly, although he may have a meticulous mind, he was very unkempt in appearance. It was thought that the serial bomber would be very neat. The UNABOM profile then was substantially revised based on the writings of the bomber. The most important change was that estimates of the bomber’s intelligence were greatly increased. Based on the content of the manifesto, the FBI profilers should have profiled someone who did not rely on technology — someone living in Wild Nature who had no electricity and a garden for self-sufficiency. Sometimes it seems that profilers have a tendency to say counterintuitive things lest it seem like ordinary common sense. Gladwell explains that profiles have rarely solved a crime:
Victims and targets were highly skeptical of the FBI’s profile. David Pecker, the AMI publisher commented:
The emphasis in the press reports has always, however, been on the suggestion that the mailer likely is “domestic” rather than foreign — a lone, male scientist who works in a lab. The profile was issued shortly after the White House meeting where it was agreed that Al Qaeda was the likely culprit, but that the theory and the possibility of a state sponsor would not be discussed. Vice President Cheney was not at all impressed by the FBI’s profile and went on television to express his skepticism. Although the FBI profile was widely criticized by experts and in editorials in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, and other newspapers and magazines, it was more flexible than its critics imagined. The Amerithrax profile of a loner with a grudge permits a variety of motivations. The FBI uses the word “domestic” to include Americans sympathetic with an extremist islamic cause. The Washington Post explained in late October: “The FBI and U.S. Postal Inspection Service are considering a wide range of domestic possibilities, including associates of right-wing hate groups and U.S. residents sympathetic to the causes of Islamic extremists.” FBI profiler James R. Fitzgerald, head of FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit, argued that the product could have been made for equipment costing as little as $2,500. Profilers were not actually part of Amerithrax Task Force and it is not clear how steeped they were in the historical evidence of Zawahiri's intent to use weaponized anthrax, relying on the cover of charities and universities. Fitzgerald testified at civil deposition that on first hearing term “person of interest” had never heard Hatfill’s name.
Outside pundits covered the entire range. Jason Pate, of the Monterey Institute of International Studies, said of the numerous private anthrax theories that have arisen:
An interesting article in MIT Technology Review in March/April 2006 is based on interviews with Sergei Popov (an expert at GMU who had worked as a Russian bioweaponeer), University of Maryland researcher Milton Leitenberg, Harvard’s Matthew Meselson, Rutger’s Richard Ebright and others:
The analytical problem is that researchers tend only to focus on their narrow field. So an analyst focused on Al Qaeda may not know anything about US biodefense programs. An analyst knowledgeable about US biodefense programs may not know anything about Egyptian Islamic Jihad. To knowledgeably address the issue of infiltration and the use of universities and charities as cover — which the documentary evidence shows Zawahiri planned to do and did in his anthrax weaponization program — requires a willingness to become knowledgeable and investigate the different substantive areas. Brian Levin, a domestic terrorism expert at the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, once reasoned that “the people committing these acts are foreign-based or have foreign sympathies. It would seem to me to be improbable that a domestic extremist would be able to put together such an attack in such a short period.” Was there something forensically about the anthrax that the FBI was not disclosing relating to the detection of silicon dioxide (silica) that in addition to the strain used, pointed to someone with access to US biodefense information? Was the FBI truly fixated on U.S. scientist Steve Hatfill? Or was the media merely fixated on the possible lead they are in the best position to know about? The camera trucks can get to Frederick by the 5 o’clock news and be home in time for dinner. The cooperation of the Pakistan ISI is not required to be able to film the draining of a Maryland pond. Certainly, the prosecutor heading the Amerithrax prosecution was throwing gasoline on the fire by fueling a Hatfill theory with the specious exclusives he was feeding to ABC News, Newsweek and the Washington Post. His daughter then worked for microbiologist Ali Al-Timimi pro bono on his criminal defense. More fundamentally, all the really interesting stuff is classified. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (”FISA”) unit in the Department of Justice has traditionally been known as the “Dark Side.” Everything coming from Khalid Mohammed, according to Agent Van Harp, is classified. To understand the matter, journalists would have to have the cooperation of someone coming over from the Dark Side — which would be a felony. The solution to the Amerithrax case did not likely lie at the intersection of Bin Laden and Saddam streets among those cubicles at Langley with desktop PCs, not unlike any other office. Instead, it likely lies with the Zawahiri Task Force at Langley (if it still exists) which hopefully has an intersection of Ayman Avenue and Rahman Road. If not, we might be looking at a different crossroads altogether. The Report of the Joint Inquiry Into the Terrorist Attacks of September 11, 2001— by the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, addresses strategic analysis, training and staffing. Did the agents and analysts in the basement of Quantico who came up with the FBI’s profile have relevant training or input from analysts expert in Al Qaeda? Assuming they did, did an investigative bias creep into their approach to the anthrax mailings that should instead have been informed by a strategic understanding of Zawahiri’s Vanguards of Conquest and its modus operandi? Did the profilers know of the al Hayat letter bombs (related to the imprisonment of the blind sheik) and KSM’s threat to use biochemical weapons in retaliation for the detention of the blind sheik and other militant islamists? Did the profilers know of the role of Islambouli, the brother of Sadat’s assassin, in working with KSM in planning the attacks on the United States? Just as with 9/11, the correct understanding of the anthrax mailings begins with a trail that leads back to Malaysia, Khalid Mohammed, Hambali, Yazid Sufaat, Rauf Ahmad, Zacarias Moussaoui, various charities, the Albanian returnees trial, Bojinka, and even the assassination of Anwar Sadat. As George Santayana said, “Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” Hatfill, a former USAMRIID scientist, who knew bioweaponeer Ken Alibek and William Patrick, was the subject of a lot of leaked reports and then later was the plaintiff in various civil suits. He once explained his view of the true crime matter:
In its March 31, 2005 Report to the President, the Commission on Intelligence Capabilities said: “competing analysis is of no use, even counterproductive, if there is no attempt at constructive dialogue and collaboration.” In September 2005, Debbie Weierman, a spokeswoman for the FBI’s Washington field office said that this “globe-spanning investigation remains intensely active and broadly focused.” According to one recent letter to a Congressman rejecting the request for a briefing, the investigation has spanned six out of seven continents. The FBI had conducted 9,100 witness interviews, 67 searches and issued 6,000 grand jury subpoenas. In a press conference in October 2005, Director Mueller said that the FBI was pursuing all domestic and international leads. He told the public to remember Oklahoma City. Remember 9/11. Both crimes involved a hatred of US policy. He declined to say if they had a suspect. That year, FBI agents visited Asia, Africa and Afghanistan in the course of the Amerithrax investigation. You can reach online a video of FBI Director Mueller’s October 2005 Briefing on the Amerithrax Probe. Attorney General Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee on January 18, 2007:
No progess was announced over the course of the next 9 months. Senator Leahy was totally dissatisfied with the vague briefing he received and in an interview by a blogger, sounded very angry. The new Attorney General who taking over in Fall 2007 is former United States Chief Judge Mukasey for the Southern District of New York. Mukasey presided over the trial Sheik Abdel Rahman and his codefendants for the plot to destroy New York City landmarks. On appeal, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit commended him for his fairness and impartiality. Whatever your political persuasion, and whatever disagreements about individual issues relating to due process and civil liberties, the FBI and CIA deserve some latitude on this issue. We are, after all, facing this threat together. First, the nature of such an investigation is that we lack sufficient information to second-guess (or even know) what the FBI and Postal Inspectors on the Amerithrax Task Force are doing. Media reports are a poor approximation of reality because of the lack of good sources. Indeed, there has been compartmentalization and divergent views even within the Task Force. Second, hindsight is 20/20. Third, now that the leaks relating to US scientist Dr. Steve Hatfill seem to have long since been plugged, it is not likely we could do better in striking the appropriate balance between due process and national security. The FBI’s profile includes a US-based supporter of the militant islamists. Attorney General Ashcroft once explained that an “either-or” approach is not useful. The media has tended to overlook the fact that when the FBI uses the word “domestic” the word includes a US-based, highly-educated supporter of the militant islamists. As Ali Al-Timimi's counsel notes in a late 2007 court filing unsealed (except for certain redacted passages) in April 2008, Al-Timimi "was considered an anthrax weapons suspect." d. Deterrence Against Invasion of Afghanistan A senior militant who met with Atef, Zawahiri and Bin Laden to discuss these issues in the summer of 2000 in Kandahar confirms that deterring the invasion against Afghanistan was a key purpose of the threatened use of WMD. In November 2007, a former leader of an armed Islamic group in Libya, Numan Bin Uthman, wrote an open letter to al-Qaeda second in command Ayman al-Zawahiri telling him that Jihadi groups in Arab countries have failed and that the strategy of using nonconventional WMD to deter an invasion of Afghanistan was a misguided and failed strategy. Ali Al-Timimi had a stern warning not to invade Iraq hand-delivered to every member of Congress on October 6, 2002 — the first anniversary of the mailing to Senator Leahy and Senator Daschle. It was in the name of Bin Laden’s sheik.
Libyan leader Bin-Uthman, a former leader in the Libyan Islamic Combat Group, on behalf of his group had declined bin Laden’s invitation in 1998 to join with Bin Laden’s “World Front.” At the several day meeting in the Summer of 2000 in Kandahar, he spoke frankly about the failure to achieve jihadist goals. He told al-Hayat last year: “We asked Bin-Ladin in 2000 to halt his operations from Afghanistan and he agreed ‘except for operations under preparation and execution and I [Bin-Ladin said he] will never give them up.’” In the December 2006 interview, Bin-Uthman explained that:
Bin-Uthman late last year told that the interviewer that Bin Laden did not expect the US to invade Afghanistan.
e. Significance of Mailing Dates : Camp David Accord and Sadat's Assassination The FBI Counterterrorism Division sent out a warning to law enforcement in August 2001 that Al Qaeda or related groups might attack on an anniversary date.
Anthrax was sent on the date of the Camp David Accord and the related Sadat assassination (Armed Forces Day). Expert Michael Scheuer, formerly with the CIA, has said that Al Qaeda does not plan attacks around important dates, so far as the CIA can glean. But take Ayman at his word when he says he at least plans some of his messages around anniversaries, as he and Islambouli did by sending Zawahiri issued messages in 2004 on the third anniversary of 9/11 and then in 2005 on the third anniversary of the transfer of prisoners to Guantanamo. He said: "These days we are marking three years since the transportation of the first group of Muslim prisoners was sent to the Guantanamo prison. " The Vanguards of Conquest did the same thing in the late 1990s. Just as Zawahiri's thinking on weaponizing anthrax was gaining traction in emails to Atef in the Spring of 1999, the Vanguards invoked an anniversary relating to the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty and issued a statement marking its 20th anniversary. The group said at the time it was reiterating its enmity toward the US and Israel to mark the 20th anniversary of the signing of the treaty in March 1979. Signed on March 26, 1979, the Egypt-Israel peace treaty was a direct result of the Camp David Peace Accords, signed in September 1978. The first round of letters was sent to ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Post, and the publisher of the National Enquirer and Sun. Letters were sent to Senators Daschle and Leahy in a second batch, using a much more highly refined product. The mailing dates were of special importance to the man in its December 4, 1998 PDB that the CIA told President Clinton was planning the attack the US using aircraft and other means -- Mohammed Islambouli, the brother of Sadat's assassin. The letters to the news organizations were mailed -- coincidentally or not -- on September 17 or September 18, either the day the Camp David Accord was signed in 1978 or the next day when it was approved by the Israeli knesset. Abdel-Rahman, the blind sheik, in the early 1980s, said: "We reject Camp David and we regret the normalization of relations with Israel. We also reject all the commitments that were made by the traitor Sadat, who deviated from Islam." He continued: "As long as the Camp David Agreement stands, this conflict between us and the government will continue." At the time of the anthrax mailings, Sadat's assassination and the Camp David Accord still dominated Zawahiri's thinking. In Knights Under the Banner of the Prophet, Al-Zawahiri argued in the Fall of 2001 that the Camp David Accord sought to turn Sinai into a disarmed area to serve as a buffer zone between Egypt and Israel. He cites the peace treaty between the two countries, particularly issues related to the armament of the Egyptian Army inside Sinai. He claims that Egypt has restored Sinai formally but it remains in the hands of Israel militarily. Al-Zawahiri cites many examples about the US flagrant support for Israel, including the US pressure on Egypt to sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty at a time when Israel publicly declares that it will not sign the treaty because of its special circumstances. Despite this, Zawahiri says, the United States sympathizes with Israel and overlooks its actions. This means that the United States has deliberately left the nuclear weapons in the hands of Israel to threaten its Arab neighbors. Al-Zawahiri argues in his book that the western states have considered Israel's presence in the region a basic guarantee for serving the Western interests. The Wall Street Journal explained in August 2002: "Oct. 8 last year was Columbus Day, a public holiday on which mail wasn't collected from letter boxes. That may mean the letters could have been posted as early as the Saturday before." Taking into account the fact that there was no mail postmarked with a Trenton postmark on Columbus Day, October 8, the letter to Senator Tom Daschle postmarked October 9 may actually have been mailed October 6. (The FBI, of course, may know the date it was mailed based on information that has not been disclosed.) (Some press reports, however, suggest that they are considering that the mailing may have been at anytime during the October 6-October 9 period). October 6 was the day Anwar Sadat was assassinated for his role in the Camp David Accord. President Sadat was assassinated on the national holiday called "Armed Forces Day." He was killed during an annual holiday parade which marks the day, October 6, 1973, that Egypt made a critical successful surprise attack on Israel during the 1973 war. "Death to Pharaoh!" the young Army officer shouted. He and his confederates jumped off the truck shot into the reviewing stand where Sadat had been watching the annual parade. "I killed the Pharaoh, and I do not fear death." Sadat's detention of Muhammad Shawqi al-Islambouli had spurred his brother, Khalid, to seize an opportunity presented on short notice to assassinate Anwar Sadat. Kamal Habib, founder of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and writer for the IANA quarterly magazine, who spent 10 years in prison in connection with the assassination, told academic Fawaz Gerges: "It was not a well-coordinated operation, and it succeeded by a miracle." A street was named after Khalid Islambouli in Iran, with Iran having been upset at Egypt for granting the Shah safe haven. After leaving Egypt in the mid-1980s, Muhammad Islambouli operated in Pakistan recruiting Egyptian fighters for the war in Afghanistan, and headed a branch of Bin Laden's Maktab al-Khidmat (‘Bureau of Services') in Peshawar. Muhammad Islambouli was the subject of the December 4, 1998 Presidential Daily Brief -- numerous motorcycles and related vehicles, complete with helicopter hovering overhead -- titled "Bin Ladin Preparing to Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks" explaining that Bin Laden planned an attack on the US involving airplanes and that the motivation was to free the blind sheik Abdel-Rahman and a dissident Saudi sheik. US Postal employee Ahmed Sattar, in a 1999 interview, said of Sadat's assassination: " I felt good. It was a shock to me at first because I never expected the pharaoh to be assassinated in front of his army. Sure, the pharaoh, yes. And but really, after absorbing the shock, I said, "Well, that was well done." The aide to blind sheik Abdel-Rahman explained: "What the Western mentality does not understand that your measurement is different -- your measurement of good and bad. Yes, President Sadat was a media star as what you said. Civilized, smoking a pipe, always referred to Barbara Walters as "my friend Barbara," and "my friend Carter" -- they were all his friends. But what did he do to the normal man in the slums of Cairo or in upper Egypt? He deceived them. When he signed the peace treaty with Israel, he promised, "This will be the end of suffering. Things will change dramatically for the Egyptian people." He promised democracy, freedom, and people believed him." In his Fall 2001 Knights Under the Banner of the Prophet, Zawahiri explained that the US support for Israel (at Egypt's expense) was well-illustrated by the historic 33-day airlift to Israel after this October 6 attack. He argues that the US support for Israel made the difference between success or failure for Egypt. Al-Zawahiri describes how the United States shipped weapons, ammunition, and tanks to Israel for 33 days, with the goal being to compensate Israel for its war losses and to swiftly upgrade the combat capabilities. He explained in his Fall 2001 book: "The animosity to Israel and America in the hearts of islamists is indivisible. It is an animosity that has provided the 'al-Qa'dia' and the epic of jihad in Afghanistan with a continuous flow of 'Arab Afghans.'" Regarding the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty, Zawahiri adds: "Whoever examines the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty will realize that it was intended to be a permanent treaty from which Egypt could not break loose. It was concluded in an attempt to establish on the ground, by force and coercion, a situation whereby it would be difficult to change by any government hostile to Israel that comes after Al-Sadat." The militants were especially angry that Sadat had not fully implemented shariah law. Complicating consideration of the issue somewhere, on October 5, 2001, the shura member of EIJ and former head of Bin Laden's farm in the Sudan, Mahjoub, had his bail denied on October 5. Mahmoud Mahjoub was second in command of the Vanguards of Conquest. A letter containing nonpathogenic bacteria had been sent in late January 2001 threatening use of mailed anthrax to the immigration minister signing his security certificate. Mahjoub was bin Laden's farm manager in Sudan. Al-Hawsawi, KSM's assistant with the anthrax spraydrying documents on his laptop, kept the books. The CIA and FBI analysts should have pored over translations of the journal Al-Manar Jadeed published by the Ann Arbor-based Islamic Assembly of North America from 1998 - 2002 by writers based in Cairo. It mainly concerned Egyptian politics and planned the strategy based on all that had gone on before. There was a change in tone between the first piece by Gamal Sultan and the second installment. The first (before his letter to Abdel-Rahman) urged a pluralistic tolerant approach to differing views while the second issue (after his letter to Abdel-Rahman) contained his piece that seems to have resorted to the familiar intransigent neo-Salafist view. Analysts should pay special heed to the terms dar al-harb (abode of war), dar al-salam (bode of peace) and dar al-’ahd (abode of the treaty). The religious doctrines were applied to the relationships between Islamic and non-Islamic countries. What the liberal and leftist antiwar activists who have rallied to support IANA defendants do not realize is that the central belief of these Salafists is that Israel must be destroyed and there can be no peace with Israel. The Camp David Accords are central to the beef they have with the US. The neo-Salafists are not at all peace-loving. It's just that the public relations debacle of the reckless invasion of Iraq played right into Bin Laden’s hands. The 2005 bombing in Egypt at a Sinai resort was on July 23, which is Revolution Day, a national holiday in Egypt celebrating the Egyptian revolution. It commemorates the 1952 overthrow of King Farouk's monarchy, led by Gamal Abdel Nassar. Perhaps a holiday weekend was chosen in order to maximize the number of casualties. The bombing last year at Taba resort in Egypt was on October 7. In September 2006 video, in a messagg on yet another 5-year anniversary of 9/11, Zawahiri explained: "Among the most prominent of these conspirators are the rulers of Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula and Jordan and the traitors in Iraq who shade themselves with the cross of America, the Great Satan…[For these regimes] the slogan 'death to America, death to Israel' has gone to be replaced by 'rule from America and peace with Israel.'" f. "Leahy Law" and Appropriations to Military and Security Units The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee Patrick Leahy would not support Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey because Mukasey hasn’t taken a firm enough stand against torture. Leahy said: “No American should need a classified briefing to determine whether waterboarding is torture.” Separately, Patrick Leahy at last report is very dissatisfied with the briefing the former US Attorney General Gonzales had promised to give him on why he had been sent mailed anthrax. He repeatedly criticized Gonzales for allowing waterboarding. Judge Mukasey was in a difficult spot through no fault of his own. Senator Leahy, one of my favorite Senators, was targeted in Fall 2001 precisely because of this issue of torture. The folks connected to the WTC 1993 prosecution overseen by Judge Mukasey were responsible. History will Judge Mukasey's tenure as Attorney General by whether he understands the correct analysis of Amerithrax. After the assassination of Anwar Sadat, Cairo attorney Montasser al-Zayat first met blind sheik Abdel-Rahman after Montasser had been tortured for 12 hours. He was near a mental breakdown. Abdel-Rahman came over to where he was huddled in a corner of a cell, bent over and whispered: “Rely on God; don’t be defeated.” Mohammed had spoken the words in the Koran. Al- Zayat would become one of Sheik Omar’s most trusted legal advisers and a lawyer on the defense team of El Sayyid Nosair. Nosair was the Egyptian who served as Abdel-Rahman’s bodyguard and was tried in New York in 1990 for the murder of Rabbi Meir Kahane. In March 1999, attorney al-Zayat was representing defendants in a massive prosecution of jihadists in Cairo. He told the press that Ayman Zawahiri would use weaponized anthrax against US targets because of the continued extradition pressure and torture faced by Egyptian Islamic Jihad members. Two senior EIJ leaders then on trial were saying the same thing to the press and in confessions. US Postal employee Sattar, who had been the blind sheik’s spokesman after his 1993 arrest, in a 1999 Frontline interview spoke of the role of appropriations and torture in fueling the islamist rage:
The founder of Egyptian Islamic Jihad Kamal Habib (who wrote for the quarterly magazine of the US charity Islamic Assembly of North America) told scholar Fawaz Gerges:
While Kamal Habib wrote for the jihad-supporting Assirat, Al-Timimi was on the Board of Advisers. In a videotape that circulated in the summer of 2001, Zawahiri said “In Egypt they put a lot of people in jails — some sentenced to be hanged. And in the Egyptian jails, there is a lot of killing and torture. All this happens under the supervision of America. America has a CIA station as well as an FBI office and a huge embassy in Egypt, and it closely follows what happens in that country. Therefore, America is responsible for everything that happens.” An August 29, 2001 opinion column on Islamway, the second most read site for english speaking muslims, illustrates that the role of “Leahy Law” was known by educated islamists:
The next day, in the same publication, there was an article describing the 21-page document released in Ottawa on August 29, 2001, in which the CSIS claimed that Canadian detainee Jaballah had contacts with the Egyptian Islamic Jihad leader Shehata and sought to deport Jaballah. Shehata was in charge of EIJ’s Civilian Branch and in charge of “special operations.”The nominal President of the Syracuse-based Help the Needy IANA spin-off was moderator of islamway for women. It would be seven more years -- not until February 2008 -- before the Canadian government for the first time revealed that after coming to Canada in 1996, Jaballah would contact Ayman regularly on Ayman's Inmarsat satellite phone. “They [Senators Daschle and Leahy] represent something to him,” says James Fitzgerald of the FBI Academy’s Behavioral Analysis Unit. “Whatever agenda he’s operating under, these people meant something to him.” To more fully appreciate why Leahy — a human rights advocate and liberal democrat — might have been targeted as a symbol, it is important to know that Senator Leahy has been the head of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Foreign Operations, the panel in charge of aid to Egypt and Israel. In addition to the Senate majority leader, anthrax was mailed to the position symbolic of the 50 billion in appropriations that has been given to Israel since 1947 (and the equally substantial $2 billion annually in aid that has been keeping Mubarak in power in Egypt and the militant islamists out of power). Within a couple weeks after September 11, a report in the Washington Post and then throughout the muslim world explained that the President sought a waiver that would allow military assistance to once-shunned nations. The militant islamists who had already been reeling from the extradition of 70 “brothers”, would now be facing much more of the same. President Bush asked Congress for authority to waive all existing restrictions on U.S. military assistance and exports for the next five years to any country where the aid would help the fight against international terrorism. The waiver would include those nations who were currently unable to receive U.S. military aid because of their sponsorship of terrorism (such as Syria and Iran) or because of their nuclear weapons programs (such as Pakistan). In late September 2001, the Washington Post quoted Leahy: “We all want to be helpful, and I will listen to what they have in mind.” The article noted that he was chairman of both the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Appropriations foreign operations subcommittee, which were considering the legislation. “But we also want to be convinced that what is being proposed is sound, measured and necessary and not merely impulsive,” said Leahy. “Moral leadership in defense of democracy and human rights is vital to what we stand for in the world. Acts of terrorism are violations of human rights. Now is the time to show what sets us apart from those who attack us,” he said. The options being considered in response to the September 11 attacks in New York and Washington included potential cooperation with virtually every Middle Eastern and South and Central Asian nation near Afghanistan. “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists” would be the only test for foreign aid. The “Leahy Law” plays a key role in the secret “rendering” of Egyptian Islamic Jihad (Al Qaeda) operatives to countries like Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Algeria where they are allegedly tortured. Richard Clarke, counterterrorism czar during the Clinton Administration, has quoted Vice-President Gore saying: “Of course it’s a violation of international law, that’s why it’s a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass.” Although humanitarian in its intent, the Leahy Law permits continued appropriations to military and security units who conduct torture in the event of “extraordinary circumstances.” In an interview broadcast on al-Jazeera television on October 7, 2001 (October 6 in the US) — about when the second letter saying “Death to America’” and “Death to Israel” was mailed — Ayman Zawahiri echoed a familiar refrain sounded by Bin Laden: “O people of the U.S., can you ask yourselves a question: Why all this enmity for the United States and Israel? *** Your government supports the corrupt governments in our countries.” A month after 9/11, late at night, a charter flight from Cairo touched down at the Baku airport. An Egyptian, arrested by the Azerbaijan authorities on suspicions of having played a part in the September 11 attack, was brought on board. His name was kept secret. That same night the plane set off in the opposite direction. Much of the Amerithrax story has happened at night with no witnesses, with the rendering of University of Karachi microbiology student Saeed Mohammed merely one example. Zawahiri claims that there is a US intelligence bureau inside the headquarters of the Egyptian State Security Investigation Department that receives daily reports on the number of detainees and those detainees who are released. At the time Ayman Zawahiri was getting his biological weapons program in full swing, his own brother Mohammed was picked up in the United Arab Emirates. He was secretly rendered to Egyptian security forces and sentenced to death rendered in the 1999 Albanian returnees case. Throughout 2001, the Egyptian islamists were wracked by extraditions and renditions. CIA Director Tenet once publicly testified that there had been 70 renditions prior to 9/11. At the same time a Canadian judge was finding that Mahmoud Mahjoub was a member of the Vanguards of Conquest and would be denied bail, Bosnian authorities announced on October 6, 2001 they had handed over three Egyptians to Cairo who had been arrested in July. In Uruguay, a court authorized the extradition to Egypt of a man wanted in Egypt for his alleged role in the 1997 Luxor attack. Ahmed Agiza, the leader of the Vanguards of Conquest (which can be viewed as an offshoot of Jihad), was handed over by Sweden in December 2001. One islamist, a Hamas supporter, summarized why the anthrax was sent in an ode “To Anthrax” on November 1, 2001: “O, anthrax, despite, your wretchedness, you have sewn horror in the heart of the lady of arrogance, of tyranny, of boastfulness!” In an interview that appeared in the Pakistani paper, Dawn, on November 10, 2001, Bin Laden explained that “The American Congress endorses all government measures, and this proves that [all of] America is responsible for the atrocities perpetrated against Muslims.” At a December 2002 conference held by “Accuracy in Media,” former State Department analyst Kenneth Dillon noted that Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ), the key component of al Qaeda under Dr. Ayman Zawahiri, head of al Qaeda’s biowarfare program, likely targeted Senator Leahy because of his role as head of a panel of the Senate Appropriations Committee that had developed the so-called “Leahy Law” in 1998. Dillon explained, “According to the wording of the Leahy Law, the U.S. Government was authorized to ‘render’ suspected foreign nationals to the government of a foreign country, even when there was a possibility that they would be tortured, in ‘exceptional circumstances.’ When the Leahy Law was applied to send EIJ members captured in the Balkans back to Egypt, Zawahiri fiercely denounced the United States. So Leahy was a high-priority target.” That aid goes to the core of Al Qaeda’s complaint against the United States. (The portion going to Egypt and Israel constituted, by far, the largest portion of US foreign aid, and most of that is for military and security purposes.) Pakistan is a grudging ally in the “war against terrorism” largely due to the US Aid it now receives in exchange for that cooperation. The press in Pakistan newspapers regularly reported on protests arguing that FBI’s reported 12 agents in Pakistan in 2002 were an affront to its sovereignty. There was a tall man, an Urdu-speaking man, and a woman — all chain-smokers — who along with their colleagues were doing very important work in an unsupportive, even hostile, environment. The US agents — whether CIA or FBI or US Army — caused quite a stir in Pakistan along with the Pakistani security and intelligence officials who accompanied them. In mid-March 2003, Washington waived sanctions imposed in 1999 paving the way for release in economic aid to Pakistan. Billions more would be sent to Egypt, Israel and other countries involved in the “war against terrorism.” The commentators who suggest that Al Qaeda would have had no motivation to send weaponized anthrax to Senators Daschle and Leahy as symbolic targets — because they are liberal — are mistaken. The main goal of Dr. Zawahiri is to topple President Mubarak. He views the US aid as the chief obstacle and is indifferent to this country’s labels of conservative and liberal. Zawahiri likely was surprised that the plainly worded message of the letters accompanying the anthrax was not deemed clear. Perhaps the talking heads would not have been so quick to infer an opposite meaning if no message had been expressed using words at all. Perhaps the public the sender had relied only on what KSM describes as the language of war — the death delivered by the letters — the pundits would not have been so misdirected. But why was Al Qaeda evasive on the question of responsibility for the anthrax mailings, dismissing the issue with a snicker, and falsely claiming that Al Qaeda did not know anything about anthrax? Simple. Bin Laden denied responsibility for 9/11 until it was beyond reasonable dispute. On September 16, 2001, he said: “The US is pointing the finger at me but I categorically state that I have not done this. I am residing in Afghanistan. I have taken an oath of allegiance (to Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar) which does not allow me to do such things from Afghanistan.” Before that, Ayman had denied the 1998 embassy bombings too. On August 20, 1998, coincidentally on the day of strikes on camps in Afghanistan and Sudan, Ayman al-Zawahiri contacted The News, a Pakistani English-language daily, and said on behalf of Bin Laden that “Bin Laden calls on Moslem Ummah to continue Jihad against Jews and Americans to liberate their holy places. In the meanwhile, he denies any involvement in the Nairobi and Dar es Salaam bombings.” To Ayman, “war is deception.” The targeted Senators have another connection pertinent to the Egyptian militants. The United States and other countries exchange evidence for counterterrorism cases under the legal framework of a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty (”MLAT”). Egypt is signatory of such a treaty that was ratified by the United States Senate in late 2000. For example, when the Fall 2001 rendition of Vanguards of Conquest leader Agizah was criticized, the US explained that it was relying on the MLAT. In the prosecution of Post Office worker Ahmed Abdel Sattar, the MLAT was described. Sattar’s attorney Michael Tigar, at trial in December 2004 explained: “Now, that might be classified, it’s true, but we have now found out and our research has just revealed that on, that the State Department has reported that it intends to use and relies on the mutual legal assistance treaty between the United States and Egypt signed May 3, 1998, in Cairo, and finally ratified by the United States Senate on October 18th, 2000. The State Department issued a press report about this treaty on November 29th, 2001 and I have a copy here.” He explained that “Article IV of the treaty provides that requests under the treaty can be made orally as well as under the formal written procedures required by the treaty, that those requests can include requests for testimony, documents, and even for the transfer to the United States if the treaty conditions are met.” Vanguards of Conquest spokesman Al-Sirri was a co-defendant in the case against post office worker Sattar. In the late 1990s Sattar and he often spoke in conversations intercepted by the FBI. Al-Sirri’s fellow EIJ cell members in London were subject to process under those treaties at the time of the anthrax mailings. Those London cell members had been responsible for the faxing of the claim of responsibility which stated the motive for the 1998 embassy bombings. A group calling itself the “Islamic Army for the Liberation of the Holy Places” took credit for the bombings listing as among their demands “the release of the Muslims detained in the United State[s] first and foremost Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman (the spiritual guide of the Gama’a Islamiya) who is jailed in the United States.” As reason for the bombings, in addition to the rendition recent EIJ members to Cairo and the detention of Blind Sheik Abdel-Rahman, the faxes pointed to the detention of dissident Saudi Sheik al-Hawali . Al-Hawali was the mentor of GMU microbiology student Al-Timimi who spoke in London in August 2001 alongside 911 Imam Awlaki (also from Falls Church) and unindicted WTC 1993 conspirator Bilal Philips. Al-Timimi was in contact with Saudi sheik Al-Hawali in 2002 and arranged to hand deliver a message to all members of Congress he had drafted in al-Hawali’s name on the first anniversary of the anthrax mailings to Senator Leahy and Daschle. Michael Scheuer the former chief, Bin Laden Unit, eruditely defended the extraordinary rendition program he had launched at the request of President Clinton and his advisors before Congress in April 2007. There’s always been a huge irony in Michael Scheuer’s emphasis on how OBL is attacking the US for its policies without publicly acknowledging the importance of the rendition policy is to those planning the attacks. For the purpose of true crime analysis, it’s not rendition as a policy or human rights issue — or even a tactical issue — that is the question presented. It is walking in the shoes of your adversary (as expert Scheuer urged us to do in his 2002 book). The key is seeing things in terms of what motivates them to act. Sometimes it’s the only way to catch the bad guys — so that you then have the luxury of deciding how well you are going to treat them. The Amerithrax Task Force imagines that Ft. Detrick anthrax researcher Bruce Ivins targeted Leahy and Daschle because they were Catholics who voted pro-choice in opposition to the beliefs of the Catholic Church. The affidavit regarding Dr. Ivins further explains:
g. Zawahiri's View of the "Lies" of the Secular Media Zawahiri explained in the Fall of 2001:
Zawahiri summarizes in Knights Under The Banner of the Prophet: "If we add to the foregoing the media siege imposed on the message of the jihad movement as well as the campaign of deception mounted by the government media we should realize the extent of the gap in understanding between the jihad movement and the common people." In his book first published October 7, 2001, Zawahiri says of the media:
Even dating back to the summer of 1993, CBS' Dan Rather was just one of many who carried reports of the blind sheik being let in the country, with interviewees taking the position that they believed the sheik was being deliberately rewarded by the CIA for his help in the Afghanistan war. The best publicly evidence available online of Dr. Al-Timimi's own views on the subject are his online speeches, "The Negative Portrayal Of Islam In the Media" and "Crusade Complex: Western Perceptions of Islam." In 1994, Al-Timimi spoke alongside Commander Abu Abdel Aziz 'Barbaros' (Bosnia) at the annual IANA conference. Barbaros was the Al Qaeda recruiter who met at BIF offices in Zagreb, Croat in 1992 to plan strategy relating to jihad directed against the US. Jihadist fighter "Barbaros" speaks pretty directly to the issue in a 1994 interview "Understanding Jihad" in the arab language Assirat, for which Al-Timimi served on the advisory board.
Zawahiri was knowledgeable about US media. In October 1998, after U.S. cruise missiles were launched at an al-Qaida training camp at Khost, Afghanistan in retaliation for the Africa embassy bombings, Ayman's office computer in Kabul computer was used to create letterhead for the fictional "Challenge for Media Services," and to draft letters to ABC, CNN and CBS. The letters purported to be from Dr. Mohammed Atef and offered film of bin Laden and the bombed training camp in exchange for cash. The draft letters, which apparently were never sent or received, promised the networks footage in which bin Laden “openly threatened U.S. and Israeli troops.” The draft urged the networks to send representatives to Kabul or Jalalabad to ensure “priority in getting the material and easiness in negotiation.” The letters were found in a folder marked “not sent” on the computer’s hard drive. Why did the sender target the New York Post rather than the New York Times? One would expect the New York Times to be targeted if a conservative biodefense insider was responsible. Was the mailer from the New York City region? The New York Post is one of the most pro-Israel papers around. Commonly the Post has stories blasting Arafat. The paper covered pre-9/11 attacks with analysis about Islam from Daniel Pipes and other conservatives, as no other paper would. The Post letter was addressed to the "Editor." In an audiotape received by al-Jazeera and published in October 2002, Zawahiri repeated his view of the secular lies being told: "America is clearly lying concerning any news related to Afghanistan." Bin Laden himself in January 2004 noted "This is in addition to the crusader media campaigns against the Islamic nation." But now who is telling lies? In January 2001, US Postal employee Sattar and Attorney Stewart discussed how they knew Abdel Rahman was refusing to take insulin for his diabetes but that Sattar would issue a public statement falsely claiming that the Bureau of Prisons was denying medical treatment. Stewart told Sattar that the lie was "safe" because no one on the "outside" would know the truth. Sattar spoke with Al-Sirri, the Vanguards of Conquest publicist, and Al-Sirri told Sattar to send the statement to Reuters and any other news outlets he could contact. Indeed, more broadly, the real lies are being told by anyone who kill or attempt to kill innocents -- or support those who do -- while purporting to have the moral high ground. The biggest lie is the one such a person is telling to himself, especially with respect to whether the killing is going to result in the strategic political goals claimed by Bin Laden and Zawahiri. h. "Release Him": Retaliation for Detention of the Blind Sheikh And Other Detainees The extradition of Egyptian islamists has been one motive for Zawahiri's crimes over the past quarter-century. In 1993, Abdel Sattar was 33. The US Post Office employee was a member of the board at Abu Bakr mosque in Brooklyn. He was already a close associate of Abdel-Rahman. In talking to a Washington Post reporter, he took a zigzag ride to a place chosen at random at the last minute. He explained that bad things likely would happen if the blind sheik was not released. In December 1994, Algerian Islamic militants seized control of an Air France jetliner in Algiers in an unsuccessful bid to crash it into Eiffel Tower on Christmas Day. The hijackers demanded the release of the blind sheik. The United States State Department, on its webpage, explains that the Egyptian Islamic Jihad "[h]as threatened to retaliate against the United States for its incarceration of Shaykh Umar Abd al-Rahman and, more recently, for the arrests of its members in Albania, Azerbaijan, and the United Kingdom." As one informant would later testify, Al Qaeda leadership, then in Khartoum, Sudan, found the blind sheikh's arrest "very sad and.. very bad." They concluded they had "to do something.. They talk about what we have to do against America." Blind sheik Abdel-Rahman spoke to Mary Anne Weaver, author of the seminal A Portrait of Egypt: A Journey Through the World of Militant Islam in the mid-1990s. Abdel-Rahman first went to Peshawar in 1985. He left from Peshawar for a trip into Afghanistan after being released after three years in an Egyptian prison after Sadat's assassination. He settled into the back seat of the U.S.-supplied camouflaged truck shortly after prayers, helped into a flak jacket by his friend, Afghan resistance leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Hekmatyar was receiving half of the CIA's financial support even though he was one of the most anti-US leaders in the resistance against Soviet occupation. Mary Anne Weaver wrote in The Atlantic Monthly in 1996: "They had much in common: both were exceedingly charismatic religious populists; both had committed their lives to jihad, or Islamic holy war; both were fiery orators. They were both given to elliptical, colorful turns of phrase, and their shared message was clear: the imperative to overthrow a secular government -- whether in Afghanistan or Egypt -- and establish an Islamic state." Weaver recounts that joining them in the truck was Mohammed Islambouli, the brother of Sadat's assassin. The 60 CIA and special forces officers in Peshawar considered Abdel-Rahman an asset. In preaching jihad, Abdel-Rahman travelled to Islamic centers in Germany, England, Turkey, and the United States. Weaver explained that Sheikh Omar's closest friend in Peshawar was Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, a highly respected Palestinian. He was killed by a car bomb in 1989. Azzam established the Service Office, which he led until November of 1989, which like its sister office at the Alkifah Refugee Center, on Brooklyn's Atlantic Avenue, recruited Arab volunteers. Islambouli headed the office after Azzam's death. Mohammed Islambouli had been a student of Sheikh Omar's at the Upper Egyptian University of Asyut. WTC 1993 McCarthy explained in a 2008 book: "In Peshawar, both in 1985 and several times thereafter, Abdel Rahman would enjoy the august company of his former student Mohammed Shawky al-Islambouli, a fixture there. A rising jihadist star in his own right, Shawky’s prominence owed much to his mythogenic brother...” By the time Weaver wrote her article for the Atlantic Monthly, Mohammed Islambouli had joined a cell with KSM in planning the aircraft and other attacks on the US and was with him in Doha, Qatar. In December 1995, the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad was attacked by a devastating car bomb following threats from militant Egyptian Islamist groups who demanded that the government of Pakistan stop extraditing their members who had stayed in Peshawar when the war came to an end. The groups also demanded that the United States release Sheikh Abdel-Rahman who had been imprisoned in connection with a plot to blow up New York City landmarks. In a booklet written by al Zawahiri, distributed among his colleagues in Pakistan and Afghanistan, al Zawahiri discussed the reasons that led to Egyptian Islamic Jihad to blow up the Egyptian Embassy in Islamabad. He criticized all branches of the Egyptian government from the Minister of Information, to the army and police forces, the justice system, the public prosecutor’s office, and the religious scholars. But his harshest criticism was directed to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs which was responsible for pursuing jihad members abroad and kidnapping and extraditing them. In September 2000, in an interview with an Arabic-language television station, Usama Bin Laden called for a "jihad" to release the "brothers" in jail "everywhere." In the book he wrote at the time of the Fall 2001 anthrax mailings, he explained that the reason for the attack on the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan in 1995 was because Egypt had been extraditing fundamentalists from Pakistan. When surveillance of the US embassy showed that it was perhaps too difficult a target, the Egyptian embassy was targeted as a symbol. Zawahiri wrote in the Fall 2001 that : "It left the embassy ruined as an eloquent and clear message." An FBI 302 memo dated December 30, 1996 relating to intelligence gathered from the jailed WTC 1993 plotter Ramzi Yousef reflected the same warning of a hijack-of-an-aircraft-to-free-the-blind sheik plot. Bin Laden's 1996 declaration of war on the United States complained of the arrests of Sheik al-Hawali and another colleague. In an interview, Bin Laden conducted with CNN’s Peter Arnett in 1997, Bin Laden told Arnett: “When the Saudi government transgressed in oppressing all voices of the scholars and the voices of those who call for Islam. I found myself forced, especially after the government prevented Sheikh Safar Al-Hawali and some other scholars, to carry out a small part of my duty of enjoining what is right and forbidding what is wrong.” The views of these two sheiks were promoted by the US-based charity, Islamic Assembly of North America ("IANA"). In a public relations debacle for the islamists, on or about November 17, 1997, six terrorists shot and stabbed a group of tourists visiting an archaeological site in Luxor, Egypt. Fifty-eight tourists were killed along with four Egyptians. The terrorists left leaflets explaining their support for the Islamic Group and calling for the blind sheik's release. The torso of one was slit and a leaflet inserted: "No to tourists in Egypt." It was signed "Omar Abdul Rahman's Squadron of Havoc and Destruction -- the Gama'a al-Islamiya, the Islamic Group." Intelligence concluded that Bin Laden had financed the operation and that Luxor was ordered by Egyptian Islamic Group military commander Mustafa Hamza. Dale Watts, Chief of the FBI's International Terrorism Section, explained in a 1998 Statement Before the Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee: "There is an indication that the November 1997 attack on foreign tourists in Luxor, Egypt, was apparently an example of this type of interwoven violence. The ambush appears to have been carried out in an attempt to pressure the United States into releasing Sheik Rahman, who is serving a life sentence in federal prison for his part in planning attacks against the president of Egypt and several sites in New York City. " Testimony from December 14, 2004 in the trial USA v. Sattar, involving co-defendant Lynne Stewart, described the position of Mustafa Hamza that the Islamic Group had no dispute with the United States so long as the Blind Sheik was released. Because of the pressure and electronic surveillance by Egyptian security services, Islamic Group was dysfunctional. For example, Hamza had first learned that he had been named military head of Islamic Group after he heard it on the Voice of Israel radio. US Post Office employee Sattar was frustrated with attorney al-Zayat, who he believed was spreading a rumor that Sattar worked for the CIA. In 1998, the blind sheik issued a fatwa directing that Americans be killed to avenge his imprisonment. During the trial relating to bombing the U.S. embassies in Africa, one witness testified that Abdel Rahman smuggled a flier from prison calling on Muslims to avenge indignities he sustained as a prisoner. "Oh people, oh men of Allah, rise up from your deep slumber. .. Rise up and see justice done," the sheik wrote in a letter smuggled out of prison. Zawahiri gave the same motivation for the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa. In 1998, the "Information Office of the Jihad Group in Egypt" issued a statement -- a copy of which was received by Al-Hayat -- entitled "About the extradition of three of our brothers." It said that "the US government, in coordination with the Egyptian government, arrested three of our brothers in some East European states." The statement said: "The accusation leveled at our three brothers was participation in a group declaring jihad against the United States and Israel and their trade, and cooperation with the mujahidin in Kosovo outside US influence." It continued: "We are interested in briefly telling the Americans that their message has been received and that the response, which we hope they will read carefully, is being [prepared], because we -- with God's help -- will write it in the language that they understand." Three days later, 220 people at the embassies, mostly Africans, were killed. Zawahiri deemed many were working on intelligence matters against islamists in the region. In response to a retaliatory cruise missile strike after the embassy bombings, Zawahiri told a Pakistan journalist by satellite phone (bought by a charity worker in Colombia, Missouri who later lived with the father of the leader of the Virginia Paintball defendants.) that "The war has only just begun." The London cell protested the detention of both radical Saudi Sheik al-Hawali and Sheik Abdel-Rahman. In the Spring and Fall of 1999, the Blind Sheik's assistant, Sattar, was in telephone communication with Deputy Military Commander Mustafa Hamza, the blind sheik's successor Taha, Yassir al-Sirri, and al-Zayat. They spoke on conference calls about the blind sheikh's withdrawal of his support for the cease fire. Although suspecting his phone was wiretapped, Sattar continued to talk vaguely in code about these issues with these people, all of whom were closely connected to al-Zawahiri. This was the period Zawahiri moved forward his anthrax planning and there was a public dialogue between Bin Laden and a London cleric's call for a holy biowar. On September 21, 2000, an Arabic television station, Al Jazzeera, televised an interview with Osama Bin Laden, Ayman Zawahiri, and Islamic leader Abu Yasser (of the Islamic Group and Al Qaeda), and Mohammed Abdel Rahman (the blind sheik's son), during which they pledged jihad to free Abdel Rahman. They urged that his followers avenge the "insult" paid him by his imprisonment for conspiracy to commit murder. Bin Laden vowed "to work with all our power to free our brother, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, and all our prisoners in America, Egypt, and Riyadh. Bin Laden told his followers to remember Nosair, the man who assassinated Rabbi Kahane. In an audio overlay, Mohammed was heard saying "avenge your sheik" and "go to the spilling of blood." In the late 1970s, while in Saudi Arabia, Blind Sheik Abdel-Rahman had become acquainted with Azzam, Bin Laden, and Turab, who would become the top religious leader in Sudan. He developed ties to the Muslim World League. When he visited Peshawar in the late 1980s and early 1990s Abdel-Rahman stayed in a large house outside of Peshawar with Mohammed Islambouli and Zawahiri. Al-Timimi would speak alongside Abdel-Rahman's son at IANA conferences in 1993 and 1996. Alarm bells should have gone off when Al-Timimi in the late 1990s first started walking down the hallways with famed Russian bioweaponeer and former USAMRIID head Charles Bailey but there is no indication that they did. "To add to the perceived outrage, according to the government's indictment of Attorney Lynne Stewart, his followers were told that he was being denied his insulin for his diabetes when actually he was just refusing to take it. (The alleged mistreatment concerned, at its core, restrictions on his ability to issue further communications ordering that Americans be killed). The false claim, Sattar says, was included to generate sympathy for the blind sheik. In addition to the videotaped statement by Bin Laden, Zawahiri and Taha in a videotape, Abu Sayyaf in Southeast Asia also demanded his release. The Cole bombing, reportedly masterminded by Khalid Mohammed, was also motivated at least in part to free the blind sheik. One government affidavit in the prosecution of the Blind Sheik's attorney, Lynne Stewart, for violating prison regulations, explained: "YOUSRY told SHEIKH ABDEL RAHMAN that "some people spoke to [SATTAR] on the phone and said that they did this operation for Omar Abdel Rahman so he could be released from prison and they asked SATTAR to do some negotiations with the American government and tell them 'if [Rahman is] not released we'll execute another operation. SHEIKH ABDEL RAHMAN responded that SATTAR had to take himself out of this and that a lawyer should handle any negotiations." Zawahiri wrote in Knights Under the Banner of the Prophet published at the time of the second anthrax mailing that he agreed with the supporter of the "blind sheik" who said: "the Egyptian Government is guilty of a major shortcoming by not intervening to safeguard the shaykh, guarantee his humanitarian rights inside the US jail, and find a solution to his case because, in the final count, he is an Egyptian national, a Muslim scholar, and a professor at Al-Azhar university. Finally he is a blind and sick old man. His continued detention and the inhuman way in which he is treated will continue to be a source of tension on all levels. The ruling shura (council) of Egyptian Islamic Jihad in the mid-1990s had 14 members, including three in London. Two of those three, Adel Abdel Bari and Ibrahim Eidarous, at the time of the anthrax mailings, were the ones who had announced that the 1998 embassy bombings were in retaliation for the detention of the blind sheik and Sheik al-Hawali. They were in Belmarsh prison fighting extradition to the United States for alleged involvement in the 1998 bombings of American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya. Ahmed and Mohammed Abdel-Rahman, two of the Egyptian sheikh's 13 children, were named as co-conspirators in the September 11 attacks. In late May 2000, Post Office employee Sattar had telephone conversations with Islamic Group leaders in which he explained that Abdel Rahman (1) did not object to a return to "work" (terrorist operations); (2) agreed that the IG should escalate the issues in the media; (3) advised the IG to avoid division within the IG's leadership; and (4) instructed the IG to hint at military operation even if the group was not ready for military action. On June 14, 2000, Attorney Stewart issued a press release that quoted Abdel Rahman as stating that he "is withdrawing his support for the cease-fire that currently exists." On June 19, 2000, Al Qaeda leader Mohammed Abdel Rahman, the blind sheik's son, told US Postal employee Sattar to ask his father issue a clarifying press release and he did. On October 4, 2000, US Postal employee Sattar called the Vanguards of Conquest publicist in London, Al-Sirri, and read to him a fatwa to be issued under Abdel Rahman's name entitled, "Fatwah the Killing of Israelis Everywhere," which Al-Sirri agreed to distribute. The next day, the fatwa appeared on a web-site operated by Al-Sirri. The fatwa called on "brother scholars everywhere in the Muslim world to do their part and issue a unanimous fatwa that urges the Muslim world to do their part and issue a unanimous fatwah that urges the Muslim nation to fight the Jews, and to kill them wherever they are." The fatwa urged "the Muslim nation" to "fight the Jews by all possible means of jihad, either by killing them as individuals or by targeting their interests, and the interests of whose who support them, as much as they can." On or about November 21, 2000, Al Jazeera featured a meeting of Bin Laden, Zawahiri and Taha under a banner that read "Convention to Support Honorable Omar Abdel Rahman. The three pleaded "jihad to free Abdel Rahman from incarceration in the United States. Mohammed Abdel Rahman, the blind sheik's son, was heard urging others to "avenge your Sheikh" and "go to the spilling of blood." But the blind sheik's plight was also of concern to alleged Al Qaeda operatives in the US. Members of an alleged Detroit, Michigan terror cell had an angry conversation in June 2001 about Abdel Rahman's imprisonment. Similarly, the Government's Indictment of the Buffalo defendants explained that one of the reasons motivating the terrorists actions was that "al Qaeda opposed the United States Government because of the arrest, conviction and imprisonment of persons belonging to Al Qaeda or its affiliated terrorist groups or those with whom it worked." In July 2001, Attorney Lynne Stewart visited Abdel Rahman and prior to the visit she signed and faxed to the United States Attorney's Office in the Southern District of New York an affirmation by which she agreed to abide by the terms of the administrative restrictions on communication. Lynne Stewart had been appointed by the Court in 1995 along with former Attorney Ramsey Clarke, to represent the Blind Sheik. In the Summer of 2001, Patrick Fitzgerald wanted to impress upon her the seriousness of the obligation. Her next visit was recorded on videotape without her knowledge. She was found to have brought a message to Abdel Rahman from his son, Mohammed Abdel Rahman, which urged Abdel Rahman to continue to support an end to the cease-fire. the blind sheikh's son, Muhammed (aka Assadullah) was reportedly on a three-member WMD Committee, along with Midhat Mursi (aka Abu Khabab) and Abu Bashir al-Yemeni. He ran a camp at the Darunta complex, as did Midhat Mursi. (Stewart was indicted in 2002 for alleging she violated prison administrative regulations by helping the Blind Sheik communicate his abandonment of support for the cease fire.) Stewart was the colleague of Stanley Cohen, who represented Hamas leaders such as Marzook, as well as the leading defendant in Virginia Paintball case. Lynne Stewart also had worked on behalf of the blind sheik with Nubani, who arranged for pro bono assets for the Virginia Paintball defendants. The daughter of the lead Amerithrax prosecutor came to work pro bono for Al-Timimi. Stewart also secretly brought to Abdel Rahman correspondence and messages from other individuals. During this visit, Stewart told Abdel Rahman that Sattar had been told that the U.S.S. Cole had been bombed on Abdel Rahman’s behalf and that translator Yousry had been asked to communicate the United States Government that other things would follow if it did not free Abdel Rahman. Abdel Rahman said that negotiations should go through an attorney. While Yousry was informing Abdel Rahman about these things, attorney Stewart actively concealed the conversations from the prison guards by, for example, tapping a water bottle on the table while noting that she was “just doing covering noises.” Attorney Stewart, Sattar, and a co-defendant were convicted in February 2005. IANA writer Kamal Habib, the founder of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, was in charge of the "National Campaign to Release Detainees." It perhaps was inevitable that IANA would be caught in the crossfire just as was Abdel-Rahman's attorney Lynne Stewart. As a source, the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Brief titled "Bin Laden Determined to Attack in the U.S." mentions "a senior EIJ member" living in California. The reference is to former US sergeant Ali Mohammed, Ayman Zawahiri's head of intelligence. The references in the PDB to the threat of aircraft hijacking in an attempt to free blind sheik Abdel-Rahman were perhaps underscored a month later when, the week before 9/11, the Taliban government offered to exchange eight Christian missionaries in exchange for Sheik Abdel-Rahman. Whether viewed as blackmail or retaliation, the detention of the blind sheikh and numerous other detainees in custody prior to 9/11 figured as an important part of the motive for the anthrax mailings. In April 2005, Moussaoui confessed to a plot to fly a 747 into the White House if the United States government refused to free the blind sheikh. Bin Laden had considered hijacking a plane in an attempt to flee the blind sheikh but determined it was impractical. In a tape in January 2007 Zawahiri reiterated that Muslims should try to free Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman. He also warned that “Americans must expect to pay the price for everything they have done to” detainees held at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. i. "The Far Enemy": Zawahiri's Victory in the EIJ Debate Whether to Target US Zawahiri's unexplained absence due to his being jailed in 1996 in Russia caused considerable stress, already building because of the lack of the movement’s success in Islamic states or in Egypt, the usual financial stresses, and the conflict within the group about Zawahiri’s decision to join with Bin Laden. His time in the Russian jail -- all the while worrying that the Russians would learn his identity -- gave him an ulcer. Not everyone was sympathetic. “We ask God to grant you recovery from your ulcer, but this illness is not too serious to prevent you from working.” Ayman was reluctant to tell his associates where he had been lest they doubt how he was able to obtain his freedom. Some favored Zawahiri’s approach of joining with Bin Laden and targeting the US. “We encourage the merger with the Contractor’s company as long as it leads to stimulating profitable” trade and the state of the inertia we are in now.” According to Egyptian Islamist Hani al Sabai, the outspoken Director of Al Maqrizi Center for Historical Studies, in London, the Egyptians who wanted to merge with al Qaeda were in the minority. Hani al Sibai speaks authoritatively on the issue -- according to al-Najjar's confession, he had been an EIJ shura member and he was detained in 1999. “There is a deep abyss in thinking," one letter wrote. The head of the group’s Islamic-law committee, according to the Wall Street Journal, described it as a “great illusion” -- questioning why Zawahiri had not limited his focus to Egypt. He ventured that “going on this dead end is like fighting ghosts and windmills. Enough pouring musk on barren land!” The letter from four Yemeni EIJ members expressed the need to improve relations between EIJ in Egypt and al Qaeda. The four agreed with Zawahiri's view that joining forces with Osama bin Laden's group represents "a great opportunity that shouldn't be missed." But Abu Abdullah, writing for the group, strongly rejected changing the priorities of the organization and succumbing to bin Laden or forsaking Egypt as the priority. The four doubted Bin Laden's leadership skills. “These are not profits. They are rather a compound of losses.” Minutes of one meeting reveal fractious in-fighting. Ayman repeatedly threatened to resign -- he even denounced his brother Mohamed for alleged financial malfeasance while he had been away. In defense of the merger, Ayman explained: "More positively, however, it is drawing us closer to each other from the contracting company (al Qaeda)." "You are all aware of our situation and what they are offering us. If the contractor (bin Laden) had promised us great things in the past and not delivered, it appears he has now changed. Nowadays, almost everything comes from God and the rest from him. I honestly believe [cooperation] is a great opportunity. I am telling you the truth when I say I believe great things are yet to come. All of us should support him." He urges his colleagues, that is "better for [us] to take action than to remain idle. Your fears that we are changing our direction and following the contractor, bin Laden, are unfounded. Only now are we starting to move in the right direction with regards to the new school (al Qaeda). While we might criticize them, we are unable to do a tenth of what they accomplish." Zawahiri stepped down temporarily (or was dismissed) as head in 1999, being replaced by Shehata. Shehata thought it much more important to concentrate on the regime in Egypt. Resignations continued under Shehata by those disgusted by “the thinking and management, whether old or new.” One letter announced, “We will try to give the impression that we are coordinating with the group to preserve the image.” Shehata added to the tensions by being prone to tantrums. He claimed that Zawahiri was a “liar, sinner and a cheat” and even threw stones at one accountant. One notice to members read “The heart is full of pain, sorrow and bitterness. There is a new problem and a new dispute every day.” Shehata stepped down and Ayman resumed the reins. Ayman had prevailed in his view that it made sense to focus on targets in the US rather than Egypt. Most of all, the formal alliance with Bin Laden solved Zawahiri's and EIJ's money problem. j. Despots, Democracy and the Cease-Fire Initiative After the Luxor Massacre Although the proposal in the Spring 1999 by IANA writers Kamal Habib and Gamal Sultan to channel their activities into nonviolent activities was rejected by the blind sheik, they were not deterred. "There is something new that is trying to storm and overcome old, traditional ideas and play a political and social role in society, ' Kamal Habib told one author Anthony Shadid in 1999. Shadid is the author of the 2002 Legacy of the Prophet: Despots, Democrats, and the New Politics of Islam. Violence, Habib explained to the author, was understandable where Sadat had left no room for participation it did not sanction. Sadat had visited and made peace with Israel. The month before Sadat was gunned down Sadat had ordered the arrest of 1500 people. Over twenty years, the lesson learned by these sons of the Movement was that violence had not led to power. The "attacks hurt not only the not only the Islamic movement but also Islam itself as da'wa and as a religion." In prison, their goal in interpreting the koran turned to deciding "what to take, what to leave, what to build on and what to add to." Former militants, in particular, were responding to the public revulsion over the 1997 murder of 58 tourists at Luxor. Kamal Habib and Gamal Sultan sought to form the Reform Party while the lawyers al Zayat and Mamdouh Ismail sought to form the Islamic Party. "We are the sons of the Islamist movement who struggled and clashed with the government in 1981." "We have been through a violent clash between the state and members of the Islamist groups and saw the negative consequences of this violence. We have learned from bitter experience that we must reorder our priorities." Shariah would be the law of the land -- but it would be brought about by democratic, nonviolent means. The Cairo-based Kamal Habib wrote for the "The Straight Path" (Assirat) out of Pittsburgh and then for IANA's quarterly journal. Kamal Habib was Ayman's friend. Habib had founded the Egyptian Islamic Jihad by bringing together several cells, including Ayman's cell which by then had as many as 40 members. One of the members of the advisory board of Assirat was Ali Al-Timimi, a colleague of famed Russian anthrax head Ken Alibek and former USAMRIID Deputy Commander and Acting Commander Charles Bailey, a prolific anthrax researcher who worked with the Ames anthrax strain. IANA's quarterly publication, Al Manar al-Jadeed (in Arabic) was written by EIJ and IG founders and other deep thinkers of the movement during the 1998-2001 period, its pages in Arabic chronicled a running dialogue on this question of the role of violence. (Two of the three main contributors were IG and EIJ founders respectively). The editor, Gamal Sultan, was behind the proposal in 1999 to renounce violence involving an attempt to form the The Reform Party. Sultan viewed his effort as a pragmatic recognition that the militants had been so infiltrated by the intelligence services that it wasn't practical to engage in violence. But, more broadly, it was in recognition of the fact that violence had not worked. Others took a different approach. They just tightened their application of the principles of cell security. The US-based charity IANA, as the result of the Cairo-based talent that they had writing for their main journal, was in the middle of the conditions of the blind sheiks' detention and a public debate by former members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad as to whether the violent means favored by jihadists could be channeled into nonviolent means. In January 1999, Gamal Sultan and Kamal Habib wrote the blind sheik, through his paralegal Sattar, seeking a fatwa agreeing to participation in a political party by Movement members. The blind sheik thought the venture pointless. In addition to key supporter Kamal Habib, Gamal Sultan's main partner in seeking to found the Reform Party was Salah Hashem, founder of the Egyptian Islamic Group and a chief proponent of the cease-fire initiative. In March 1999, upon the visit by attorney Lynne Stewart, the blind sheik indicated that he thought the effort pointless and rejected the idea of a political party. At the same time he withdrew support for the cease-fire initiated by the imprisoned Islamic Group members in 1997. In his opening argument in the prosecution of US postal employee Sattar, the federal prosecutor explained: "What was Abdel Rahman's view on an Islamic Group political party? He flatly rejected the idea. In other words, we will prove to you that Abdel Rahman from prison and while subject to the SAMs, with the assistance of these defendants, directed the Islamic Group to remain outside the law, to remain a terrorist organization." Counsel for Lynne Stewart explained on her appeal:
The co-founder of the Islamic Party, Cairo lawyer Montasser El-Zayat, deferred to the blind sheik's pronouncement. He later explained that any political participation, let alone in parliamentary elections, was sinful. "We are committed to the fatwa of Sheikh Omar Abdel-Rahman, because even if Islamists were to be voted into the Assembly, they would still be a minority and they might find themselves in a position where they have to participate in passing laws that might contradict the Shari'a." El-Zayat's view highlighted the difference that also existed the ranks of Islamists -- with some militants willing to be part of the system and others determined not to participate. "There is no turning back to violence. We have renounced violence once and for all. All we need now is for the state to open up to us. They don't seem to be doing so or even willing to do so in the coming period." Al Zayat was the attorney who in March 1999 said that Ayman likely was going to use weaponized anthrax against US targets to retaliate against the rendering of EIJ leaders. Abdel-Rahman's Cairo lawyer, Montasser al-Zayat, announced the intention to use anthrax in the press on March 6, 1999. Zawahiri in April 1999 pressed the current Islamic Group leader Taha for news and the implications and details of the ceasefire initiative and the proposal to establish a political party. Taha had been maintaining contact with the blind sheik's paralegal Sattar, as had Cairo attorney Al-Zayat and Islamic Group military commander Mustafa Hamza. In public and in private teleconference calls set up by US Post Office employee Sattar, Cairo lawyer Al-Zayat played "good cop" to the "bad cop" played by IG leader Taha in faraway Afghanistan. Ayman wrote Taha in April 1999:
As Post Office employee Sattar explained at trial, "if there is somebody to be called the founder of the Islamic Group it is Salah Hashim." Hashim lived in Egypt and was an engineer by training. He was arrested for a little period of time and then renounced politics and violence. Sattar explained that Hashim stayed home for a long period of time until he actually initiated -- or he was -- him and Muntasir Al-Zayat were the architects of the peace initiative." In his letter to Taha, Ayman was discussing the party sought to be cofounded in 1999 by IANA editor Gamal Sultan and IANA writer Kamal Habib. Al-Timimi had been on the advisory board of the related publication Assirat for which IANA writers Gamal Sultan and Kamal Habib were the leading writers. In this way, Al-Timimi was close to the intellectual and tactical debates raging in 1999 about cease-fire declared in Egypt, nonviolence and democracy, the release of the blind sheik and other detainees, and the "near" vs. "Far" enemy issue so important to Ayman and his Egyptian colleagues.
There were close parallels between the debate raging among Ayman and the EIJ shura members in secret emails dating to 1998 and 1999 and the content of IANA's Cairo-based quarterly publication Al Manar al Jadeed (in Arabic). Leading lights in the Movement contributed to the dialogue that extended from 1998 through 2000. The publication Al Manar al-Jadeed was funded by the Ann Arbor-based IANA which in turn got most of its funding from sources in Saudi Arabia. Al-Timimi was IANA's most celebrated speaker and the colleague of two of the world's major anthrax research programs. When the FBI searched Al-Timimi's townhouse, they found Khafagi's personal papers. Some pretty weighty and focused tactical matters involving Egyptian politics were discussed in the Arabic-language Al Manar al Jadeed -- to include the role of violence and whether democracy could be a vehicle for imposing shariah. IANA’s webmaster Sami al-Hussayen once pleaded by email that Al-Manar Jadeed was out of control, printing what they wanted and then sending IANA the bill, while risking getting IANA officials in trouble (which then, in fact, happened). For example, IANA websites published a fatwa in June 2001 saying it was a duty to kill as many as possible, such as by flying a plane into a building. IANA websites prominently distributed the views of Sheik al-Hawali who was working closely with both Sami and with GMU microbiologist Ali Al-Timimi. In late March 2007, al-Zayat's co-founder of the Islamic Party, Mamdouh Ismail, was arrested. The Egyptian government alleged to be the conduit between Ayman Zawahiri and jihadists in Yemen, Iraq and Egypt. The alleged intermediary between Zawahiri and Mamdouh Ismail was the Al Qaeda's spymaster, Al-Hakayma, who had written the 2002 treatise on intelligence. That treatise included a description of the Amerithrax investigation and was dedicated to those who are up at late night working to bring victory to Islam. Mamdouh Ismail was the attorney who volunteered to represent the expert in functionalized polymers. Ironically, although Zabadi was Ayman's program, the anthrax letters -- in showing some restraint -- represented a compromise between his desire to attack the "Far Enemy" and the wishes of the many who opposed him and thought that EIJ should remain focused on Egypt and should avoid the targeting of civilians. The anthrax letters confirmed abandonment of the cease-fire while escalation in the media just as blind sheik Abdel-Rahman had urged. The anthrax letters followed the same modus operandi as the al Hayat letters to newspapers in DC and NYC and people in symbolic positions relating to detention of the WTC plotters. Thus, the one thing that seems clear is that the anthrax mailer and processor likely are supporters of the blind sheik. While they know and respect Zawahiri, they may view democracy as a viable vehicle for imposition of shariah. Perhaps among the 300,000 telephone calls intercepted with blind sheik supporters in Florida or the 85,000 conversations involving Sattar in New York, the authorities already have taped phone calls made with the anthrax plotters. Upon the renunciation of violence against civilians in 2007, up to 5,000 Egyptian Islamic Jihad members stood to be released. If Ayman had tactical sense, he would relent to the revision and target only combatants (as provided for by the hadiths) or else the same 5,000 will simply be scooped up again. As Ali used to say, there needed to be a fiqh, an interpretation of the islamic jurisprudence, suitable for the time. Democracy and the pursuit of islamic rule, in the first place, however, might better have been left to be furthered by those who had not been jailed for the assassination of Anwar Sadat. The ballot box should be a genuine alternative to bullets -- not part of a tactical gambit. Ayman Zawahiri is a fanatic fueled by rage and his guilt in betraying Qamari. In seeking to achieve their goals, the EIJ members should have stuck to their principles and goals and not gone along with his embittered approach. The correct interpretation of the koran and hadiths should not have been left to someone whose vision was tormented by such anger and hatred and remorse. The renunciation of violence announced in Cairo in May 2007 by a number of detained EIJ leaders relates to violence against muslim governments, other muslims (e.g., shiites), and civilians. It does not entail a renunciation against military or political targets associated with "the Far Enemy." EIJ members should now at least heed the urging of recently released brothers in Cairo who urge that at least the targeting of civilians stop ---- if for no other reason than, as Zawahiri himself says, half the battle is fought in the media. In the meantime, the United States must do more than pay lip service to democracy and human rights. k. The CIA's December 4, 1998 Presidential Daily Brief: The Ghost Of Sadat's Assassin Visits the United States to Plan the Attacks Using Aircraft and Other Means After Ramzi Yousef's arrest, KSM sent a $660 wire transfer from Qatar to New York to aid the World Trade Center bombers. KSM reportedly was working as an engineer at the Doha Water Department. The FBI apparently tracked KSM to Doha by a call Ramzi Yousef made from prison in a scheme in which the FBI made him think a mafiosa prisoner was helping to secretly route his calls -- when actually the folks at the front company Roma Corp. in the Flatiron Building New York routing the calls were FBI and not mob. Separately, former CIA agent Robert Baer in See No Evil first publicly reported that in 1996 KSM was in a cell with Mohammed Islambouli, the younger brother of Khaled al-Islambouli, the militant who assassinated Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat in 1981. Baer's source was a local police chief. ABC's Brian Ross has reported that "the FBI tracked Mohammed to Doha, and was within hours of capturing him." Ross's source was Jack Cloonan, in the New York Office Bin Laden Squad. Cloonan told Ross that "a specially equipped government executive jet complete with blackout windows, was standing by to transport Mohammed." As recounted by author Peter Lance in Triple Cross, Cloonan said that "somebody had leaked the information to Khalid Shaikh and he left." Brian Ross identified the collaborator as none other than the Qatari religious affairs minister. The FBI's elite Hostage Rescue team found that he had already fled to the Czech Republic. Mohammed's work at the water department is worth noting given the later plans and research relating to poisoning water supplies. The head national security person at the time at the DOJ, Daniel Seikaly, would later serve as lead Amerithrax prosecutor who was leaking sensationalized stories diverting public attention to Hatfill. The "Presidential Daily Brief" on December 4, 1998 to President Clinton, titled "Bin Ladin Preparing to Hijack US Aircraft and Other Attacks," states: "1. Reporting [ redacted ] suggests Bin Ladin and his allies are preparing for attacks in the US, including an aircraft hijacking to obtain the release of Shaykh Umar ‘Abd al-Rahman, Ramzi Yousef, and Muhammad Sidiq Awda.'" Awda was al-Hawali’s fellow radical Saudi sheik who was detained from 1994 through 1998. Sheik Abdel-Rahman, Awda and al-Hawali were all expressly the subject of Bin Laden's 1996 declaration of war against the US. US Sheik Al-Timimi drafted a letter for al-Hawali and had it hand-delivered to members of Congress on first anniversary of anthrax letters to Senators. The December 1998 PDB continued: "One source quoted a senior member of Gama’ at al-Islamiya (IG) saying that, as of October, the IG had completed planning an operation in the US on behalf of bin Ladin, but that the operation was on hold. A senior Bin Ladin operative from Saudi Arabia was to visit IG counterparts in the US soon thereafter to discuss options -- perhaps including an aircraft hijacking." The December 4, 1998 PDB stated: "IG leader Islambouli in late September was planning to hijack a US airliner during the “next couple of weeks” to free ‘Abd al-Rahman and the other prisoners, according to what may be a different source." Islambouli was the brother of Sadat's assassin. Islambouli is still at large and is working with Zawahiri. He can be thought of as the leader of those IG members who support Al Qaeda. That very day of the December 1998 PDB, CIA's George Tenet issued a directive to several CIA officials: "We are at war. I want no resources or people spared in this effort, either inside CIA or the Community." The younger brother of Sadat's assassin, Mohammed, had gone to Pakistan where he had joined Al Qaeda and run a camp. Islambouli operated in Afghanistan and had good connections in Pakistan. He worked for Maktab al-Khidmat (Bureau of Services) in Peshawar. When the blind sheik visited Peshawar, he would stay at a large house outside of Peshawar with both Islambouli and Ayman. Islambouli had an Algerian passport. He left Peshawar, Pakistan for Afghanistan in Spring 1993 upon a crackdown on foreign fighters. In more recent years he reportedly spent some time living in Algeria. Midhat Mursi had connections to Algerians. Perhaps there was a connection between Midhat Mursi and Islambouli. In his introduction on an August 2006 tape, Al-Zawahiri said the Egyptian group was led by Mohammed al-Islambouli. It had been his detention that had motivated the assassin Khalid Islambouli to seize an opportunity presented to kill Sadat on October 6, 1981. Sadat was killed during the annual Armed Forces parade celebrating Egypt's successful attack on Israel in 1973. The militants objected to his signing the Camp David Agreement establishing a peace between Israel and Egypt. The assassin was promptly tried, sentenced to death, and executed. Al Qaeda chose the dates of the approval of that agreement and Sadat's assassination to send the anthrax letters. The Al Qaeda spymaster Al-Hakayma appeared on a tape in 2006 claiming that IG had joined formally with Al Qaeda. Al-Hakayma was once a "second tier" leader of the original Gamaa, Cairo lawyer Montasser al-Zayat told Al-Jazeera. In front of a grove of palm trees, Al-Hakayma said former members had decided to revive the group and rejected the imprisoned leaders’ adherence to a truce. He vowed loyalty to Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman. This was a controversial announcement because the shura members of the group had all announced violence against innocents and dissolved their military wing. A message posted on the Egyptian Islamic Group website in Arabic specifically denied that the blind sheik Abdel Rahman is with the breakaway group: "It is well known [he] was and still is one of the staunchest supporters" of the renunciation of violence. The head of the shura, in his first interview since his release in 2003, told al Jazeera that Zawahiri was lying. One Egyptian Islamic Group leader told Al Jazeera from Germany that support for the merger was limited: "If [some] brothers have joined, then this is their personal view and I don't think that most ... members share that same opinion." It was notable that the person making the announcement, Al-Hakayma, was the Al Qaeda spymaster, an Egyptian Islamic Group member himself, who had summarized the Amerithrax investigation in a 2002 treatise on US intelligence apparatus. Al-Hakayma says in the interview that a group of hardliners from Al Jamaa Al Islamiya had joined Al Qaeda, "to help our great scholar, His Eminence the unshakable Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, languishing in the dungeons of the American prisons, and to repel the attacking enemy which is occupying the countries of the Muslims." l. "Do No Harm": Biography of the Former Cairo MD Vanguards of Conquest #1 Agiza Ahmed Agiza was born in 1956. A summary provided by the American Civil Liberties Union: describes the life of Ahmed Agiza. In November 1998, Mahmoud Jaballah spoke to a colleague and was informed that a man matching Mohammad Zeki Mahjoub's description had moved to Toronto. Jaballah said that he was a shrewd and manipulative man who had worked directly under Abdel Hamid, thought to be a reference to Ahmed Agiza, which CSIS maintains would make Mahjoub the second-in-command of the militant organisation Egyptian Islamic Jihad/Vanguards of Conquest. Ahmed Agiza's rendition from Sweden in mid-December is one of the most oft-cited examples of a CIA rendition. Forty-five year-old Ahmed Agiza was secretly apprehended in Sweden on December 18, 2001, by Swedish Security Police. Agiza was then handed over to agents of the CIA. The ACLU reports rendition agents " stripped him, dressed him in overalls and chained and shackled him before transporting him in a Gulfstream V aircraft to Egypt, where he was severely tortured." In 1982, the ACLU alleges, Agiza had been arrested and tortured by Egyptian security police because they suspected that his cousin had been involved in the assassination of President Anwar Sadat. Agiza filed a lawsuit against the Egyptian government in 1991 for his torture and then left Egypt with his family to various countries in the Middle East, before finally settling in Iran. Agzia was convicted in absentia and sentenced to 25 years in the 1999 trial of the Albanian returnees. The ACLU biography explains:
On April 27, 2004, after a six-hour military trial, Agiza was sentenced to 25 years imprisonment for membership in an Islamic organization banned under Egyptian law. In June 2004, Agiza's prison sentence was reduced to 15 years and he was transferred to the minimum security prison at Tora. In September 2008, Agiza was awarded $ 527,000 in damages in a settlement with the Swedish ministry of justice. Given that the anthrax was sent the day after the denial of Mahjoub's bail -- just as had been threatened in late January 2001 -- the facts relating to Agiza and who he knew are important to keep in mind. m. "Do No Harm": Biography of the Former Cairo MD Vanguards of Conquest #1 Al-Sharif Al-Sayyid Imam Abd-al-Qadir Imam al-Sharif was the ideological theoretician and spiritual leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad throughout much of the 1990s in Afghanistan. He was born in Egypt in 1950. Like Zawahiri, he was introverted and memorized the Quran at a young age. He learned life's lessons by rote from an old book. Like Zawahiri, his academic success led him to the Cairo University Medical School He graduated in 1974, the same year as Zawahiri, and like Zawahiri got his masters there in 1978. He worked as an intern in the surgery department of Qasr al-Ayni Medical College, which was the school's teaching hospital. Al-Shairf, known as Dr. Faldl in Islamist circles, was active in the student cells that formed the first core of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. He knew Kamal Habib, EIJ's founder, and Ayman Zawahiri well. After the Sadat assassination and its aftermath, he fled in 1982 and settled for a short while in the United Arab Emirates. He then left it for the city of Jeddah in Saudi Arabia, He was joined by Ayman al-Zawahiri in 1986 and taught Ayman some of the practical surgery skills that had eluded him. They both then left for the city of Peshawar on the Pakistani-Afghan borders where Al-Sharif managed the Kuwaiti Crescent Hospital. Al-Sharif was the spiritual leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad organization from 1987 until 1993. He completed there his first book "The Fundamentals of Preparedness for Holy War" which provided key guidance for the jihadists along with his book "The Complete Guide to Seekers of Holy Science." After going to Sudan in 1993, he had a falling out with Al-Zawahiri there. Al-Sharif's chief strategic disagreement with Zawahiri was that he believed that violent attacks were futile, and instead advocated slow and steady infiltration into the structure of the state. Before he left Sudan, Al-Sharif gave a copy of his finished manuscript to Zawahiri, saying that it could be used to raise money. But then Zawahiri omitted key criticisms from the manuscript and the radical changes infuriated Al-Sharif. Al-Sharif then left Sudan to Yemin in the middle of 1994 where he worked as a doctor. He worked at a hospital at a mountain town outside of Sanaa, Yemen and called himself Dr. Abdul Aziz al-Sharif. In 1999, like Dr. Agiza, he was sentenced was 25-years in absentia in the "Returnees from Albania" trial. He worked in Yemen until 2004 when the government handed him over to the Egyptians in February 2004. In 2007, he issued his initiative for stopping the violence "A Document for Rationalization of Jihad in Egypt and the World." In it, he emphasized that "all the jihadist movements in the world should rationalize their operations according to the Shariah rules, especially after the appearance of updated versions of killing in the name of jihad which involved breaches of the Shariah." His son reports that at Tora Prison, his "cell" is a private room with a bath and a small kitchen, refrigerator, and a television. Al-Sharif writes: “Oh, you young people, do not be deceived by the heroes of the Internet, the leaders of the microphones, who are launching statements inciting the youth while living under the protection of intelligence services, or of a tribe, or in a distant cave or under political asylum in an infidel country. They have thrown many others before you into the infernos, graves, and prisons.” Muhammad Salah, the Cairo bureau chief of Al Hayat, was allowed into Tora Prison to interview Fadl, and published a . a six-part series, where Fadl defended the work as his own and "left no doubt of his personal grudge against Zawahiri." Fadl labels 9/11 “a catastrophe for Muslims,” because Al Qaeda’s actions “caused the death of tens of thousands of Muslims—Arabs, Afghans, Pakistanis and others.” Former EIJ spiritual guide, Cairo Medical School trained Al-Sharif, has continued his catfight with Zawahiri. Cairo-based ANA writer Kamal Habib says that the criticism of Zawahiri is making Imam (Al-Sharif) look bad. Al-Sharif reports that Sudan intelligence had paid Zawahiri $100,000 for the attempted assassination of an Egyptian prime minister in Ethiopia in the mid-1990s. Al-Sharif says that Ayman once told him in the 1990s that he thought Bin Laden worked for Saudi intelligence. As with both Zawahiri and Agiza, given that the anthrax was sent the day after the denial of Mahjoub's bail -- just as had been threatened in late January 2001 -- the facts relating to Agiza and who he knew are important to keep in mind. | ||
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