Please examine the pictures below taken of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM),
the admitted
mastermind of 9/11, right after his capture on March 1st of 2003:
How old does this man appear to be to you?
Now let's consider some excerpts from the transcript of Khalid Mohammed's
military tribunal at which he confessed to masterminding 9/11 and most of
the terrorist attacks against America up to his capture that were attributed
to "al Qaeda". (In the tribunal Khalid opted to testify in English and his words were transcribed verbatim.)
Here is the key paragraph where
KSM says "Yes" to 31 stated confessions including responsiblity
for the 9/11 attacks (from A to Z) and the first terrorist attempt to destroy
the World Trade Center towers in 1993:
BEGIN DETAINEE ORAL STATEMENT
Yes.
And I want to add some of this one
just for some verification. It like some operations before I join
al Qaida. Before I remember al Qaida which is related to Bojinka
Operation I went to destination involve to us in 94, 95. Some Operations
which means out of al Qaida. It's like beheading Daniel Pearl. It's
not related to al Qaida. It was shared in Pakistani. Other group,
Mujahadeen. The story of Daniel Pearl, because he stated for the
Pakistanis, group that he was working with the both. His mission
was in Pakistan to track about Richard Reed trip to Israel. Richard
Reed, do you have trip? You send it Israel to make set for targets
in Israel. His mission in Pakistan from Israeli intelligence, Mosad,
to make interview to ask about when he was there. Also, he mention
to them he was both. He have relation with CIA people and were the
Mosad. But he was not related to al Qaida at all or UBL. It is related
to the Pakistan Mujahadeen group. Other operations mostly are some
word I'm not accurate in saying. I'm responsible but if you read
the heading history. The line there [Indicating to Personal Representative
a place or Exhibit D-c].
[Transcript
PDF]
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Very little information has been released to the public by U.S. intelligence
regarding the al Qaeda terrorists who have been apprehended thus far that
were behind 9/11 and other terrorism against America to-date. In the case
of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, as far as I know the only information released
to the public since his capture are the photos above and the
transcript from the military tribunal excerpted above in which he confessed
to masterminding 9/11 and most of al Qaeda's terrorism to-date.
Here's the problem.
According to the Kuwaiti Interior Ministry, Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed was born on April 14th, 1965, making him 37-years-old when
the photos above were taken following his capture. Does the man above look
like he's 37 years old?
What's more, according to his official biography, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed studied
in the U.S. for three years between 1983 and 1986 and received a college
degree in mechanical engineering. As Time magazine reported regarding KSM : "His English is flawless, and his intelligence
formidable. He raced through an engineering degree at the North Carolina
Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro in just two and
a half years, graduating in 1986".
Is the tortured English spoken in the confession above consistent with
someone known to speak "flawless" English who earned a four-year degree in
mechanical engineering in less than three years at an American college?
If you are of sound and open mind, the answer to these questions should
be NO and NO.
Now, given that KSM masterminded the 9/11 attacks, given that he was behind
almost all the terrorism against America up to his capture that has been
attributed to al Qaeda, and given that the War On Terror was effectively
provoked by the actions of this one man, you would think U.S. intelligence
would be concerned with the suspicious points I'm addressing here regarding just who KSM really is. The man captured and
considered to be Khalid Sheikh Mohammed by U.S. authorities may, in fact,
be someone else. In other words, the person now in custody at Guantanamo
is quite possibly using a LEGEND, i.e., a false identity, stolen from a real
individual named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
On March 1st, 2003, I met with Dr. Laurie Mylroie, author of War
Against America: Saddam Hussein and the World Trade Center Attacks
- A Study Of Revenge and BUSH
VS. THE BELTWAY: How the CIA and the State Department Tried to Stop the
War on Terror, at the Pentagon City Ritz-Carlton for lunch to discuss
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
We were meeting because I had earlier uncovered, upon reading
a lengthy
article which appeared in the Los Angeles Times, that Khalid
Mohammed was the uncle of Abdul Basit, rather than the terrorist
mastermind Ramzi Yousef as was being widely reported at the time.
This is critical because in her work, Dr. Mylroie posits that Abdul
Basit is a Kuwaiti
that Ramzi Yousef sought to assume the identity of in pursuing his terrorist
operations against the U.S. including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing
and the first attempt to destroy the Twin Towers [See Chapter
5 from Study Of Revenge - note that, even though Abdul Basit was born in Kuwait, he still was technically a Pakistani living in Kuwait because of the emirate's laws regarding foreigners....the same goes for KSM]. If Khalid Mohammed was Yousef's "uncle",
then the odds were that Khalid Mohammed was likewise a Kuwaiti identity
being used falsely by a state-sponsored operative to conduct terror operations against
the U.S. in a surreptitious manner. One would think a nephew and uncle would recognize
if the other was eliminated and a terrorist infamous around the world was
assuming their identity.
Before going public with this information, Laurie
wanted to have lunch with me to discuss what I had figured out as she wished to preempt
publication of the case regarding Iraqi complicity in 9/11 with
an article that appeared seventeen days later, just before the Iraq War
commenced, in the Wall Street Journal dubbed, The
Baluch Connection: Is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed tied to Baghdad? (see
below).
As it turned out, just before I left my hotel room at the Ritz-Carlton
to meet Dr. Mylroie for lunch that day, news broke that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed
had been arrested in Pakistan. Indeed, I got to break the news to Dr. Mylroie
and she responded "that's huge".
The critical point is that the same argument
that Dr. Mylroie made regarding Ramzi Yousef in Study Of Revenge
can be applied to Khalid Mohammed [again, see Chapter
5 from Study Of Revenge]. Accordingly, in the same way Dr. Mylroie
established Saddam Hussein's complicity in the 1993 World Trade Center
bombing and the first attempt to take down the Twin Towers, one can establish
Saddam's involvement in 9/11.
Dr. Mylroie, in her most recent book, Bush vs. The Beltway, spells out the case as follows:
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. . . instead of a loose network of radical Muslim terrorists, we now have the picture of a single family located at the center of almost all the major terrorist assaults against American targets over the past decade, starting with the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 - an attack undertaken with no evident source of outside funding or training - and culminating in the September 11 strikes. Scarcely mentioned is the existence of intelligence ties between the Baluch and Iraq, though an insider such as General Samarrai has insisted that they are serious and longstanding. The notion that one family lies behind this unprecedented campaign of increasingly spectacular terrorism is difficult to credit. It is without any precedent. No terrorist organization has had a family at its heart, and there has never been a string of major terrorist attacks directed by a wayward family, such as Yousef et al.
- The Kuwait Files -
THE IDENTITIES OF ALL these individuals - Ramzi Yousef; Yousef's uncle Khalid Shaikh Mohammed; Yousef's two brothers, Abd al Munim and Abd al Karim; and Yousef's childhood friend, Abdul Hakim Murad - are all based on documents from Kuwait. (That may be true also for Yousef's cousin, Ali Abdul Aziz.) And these documents all come from files that predate Kuwait's liberation.
But, of course, nothing in Kuwait's files from that time can be assumed to be reliable. Iraq occupied the country from August 2, 1990, until its liberation on February 28, 1991. During that time, Iraqi intelligence had ample opportunity to tamper with Kuwait's files, if it so chose.
It is a standard practice of Soviet-style intelligence agencies to develop a false identity, or "legend," for agents involved in "wet" or illegal operations. The purpose, of course, is to avoid retaliation for an act of aggression by preventing it from being traced back to the sponsor.
There exists an alternative explanation to the theory that these Baluch terrorists represent a single, uniquely violent (and - from a certain perspective - an unusually talented) family: that is, these people are elements of Iraq's Baluch network who were given legends by the Iraqi mukhabarrat (intelligence) during Iraq's occupation of Kuwait. The Baluch network was actively used by Iraq throughout the Iran-Iraq war; it would still have been available two years later, when Iraq invaded Kuwait.
At that time, 95,000 Pakistanis lived in Kuwait. Shortly after the invasion, Iraqi forces seized some two dozen Pakistani nationals and held them hostage. This was, of course, a very violent period, and there has been no real accounting of what happened to third world nationals then. Legends could easily have been developed for Iraqi intelligence agents, using the Kuwaiti Interior Ministry files of individuals who died in that period. Indeed, it would not have been beyond the Iraqis to have killed people for that purpose; or, they could have made up entire files.
- Who Is Khalid Shaikh Mohammed? -
THERE REALLY WAS an individual named Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, born to Pakistani parents in Kuwait on April 24, 1965. He grew up in Kuwait, attended high school there, and graduated in 1983. In January 1984 he traveled to the United States to enroll at Chowan College in Murfreesboro, North Carolina, a small Baptist school that had begun aggressively recruiting foreign students to boost its enrollment. After one semester at Chowan, Mohammed transferred to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (A&T), a historically black college in Greensboro. He graduated in December 1986, with a bachelor of science in mechanical engineering.
 Is the September 11 terrorist mastermind, now in U.S. custody, the same person as the individual described above? Or did the real Khalid Shaikh Mohammed die, and was his identity then assumed by a terrorist agent? At the time of the terrorist's arrest, Mohammed would have been only thirty-seven years old - but the arrest photo, with its grizzled side-burns and heavy jowls, suggests an older man.
That, however, is a subjective judgment. Yet it would be easy enough to investigate the question much more thoroughly and reliably.
Three sets of information exist regarding Mohammed: (1) information from U.S. and Kuwaiti sources from the 1980s, before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. (This would include U.S. immigration records and college documents, as well as information to be obtained from individuals who might remember Mohammed.) (2) Documents from Kuwait. (3) Information since the liberation of Kuwait (including evidence from the terrorist's arrest and interrogation; from the interrogation of other al Qaeda prisoners, and from the investigation into the 1995 plane bombing plot).
The Kuwaiti documents should be scrutinized for internal consistency, and for any irregularities that would suggest the file was doctored.
The information about Mohammed from the 1980s should be compared with the information about him that has emerged since Kuwait's liberation. The terrorist may prove to be taller (or shorter) than the student. His U.S. interrogators might ask him what he remembers about the American colleges he is supposed to have attended. If he cannot recall anything about them - especially personal information, like the classes he took or some of the teachers he had - that would be a significant indicator that he is not who he purports to be.
There may be individuals who remember Mohammed from his time in America, who would be able to say whether the terrorist is really the student or not. There may also be individuals in Kuwait who would remember him from before Iraq's invasion. (This sort of statement always has to be carefully vetted, possibly by polygraph, particularly in the context of a high-profIle investigation.)
There do appear to be some individuals who have a genuine memory of Mohammed. Professor Gaith Faile heads the science department of Chowan College and recalls Mohammed as "a B-type student" who "wasn't unusually radical. I didn't notice anything different about him." Mohammed al Bulooshi, a fellow Baluch from Kuwait, studied with Mohammed at Chowan. He states, "We lived in one building, had breakfast, lunch and dinner together, us and thirty Arab students. We all became quite close." Al Bulooshi also said that Mohammed "was so quiet, there was no indication that he was involved in [religious extremism]. I would never have thought in a million years that he could be involved in these terrorist things." These and other acquaintances should be allowed to meet with Mohammed, to try to provide an authoritative answer to the question as to whether the terrorist is really the same person as the student or not. (Mylroie, pp.152-155)
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Now here's what is key....with both Ramzi Yousef and Khalid
Mohammed in U.S. custody, America's. intelligence services can establish
whether or not they are related through DNA testing. Such
a DNA comparison is even more potentially tell-tale today because, as Laurie
Mylroie points
out in a recent American Spectator article dubbed "How Little We Know",
the U.S. has nabbed three of Khalid Mohammed nephews other than Ramzi
Yousef: Ali
Abdul Aziz Ali, the 9/11 money man, and two of Ramzi's brothers, Abdul
Munim Yousef and Abdul Karim Yousef. The DNA of all the members of this
mysterious Baluchi family from Kuwait should be compared to determine whether
or not these terrorists are related, because, if they are not, it follows
that they are most likely operatives using assumed identities from a likely
dead Kuwaiti family. In other words, U.S. intelligence is currently in a
position to uncover a forensic SMOKING GUN of Iraqi complicity
in 9/11 and almost all of the terrorism against the U.S. to-date that's
been attributed to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. If such a smoking gun is
found, one can well argue that the Iraq War is a JUST CAUSE because
Saddam Hussein's Iraq was behind 9/11 and other acts of terror against the
U.S. that caused the deaths of thousands of innocent Americans.
