The year after: The plot thins, but US spins
CHIDANAND RAJGHATTA
TIMES NEWS NETWORK TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 10, 2002 11:55:05 PM ]
WASHINGTON: One year to the day after the most catastrophic terrorist attack in history, the United States is slowly unravelling the plot that motivated 19 young men, some of them with fine college degrees, to hijack four jetliners and use them as missiles to kill 3000 people.
This much has emerged in the year since the tragedy: The young men were not seminary-trained extremists or fire-breathing fanatics in the sense it is usually understood. Some of them were western educated. They seemed to have developed a quiet and extreme hatred of US policies, especially in the Middle East, that culminated in their becoming mega suicide bombers.
Some of the key leaders of the group may also have met Osama Bin Laden much later in their journey of hatred. US intelligence agencies now put the date of chief hijacker Mohammed Atta’s journey to Afghanistan via Karachi to meet Bin Laden at sometime in November 1999, many months and even years after he decided to kill himself to hurt America.
Bin Laden evidently gave his blessings and promised support for the mission. But he may not have known the finer details. In some ways, plot resembles the story of the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, an operation handed down to a Tamil extremist cell that may have been subsequently and deliberately disassociated from the parent body months and even years before act.
What has also become clear in the year since the staggering attack is that there were bits and pieces of intelligence, trails, and warnings, that, had they been read together by US agencies, could have foretold them of the impending strike.
Some of the indications come from the shadowy figure of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is now described a key mastermind behind the attack, and who, according to US accounts, is still on the lam in Pakistan. Khalid is said to be the uncle of Ramzi Yousef, the first who tried to blow up the World Trade Center in 1993.
According to accounts that followed Ramzi Yousef’s arrest in Pakistan in 1995, he had planned to hijack up to a dozen American airliners simultaneously and crash them over the Pacific.
Another plan found on his computer revealed thoughts of hijacking a plane in the US and crashing it into the Central Intelligence Agency headquarters, where another Pakistani national named Mir Aimal Kansi shot and killed two CIA employees in an ambush outside the main gates before fleeing to Karachi.
Both Kansi and Ramzi Yousef were subsequently apprehended by the civilian governments in Pakistan and extradited to the US.
When Yousef was being transferred into Manhattan in a helicopter for his trial, an agent, who accompanied him, is said to have taken off his blindfold to show him the World Trade Center which he tried to bring down was still standing.
Ramzi Yousef is believed to have told him it wouldn’t be – the next time.
Uncle Khalid then seems to have worked to bring his plans to fruition, incorporating elements of Ramzi’s two earlier plans.
There were other such clues. As the al-Qaeda team plotted the gigantic attack in Hamburg, Germany, Marwan al-Shehri, one of the main hijackers who crashed his plane into WTC II, bragged to people he interacted with that the buildings would come down, many people would be killed, and they would then remember him.
In recent days, there have also been reports that the US administration was warned of an impending attack by the Taliban’s then foreign minister, Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil.
Even in the months before the 9/11 attack, the state department’s South Asia bureau kept a line of communication open with the Taliban and Muttawakil apparently sent word of a big al-Qaeda plot brewing, going as far as saying that the "guests (Bin Laden and al-Qaeda) were going to bring havoc on the guest house(Taliban’s Afghanistan).
But administration officials failed to take the warning seriously. “There was a lot of talk then that Muttawakil had fallen out of favour, that he was under house arrest himself. At other times, there were reports that Bin Laden himself was under house arrest. There was no specific information about the attack,” one official explained.
However, the one thing that has become abundantly clear over the past year is that epicentre of the terrorism was the badlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the gateway to this bog was Karachi.
Every single major terrorist who has been identified, from Ramzi Yousef to shoebomber Richard Reid, invariably wended his way to this port city before disappearing to the badlands in search of training and inspiration. For that reason alone, access to and exit from Karachi is now totally regulated by US authorities.
But even as the plot thins, the Bush administration has been imparting new spin on terrorism. Despite the evident trail, US officials, on the eve of the first anniversary of the attack, have been strenuously attempting to link the 9/11 catastrophe to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.
Amid general scepticism, US officials have maintained that the chief hijacker Mohammed Atta met an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague shortly before 9/11. Even more seriously, one senior administration official has claimed Atta met with the Iraqi despot himself.
Dispassionate analysts are suggesting that the Bush administration is trying to superimpose Saddam Hussein over Osama Bin Laden to cover up the US failure to ascertain the fate of – let alone capture or kill – the man believed to be the mastermind of 9/11.
In a scathing comment titled “Our Insane Focus on Iraq” Washington Post’s William Raspberry handed one to the administration, observing, “Wouldn’t any clinician worth her salt observe that Hussein has become immensely bigger and more menacing precisely as Osama Bin Laden has become less available?”
Irrespective of the finale of the administration’s attempt at what is being called “transference,” 9/11 has now certifiably become a milestone in modern history, like the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand or the bombing of Pearl Harbour.
For some, it is the beginning of World War Three, an undeclared war against the axis of terrorism that, regardless of what is officially claimed, goes beyond the countries named by President Bush as the axis of evil.
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow.asp?artid=21796778
LOOKS ARE DECEIVING 
HOW MANY MORE YEARS WILL IT TAKE AMERICANS TO LEARN THAT ?