Steven said, he drove 15 men from his unit in Brooklyn by bus through the Battery Tunnel but couldn't go more than 5 - 10 miles an hour because the tunnel was literally black with smoke, ash, etc. from the collapsing of the two WTC buildings.

He couldn't see anything. By the time he got to the south side of the WTC (all the relief workers were on the north side), he said that what he saw was the most unbelievable thing he'd ever seen in his life, let alone all the years he's been working for EMS.

 

Said, once he got to the north side, he helped to set up triage and coordinated the efforts of getting the ambulances in and out of the "ground zero" area to transport the injured once they were somewhat stabilized.Got evacuated before the other building(s) collapsed and then went back to help where they could. He worked for 22 hours straight before they sent him home. Had to go back again last Saturday. Haven't talked to him since.

 

I can't even begin to imagine what he must be going through having to experience something like this first hand.   The TV doesn't give justice to what the relief workers at that "ground zero" site have to live.   At one point in our conversation, he just sobbed because of the loss of the 300 firefighters.   And, because of the loss of so many lives and so much devastation.

---------------------------------

 

Mystery Recruiting at German Cell

 

AP: International -

HAMBURG, Germany (AP) -

 

Some 200 worshippers listened raptly as the imam at al-Quds mosque delivered a fiery 45-minute sermon on the sins of the infidels and the arrogance of the West.

 

``God, we implore You to destroy the United States of America,'' shouted the imam in a sermon Friday.

 

Not a soul flinched. The congregation recited in unison, ``Amen.''

 

Investigators here believe the Hamburg cell that carried out the Sept. 11 attacks were recruited after they arrived in Germany to live and study - and the rhetoric at the mosque illustrates a charged atmosphere that might cultivate Islamic extremists.

 

The caretaker of the al-Quds mosque, which serves mostly North African Muslims, said Mohammed Atta, believed to be the cell's main plotter, used to visit the mosque to pray. ``He came to pray here, but not regularly,'' the caretaker told The Associated Press on Wednesday. ``I never spoke to him.''

 

The caretaker had earlier reacted angrily when asked if the five Arab suspects with Hamburg ties had ever prayed there. ``Do you think we would still be open if police had anything on us,'' he said, refusing to give his name.

 

Experts who monitor terrorism say comments like the imam's put the welcome mat out to extremists - giving them a place to build contacts even if it is unlikely the contact person was anyone as visible as an imam.

 

``It's a case of the recruiter more likely to be a barman in Hamburg than an imam at a mosque; a man who never reveals his true identity,'' said Mohammed Salah, an expert on Muslim groups who writes for Al Hayat, a respected Arabic daily based in London.

 

The personal history of some of the suicide hijackers supports investigators' assertions that they adopted extremist views after coming to Germany.

 

By all appearances, Atta was a serious student at Hamburg's Technical University with a quick mind. But suddenly in 1994 or 1995 he disappeared from Hamburg, returning several years later wearing a beard.

 

Atta's father said in Cairo that his son performed the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, or Hajj, in 1995. Back in Hamburg, he started a prayer group, the Islamic working society.

 

Friends and relatives of another Hamburg suspect, Ziad Jarrah, who the FBI says was on board the flight that crashed in rural Pennsylvania, also described a sudden shift to outward signs of militant Islam. The religious history of the others is less clear.

 

While investigators are certain that there is recruitment in Germany, they are much less sure how it works, saying it is nearly impossible to penetrate the network of extremists who blend in among Germany's 3.5 million Muslims.

 

What clues they have so far are piecemeal. A senior German intelligence official admitted Monday that authorities knew that contacts had been made between operatives of Osama bin Laden, the main suspect behind the attacks, and Muslims living in Hamburg before Sept. 11. He did not specify the nature of those contacts, but said they did not involve the three hijackers.

 

German intelligence have had mosques like al-Quds, Arabic for Jerusalem, under observation and the agency that monitors extremists in Germany has identified it as a center of extremist thinking.

 

But hate-filled rhetoric alone is not cause for an investigation in Germany, where successive governments have been reluctant to ban religious groups, due to the Nazi history of religious persecution.

 

``We get information that things that are terrible from our point of view are said in mosques, but it would be the exception that someone is arrested for what he said in a speech,'' the senior intelligence official said.

 

A group of prominent terrorism experts, writing in the August edition of Jane's Intelligence Review, said the broad ideology behind bin Laden's al-Qaida network would have enabled it to infiltrate regional and local Islamic groups in Europe relatively easily.

 

Bin Laden established al-Qaida in the early 1980s to absorb volunteers from across the Muslim world for the fight against Soviets in Afghanistan. Each of the Islamic groups, including Egypt's Jihad and Jamat al-Islamaya, retained its own structure and was only loosely affiliated with bin Laden - attracted by his fervor and the opportunity to fight in a jihad, or holy struggle, against ``infidels.''

 

Salah and others said members of the Hamburg cell did not necessarily have to be members of any particular militant group to become involved in the Sept. 11 attack. But their belief in the same ideas as those propagated by bin Laden, a Saudi-born dissident based in Afghanistan, would have been enough to enlist his financial and logistical assistance.

 

``They were most likely a free-lance, independent group who thought up the idea and then found a way of ensuring support for it,'' said Alex Standish, editor of Jane's Intelligence Review.

 

----------------------------

 

WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 03 2001

 

Women shunned to the end by hijacker

 

BY IAN COBAIN

 

THE hijacker who flew the first aircraft into the World Trade Centre left a will barring women from his funeral and ordering those touching his body to wear gloves. He said that mourners should remain at his grave for an hour to keep him company after burial and pray that he be forgiven. In the document, found in a car at Boston¦s Logan airport, Mohammed Atta ordered: (No one should cry for me, scream or tear his clothes and beat his face ˜  those are foolish gestures.

 

¦ The will, written in 1996 and leaked to the German magazine, Der Spiegel, gives 18 precise instructions for the preparation of his body for burial. (Neither pregnant women nor unclean people should say goodbye to me,¦ he orders. (Women must not be present at my funeral or go to my grave at any later date.¦ Another says: (Those who wash my body must be good Muslims. And there should not be too many people, unless it is absolutely necessary.

 

¦ He also says: (He who washes around my genitals should wear gloves so that I am not touched there. (My clothes must be of three pieces of white material, but not of silk or any expensive material.¦ He requests that during his burial, earth should be thrown on to his body three times with the words: (You come from dust, you are dust and you return to dust. And from the dust a new person will be created.¦ (After that everyone should call God¦s name and testify that I died as a Muslim, believing in God¦s religion. All who take part in my burial should pray for my forgiveness. (People should stay at my grave for an hour so that I can enjoy their company. An animal should then be sacrificed and the meat be distributed among the needy.

 

¦ Atta shied away from women during his eight years at Hamburg¦s Technical University, and his father, a wealthy Cairo lawyer, described him as a (mother¦s boy¦ who was reluctant even to shake hands with women. Mohamed al-Amir Atta, 65, said: (Many times I asked him to marry a woman of any nationality because he did not have a girlfriend like his colleagues. But he insisted that he would marry an Egyptian. We found him a bride who was nice and delicate, the daughter of a former ambassador.¦ But Atta said he wanted first to study for his doctorate. The woman¦s father promised that she would be waiting when he returned. He never did.

 

A Fanatic's Quiet Path to Terror

Rage Was Born in Egypt, Nurtured in Germany, Inflicted on U.S.

By Peter Finn

Washington Post Foreign Service

Saturday, September 22, 2001; Page A01

HAMBURG, Germany -- In 1995, shortly before a three-month trip to Egypt, the country of his birth and upbringing, Mohamed Atta grew a beard. A beard is traditionally a sign of a devout Muslim man, but in this case it was also a defiantly political gesture, chosen to register disgust at the secular elite that ruled his homeland.

 

 

The Egyptian government was cracking down viciously on Islamic fundamentalists at the time. But Atta informed two German traveling companions that he would not be cowed by the country's "fat cats," who he believed were criminalizing religious traditionalists while bowing shamefully to the West in foreign and economic policies.

The beard "was a reaction," recalled Volker Hauth, a fellow student at Hamburg's Technical University, who traveled to Cairo with Atta in August 1995. "He was saying, 'I'm willing to show my religious convictions.' . . . He talked openly about the internal political situation in Egypt. That was his main topic."

 

 

As investigators around the world piece together the mechanics of the attacks on New York and Washington, they are expanding the known biography of one key suspect, Mohamed Atta, the alleged pilot of the first plane to slam into the World Trade Center.

 

 

In the details of his life are clues, tentative to be sure, about the making of a suicidal fanatic -- a devout, highly intelligent and diligent student who lived and moved easily within Western society while secretly hating it.

 

 

Acquaintances say the locus of Atta's rage, the subject that most animated him, was Egypt and the tension between its Western-oriented government and its Islamic fundamentalists. But at some point that appears to have expanded into anger about the United States' power in the world, anger strong enough, it seems, to have placed him at the controls of the jet.

 

 

The Sept. 11 attacks have laid bare the existence of a cadre of young men like Atta, ready to plot their own deaths years in advance to serve a cause, and normal enough on the outside to attract no special attention from neighbors and colleagues. No one knows how many there are, but initial investigations suggest that they come from many places -- Egypt, Lebanon, the United Arab Emirates and the Arab diaspora community in Hamburg.

 

 

Identifying them and understanding their motivation and psychological development will be a key task in the war that the Bush administration has declared on terrorism.

Born 33 years ago in the town of Kafr el Sheikh, Atta grew up the son of a middle-class lawyer. The family, including Atta's three sisters, moved to Cairo where Atta's 65-year-old father still practices. The family was comfortable and able to afford a getaway home on the Mediterranean coast.

 

 

In 1985, Atta entered the architecture school in the engineering department at Cairo University. The Muslim Brotherhood and other religion-based political organizations are banned in Egypt, but the beliefs they represent show up in many seemingly unlikely institutions. One of them was the engineering department.

 

 

In 1990, after finishing his studies in architecture, Atta joined what is called an "engineering syndicate," a professional or trade group. Like the school that trained many of its engineers, the syndicate was an unofficial base for the Muslim Brotherhood, where it recruited and propagated its ideas, including the demonization of the United States.

 

 

In an interview this week with the Egyptian newspaper Al Hayat, Atta's father said that despite a politicized environment in study and work, his son was not political. The slight, short young man, he said, was in fact "soft as a breeze."

 

 

"The police never knocked on our door to question Mohamed's activities or to warn him," the father said, referring to a common practice by Egyptian police who warn parents about activist children.

 

 

Despite the disavowal of politics, Atta's father's language, in a brief interview with The Washington Post, was stridently political. "Egypt is a hypocrite and the U.S. is a hypocrite," he said before slamming his front door. "We are people who don't have hypocrisy. Oil companies rule the U.S. with power and [are] killing people." He didn't say who he meant by "we."

 

 

After finishing his studies in 1990 -- it is unclear if he obtained an architecture degree -- Atta worked for a couple of years with a German company in Cairo before obtaining a visa to study urban planning at the Technical University in Hamburg, beginning in October 1992.

 

 

That same year, an Islamic campaign to overthrow the government in Egypt intensified, sparking harsh repression by the political leaders. Atta discussed his country's problems, but with no more fervor than other students, colleagues in Germany recall.

 

 

Smart and hard-working, he settled on an academic specialty of the preservation of the Islamic quarters of old cities, particularly Aleppo in Syria. Later Aleppo would become the subject of his thesis.

In December 1992, Atta began working up to 19 hours a week at Plankontor, an urban planning firm in Hamburg, earning around $850 a month.

 

 

"He was very, very religious," said Joerg Lewin, one of the firm's partners, who noted that Atta regularly prayed on the floor of the office by a large draftsman's table. "My impression is that he became more and more intense."

 

 

Atta, Lewin said, wouldn't eat cookies laid out for people in the office without studying the contents label to make sure there was no pork-based gelatin in the ingredients, which would violate Islamic strictures against eating pork.

 

 

Matthias Frinken, another Plankontor partner, noted that "he was very critical of capitalistic Western development schemes." And Lewin said that unlike other foreign students, Atta said he had no desire to stay in Germany but wanted to return to Egypt with new skills.

 

 

He appears to have had a sometimes ascetic existence. Nothing has come to light to suggest that he had a romantic life. He took multiple jobs, working for a cleaning firm, and buying and selling cars part time to earn extra cash.

 

 

In 1995, Atta took six months off from Plankontor. Half of that period, Atta told his office mates, he would use for a pilgrimage to Mecca, which every Muslim is expected to make once in a lifetime. It's unclear if he actually did it.

 

 

The other half was for a three-month study trip to Cairo, sponsored by the German Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development, the equivalent of the U.S. Agency for International Development. In his application for a coveted place in the program, Atta wrote that he was interested in the relationship of Third World countries to First World countries, according to an official at CDS International, which supervises such study trips for the government.

 

 

Hauth and another German student, Ralph Bodenstein, went along on the trip. Atta was still a member of the engineering syndicate and he took the two Germans to its eating club. Hauth recalled in an interview that Atta did nothing during the trip that suggested he was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, but the group's influence in the club was obvious even to the German.

 

 

The talk about government oppression left the fellow students feeling that Atta "was searching for justice," Hauth said. Hauth now theorizes that Atta had reached a line in his political and religious development.

"It's a line that can be crossed" into terrorism, he said.

 

 

Hauth noted that the quiet student he knew in Germany was vastly more at home in Cairo. "His communication abilities awoke, with children, with old men, with professors, with people in government," Hauth said.

 

 

Upon his return, Atta spent six months, along with Hauth and Bodenstein, preparing a report, which focused on urban development in Egypt. The report was deemed "excellent" by CDS.

 

 

By this time, 1996, the various men who German police say would form a terrorist cell in Hamburg and share an apartment were beginning to appear in that city and others in Germany. Atta and others rented a walk-up apartment on Marien Street in Hamburg. Neighbors recall constant gatherings of men there in the evenings.

 

 

In the summer of 1997, after leaving Plankontor, Atta apparently dropped out of school for 15 months, a gap that remains unexplained. When he reappeared in October 1998, his mustache-less beard had become thick and long. He founded an Islamic prayer and study group at the university in January 1999; its computers have now been seized by police.

 

 

And he seemed more serious and aloof to those who had known him before.

"I thought it was because he was working hard on his thesis," said Professor Dittmar Machule, Atta's academic supervisor. "It could be, though, that he was not the same. He studied very quickly and very rigorously. He gave the impression that he wanted to get his work over and done with."

 

 

Other evidence has surfaced to suggest something big was being planned. German media have reported that Atta and two other Hamburg plotters reported their passports lost or stolen within two months of one another in 1999. German police speculate that they may have wanted new documents, without entry and exit stamps from countries such as Iraq or Afghanistan, before applying for U.S. visas in 2000.

 

 

Between June and August 1999, Atta worked with university architect Chrilla Wendt at the suggestion of Machule to improve the German in his thesis; although Atta's spoken German was good, it was far from perfect, and his written German was flawed.

"He was a very tight person," said Wendt, who worked with him side by side two hours a week that summer. "I cannot remember him smiling."

 

 

On the front of his thesis, when it was finally ready, Atta included a quote from the Koran: "My Prayer and my sacrifice and my life and my death belong to Allah, the Lord of the worlds."

 

 

The presentation of the thesis in October 1999 was followed by an oral examination by Machule and an independent assessor, who happened to be a woman. After deciding to award Atta his degree, the equivalent of a master's with highest honors, both academics congratulated him, extending their hands. Atta took Machule's hand but declined to shake the woman's.

 

 

Hauth recalled that the only time he saw Atta show any interest in a woman was in Aleppo, where the pair met a self-assured and beautiful Palestinian working in a planning office. Atta, with clear regret, told Hauth back at their hotel that she wouldn't be suitable because she was too emancipated.

 

 

By May 2000, his new Egyptian passport containing a U.S. visa obtained in Berlin, the beard he grew for religious reasons shaved off, and flush with money beyond his known means, Atta was ready to move.

 

 

He traveled to Prague in the Czech Republic in early June and 24 hours later took a flight to Newark. In the next year, he learned how to fly aircraft in Florida. But during this period, he returned to Europe twice.

 

 

The first time was in January 2001 when he flew from Miami to Madrid. He returned to the United States six days later, apparently with a new visa despite having overstayed by one month on his previous trip. On July 7 he flew to Spain again for 12 days, renting a car and visiting the northeastern Catalan resort of Salou. Spanish press reports say he left the hotel where he first checked in, trading it for a more modest hostel, whose room he inspected before deciding to stay.

 

 

Atta flew back to the United States on July 19. His time in Europe was over.

 

 

The Friday night before the attacks, Atta and two other men -- one of them another suspected hijacker, Marwan Al-Shehhi -- spent 3 1/2 hours at a sports bar in Hollywood, Fla., called Shuckums. Atta played video games, a pursuit out of line with fundamentalist beliefs. But the manager on duty that night has said that he doesn't recall seeing Atta drink alcohol.

 

 

Correspondent Howard Schneider in Cairo, staff writer Amy Goldstein in Washington and special correspondents Shannon Smiley in Hamburg and Pamela Rolfe in Madrid contributed to this report.

© 2001 The Washington Post Company

 

Wednesday October 10 10:13 AM ET

Reports: Hijack Suspects Looked for Hookers in Boston

BOSTON (Reuters) - Some of the hijackers accused in the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States spent their last nights in Boston looking for illicit sex, trolling for prostitutes as they prepared to crash two planes into the World Trade Center, Boston newspapers reported Wednesday.

 

On the night before the attacks, four of the suspects called several Boston escort services, asking how much it would cost for prostitutes to have sex with them, The Boston Globe reported, quoting law enforcement sources.

 

``It was going to be really expensive and they couldn't come to a consensus on price,'' a law enforcement official told the Boston Globe. ``Either they thought it was too extravagant or they didn't have enough money left.''

 

A driver for a pair of local escort services told the Boston Herald that on Sept. 9 he drove a prostitute twice to a suburban hotel where two of the accused hijackers stayed.

 

``She went there earlier in the day and then later that night,'' the driver told the Boston Herald. ``She saw just one guy when I drove over there.''

 

Authorities believe a group of hijackers used Boston as a staging area before boarding two doomed flights at Logan International Airport. Other news organizations have reported that some of the suspects spent time at bars and strip clubs in Florida, New Jersey and Las Vegas.

A woman who advertises ``adult services'' in a local weekly newspaper told The Boston Globe she was interviewed by the FBI (news - web sites) three days after the attacks to look at pictures of men she might have seen in local hotels.

 

 

October 10, 2001

 

THE MASTERMIND

Portrait of a Terrorist

By JIM YARDLEY

 

  Mohamed Atta, the suspected mastermind of the Sept. 11 terror attacks, with his sister on vacation in the 1980's. A shy child, he became an efficient mass murderer.

    

News Analysis:

In Germany, Terrorists Made Use of a Passion:

An Open Democracy (October 5, 2001)Disavowal:

Father Denies 'Gentle Son' Could Hijack Any Jetliner (September 19, 2001)   

 

This article is based on reporting by Neil MacFarquhar, Jim Yardley and Paul Zielbauer and was written by Mr. Yardley.

recisely two years ago, not long before he traveled to the United States to coordinate the worst terrorist attacks in history, Mohamed Atta attended a wedding. The event was held in the German port city of Hamburg, where Mr. Atta had recently earned a university degree, but this was not the marriage of a college friend.

 

The groom was Said Bahaji, now the focus of an international manhunt for his suspected role in the Sept. 11 attacks. Prominent among the guests was Mamoun Darkazanli, a Syrian businessman suspected of being a financial conduit for Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda organization. Another guest was Mr. Atta's friend, Marwan al-Shehhi, whom authorities say crashed the second hijacked airliner into the World Trade Center.

 

This was not what Mr. Atta's father in Egypt had imagined when he sent his son abroad to earn the sort of academic degree that would bring him prestige and success at home. Instead of becoming an architect or an urban planner, Mr. Atta had become an Islamic terrorist.

Mr. Atta's path to Sept. 11, pieced together from interviews with people who knew him across 33 years and three continents, was a quiet and methodical evolution of resentment that somehow ˜  and that how remains the essential imponderable ˜  took a leap to mass-murderous fury.

 

The youngest child of a pampering mother and an ambitious father, Mr. Atta was a polite, shy boy who came of age in an Egypt torn between growing Western influence and the religious fundamentalism that gathered force in reaction. But it was not until he was on his own, in the West, that his religious faith deepened and his resentments hardened. The focus of his disappointment became the Egyptian government; the target of his blame became the West, and especially America.

 

In Hamburg, his life divided into before and after. He would disappear more than once, and officials say they have strong evidence that he trained at Mr. bin Laden's terrorist camps in Afghanistan during the late 1990's. It was also in those years, German investigators say, that Mr. Atta became part of the Hamburg cell that became a key planning point for the Sept. 11 attacks.

 

"I remember that he changed somewhat," said Dittmar Machule, his academic supervisor at Hamburg Technical University. "He looked more serious, and he didn't smile as much."

His acquaintances from that time still cannot reconcile him as a killer, but in hindsight the raw ingredients of his personality suggest some clues. He was meticulous, disciplined and highly intelligent.

 

His vision of Islam embraced resolute precepts of fate and destiny and purity, and, ultimately, tolerated no compromise. He ate no pork and scraped the frosting off cakes, in case it contained lard. He threatened to leave the university unless he was given a room for a prayer group. He spoke of a desire to marry, but was remote to the point of rudeness with women, considering most insufficiently devout.

Those who had known him as a quiet student say his demeanor became more brooding, more troubled. The most obvious change was both cosmetic and spiritual: he had grown the beard of an Islamic fundamentalist.

A Shy and Sheltered Boy

 

The genteel gloss of the Abdein neighborhood of Cairo had dulled to shabby disrepair by the early 1980's when Mohamed al-Amir Atta entered his teenage years. The government workers who had once lived well on $100 a month found themselves in a vortex of downward mobility, working second and third jobs to survive.

 

Mr. Atta's father, a lawyer, considered his neighbors inferior, even if he, too, feared the economic undertow. Neighbors recalled an arrogant man who often passed without a word or a glance.

 

The family was viewed as thoroughly modern, the two daughters headed for careers as a professor and a doctor. The father was the disciplinarian, grumbling that his wife spoiled their bright, if timid, son, who continued to sit on her lap until enrolling at Cairo University.

 

"I used to tell her that she is raising him as a girl, and that I have three girls, but she never stopped pampering him," Mohamed al-Amir Atta Sr. recalled in a recent interview at his apartment.

 

In a high school classroom of 26 students grouped by their shared given name, Mohammed Hassan Attiya recalled that Mr. Atta focused solely on becoming an engineer ˜  and following his father's bidding.

 

"I never saw him playing," Mr. Attiya said. "We did not like him very much, and I think he wanted to play with the rest of the boys, but his family, and I think his father, wanted him to always perform in school in an excellent way."

 

The social, political and religious pressures roiling Egypt exploded in 1981 with the assassination of President Anwar el- Sadat, the first Arab leader to make peace with Israel. Fundamentalists decried him as a puppet of the West, a traitor to Islam.

 

Even for a boy as sheltered as Mr. Atta, the disillusionment on the streets would have been difficult to ignore. His father, without explanation, says his son began to pray in earnest at 12 or 13, an awakening that coincided closely with Sadat's slaying. But the elder Mr. Atta said his son's religious inclination did not extend to politics.

 

"I advised him, like my father advised me, that politics equals hypocrisy," his father said.

 

The boy refused to join a basketball league because it was organized by the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's most established religious political organization, which also recruited from Cairo University's engineering department but not, apparently, Mr. Atta, who graduated from there in 1990.

 

His degree meant little in a country where thousands of college graduates were unable to find good jobs. Though Mr. Atta found work with a German company in Cairo and was reluctant to leave his mother and sisters, his father convinced him that only an advanced degree from abroad would allow him to prosper in Egypt. Soon he was headed to Hamburg Technical University on scholarship.

 

"I told him I needed to hear the word `doctor' in front of his name," his father recalled. "We told him your sisters are doctors and their husbands are doctors and you are the man of the family."

 

From initial appearances, the slender young Mr. Atta remained the same person in Hamburg that he had been in Egypt ˜  polite, distant and neatly dressed. He answered a classified ad and was hired part- time at an urban planning firm, plankontor. He impressed his co-workers with his diligence and the careful elegance of his drafting.

Yet he must have felt unmoored, on his own in a strange land. He took refuge in the substantial population of Turkish, African and Arab immigrants living in the blue- collar Harburg section surrounding the university. There, his religious faith, still tentative in Egypt, took deeper hold.

He brought a prayer carpet to his job and carefully adhered to Islamic dietary restrictions, shunning alcohol and checking the ingredients of everything, even medicine. He had his choice of three mosques, but the two closest to campus were dominated by Turks, whom many local Arabs disdained as less devout and too sympathetic to America.

 

 

Instead, Mr. Atta often prayed at the Arabic-language Al-Tauhid mosque, a bleak back room of a small shop where the imam, Ahmed Emam, preached that America was an enemy of Islam and a country "unloved in our world."

 

 

Mr. Atta's academic focus was Arab cities, specifically preserving them in the face of Western-style development. He returned to Cairo for three months in 1995 to observe a renovation project around the old city gates, Bab Al-Nasr and Bab Al-Futuh. The project, he came to believe, involved little more than knocking down a poor neighborhood to improve the views for tourists.

 

 

"It made him angry," recalled Ralph Bodenstein, one of two German students in the program. "He said it was a completely absurd way to develop the city, to make a Disneyworld out of it."

 

 

Over meals with Mr. Bodenstein and the other German student, Volker Hauth, Mr. Atta spoke bitterly about the government's suppression of Islamic fundamentalist groups and the clinics and day care centers they had built in ignored neighborhoods.

His sympathy for their cause, Mr. Atta feared, would doom his own future at home. His only hope for a good urban-planning job in Egypt was to be hired by an international organization. He tried but never was. The young man sent West to better his future at home now worried that he had no future in Egypt at all.

He returned to Hamburg in 1996, and investigators say he eventually moved into an apartment at 54 Marienstrasse with two other suspected hijackers, Mr. al-Shehhi and Ziad Jarrah.

 

 

In November 1997 he paid an unexpected visit to his academic supervisor, Professor Machule, to discuss his thesis, then disappeared again for about a year. Federal officials say they have strong evidence that he trained at an Al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan during the late 1990's, which could explain his whereabouts in 1998.

He reappeared in Hamburg in early 1999, the period that German investigators connect him with the cell of about 20 other suspected terrorists. At the university, he insisted on a room for an Islamic prayer group. A student council representative demurred, suspicious that such organizations were cover for terrorist recruitment.

 

 

"He said, `This is about my life. If I cannot pray here, I cannot study here, at this university,' " said the council representative, Marcus Meyer.

Mr. Atta's degree had been on hold; suddenly, finishing it became imperative. He submitted his thesis in August 1999. When he successfully defended his thesis, graduating with high honors, Mr. Atta refused to shake hands with one of the two judges, a woman.

 

 

His father has told reporters that his son earned a masters degree in Germany, but in fact, Mr. Atta received only an undergraduate degree. But his attentions were already elsewhere. He began preparing to go to America.

 

 

A Disciplined Perfectionist

 

With few exceptions, Mohamed Atta regarded the Americans who crossed his path with the same contempt his father once reserved for his Cairo neighbors. He was polite when he had to be ˜  to rent a car or an airplane ˜  but the mildness recalled by his friends in Egypt and Germany was gone, as was his beard.

 

 

He arrived in June at Newark International Airport and would spend the next 15 months in near perpetual motion, earning a pilot's license in Florida during the last six months of 2000, then spending the first nine months of 2001 traveling across the country and at least twice to Europe.

 

The awful efficiency of the attack demanded a leader with a precise and disciplined temperament, and Mr. Atta apparently filled that role. Federal investigators have told a House committee that in the fall of 2000, as he was in the middle of flight training in Venice, Fla., Mr. Atta received a wire transfer of more than $100,000 from a source in the United Arab Emirates. Investigators believe the source was Mustafa Ahmad, thought to be an alias for Shaykh Said, a finance chief for Mr. bin Laden.

 

 

For much of 2001, Mr. Atta appeared to make important contacts with other hijackers or conspirators. He traveled twice to Spain, in January and July, and officials are investigating whether he met with Al Qaeda contacts. He also used Florida as a base to move around the United States, including trips to Atlanta, where he rented a plane, to New Jersey, where he may have met with other hijackers, and at least two trips to Las Vegas. Everywhere he went, he made hundreds of cell phone calls and made a point to rent computers for e-mails, including at a Las Vegas computer store, Cyberzone, where customers can play a video game about terrorists with a voice that declares "terrorists win."

 

 

While Mr. Atta was considered a perfectionist, he was not infallible. Brad Warrick, owner of a rental agency in South Florida where Mr. Atta returned a car two days before the attack, found an ATM receipt and a white Post-it note that became key evidence. Mr. Atta's decision to wire $4,000 overseas shortly before the attacks left an electronic trail that investigators believe is leading back to Al Qaeda. Finally, authorities found his luggage at Logan Airport in Boston, containing, among other things, his will. It remains unclear if the bag simply missed the connection to his flight....

 

Or perhaps the introvert, the meticulous planner, the misogynist, the latent homosexual, the man who believed he was doing God's will, wanted to make certain the world knew his name.

-----------------------------------

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/world/americas/newsid_1567000/1567815.stm

 

The hijack suspects (Most from Saudi Arabia some from Egypt - none from Afghanistan, none from Pakistan, ALL young highly educated Arab speaking middle and upper class Muslims)

 

The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation has released the photos of the suspected hijackers of the four planes seized on 11 September.

Two planes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York, one into the Pentagon in Washington, and a fourth in rural Pennsylvania.

 

 

AMERICAN AIRLINES FLIGHT 11, which slammed into the North tower of the World Trade Center

 

Atta: Key link to other hijackers

 

1. Mohamed Atta, 33, (Misogynist and perhaps latent homosexual) an Egyptian national, has emerged as a key link among the 19 men. He is believed to have been at the controls of Flight 11 when it hit the World Trade Center and has been linked to hijackers on two of the three other planes. Investigators say Atta was part of a terrorist cell in Hamburg, Germany, and received flight training in Florida.

 

2. Waleed M Alshehri, from Saudi Arabia, has used birth dates from 1974 to 1979 on various documents. Immediately after the attacks, he was identified as a Saudi commercial pilot who graduated in 1997 from Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach. But school officials said the FBI told them they had found the Waleed Alshehri who graduated from their school alive in Morocco.

 

Waleed Alshehri: Identity may be false

 

3. Wail M Alshehri, 33, lived in Hollywood, Florida, and Newton, Massachusetts.

 

4. Satam M A Al Suqami, 26, is a Saudi national whose last known address was the United Arab Emirates. Florida records show he obtained a driver's license, listing a Boynton Beach address and reporting that his previous license was from Saudi Arabia.

 

5. Abdulaziz Alomari, a Saudi national, has used birth dates in 1972 and 1979 on various documents. Saudi Embassy officials in Washington have challenged his identity. They say a Saudi electrical engineer named Abdulaziz Alomari had his passport and other papers stolen in 1996 in Denver when he was a student and reported the theft to police there at the time.

 

UNITED AIRLINES FLIGHT 175, crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center

 

Al-Shehhi: pilot of United Airlines 175

 

6. Marwan Al-Shehhi, 23, is a cousin or nephew of Atta and the pilot of Flight 175. He and Atta lived together during flight training in Florida and while students at the Technical University in Hamburg, Germany.

 

7. Fayez Rashid Ahmed Hassan Al Qadi Banihammad used a half-dozen different aliases. One alias, Fayez Ahmed, is a pilot who listed Spartan School of Aeronautics in Tulsa as his address on his license. School officials say they have no record that he attended and that he could have got the address from publications or the Internet.

 

8. Ahmed Alghamdi has been identified by witnesses as one of five hijackers who were at the Arlington Department of Motor Vehicles on 2 August. DMV officials said all five were there seeking Virginia identity cards. US officials say Alghamdi and three other hijackers have links to Bin Laden's al-Qaida network.

 

9. Hamza Alghamdi has used at least four aliases. Little more is known about him, although US officials have said he is one of four hijackers with known links to Bin Laden's network.

 

10. Mohand Alshehri The FBI lists three aliases he may have used.

 

AMERICAN AIRLINES FLIGHT 77, which crashed into the Pentagon

 

Hanjour: Suspected pilot of Flight 77

 

11. Hani Hanjour, 29, pilot of Flight 77. According to public records and witnesses, Hanjour lived off and on in the United States for a decade before the attacks. Hanjour also was one of five hijackers identified by witnesses as being at the Arlington County, Virginia, Department of Motor Vehicles. Federal Aviation Administration records show a Hani Hanjour received a commercial pilot's license in 1999 and listing a post office box in Saudi Arabia as his address.

 

12. Majed Moqed, 24, is a Saudi national. Moqed was one of five hijackers who went to the Arlington County, Virginia, Department of Motor Vehicles.

 

13. Khalid Almihdhar, 26, from Saudi Arabia, is one of two hijackers placed on a watch list this summer after US intelligence officials received information that they might have been meeting with suspected terrorists. By the time they were placed on the list, however, they were already in the United States. Almihdhar was shown on a surveillance videotape in Malaysia meeting with one of the suspects in the bombing of the destroyer USS Cole in Yemen.

 

Nawaf Alhazmi: Car found after the attacks

 

14. Nawaf Alhazmi, from Saudi Arabia, is the other hijacker on the terrorist watch list before the attacks. A car registered to Alhazmi was found at Dulles International Airport the day after the attacks. It contained a cashier's check made out to a flight school in Phoenix; four drawings of the cockpit of a 757 jet; a box-cutter-type knife; and maps of Washington and New York. One map had a telephone number that led police to Mohamed Abdi, who is being held without bond in Alexandria, Virginia, as a material witness.

 

15. Salem Alhazmi, 20, from Saudi Arabia. He was among the five hijackers who went to the Arlington Department of Motor Vehicles on 2 August seeking identity cards.

 

UNITED AIRLINES FLIGHT 93, crashed into rural Pennsylvania

 

Jarrah: Part of Hamburg cell

 

16. Ziad Samir Jarrah, pilot aboard Flight 93, was part of the terrorist cell in Hamburg, Germany, that also included Atta and Al-Shehhi. Two other members of that cell, Said Bahaji and Ramzi Binalshibh, are being sought by German authorities on warrants charging them with more than 5,000 counts of murder. Jarrah is listed as a pilot in Hamburg in FAA records.

Friends of Terror Suspect Say Allegations Make No Sense

Ziad Jarrah, believed to be one of the 19 hijackers, appeared to embrace Western life.

 

By CAROL J. WILLIAMS, Times Staff Writer

 

 

GREIFSWALD, Germany -- Nearly every weekend of his childhood and adolescence, Ziad Samir Jarrah's doting parents drove him from war-ravaged Beirut to the Bekaa Valley oasis of Al-Marj so he could play with his cousin Salim.

 

Born just 40 days apart to two brothers of a close-knit and prosperous family, Ziad and Salim learned how to ride bikes together, how to drive and how to dodge their parents' plans for their future. More like twins than cousins, the two left Lebanon together April 4, 1996, at the age of 20, heading to the eastern German town of Greifswald in pursuit of both an education and a good time.

 

Today, Salim has a German wife, a young daughter and a thriving restaurant in Greifswald. He is a picture of integration and contentment. Ziad also seemed on track for a career in aviation and a happy family life--until he turned up on the FBI list of the 19 suspected terrorists responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.

 

How a handsome, likable young man who appeared to be at peace with the Western world could have gotten mixed up in mass murder is one of the many mysteries still shrouding the attack.

 

Little, if anything, is known about the personal lives of most of the suspects. Of the 19, only alleged organizer Mohamed Atta and Jarrah left behind a long trail of acquaintances. But family and friends say the Ziad Jarrah they knew exhibited none of the smoldering political resentments or cultural conservatism of Atta.

 

Instead, they recall Jarrah as quiet, pampered, a little lazy and madly in love. How, they ask, do you convert a happy, intelligent young man with little religious or political conviction into a suicidal foot soldier in a holy war? With no answers, they are left to speculate that he was brainwashed or coerced.

 

For investigators, many circumstances point to the 26-year-old Lebanese being part of a plot to hijack the four jetliners. Jarrah studied in Hamburg, where two of the suspected leaders of the terror plot lived. He trained for a pilot's license in Florida just a few miles away from other sky pirates. He lost his passport two years ago, about the same time that two other Hamburg suspects did, leading investigators to believe they were trying to cleanse their travel documents of visas that might arouse suspicion.

 

There also are jarring details and gaps from his months in Florida that friends and relatives cannot explain. Why did he rent a cottage with one of the other suspected hijackers of United Airlines Flight 93 in late summer? Why did he, like many of the other suspected hijackers, receive personal fitness training? And besides hijacking, what other reason could he have had to be on the flight from Newark to San Francisco, which crashed into a Pennsylvania field and killed all 44 passengers and crew?

 

'Identified as Having "Arabic" Names'

 

Jarrah and the other three men named by the FBI as hijackers of the flight--Ahmed Ibrahim A. Al Haznawi, Ahmed Alnami and Saeed Alghamdi--initially came to be on the list of 19 because they "have been identified as having 'Arabic' names . . . on the UA93 manifest," according to the first FBI document alerting Hamburg police to their city's connection to the terrorist act, a copy of which was obtained by The Times.

 

What prompted the police theory that Jarrah was at the controls has never been disclosed. The first publicly released list of the 19 suspects named by the FBI on Sept. 14 provides no other information about Jarrah except his name and the words "believed to be a pilot."

 

That list was released in Washington a day after Jarrah's girlfriend back in Germany, Aysel Senguen, reported him missing to police in the Ruhr River city of Bochum.

 

If they didn't know already, police probably would have learned from interrogating her that Jarrah, who had gone to the United States for pilot training the previous fall, had just earned his license, and that he had previously studied in Hamburg.

 

But German police and officials who are familiar with the investigation say that they have little to link Jarrah to the two other Sept. 11 suspects who lived in Hamburg at the same time, Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi.

 

Federal prosecutor Kay Nehm disclosed the first hint of a connection only on Friday when he alluded to having a photo showing Jarrah at the 1999 wedding of a fugitive known to espouse fanatic views, Said Bahaji, who once roomed with Atta and Al-Shehhi.

 

Federal authorities in Germany have withdrawn assertions that Jarrah at one time lived at or frequented the Hamburg apartment rented by the three.

 

"He never lived with the others. He had three different apartments during his time in Hamburg, but none in common with any of the other suspects," a senior German official told The Times.

 

"The only information we have connecting the three Hamburg suspects is the FBI's assertion that there is a connection," said a high-ranking police source involved in the investigation, apparently unaware of the wedding photo. "We have come across absolutely no evidence of our own."

 

While Jarrah overlapped in Hamburg with Atta and Al-Shehhi from 1997 to 1999, he lived and studied in different areas of the city. The University of Applied Sciences, where Jarrah studied aviation construction, is in Hamburg's St. Georg district, a half-hour subway ride from Technical University and the Harburg suburb south of the Elbe River where Atta and Al-Shehhi lived.

 

The single room Jarrah rented from Rosemarie Canel on Alte Landstrasse would have put him even farther away. He is not known to ever have attended the Steindamm mosque that is the suspected meeting place of the other suspects and their purported associates from Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network.

 

Senguen has been in seclusion under a witness protection program since she reported Jarrah missing, and she has not spoken to reporters. But she has been in telephone contact with friends and family to say she didn't believe he was among the plotters.

 

"She said she'd never heard him mention the name Atta or anyone else" from the list of suspects, Jarrah's uncle, Jamal, remembers of Senguen's call to Beirut. "She knew him best these last years and she, too, says he just couldn't do this."

 

Canel, Jarrah's Hamburg landlady, remembers him as a quiet and courteous tenant who had few visitors and spent his nights studying or watching TV. On weekends he left to stay with Senguen, first in Greifswald, where they met in 1996, and later in Bochum, where she moved in 1999 to study medicine. She passed her medical school exams at Ruhr University just a few days before Sept. 11.

 

'Just a Lovely, Kind Young Man'

 

"He was just a lovely, kind young man," says Gudrun Schimpfky of Greifswald's Arndt University, who taught Jarrah to speak German in a program that brought them together six to eight hours a day, five days a week, for the year it took him to complete the college-level proficiency exam in 1997.

 

Jarrah called his family in Lebanon most weekends and was in touch with Senguen nearly every day, says family friend Mahmoud Ali, a Duesseldorf sports club entrepreneur who last spoke to Jarrah in July.

 

"There is nothing in his character that would allow him to do this--not from his past, not from his family, not from his country," Ali said.

 

Although Jarrah spent his first 14 years in war-torn Beirut, his family insists he was shielded from the hardships and showed no interest in politics. Jarrah attended Christian schools, graduating from a French high school, where he became fluent in French and English.

 

The Jarrah family is the most influential in Al-Marj, says Ali, and included Jamal, a banker; Nesim, a senior customs officer; and the fathers of Jarrah and cousin Salim--Samir and Gazi, respectively, high-ranking officials of the Lebanese social security system.

 

Ali has lived in Germany for 16 years and was already an established businessman in Duesseldorf when Jarrah and his cousin arrived in 1996.

 

"Samir told me to give them whatever they needed," Ali recalls. Jarrah never asked for money, he says, only Ali's connections with a travel agency that could procure cheap air tickets.

 

Otherwise, he got by on the $700 a month his parents sent--a sum they boosted to about $2,000 a month when Jarrah went to Florida last year for flight training.

 

Jarrah and Senguen began their relationship shortly after he arrived in 1996, and he moved with her to Bochum in late 1999. Still, they took pains to hide their intimacy from her conservative Turkish parents.

 

Senguen had complained to friends, including Ali, that Jarrah had become more conservative and possessive in recent months. But Ali dismissed a theory among police and the German media that Jarrah had become a religious fundamentalist.

 

"We Arab men are very jealous about our women, that's all," said Ali. "We try to tell them what to do, and they just ignore us."

 

Salim Jarrah said he believes his cousin decided to go to flight school because he simply did not want to invest the time required for him to earn a German doctorate in aviation engineering, which could take up to a decade.

 

From the United States, Jarrah made at least two trips this year to Bochum, which is just outside Duesseldorf, to see Senguen. The first was in late February and early March after he had spent three weeks in Beirut to be with his father, who had suffered a heart attack.

 

Senguen last saw him in mid-July. He returned to Florida after less than a week, missing the Beirut wedding of his older sister Dania on Aug. 2 because he was scheduled to take his test for a pilot's license, he told Senguen and Ali. Records show Jarrah earned his single-engine certification July 30 after successfully completing more than six months of lessons at the Florida Flight Training Center in Venice.

 

'He Was a Friend to All of Us'

 

Those who met Jarrah at the flight school also say they can't see him as a terrorist.

 

"Our entire staff does not believe that he had bad intentions," says FFTC President Arne Kruithof. "Let's put it this way: Everybody interviewed here on this guy was in shock, because he was a friend to all of us."

 

"I don't think there's anyone in the time that he was here that could say anything negative about him; on the contrary, he would help everybody," says Kruithof, who insisted that Jarrah's demeanor was "not faked."

 

Thorsten Biermann, who roomed with Jarrah at the flight school for the first six weeks of training, found him to be "just a normal person, like anyone else."

 

Biermann says he never saw Jarrah pray in the time they lived together, and Jarrah never had visitors. However, he says his roommate was looking forward to a visit by Senguen that occurred after the German returned home Dec. 13.

 

Jarrah called his family two days before the terror attacks to confirm that he and Senguen would be in Beirut on Sept. 22 for another family wedding--this time Salim's younger sister.

 

Ali, the family friend, said Senguen called him Sept. 11 to tell him that she had just spoken to Jarrah--about an hour before he boarded United Flight 93. She described the conversation as pleasant and normal, although it is unclear whether she knew he was flying that day.

 

"We watched the news on television at the racquet club--all anyone did that day was watch TV," Ali recalled of the first hours after the hijacked planes hit the World Trade Center about 3 p.m. local time. "She was upset like everyone else, and when she didn't hear from him for two whole days when everyone in America was calling to say they were OK, she became really worried."

 

Ali next heard from Senguen when she called in tears from a Bochum police station, where she was held overnight and interrogated as detectives combed her tiny apartment, impounding a suitcase belonging to Jarrah and personal records such as phone bills and banking statements.

 

In retrospect, Ali wonders whether Senguen heard something in Jarrah's voice in that last phone conversation that put her on alert and prompted her to declare him missing.

 

Meanwhile, the tantalizing coincidences pile up.

 

Three months before the terror strikes, Jarrah traveled to Las Vegas. His uncle in Lebanon describes the trip as a gambling junket, but that June 7-10 sojourn also provides another possible connection with other hijackers. Atta, Al-Shehhi and three other suspects also made trips to Las Vegas between May and August, although none overlapped with Jarrah's.

 

Like Atta and Al-Shehhi, Jarrah reported his passport lost in late 1999 and obtained a new one from the Lebanese consulate in Bonn. Authorities speculate the men were trying to get rid of visas to Afghanistan or elsewhere, although Salim Jarrah insists his cousin was never unaccounted for in those days.

 

Although Jarrah paid his expenses in cash from money wired by his parents, U.S. federal investigative documents suggest he had a Visa debit card and that its number was only a few digits off from those used by four other suspects.

 

Jarrah also moved in April from Venice, Fla., on the west coast to Hollywood, in the east, living separately but in the same city as Atta and Al-Shehhi and spending much of his free time working out and taking self-defense classes at a gym in nearby Dania Beach.

 

Several of the other suspects also worked diligently at getting themselves in shape, although at different facilities.

 

Jarrah was also identified by a landlady in Ft. Lauderdale-by-the-Sea as having rented a cottage for a few weeks in late summer with another suspect who died on Flight 93, Ahmed Al Haznawi, someone Jarrah was never previously associated with.

 

Friends Nagged Him to Get Married

 

It all leaves those who knew Jarrah wondering.

 

In one of the last photos taken of him, in Beirut early this year, he wears a jacket and tie and designer eye wear, his hair brushed back and an arm lovingly draped around the shoulders of his diminutive mother, Nafisa.

 

"We were all telling him he should marry Aysel and get themselves out of this little one-room student apartment," says Ali. "But he wanted this too. He really loved her."

 

Being nagged about living with Senguen was something Jarrah should have been used to.

 

"I used to criticize him for living with her. By our religion, this living together before marriage is not allowed," recalls Abdullah Al-Makhadi, a classmate of Senguen's at the Greifswald premed program and founder of a rudimentary mosque in the town that hosts more than 500 foreign students from Islamic nations.

 

Jarrah rarely attended Friday prayers and never prayed five times daily, as do the devout, says Al-Makhadi. "He was a weak Muslim, I must say."

 

Salim says none of the Jarrahs was raised with much religious conviction. The cousins went to parties and discos, drank alcohol and flirted with women of various ethnicity and religion.

 

"I remember the first time we went to a disco here, we were laughing at how small and pathetic it was," says the restaurateur. "Back home in Lebanon, discos are much more elegant, sprawling up several floors and much more modern."

 

That Ziad Jarrah might have become more serious in the last couple of years, when Senguen's 1999 transfer to Bochum ended the pretext for his weekly visits to Greifswald, is something his cousin cannot exclude.

 

But he says he can "rule out with 100% certainty" that his cousin could have turned into a fanatic.

 

"We came here to Germany so we could live better, not to die for some insane idea," he says. "We don't know if it was really Ziad on that plane. It seems it was, or he would have come forward by now. But if he died in that crash, he died as a victim like the other passengers."

 

17. Saeed Alghamdi is one of three hijackers that US officials have said are linked to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network.

 

18. Ahmed Ibrahim A. Al Haznawi, 20, from Saudi Arabia and may have lived in Delray Beach, Florida.

 

19. Ahmed Alnami used several aliases and may have lived in Delray Beach, Florida.

 

20. ?   http://www.foxnews.com/story/

    

By CAROL J. WILLIAMS,MICHAEL J. GOODMAN and WILLIAM C. REMPEL , Special To The Times

 

 

HAMBURG, Germany--German prosecutors issued international arrest warrants Friday for two men associated with Mohamed Atta, the only one of 19 hijackers who is known to have contacted members of all four terrorist cells responsible for the attacks on New York and the Pentagon.

 

The warrants accused Said Bahaji, 26, and Ramzi Binalshibh, 29, of providing criminal assistance to the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks, which allegedly makes them culpable for "several thousand murders."

 

The two arrest warrants are the first accusing anyone of criminal acts in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center and badly damaged the Pentagon. The hijackers also crashed an airliner in western Pennsylvania.

 

Bahaji and Binalshibh were not in custody. Prosecutors issued international warrants, apparently believing the pair had fled Germany. The two men bring to five the number of former students that authorities believe belonged to a terrorist cell in Hamburg that plotted the attacks for at least two years.

 

 

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-092201probe.story

 

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New York survivor's son turns traitor

Damon Johnston in New York

06nov01

MOHAMMAD Junaid's mother was led to safety from the blazing World Trade Centre by New York's brave firefighters and policemen.

 

 

But 26-year-old Junaid's thank you has shocked New York.

 

In return for saving his mum's life, the Islamic-American has turned traitor and bought a one-way ticket to Pakistan to sign up for the Taliban and kill Americans.

 

Junaid left on what could be a suicide mission one week after his mother –  an office worker on the ninth floor of the north tower –  was among the survivors.

 

About 4500 others were not so lucky, and lost their lives in the terror strikes on September 11.

 

"My mother was in the north tower of the World Trade Centre but I still feel absolutely no remorse about what happened on September 11," Junaid said.

 

"I saw the towers collapse but felt nothing for the Americans inside. I may hold an American passport, but I am not an American –  I am a Muslim."

 

Junaid offered his own personal jihad against his own country when in Islamabad, Pakistan, as he waited to cross the border into Afghanistan to join the Taliban.

 

"I did not feel any remorse for the Americans who died," Junaid told Britain's ITN television network.

 

"I'm willing to kill the Americans. I will kill every American that I see in Afghanistan. And I'll kill every American soldier that I see in Pakistan."

 

Junaid's parents migrated from Pakistan.

---------------------------------------

 

 

Woman Charged With Helping Hijackers Establish Residency Pleads Guilty to Unrelated Charge

The Associated Press

Published: Nov 10, 2001

 

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) - A notary public who admitted signing fraudulent paperwork for two of the hijackers in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks agreed to a plea bargain in which she pleaded guilty to an unrelated federal fraud charge.

 

Kenys Galicia's plea, entered Friday in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, stemmed from allegations that she sold 30 blank Virginia Department of Motor Vehicle forms that she had notarized to a man who was working undercover for DMV investigators.

 

Sentencing was set for Jan. 25. She could receive up to 15 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

 

Galicia, a Salvadoran national living legally in Falls Church, Va., admitted to authorities that she signed residency certification forms on Aug. 2 for Abdulaziz Alomari and Ahmed Saleh Alghamdi, two men believed to have helped commandeer the planes that crashed into the World Trade Center. The residency forms are used to obtain state identification cards.

 

Galicia is one of four people who have been charged in northern Virginia with helping hijackers obtain false IDs. Charges against the other three are pending. Authorities have said none of the four had advance knowledge of the hijackers' plans.

 

-------------------------------------------

 

 

Bin Laden: Yes, I did it

By David Bamber

(Filed: 11/11/2001)

 

 

OSAMA BIN LADEN has for the first time admitted that his al-Qa'eda group carried out the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, the Telegraph can reveal.

 

 

Osama bin Laden with journalist Hamid Mir during the interview for a Pakistani newspaper

 

In a previously undisclosed video which has been circulating for 14 days among his supporters, he confesses that "history should be a witness that we are terrorists. Yes, we kill their innocents".

 

In the footage, shot in the Afghan mountains at the end of October, a smiling bin Laden goes on to say that the World Trade Centre's twin towers were a "legitimate target" and the pilots who hijacked the planes were "blessed by Allah".

 

The killing of at least 4,537 people was justified, he claims, because they were "not civilians" but were working for the American system.

 

In the video, bin Laden says: "The Twin Towers were legitimate targets, they were supporting US economic power. These events were great by all measurement. What was destroyed were not only the towers, but the towers of morale in that country."

 

The hijackers were "blessed by Allah to destroy America's economic and military landmarks". He freely admits to being behind the attacks: "If avenging the killing of our people is terrorism then history should be a witness that we are terrorists. Yes, we kill their innocents and this is legal religiously and logically."

 

In a contradictory section, however, bin Laden justifies killing the occupants of the Twin Towers because they were not civilians - Islam forbids the killing of innocent civilians even in a holy war.

 

He says: "The towers were supposed to be filled with supporters of the economical powers of the United States who are abusing the world. Those who talk about civilians should change their stand and reconsider their position. We are treating them like they treated us."

 

Bin Laden goes on to justify his entire terror campaign. "There are two types of terror, good and bad. What we are practising is good terror. We will not stop killing them and whoever supports them."

 

----------------------------------------

 

Sunday November 11, 2001

The Observer

 

They sat and laughed and talked long into the early hours, about religion and war and the meaning of life. But most of all, they talked about death.

 

They talked about the death of 5,000 on 11 September, about the deaths of millions in wars to come and about the coming death of one man in particular.

 

Osama bin Laden told his interlocutor, and thus the world, that he feels certain the Americans will kill him sooner or later and that he is 'ready to die'.

 

He blamed the 'Jewish lobby' who, he said, had 'taken America hostage'.

 

'They think they will solve this problem by killing me. It's not easy to solve this problem. This war has been spread all over the world.'

 

---------------------------------------

50 Nations Hold 360 Terror Suspects at CIA Behest

Roundup Reflects Aggressive Efforts of an Intelligence Coalition Viewed as Key to War on Terrorism

 

By Bob Woodward

Washington Post Staff Writer

Thursday, November 22, 2001; Page A1

 

 

At the urging of the CIA, foreign intelligence services and police agencies in 50 countries have arrested and detained about 360 suspects with alleged connections to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network or other violent terrorist groups, according to well-placed sources.

 

The massive, aggressive international roundup mirrors, in part, the broader detention program carried out by the FBI in the United States that has netted more than 1,100 people, including a small number believed to have information about terrorists and a far larger number of Middle Eastern nationals held on immigration violations.

 

The growing number of foreign detentions, part of the "unseen" war on terror that President Bush has frequently alluded to, shows the degree of cooperation other nations are quietly providing to the U.S. effort to crush al Qaeda.

 

The number of overseas arrests has grown considerably from what has been previously acknowledged –  on Oct. 21, President Bush said more than 200 suspected terrorists had been rounded up overseas. An exhaustive search of English-language newspapers worldwide turned up the names of only 75 foreign terror-related arrests since Sept. 11.

 

In one CIA case, intelligence reports indicated the general whereabouts of a suspected terrorist who may have had advance knowledge of previous attacks. Only a handful of suspects fall into that category –  a key group that is targeted because its members might be involved in future attacks.

 

But one country balked at providing the information the CIA needed to pinpoint the terrorist's location. Time was critical, so a covert CIA team broke into a facility overseas and stole the information. Within 12 hours, the suspected terrorist was located and the details were passed on to a fully cooperative foreign intelligence service, which had the individual arrested by one of the country's law enforcement agencies.

 

As part of the deepening relationships between the CIA and foreign intelligence services, agency officials abroad are increasingly sharing sensitive intelligence on suspected terrorists, supporting overseas investigations and initiating –  in several cases virtually insisting on –  arrests.

 

The foreign effort reflects the continuing concern of the White House, the Justice Department, the FBI and the CIA that bin Laden and his network may have future terrorist attacks already planned in the United States or against U.S. facilities abroad.

 

The total number of people detained worldwide as part of the Sept. 11 probe is unknown, as are the identities and significance of most. In addition to the 360 foreign arrests generated by the CIA, the FBI through its own contacts and legal attache»s overseas has helped produced a separate, unknown number of arrests. Dozens of countries have also stepped up their counterterrorism programs and have arrested on their own many more suspects, possibly in the hundreds, without any encouragement from the CIA or the FBI.

 

Of the 360 suspects arrested or detained abroad at the CIA's instigation, there were more than 100 in Europe, more than 100 in the Near East, 30 in Latin America and 20 in Africa. Officials said those arrests may have thrown some known al Qaeda groups off balance, but it is not clear whether any terrorist attacks have been disrupted or aborted.

 

The CIA is rapidly developing information on suspected terrorists and working intensely with foreign intelligence services to turn that information into arrests. In addition, the agency, which had been accused of timidity, is undertaking some high-risk operations of its own to track suspected terrorists.

 

Since Sept. 11, a number of countries where the authorities thought al Qaeda did not have a presence have received a loud wake-up call and discovered cells or operatives within their own borders, several sources said.

 

The CIA effort is part of the work of a substantial foreign intelligence coalition involving dozens of countries assembled by CIA Director George J. Tenet. A senior White House official said recently that the intelligence coalition is as important as the military and diplomatic coalitions involved in the war on terrorism, particularly in the war's initial phase in Afghanistan.

 

"Intelligence may be more important down the road," the official said, "when we can't bomb or send in the [U.S.] Special Forces and have to operate covertly to root out" the terrorists.

 

Two senior diplomats in Washington involved in assisting the CIA said that the intelligence-sharing and the pressure to detain suspected terrorists in their countries are remarkable. "We can't get away from these [CIA] people," said one European diplomat, adding that the agency inundates his country with information, lists and requests.

 

On Oct. 1, Bush made reference to the foreign arrests in a speech at the headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) in Washington.

 

The president said that the American people "aren't going to see exactly what's taking place on their TV screens," but he added that "slowly, but surely," progress was being made.

 

Since Sept. 11, intelligence-sharing and cooperation among foreign services worldwide have flourished, several sources said.

 

The Jordanian General Intelligence Department (GID) has been involved in more than a dozen arrests. The CIA provided the name of one of the eight suspected al Qaeda members arrested in Spain earlier this week.

 

In another example, shortly after the terrorist attacks, two suspected al Qaeda members were picked up in Bahrain. The two were sent to Saudi Arabia for questioning, and they provided authorities there with an al Qaeda contact telephone number in the country.

 

After several weeks spent tracing calls from that number to other phone numbers, Saudi authorities tracked down and arrested a senior al Qaeda figure who uses various aliases, including "Abu Ahmed." He and five other al Qaeda members were arrested while attempting to leave the country.

 

Ahmed is believed to be the highest-ranking al Qaeda member to be held for questioning, and is one of the people believed to have had advance knowledge of previous terrorist attacks.

 

Sources said that he has provided information about the alleged involvement of a Yemeni intelligence officer in the October 2000 terrorist boat-attack on the destroyer USS Cole at a Yemeni port, in which 17 U.S. sailors were killed. Ahmed reportedly had details of the planned attacks that were thwarted in the United States before the millennial celebrations of December 1999.

 

One source said Ahmed also knew some of the 19 hijackers who took over four planes on Sept. 11 and carried out the worst terrorist incident in U.S. history, killing about 4,000 people. Ahmed's information is considered a critical link between the hijackers and al Qaeda, and both the FBI and the CIA have been given limited access to him and his interrogation sessions, the sources said.

 

 

The Egyptian foreign intelligence services have been particularly active and helpful to the CIA. Egypt has among the most formidable and ruthless intelligence services in the Middle East, and several of those arrested in other countries as part of the Sept. 11 roundup have been sent to Egypt for interrogation or trial. According to evidence gathered for a 1999 trial in Egypt of more than 100 defendants from the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which had merged with al Qaeda the previous year, the intelligence agents regularly used torture to obtain confessions from suspected terrorists.

 

The possibility of torture has raised some concerns within the Bush administration, according to one source, who also said there are worries that the wide-ranging terrorist roundup might be used by repressive regimes to crack down on their political opposition.

 

In his Oct. 1 speech at FEMA, Bush, as he has often done since Sept. 11, tried to lay out publicly and in general terms what was going on behind the scenes.

 

"You see, we've said to people around the world: 'This could happen to you, this could have easily have taken place on your soil, so you need to take threats seriously, as well,' " Bush said. "We're beginning to share intelligence amongst our nations. We're finding out members of the Qaeda organization, who they are, where they think they can hide. And we're slowly, but surely, bringing them to justice."

 

Staff researchers Jeff Himmelman and Margot Williams contributed to this report.

 

 

=========================================

 

CONSERVATIVE TRUTH 12/16/01 - ISLAMIC NATIONS SLAUGHTER, ENSLAVE CHRISTIANS

by Tom Barrett Editor@ConservativeTruth.org

 

 

THERE IS NOT ONE CHRISTIAN NATION ON EARTH WHERE MUSLIMS ARE PERSECUTED. Yet in 83% of nations where the majority of the population are Muslims, there is systematic government persecution of Christians. (See "Religious Freedom in the Majority Islamic Countries" in the Resources section below.) This persecution includes imposing the death penalty for sharing the Christian faith with a Muslim; national laws prohibiting conversion from Islam to Christianity; destruction of churches; and murder or expulsion of Christian missionaries. Even in the few predominantly Muslim countries where the government does not openly participate in the persecution, it ignores and even encourages illegal persecution by Muslims against Christians.

 

I spent hours going through the well-documented profiles of the forty-six countries listed in the report mentioned above. Of these, six did not have significant Muslim populations. Of the thirty-nine with a strong Muslim majority, only seven could be considered to be either neutral or tolerant toward their Christian minorities. If the United States were to treat its roughly two million Muslims with one-tenth of the violence and humiliation that these Islamic nations heap on their Christians, the worldwide outcry would be immediate, and justified. Why, then, does the "Community of Nations," including the United States, turn a deaf ear to the cries of the persecuted Christians in Muslim nations?

 

The laws of most of these Islamic nations give lip service to religious freedom. Nothing could be further from the truth. In most of the countries I researched, the death penalty was common for converting from Islam to Christianity (or any other religion). Christians receive no protection from these governments when they are persecuted; indeed, most often the governments themselves are the persecutors. Children of Christians are stolen from their parents so that they can be raised as Muslims. Speaking about Christianity to a Muslim can result in beatings, long prison sentences and even death.

 

The most urgent situation demanding our attention today is in Indonesia, which has the largest Muslim population of any non-Arab country. There Islamic fundamentalists have promised a bloodbath of Christians before Christmas. This is no idle threat; in 1996 Islamic fundamentalists slaughtered 3,000 Christians in East Timor. More recently, a group called Laskar Jihad, which hails Osama bin Laden as its hero, slaughtered thousands of Christians with the help of government troops. (See "Christians Terrorized in Muslim Indonesia" in the Resources section.) An Indonesian military officer is quoted as saying that the government has the power to stop the Jihad, but government officials "all the way to the top" profit from it. Their goal is nothing less than to exterminate every Christian in Indonesia or force them to leave. According to Steven Snyder, the president of International Christian Concern who visited Indonesia in November, about 15,000 Laskar Jihad troops equipped with AK-47 assault rifles, rocket launchers and bulldozers are threatening to kill 50,000 Christians and destroy their homes and churches in the next week.

 

In Sudan, Christians are sold into slavery or murdered for no other crime than naming the Name of Christ. Over two million have been murdered, and 200,000 have been sold into slavery by their government. An organization named Christian Solidarity International (PLEASE visit C.S.I.'s website listed in Resources Section) has raised money to buy almost 60,000 slaves from their captors and free them. One 22-year-old Protestant girl, a virgin, was captured by government soldiers and raped repeatedly for five days as she was marched through the jungle tied to twenty other slaves. Many women and children died during this march. She was then used as a slave and forced to study Islam until bought out of slavery by C.S.I. You can read her complete story and those of other slaves at http://www.csi-int.ch/csi-trp/csi-trp_0003a.htm  (scroll down to section IV, item B).

 

What about our "allies"? You can dress a monster up in a pinstriped suit, teach him to speak formally and use the right fork at state dinners, and put him in a group of diplomats for a photo opportunity, but that doesn't make him civilized. Our "friends" in the international community, including Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Egypt, and our most recent buddy, Pakistan, are all guilty of atrocities against Christians based on nothing other than their profession of faith. Let me emphasize that we are not talking about a radical minority of citizens acting on their own. We are talking about systematic state persecution, state murder and state crimes against humanity, all legal according to the various constitutions and laws of these vicious nations.

 

Let's start with our "friend and ally," Saudi Arabia. Their "Constitution" is the Koran. This nation, whose population is 98% Muslim, finances Islamic terrorist groups in moderate Islamic nations which force conversion to Islam under the threat of death. In Saudi Arabia, rape is punishable by death- unless it is a Muslim man violating a Christian woman. The Saudis are so rich from their oil that most refuse to do common labor, so they import six million foreign workers. Of these, ten percent are Christians. They are not allowed to wear a cross in public and or to celebrate Christmas, but are forced to observe Ramadan. Christians, even tourists, have been arrested by the Religious Police for participating in prayer meetings in private homes. Any who speak of their faith publicly are tortured in an attempt to convert them to Islam. Those who refuse are executed. Punishment for distributing Bibles can range from lashes with a whip or amputation of a limb, to beheading.

 

Turkey, our "military ally", is 99.8% Muslim. Recently, eight Americans were arrested in Turkey for the "crime" of giving away copies of the New Testament. In 1974 Turkey overran Cyprus - which is 80% Christian - and has ruled that small nation with an iron fist since then. The Turkish government expelled thousands of Orthodox Christians, then took a thousand-year-old monastery and turned it into a mosque! Imagine the international outcry if a mosque anywhere were to be stolen by a government and turned into a Christian church.

 

Egypt, described by our State Department as a "friend of the United States" is one of the worst persecutors of Christians. In Cairo an entire Christian neighborhood was set on fire by Islamic terrorists. Children were thrown out of windows in front of their horrified parents, churches were burned and Christian's homes destroyed. This went on for two days without the government doing anything to stop it. Egyptian security forces have been accused by eye-witnesses of raping, then crucifying adolescent girls.

 

 

In Pakistan recently a 14-year-old Christian girl was kidnapped, forced to convert to Islam, then raped and given to a Muslim to be one of his wives. The pleas of her parents were ignored by the police. In 1997, Islamic extremists, aided by Pakistani police, destroyed the homes of 800 Christians as well as thirteen churches, because they had "insulted Islam." A few weeks ago six children and nine adults were gunned down as they worshiped in a Christian church. This terrorist nation is our newest "ally" in the war against terrorism.

 

The Libyan government took a Christian Cathedral and converted it to a mosque. In Kuwait, the nation America's military saved from a brutal occupation by Iraq, the government tries to bribe Christians to convert to Islam. A Kuwaiti Christian was recently condemned to die by the religious court for converting from Islam. It should come as no surprise that 150,000 Christians have fled Iraq to avoid persecution. Over 150 Christian churches have been demolished in Iraq, where death is the penalty for proclaiming faith in Christ, and where Saddam Hussein has proclaimed himself "The Defender of the Islamic Faith."

 

Hundreds of Christian missionaries have been murdered in Algeria and other Islamic nations. Iran pretends to have religious freedom, but students in all schools are forced to study Islam, as are draftees in their military services. Conversion to any religion other than Islam brings a swift death sentence. If space permitted, I could give hundreds of other examples of atrocities committed by Muslims against Christians simply because of their faith. The events I have described are happening as you read this. Christians are being tortured today because they will not convert to Islam. Christians are dying today because they dare to speak the Name of Christ.

 

Our President has stated repeatedly that Islam is a peaceful religion which has "been hijacked by radicals." I know why he makes that statement. If Bush said anything else, he would be labeled a hate-monger, as I am sure I will be for speaking the truth. The facts speak for themselves. Do the research, as I have done. Eighty-three percent of the governments of nations with a Muslim majority kill, enslave, and persecute Christians with the blessings (and very often, the complicity) of their Islamic clergy. I'm sure that there are many kind, loving Muslims who live in those countries. I just wonder why they allow such atrocities to be committed in the name of their religion.

 

Most of you who have written to me about the goodness and kindness of Muslims know only Muslims who live in this country. They have been influenced by the values of America, which include tolerance toward other religions, values based on the Bible. Many U.S. Muslim immigrants are as horrified as we are by the actions of Muslims in the countries of their birth (see the letter from a subscriber on this subject following the Resources section).

 

God tells us in Proverbs 31:8 that we must speak up for those who cannot speak for themselves. President Bush needs to speak up in behalf of the good people of this nation who are appalled by the cruelty of Islamic governments towards our brothers and sisters in Muslim nations. Our President needs to demand that Muslim nations treat Christians as Muslims are treated here in America. Please sign the petition to our President regarding this persecution, the first item in the Resources section. Tell President Bush not to be seduced by promises from liars, in order to get their cooperation in our battle against terrorism. The war against terrorism is a just war, but if in our zeal to punish international terrorists we ally ourselves with religious terrorists, what have we gained?

 

 

RESOURCES:

PETITION asking President Bush to demand an end to Muslim persecution of Christians: http://www.persecution.org/whatcanido/petition.html

RESEARCH on Religious Persecution in 46 Muslim Nations:

http://www.alleanzacattolica.org/acs/acs_english/acs_index.htm#A

http://www.alleanzacattolica.org/acs/acs_english/acs_index.htm

 

"Christians Terrorized in Muslim Indonesia":

http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=25599  <http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp>

International Christian Concern: <http://www.persecution.org/>

Voice of the Martyrs: <http://www.persecution.com/>

Save a life in Sudan: http://www.persecution.com/ministry/index.cfm?action=details&Ministryid=2

 <http://www.persecution.com/ministry/index.cfm>

 

 

A LETTER ABOUT THE EXPERIENCE OF A U.S. MUSLIM

"Hi Tom, I've just finished reading your article, "Bin Laden's Greatest Mistake," and felt compelled to relate a recent incident. I consulted a new physician, and was struck by the fact that he was very obviously from the Middle East. During the consult, I asked him if he, as a foreign-born American, was concerned about his safety following the attacks. He told me that he is Muslim, and that he had recently made his required trip to Mecca. He related how horribly he and his fellow worshipers were treated by his fellow Muslims - they were spat upon and verbally reviled during their stay. It was with a sense of relief that they returned to the United States. He went on to say that these attacks are not anything that ever would have been perpetrated by a true Muslim. He told me that they violate three basic tenets of that faith: "1) You must never strike a woman to harm her, no matter what. 2) You never, ever under any circumstances seek to harm a child. 3) You never take up arms to harm a man unless he has first done grievous harm to you." I asked him why there was this unreasoning hatred against the United States, and he explained that it was because of America's political policies, and should never in any way be confused with the faith of Islam. 'These people are hiding behind religion in an effort to bring down American foreign policy,' he said. He also went on to tell me that, even with the attacks on some Muslims within this country, he feels safer here than anywhere else on this planet, including his birth country. Please keep up the wonderful work that you're doing. We need more voices of calm sanity and confidence. Pam Phillips."

 

 

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"Ah, Christmas in America, 2001. Excuse me, the holidays in American 2001. In today's hyper-PC environment, it is no longer about 'Christmas' or even the 'Christmas season'..."

 

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"Why, suddenly, have senators like Patrick Leahy discovered principles of American government, like Checks and Balances or Separation of Powers, which lay dormant during the eight long years of Clinton's reign?"

 

FOUNDING PRINCIPLES

by J. C. Bowman - December 16, 2001

"Recently I visited Philadelphia where I returned to Independence Hall, the birthplace of the American Republic. As a Christian, and a proud United States Marine Corps veteran, I vowed to renew my commitment to the American experience..."

 

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by Brian W. Peterson - December 16, 2001

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A HOLIDAY TRADITION FOR YOUR FAMILY; The Gift of Love: http://www.aroundbama.com/soapbox.html

 

THE REAL STORY OF FLIGHT 93: http://www.msnbc.com/news/662607.asp?0dm=N24SN&cp1=1#BODY

<http://www.msnbc.com/news/662607.asp>

 

VISIT OUR WEBSITE AT www.ConservativeTruth.org <http://www.ConservativeTruth.org> for daily updates of Conservative news, new commentary posted every Sunday, and to view our archives.

 

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Terrorists Still Popping Up Worldwide

 

By PAULINE JELINEK

.c The Associated Press

 

WASHINGTON (AP) - The war on terror keeps rounding up terrorists, yet every day there appear to be more.

 

Some 3,400 al-Qaida-linked operatives have been captured or killed in 100 countries since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on America, the State Department said last week. Now, officials believe, a new wave of threats is coming from dozens of smaller groups only loosely connected to the network but inspired by al-Qaida's message and methods.

 

In the last week alone, authorities made arrests in the Philippines, Britain, Turkey and France, but new threats have been reported in the United States and Spain and deadly attacks occurred in Uzbekistan.

 

The seemingly endless cycle of progress and setbacks stokes the debate over whether the Bush administration is using the proper strategy to fight the global battle.

 

Did it launch war in Iraq that only inflamed anti-American sentiment? Did it divert the U.S. focus, allowing terror cells around the world time to strengthen and evolve?

 

Is the United States using the military too much and other counterterror tools too little? Has it and the rest of the world failed to strike at terror's root causes, leaving the world's repressed or disenfranchised vulnerable to the lure of extremists?

 

``Are we capturing, killing or deterring ... more terrorists every day than the (Islamic schools) and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?'' Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld asked in an October memo to other Pentagon leaders.

 

Europeans questioned U.S. strategy after last month's bombings in Spain.

 

``It is clear that force alone cannot win the fight against terrorism,'' European Commission President Romano Prodi said. ``These dark days have shown us how the American approach itself has not been sufficient to deal with the situation completely.''

 

After the 2001 attacks, the administration began assembling an international coalition for the war against Afghanistan's ruling Taliban militia and the al-Qaida fighters they harbored as well as to gather intelligence, cut off terrorist financing and coordinate international law enforcement around the world.

 

Although those efforts continue, two back-to-back wars have been the main U.S. focus for the past 2 1/2 years, consuming most of hundreds of billions of dollars spent on security.

 

President Bush has said repeatedly that the way to defeat terrorism is to take the battle to the terrorists before they can attack the United States.

 

In the fall of 2001, there was little taste in the United States for uncovering ``root causes.'' The first priority was to eliminate al-Qaida before it could carry out more attacks. It wasn't seen as the time to dwell on whether the United States could undercut the extremists' motivations.

 

To some, it still isn't.

 

``I'm still in the retribution and war-planning stage,'' said Bill Harvey, whose wife of one month, Sarah, was killed when al-Qaida operatives hijacked planes and flew them into New York's World Trade Center.

 

``Now is not the time to talk about how do we help them,'' he said of the radicals. ``Now is the time to talk about exterminating them.''

 

But Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert with the Rand Corporation, said the fight has to be two-pronged: the short-term effort to break the backs of terrorist organizations and the long-term goal of breaking the cycle in which new generations of extremists are recruited and existing ones replenished and strengthened.

 

``It has to be both'' military and other efforts, he said. ``The question is in what balance and what proportion.''

 

Critics say the U.S. approach is off-kilter.

 

``Despite the administration's promises of a comprehensive approach to fighting terrorism, its budget concentrates seven times as many resources on the military as on all nonmilitary security tools combined, including homeland security,'' said Miriam Pemberton of the research group Foreign Policy in Focus.

 

She co-authored a report released jointly by some dozen liberal think tanks that recommended paring weapons systems less suited to today's battles and redirecting some $50 billion in budget money to diplomacy, development and other security efforts.

 

The Heritage Foundation's Nile Gardiner disagrees.

 

``The United States has taken exactly the right approach,'' said Gardiner, once a foreign policy aide to former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. ``The war on terrorism is primarily a military-driven operation combined with diplomacy and cooperation with key allies.''

 

In its diplomacy, the administration has pushed Arab governments to move toward democracy, better education, economic development and political change, lest future generations remain vulnerable to anti-Western ideology. At the population, it has aimed new U.S.-funded Arabic-language television, radio broadcasts and a cultural and lifestyle magazine as part of what U.S. officials call the battle of ideas.

 

Lawmakers urged the administration last week to commit more money to Africa as well, saying radical Islamic charities have long invested resources into helping the poor there.

 

The overall counterterror effort will take years and years.

 

``And it has to be dynamic,'' said Hoffman, with a strategy that adapts, just as terrorism itself ``is always evolving.''

 

 

 

04/06/04 01:39 EDT

---------------------

 

  

CONCLUSION

 

We can safely say that ISLAM is and has always been since its bloody beginnings to conquer the world by the sword a sick religion that teaches HATRED for everything not islamic. Muslims attack countries which bear no state-sponsored prejudice and discrimination against them. - the USA, UK, Spain, and Indonesia among others. The Mullahs ie. PRIESTS or RABBIS are behind the terrorism financed by the tithes (10%) of oil revenues. This blood money from the middle east in general and Saudi Arabia in particular finances them throughout the world. The Muslim mosque worldwide network has grown bigger and bigger with every year that passes. The big error the USA has made is that they are afraid of alienating SAUDI ARABIA and have their eyes focusing solely on Osama Bin Laden and erroneusly and belatedly on Saddam Hussein. If OSAMA and SADDAM were killed, the Muslim terror network would remain intact. The attack against IRAQ was a collosal mistake by W. Bush avenging the error of his father in DESERT STORM when SADDAM after the war fingered his father BUSH Sr. for assassination. The mistake strengthened terrorism world-wide who focused ever so more on richer nations (USA, UK, GERMANY, FRANCE, TURKEY, MOROCCO, JAPAN and INDONESIA) while weakening it against the desperately poor nations ie. Afghanistan and the Packistan border.

 

If the funding by SAUDI ARABIA were to stop a crushing blow would be implemented against terror.

 

ISLAM MUST CHANGE systemically and preach LOVE not HATE. This is a big task since there is no central authority. Muslim sects rule as anti-west WARLORDS. Some (very few) benign but others deady while all becoming rich with ample tithes income from Saudi Arabia. The Muslim-saudi network insists on fomenting hatred for the USA not only in poor backward countries which pose little danger to the USA but also most dangerously in Europe with well-educated but severely misguided young Muslims. By and large these young educated Muslims are not able find employment in their mother country and are promised a heavenly paradise by their Mullahs. These educated young Muslims become TRUE BELIEVERS ready to give up their lives for a worthless and dastardly religiously evil cause which focuses on destroying innocent bystanders. The world-wide Muslim network of Mullahs are looked on favorably by Muslims in general who preach unavoidable collateral damage with Muslim martyrs. These multi-networks of Mullahs preach that the guilty as well as the innocent alike must perish for "heaven" to triumph over the non-muslim infidels and the chief enemy with their alien un-muslim culture is the too rich USA who sides with ISRAEL at every turn.

 

The USA is held hostage to oil from the MIDDLE EAST in general and SAUDI ARABIA in particular not only by the REPUBLICANS who were in power on September 11, 2001 and have lied on three (3) occasions (1.) That the terrosts and Osama Bin Laden were a first priority in their administration BEFORE 911 and (2.) That "ISLAM is a peaceful religion" said by   W. Bush   AFTER 911. (3.) That there were weapons of mass destruction in IRAQ, a scapegoat tactic to invade IRAQ who for 10 yrs suffered 2/3 "no-fly" operations and sanctions which left their infrastructure of roads, hospitals and schools in shambles - and chose a substitute for inaction - a "kick the dog when you get home" strategy against the real terrorists - AL QAIDA and ample unending tithe money from SAUDI ARABIA but also the DEMOCRATs who previously in tandem implemented and continued the same policy.

 

cost of Iraq of 2003

http://costofwar.com/

 

The Republicans after 911 have yet to act against the SAUDI terror kabal and the granting of tithes to the world-wide ISLAM terror network and demand PUBLICALLY an answer for undeniable SAUDI presence in the 911 horror. Both the REPUBLICANs and the DEMOCRATs both don't protect American citizens in Saudi Arabia as witnessed in the movie NOT WITHOUT MY DAUGHTER. This is a regular occurrence and ALL complaints about improper SAUDI behavior have gone unanswered for the last fifty years have been well documented but ignored under both administrations.

 

What sets aside the reaction of the REPUBLICANs is that they have conducted their administration since January 2001 in unprecedented secrecy which either leads to lying by the highest office holders or the appearance of lying. Also the REPUBLICANs claim that the LIBERALs are a "HATE BUSH" traitor bunch who side with the enemy. This is a patently bogus charge as Conservatives and Liberals both died in the TWIN TOWER horror and in the fight in IRAQ and AFGHANISTAN against terror and continue to defend the USA with their lives.

 

We can see the ISLAM connection when a blind cleric Sheik Abdel Rahaman was jailed in NYC for masterminding the first TWIN TOWER attack. THe MULLAHS and IMAMS worldwide never are eager to condemn terror even when asked; but when asked do so always with conditions not acceptable to the victims or to the rest of the world. http://www.somalilandtimes.net/2003/110/11011.shtml

 

 

In the last five centuries Europe and the New World in general and the USA in particular emerged as dominant powers due in large part to the INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION before WW I and modern inventions as television, radio, transisters, the computer and modern army after WW II due in large part to middle east Arab oil. In these last fifty (50) yrs 10% of the oil purchases became oil tithe money to ISLAM. Money came gushing in at an unprecendented rate financing a worldwide brainwashing network. SAUDI financed Wahabi sect ISLAM in particular is behind the terror which has lain dormant for over five (5) centuries. Today a powerful, well educated, YOUNG majority proded and financed by zealous Islamic CLERICS in general and Wahabi clerics in particular teach ISLAMIC Wahabi world domination dogma risking martyrdom and retaliatory death to change and eliminate anything modern and progressive.

http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1062548/posts