A couple weeks ago, news broke that Hezbollah had approached distributors of Fahrenheit 9/11, asking how they could help support the movie:

In terms of marketing the film, Front Row is getting a boost from organisations related to Hezbollah which have rung up from Lebanon to ask if there is anything they can do to support the film. And although Chacra says he and his company feel strongly that Fahrenheit is not anti-American, but anti-Bush, “we can’t go against these organisations as they could strongly boycott the film in Lebanon and Syria.” [Originally published in ScreenDaily, 6/9/2004]

News of this connection has been decried by many as right-wing conspiracy-fostering, but those complaints miss the point. The fact that terrorist groups would approach the distributor is not scary; those groups are rational, and they see that this film is the better propaganda than they could ever make (after all, it’s not like American movie theatres would ever show al Qaeda training tapes).

What is scary is that the distributor is so nonchalant about accepting help from these terrorists:

Gianluca Chacra, the managing director of Front Row Entertainment, the movie’s distributor in the United Arab Emirates, confirms that Lebanese student members of Hezbollah “have asked us if there’s any way they could support the film.” While Hezbollah is considered a legitimate political party in many parts of the world, the U.S. State Department classifies the group as a terrorist organization. Chacra was unfazed, even excited, about their offer. “Having the support of such an entity in Lebanon is quite significant for that market and not at all controversial. I think it’s quite natural.”

The right can’t make up stuff as absurd as this. (Hat Tip: Blogs for Bush)

The Department of Homeland Security has issued a notice for security personnel at some U.S. airports.

Customs agents at six U.S. airports are being asked to look out for travelers from Pakistan with indications that they might have been to terrorist training camps in that country.

A Homeland Security Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Tuesday that the agents were told to look for such physical evidence as rope burns, unusual bruises, wounds and scars — things that indicated recent participation in paramilitary training.

“There is no hard intelligence connecting the camps to a threat against the United States,” the official said.

“It’s not unusual to have specific information to assist our inspectors. This is part of our process,” the official said, calling the notice a “regular border enforcement tool.”

The notice was sent to Customs officials at Newark Liberty International, Washington Dulles International, JFK International, Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County, O’Hare International and LAX airports.

The Pentagon is now considering moving some terror suspects being held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Scrambling to come up with a plan for dealing with an expected deluge of lawsuits from prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, Pentagon officials are considering transferring some suspected “hard-core terrorists” to a federal or military prison in the United States, Defense Department officials told NBC News on Wednesday.

The Pentagon also is reviewing the cases of the approximately 600 remaining detainees at Guantanamo with an eye toward releasing as many as 400 of them within the next year, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

The moves follow Monday’s broad rejection of the indefinite detentions of suspected terrorists by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that both American citizens and foreign nationals have a right to contest their open-ended detentions in U.S. courts.

The officials said that moving the “hard-core” terrorists to prisons in the United States was just one option being considered.

According to published reports many within the government had no plan for what might happen if the Supreme Court ruled against the Bush administration. The L.A. Times reported:

“They didn’t really have a specific plan for what to do, case by case, if we lost,” the newspaper quoted an unidentified senior Pentagon official as saying. “The Justice Department didn’t have a plan. State didn’t have a plan. This wasn’t a unilateral mistake on the Defense Department’s part. It’s astounding to me that these cases have been pending for so long and nobody came up with a contingency plan.”

AP: Saudi Clash Kills 2 Militants, Policeman

A shootout in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, on Wednesday killed two militants and one policemen, a security official said, adding that at least one militant fled the scene.

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the shootout and a subsequent police chase occurred in the al-Quds neighborhood in eastern Riyadh.

It was not immediately clear if the militants were on a list of 26 most wanted terrorists sought in relation to previous attacks in the Gulf kingdom.

(Militants on terrorist lists?)

Winds of Change.NET Regional Briefings run on Tuesdays & Wednesdays, and sometimes Fridays too.

This Regional Briefing focuses on Israel and its neighbours in Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Jordan, et. al., courtesy of the inimitable Inkgrrl.

TOP TOPIC

• They’re calling it Sderot Syndrome… I’d call it echoes of Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon, as this essay nicely outlines. The voluntary pullout of Israeli settlers from Gaza is slated to start this August; cleanup of recalcitrant settlers from the Gaza Strip will begin on September first. Arafat’s still not happy and opened the UN conference on Palestinians in South Africa by shadow-boxing over the Gaza pullout.

• It takes one to know one? Lebanon has become a favorite hunting ground for American and other security contracting companies looking for experienced mercenaries willing to work in Iraq for relatively low pay. Makes sense, after all, Lebanon’s still got that old-time flyover/anti-aircraft action going on. There’s an old Arabic saying… the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Or is it the bank account of my enemy is my friend? Wait, no, it’s the bank account of the capitalist Zionist dogs is my friend… yeah, that’s it.

Other Topics Today Include: Raising ‘Em Up Right, Pre-Emptive Weasel Strikes, Sderot Syndrome, Hizbollah’s Road Show, Radio Free Syria, Lebanese Cherry Picking, (Queen) Colonel Rania of Jordan, $300M in aid to Egypt, On The Difficulty of Buying a Vowel in Egypt

Read The Rest…

JERUSALEM POST: IDF setting up Gaza security zone

The IDF has begun setting up a security zone within the Gaza Strip surrounding Bet Hanoun, from where Kassam rockets have been fired in the past few weeks hitting southern Israeli settlements, such as Sderot.

The border of the zone stretching from the Erez border crossing and south towards the Jabaliya refugee camp on the outskirts of Gaza City.

So far, about 2 battalions have been deployed for an extended period of time. “This is not an operation,” said a senior IDF officer. “This is a new deployment.”

From The Australian :

A quick move to form the military tribunal to try Australian David Hicks was a clear response to a US Supreme Court ruling in relation to the terror suspect’s case, his lawyer said today.

In a statement issued overnight, the US military said a five-member tribunal had been formed to try the first three cases involving detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

They will be Adelaide-born Hicks, Ali Hamza Ahmed Sulayman al Bahlul of Yemen and Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al Qosi of Sudan.

The US administration said it hoped at least one case would be heard by the end of this year.
[…]
The first three military trials will be conducted at the US Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, where detainees have been held since January 2002 and would be the first such tribunals convened by the US since World War II.

The presiding officer will be Retired Army Colonel Peter Brownback, who is being recalled to active duty. Brownback has 22 years of experience as a judge advocate and nearly 10 years’ experience as a military judge.

The remaining panel members will be two US Marine Corps colonels, an Air Force colonel and an Air Force lieutenant colonel, but they have not been identified.

Be careful what you wish for - you might get it. The last similar case, one involving German citizens and US traitors landed by U-Boat, turned out badly for the accused.

…Roosevelt ordered that a military tribunal would trial the case, the first time such a tribunal had been set up since the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

The trial last most of July and the prosecution asked for the death penalty, the standard punishment for espionage during wartime. Due to the co-operation of Dasch and Burger it was difficult to sentence them to death. Burger was give life of hard labour while Dasch was sentenced to 30 years in prison. The other 6 members of the teams were electrocuted at the Distinct Jail in Washington D.C. on 8 August, 1942.

Dasch and Burger deliberately betrayed the operation to the FBI, and none of the accused ever got a chance to actually commit sabotage, let alone harm anyone.

Per Fox News, the flight returned to Munich where the hijackers were overpowered by special ops forces.

More from Reuters:

Three men have tried to hijack a plane from Munich to Istanbul carrying 150 passengers but the pilot was able to return to Munich airport where special forces stormed the plane, German television has reported.

Bayerischer Rundfunk television reported that police said the pilot hit an alarm button after the plane, run by the company Free Bird, had been in the air for 10 minutes on Tuesday.

The television said the 150 passengers were unhurt. It said special forces overpowered the three kidnappers and one of them jumped from the plane onto the tarmac. No other details were immediately available.

More from Google News.

UPDATE: The plane belonged to Free Bird Airlines.

The Special Ops troops involved may have been from GSG-9 Grenzschutzgruppe-9), which handles counter-terrorist ops for the German military. They were founded after the Munich Olympics tragedy in 1972.

7:05 UPDATE: Fox News reported on the basics of this attempt as detailed above. They also reported that a “wallet bomb” exploded on a plane in Istanbul earlier today. They also reported that one airline employee was injured in the blast, which was hours before President Bush was scheduled to leave Turkey.

7:20 UPDATE: BBC has details on the earlier blast in Istanbul, which was on a Turkish Airlines plane:

A booby-trapped device has exploded on a plane at Ataturk airport in the Turkish city of Istanbul, police say.

Three cleaners on board the Turkish Airlines plane were injured in the blast, which happened after the passengers had left, police said.

The plane had just arrived on an internal flight from Izmir on the Aegean coast….

…A Turkish Airlines spokesman said the explosion on board the plane was caused by a booby-trapped parcel resembling a wallet.

The spokesman said one cleaner lost a finger in the blast when he tried to open the package, while two other cleaners suffered minor injuries.

7:45 UPDATE: AP reports that the incident on the Istanbul-bound flight that returned to Munich may have been a bomb threat:

The Freebird Airlines Airbus with 150 passengers and seven crew on board had just started its flight from Munich to Istanbul when it reported “security problems,” police spokesman Armin Ganserer said.
It returned to Munich airport, where a man was removed and arrested, he said.

“Apparently it was a bomb threat,” Mr Ganserer said.

Mr Ganserer did not have any details about the man’s nationality or age, and motives were unclear.

Other blogging:
Blogs of War
One Fine Jay
Dean’s World
Cross-posted at Backcountry Conservative.

HAARETZ: IDF says it destroyed 300 Qassam workshops in 2.5 years

The IDF has destroyed some 300 Qassam rocket workshops in the Gaza Strip in the last two and a half years, head of the general staff’s operations division Brigadier General Gadi Shamni told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Tuesday.

Shamni said that despite the IDF’s efforts to destroy the workshops, some still exist in Gaza.

He said the security forces have difficulty tracing the Qassam rocket launchers, because the region around Beit Hanun, from where the rockets are fired, is densely populated and is also covered with a lot of shrubbery. The Qassam operators can therefore bring the launchers to a camouflaged site, launch the missile and get out.

Diamonds are a terrorist’s best friend?

JERUSALEM POST: Hizbullah profit from West Africa diamond trade

Lebanon’s Hizbullah terrorist group is systematically siphoning profits from West Africa’s multimillion-dollar diamond trade, in part by threatening the Lebanese merchants who long have handled much of the region’s diamond business, US diplomats in West Africa charge.

The allegations, supported by independent analysts but denied by some traders, claim more pervasive, organized and coercive Hizbullah profiteering from West Africa’s diamond trade than most US officials have previously acknowledged.

“One thing that’s incontrovertible is the financing of Hizbullah. It’s not even an open secret; there is no secret,” Larry Andre, deputy chief of mission for the US Embassy in diamond-rich Sierra Leone, told The Associated Press.

“There’s a lot of social pressure and extortionate pressure brought to bear: ‘You had better support our cause, or we’ll visit your people back home,”’ Andre said, citing interviews by embassy staff with alleged Lebanese targets of the Hizbullah racketeering.

An estimated 100,000-plus Lebanese live in West Africa, where they have formed the core of the region’s merchant class since they began sailing here over a century ago. Middle East crises of the 1970s and 1980s sent another wave of Lebanese immigrants to West Africa. Many Lebanese retain strong business, cultural and family ties to their homeland.

A profile of the various rocket types used by Palestinian terrorists in Gaza is profiled in this article:

SEATTLE PI: Palestinian rockets inaccurate, improving

Palestinian militants have fired more than 200 homemade rockets at Israeli communities since 2002, but only a few have caused damage or injury. On Monday, two Israelis, a 49-year-old man and a 3-year-old boy, were the first to be killed by such rockets.

Israeli military officials say militants are constantly trying to increase the rockets’ range and deadliness, with some success.

Read the rest.

AP: Palestinians Fire New Barrage of Rockets

Palestinian militants fired five makeshift rockets into southern Israel as Prime Minister Ariel Sharon visited the area Tuesday, a salvo that came despite the launch of an Israeli offensive meant to halt such attacks.

The rockets, which wounded one man, were fired a day after a rocket attack killed two Israelis, including a 3-year-old boy, in the border town of Sderot.

A senior official said Sharon was in the town to visit the boy’s family and was not harmed.

“We don’t plan to ignore what happened here. The security services have begun taking actions whose aim is to prevent the firing of these missiles,” Sharon said.

It was unclear whether militants knew Sharon was in the area.

(If the rockets had come closer to Sharon, would Arafat finally have been killed in response?)

HAARETZ: Shin Bet arrests terror cell suspected of planning murder

The Israel Defense Forces and Shin Bet internal security service recently arrested a terror cell that plotted to kill an Israeli and use his body as a bargaining chip to secure the release of Palestinian security prisoners held by Israel, security officials revealed Tuesday.

The primary suspect, Gaza Strip-resident Allah Salah, 31, was allegedly planning to kill an Israeli Jew in the Israeli Arab city of Taibeh after which he planned to transfer the body to nearby Tul Karm in the West Bank.

Salah has been on the Shin Bet’s most wanted-list since 1994 and is suspected of murdering Yossi Zandani from the southern Israeli town of Bnei Aish in the same year.

(From m-w.com, the definition of ghoul: “a legendary evil being that robs graves and feeds on corpses”)

JERUSALEM POST: Aksa Martyrs’ Brigades say killed Israeli near Elkana

A 63-year-old Israeli man was found shot dead in Beit Rima, south of Elkana on Tuesday morning.

The man’s family has been notified.

The man’s truck was found parked in an area controlled by the Palestinian Authority known as Area A. The man, a resident of southern Israel, was found shot in the chest by the Red Crescent paramedics in his truck, which had been sprayed with gunfire, the rescue officials said.

The Red Crescent paramedics then alerted the incident to Israeli authorities, who reported the man had a criminal record.

The Al Aksa Martyrs’ Brigades, a terrorist group with links to Yasser Arafat’s Fatah party, took responsibility for the killing. In a call to The Associated Press, a member of the group said the murder was “the first step of a series of revenge actions” for the killing of senior militants over the weekend.

From Reuters via the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) :

The US Supreme Court has ruled that US courts have jurisdiction to hear appeals from foreign detainees held as enemy combatants in the US military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

It also ruled that an American captured overseas in President George W Bush’s war on terrorism and held in a US military jail must be given a chance to contest the government’s decision to detain him.

In a 6-3 decision, the High Court held that “United States’ courts have jurisdiction to consider challenges to the legality of the decision of foreign nationals captured abroad in connection with hostilities and incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay”.

The high court divided by a 5-4 vote to rule that Mr Bush has the power to detain American citizen Yaser Hamdi, who was captured in Afghanistan as a suspected Taliban fighter and has been held in a US military jail in the United States.

But in the more important part of the ruling, the justices by an 8-1 vote ruled he should get a fair opportunity to rebut the government’s case for detaining him.

Winds of Change.NET Regional Briefings run on Tuesdays & Wednesdays, and sometimes Fridays too. This Regional Briefing focuses on South Asia, courtesy of Robi Sen and Nitin Pai of The Acorn

THE THAW AND THE MELT

• There was positive movement on the diplomatic level between India and Pakistan. Diplomats formalized nuclear risk reduction measures (NRRMs), agreed to disagree on Indus river water sharing, and began high-level discussions on the Kashmir dispute. The latter included a quiet low-profile meeting between J N Dixit, India’s National Security Advisor and Tariq Aziz, General Musharraf’s key point-man.

• Even as there is progress on the diplomatic front, cross-border infiltration and terrorism in Kashmir follow set patterns, with violence picking up come summer, as melting Himalayan snows open infiltration routes that even India’s over 700km long fence is unable to completely plug. In the days immediately preceding the talks, jihadi terrorists slit the throats of a railway engineer, and massacred 12 villagers including several young children.

Other Topics Today Include: Double agents and nuclear con-men in India; Palace intrigues and provincial rebellions in Pakistan; Nuclear Proliferation; India and Israel; Much ado about something in Bangladesh; Potential missteps in Afghanistan; Dalai Lama rejects Colonel Saunders in Tibet.

Read The Rest…

For comparison purposes, here’s the story of the rocket attack on the Israeli town of Sderot as covered by Al-Jazeerah:

AL-JAZEERAH: Settlement targeted after Gaza attack

At least two Israeli settlers were killed and a third seriously wounded when two home-made missiles fell on the Jewish settlement of Sderot east of Gaza.

One of the victims of Hamas’ first ever deadly rocket attack on Israel was a three-year-old boy on his way to nursery school.

The attack came on Monday a few hours after Israeli helicopter gunships attacked the Hay Al-Zaytun neighbourhood in central Gaza, destroying a foundry and injuring some Palestinian civilians.

Sderot is an Israel city within the State of Israel. It is not a settlement by any definition.

HAARETZ: Report: IAF missiles strike Gaza high-rise, destroy metal foundry

Israel Air Force helicopters fired missiles at targets in Gaza late Monday, Palestinian witnesses said.

Three missiles were fired at a 16-story building in Gaza City, while one missile hit a metal foundry in the Nusseirat refugee camp in central Gaza.

The high-rise houses several media outlets, including the Arab TV satellite station Al Jazeera. White smoke rose from the building and ambulances raced to the scene.

The missiles hit a third-floor media center affiliated with the Islamic militant group Hamas, witnesses said. Two people suffered moderate injuries, doctors said.

The foundry was said to be destroyed in the strike. There were no reports of casualties.

Also at Jerusalem Post.

Welcome! Our goal is to give you one power-packed briefing of insights, news and trends from the global War on Terror that leaves you stimulated, informed, and occasionally amused every Monday & Thursday. Today’s “Winds of War” is brought to you by Dan Darling. of Regnum Crucis.

TOP TOPICS

• A member of the Eritrean Islamic Jihad has confessed to planning attacks on Eritrea from Sudan. The Eritrean Islamic Jihad is a key part of bin Laden’s terrorist coalition in East Africa and this is a key point to remember when discussing Sudan with respect to its ongoing genocide in Darfur - it is not simply a past state sponsor of al-Qaeda - it is a current one.

• The Saudi princelings have offered an amnesty to al-Qaeda fighters in the Kingdom in the wake of al-Muqrin’s death. I think Cox and Forkum summarizes my thoughts fairly accurately on this one. Prince Nayef, meanwhile, is assuring us that al-Qaeda hasn’t infiltrated Saudi security forces. Right.

• If only it were that simple, for al-Quds al-Arabi reports that even despite the recent surge of violence, some Saudi princes are still funding al-Qaeda. This would seem to square with reports that the princes are divided over how to deal with bin Laden’s thugs.

Other Topics Today Include: Iran Reports; USA Homeland Security Briefing; violence back on the rise in Kashmir; Ingush violence round-up; Turkish terrorists and cops in action as NATO summit begins; Spaniard arrested for selling explosives used in 3/11; Switzerland used by al-Qaeda as a logistics base for 9/11; Zarqawi’s wife sez he’s a good man; Dr. Azahari in Bandung; 40 JI in the Philippines; Abu Sayyaf leader killed in Tawi-Tawi; GSPC massacres 5; Bosnia a way station for Islamist extremists; Taliban kill election workers; and North Korea’s Soylent Green.

Read The Rest…

JERUSALEM POST: Aksa Brigades seek reforms, elections in Fatah

Leaders of the Aksa Martyrs Brigades on Monday called for sweeping reforms in Yasser Arafat’s ruling Fatah faction, including the demand that they be officially recognized as Fatah’s military wing.

They demanded the expulsion of corrupt officials and “collaborators” from Fatah and urged Arafat to hold democratic elections throughout the faction.

CNN: Saudis: Al Qaeda member surrenders

One of Saudi Arabia’s most wanted militants has turned himself into the authorities, the first senior suspect to surrender under a one-month government amnesty announced last week.

Othman Al-Omari, number 21 on Saudi Arabia’s most wanted list of 26, accepted King Fahd’s offer of amnesty, which was made last week, according to Saudi sources Monday.

Al-Omari, who turned himself in on Sunday night, was a business partner of Shaban Al Shihri — the first al Qaeda member to accept the offer when he turned himself in Friday.

Al-Omari and Al Shihri shared a vegetable stall in a market in Medina. Al Shihri, according to sources, was in part responsible for persuading Al Omari to turn himself in.

HAARETZ: Two killed, several hurt as Qassam rockets hit Sderot

Two people were killed and at least nine were injured on Monday morning, when four Qassam rockets landed on the southern town of Sderot.

The fatilities were Mordechai Yosopov, 49, and four-year-old Afik Zahavi, whose mother, Ruthie, was seriously wounded in the attack.

According to emergency services, one of the rockets landed just meters from the man, killing him on the spot.

The rockets landed near a kindergarten.

UPDATE:

In a meeting Monday afternoon, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and security chiefs decided that Israel will respond to the Qassam attack, as well as to an explosion at an IDF post in the Gaza Strip late Sunday that killed one soldier and left five others wounded.

Present at the two-hour discussion were Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon and the heads of Military Intelligence and the Shin Bet security services, Israel Radio said.

Following the attacks, Mofaz cancelled a trip to Italy later in the week.

UPDATE 2:

Israel Defense Forces soldiers blew up two empty eight-story buildings in the Gaza Strip on Monday night, a day after an IDF soldier was killed and five others were wounded in an attack on their post in the central settlement bloc of Gush Katif.

The two buildings were destroyed after troops found a ventilation shaft between them, which was apparently linked to the explosives-laden tunnel dug by militants under the IDF post.

World Net Daily reports:

Iranian Revolutionary Guards are attempting to conceal a spill of weapons-grade uranium delivered from North Korea at Tehran’s new airport, according to western intelligence sources.

…

The accident at the facility reportedly occurred in December 2002 when a North Korean cargo jet delivering nuclear technology and some weapons-grade uranium was being unloaded at night. During the delivery, a container slipped and cracked on the Tarmac. All personnel in the area were taken from the site and given thorough medical examinations.

Note: Weapons grade uranium, in sufficient quantity (a few tens of kilograms) is material which can easily be made into a fission weapon (“atomic bomb”). See here for nuclear weapons information and links.

HAARETZ: Israel fires 3 missiles at Gaza City metal workshop

An Israel Air Force helicopter fired three missiles at a metal workshop in Gaza City early Monday, causing some damage, but no major injuries. Witnesses said a few minutes later that Israel launched a second missile strike in Gaza City, but no details were immediately available.

The strike occurred just hours after Palestinian militants blew up an Israel Defense Forces base in the Gaza Strip, wounding six soldiers. Hamas and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades claimed responsibility for that attack.

Update to story here.

There is still some confusion - or just mixed reporting - in regards to the death toll. Some reports say there were five injuries, other reports say at least one soldier who was trapped in the rubble has died.

Also, Israeli ambulance crews were fired at by Palestinian militants as they tried to get in to rescue the wounded soldiers.

Hamas and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades both claim responsibility for the attack.

While some are claiming that this attack was in response to Israel’s attack on terrorist bases yesterday, which killed five Al Aqsa members and one Hamas member, it is being reported that the tunnel where the explosives were set off probably took at least a week to prepare.

[Updates via Fox and CNN tv]

Update: Reuters is reporting that Israel has fired a missile on a target in Gaza in retaliation for the attack.

HAARETZ: Dozens of injuries in Gush Katif

An explosion went off Monday night at an Israel Defense Forces outpost located near the Gush Katif Junction in the Gaza Strip, causing a large number of casualties.

According to initial reports, the blast was set off by explosives planted in a tunnel dug near the base. “There are a lot of people injured at the scene,” said Yeruham Mendola, a spokesman for the Magen David rescue service.

Palestinian gunmen were firing at rescue forces as they attempted to evacuate the injured form the site of the attack.

Channel Two reported that Hamas and Al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades claimed responsibility for the attack.

MORE INFORMATION:
Jerusalem Post, Reuters, Maariv.

(Al-Jazeerah is reporting five dead Israeli soldiers. When Al-Jazeerah is done celebrating, they will most likely file additional reports.)

Would-be voters slaughtered in Afghanistan.

Suspected Taliban gunmen stopped a van packed with people on a road in southern Afghanistan, then sprayed the occupants with bullets after finding that they had registered to vote, a local police official said Sunday. Ten people were killed.

The attack, which occurred Friday on a road in southern Uruzgan province, was the deadliest yet in a wave of violence aimed at sabotaging the nation’s first free vote, scheduled for September.

On Saturday, a bomb ripped through a bus carrying female election workers in the eastern city of Jalalabad, killing two of them and wounding 13 others. A spokesman for the Taliban claimed responsibility.

JERUSALEM POST: Mofaz: Security Fence saves lives

Mofaz, in a briefing on the security situation to the cabinet, said there has been a significant decrease in terror attacks in recent months, the product of constant pressure on terrorists — including arrests, targeted assassinations, and action taken to dry up financial support for the terror organizations. He also said that the fence has had a dramatic impact in bringing down the number of attacks.

Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom, during his briefing, told the cabinet Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat has given instructions to step up Palestinian protests against the fence, both at the site where the fence is being erected and around the world, to bring the issue back onto the international agenda.

Israel is expecting the ICJ ruling to go against it, and is gearing up for Palestinian attempts to bring the issue to the United Nations General Assembly for a resolution against the fence. The assumption is that the Palestinians would like a Security Council resolution, including sanctions against Israel, if it does not stop building the fence, something very unlikely given the US veto power on the Security Council.

Mofaz said that in the first six months of 2004 some 63 people have been killed in terror attacks, and 216 wounded. By comparison, 214 people were killed and 1,004 wounded in 2003, and 451 people killed and 2,307 wounded in 2002. According to Mofaz, some 1,200 terror suspects have been arrested since the beginning of the year, and 60 suicide attacks have been thwarted.

ARAB NEWS: ‘Families Can Punish Terrorists’

Families of victims killed by terrorists who surrender to the authorities could decide if they will be executed, Saudi Ambassador to UK Turki Al-Faisal said in an interview to be aired today.

“The state will drop its claim on these individuals if they give themselves up, but the private claims of the families of those who were killed or who were assaulted or who were wounded will remain for them to decide and not for the state,” Al-Faisal said.

Asked by interviewer Jonathan Dimbleby on Britain’s ITV television if the families of Westerners killed could demand terrorists faced the death penalty, Al-Faisal said: “It is up to them. They will decide.”

JERUSALEM POST: Arafat aide: No confiscation of illegal weapons

Sakher Habash, a senior Fatah official, on Saturday denied reports that Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat was contemplating appointing a new interior minister with expanded authorities over the security forces.

He also announced that the PA has no intention of confiscating the weapons of the various Palestinian factions, including Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Habash, who is closely associated with Arafat, said the current interior minister, Hakam Balawi, would be replaced only when and if the entire PA cabinet is changed. He said that in any case, Arafat would remain in charge of PA security forces.

HAARETZ: IDF kills six senior Palestinian militants in Nablus

Seven armed Palestinians were killed by Israel Defense Forces soldiers in Nablus on Saturday, including six senior militants, in the third day of an operation to round up wanted militants and locate bomb laboratories in the West Bank city.

Palestinian sources reported that six wanted militants, including the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades commander in Nablus, were killed after troops hurled a grenade into a hidden room where the Palestinians were hiding.

Among those killed were 38-year-old Al-Aqsa commander Na’af abu-Sarah, and the Islamic Jihad’s West Bank commander.

Abu-Sarah was one of the top two wanted militants in the West Bank and the leader of all militant factions in Nablus. Since 2002 he has also led the Tanzim faction in the city.

JERUSALEM POST: Arafat announces ‘Olympic Truce’ with Israel

Arafat issued the call at a lighting ceremony for a symbolic Olympic torch at his headquarters in Ramallah.

“On the occasion of lighting the Palestinian Olympic torch, I declare our respect and commitment for an Olympic Truce, which I signed in my besieged office,” Arafat said.

“We hope that the revival of the ancient and noble Greek tradition will help in creating a world that enjoys peace, justice and security for the coming generations,” he said.

A senior Israeli official dismissed Arafat’s offer, accusing the Palestinian leader of being behind the killings of Israeli athletes during the 1972 Munich Olympics.

“Arafat’s Olympic torch is a torch of death. There is a big difference between what Arafat says and what he does,” the official said.

From the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) :

Three women working to register voters for Afghan elections have been killed and 17 female election workers wounded after a blast destroyed their bus in the eastern city of Jalalabad.

The attack was one of the worst against workers preparing for elections supposed to be held in September, which the Taliban and allied Islamic militants have vowed to disrupt.
[…]
A senior police officer said the women were heading for a voter registration site on the outskirts of the city when the blast occurred.

A United Nations spokesman, which is overseeing voter registration, said that according to preliminary reports, the explosion occurred as the bus was heading to Rodat district to the east of Jalalabad.

“Three have been killed, three to four seriously wounded,” Manoel de Almeida e Silva said.

“They are all Afghan national staff and they are all female,” he said.

The police officer said 17 women had been wounded.

Registration of female voters for the poll has lagged behind that of men, especially in conservative southern and eastern provinces where militants are most active.

The attack comes after Mr Karzai’s appeal to NATO to make good its pledge to send more troops to protect the polls and ensure they can be held on time.

HAARETZ: Nasrallah: ‘Mistake’ led to deaths of 3 IDF soldiers

The three Israel Defense Forces soldiers whose bodies were returned to Israel in January’s prisoner exchange were killed by “mistake,” Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah said Thursday.

Adi Avitan, Omar Suwad and Benny Avraham were kidnapped and killed by Hezbollah in October 2000, while patrolling along the Israeli-Lebanese border. But Nasrallah told Al Jazeera television Thursday that Hezbollah had intended to kidnap live Israeli soldiers.

“A mistake was made,” Nasrallah said. “We expected the Israeli vehicles to be armored.” The explosive device used against the IDF vehicle in which the soldiers were traveling, Nasrallah said, was too strong for an unarmored vehicle.

Expats will be allowed to carry guns to stop militants.

Western expatriates working in Saudi Arabia will be allowed to carry weapons to defend themselves against attacks by Islamic militants.

Prince Nayef bin Abdulaziz, the interior minister, made the radical concession because foreigners working in the private sector feel poorly protected by Saudi security forces.

However, those working on government contracts will not be eligible and will be protected by the Saudi authorities.

“In principle, a Saudi has the right to carry a weapon if he has a permit. Likewise, a foreign resident, if he felt in danger, could get a permit to carry a weapon,” the prince said in remarks reported by the official Saudi Press Agency.

His comments came as some expatriates - who do not have the right to carry arms - have started buying them on the black market for about £230.

HAARETZ: Defense Minister Mofaz, William Burns meet over Gaza pullout

Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz met with U.S. Assistant Secretary of State William Burns Friday in Tel Aviv, to discuss the disengagement plan and Egypt’s security role after Israel pulls out of Gaza.

Mofaz told Burns that Israel was interested in quitting the Philadelphi Route along the border as part of its overall plan to withdraw from the Gaza Strip, but reiterated that it would not do so unless it was ensured that all smuggling of arms from Egypt into the Strip was halted.

Mofaz also presented Israeli preparation for the unilateral withdrawal.

JERUSALEM POST: Major operation in Nablus yields fugitives, bombs

A major force of four crack battalions moved into the narrow warrens of the Casba in Nablus Thursday on an open-ended hunt for Palestinian terrorist leaders and bomb factories.

The operation, dubbed “Close Pressure,” came a day after security forces intercepted a suicide bomber and a 10-kilo bomb dispatched from the West Bank’s largest city.

“Nablus continues to be the ‘Palestinian terror capital’ that knows how to produce attacks daily,” said Lt.-Col Itzik, commander of the 101st paratrooper battalion.

Welcome! Our goal at Winds of Change.NET is to give you one power-packed briefing of insights, news and trends from the global War on Terror that leaves you stimulated, informed, and occasionally amused every Monday & Thursday. In addition, we also have our in-depth Iraq Report.

Auditions are in progress, and today’s Winds of War briefing is brought to you by Sean Manion.

TOP TOPICS

• As of Wednesday evening (EDT) the eight British servicemen taken into custody in Iran still remain. Earlier reports of their release were premature, and it has been pushed back until Thursday. Hopefully, this situation will end quickly, but Belmont Club has some observations should it turn into a protracted crisis.

• A South Korean translator, Kim Sun-il, taken hostage in Iraq in May and threatened with execution unless South Korea pulled its troops out of Iraq, has been beheaded. The video of the killing has been posted on an Islamist website, where the devout Christian translator is referred to as a missionary. South Korean President Roh Moo-hyun refuses to pullout troops and still plans to send more.

• The White House has released memos detailing what was and wasn’t approved of with regards to prisoner treatment. Intel Dump has all of the details.

Other Topics Today Include: Iran v. IAEA; Portland 7:And then there were none; Saudi Amnesty; Fighting in Waziristan; Indo-Pakistan Talks; Pakistan denies link with al Qaeda; Canada leaving Afghanistan; Elections; Moore 9/11; NK proposal; Igushetia raids; and supersooldiers of the future

Read The Rest…

JERUSALEM POST: IDF kills Palestinian near Gaza security fence

IDF forces shot and killed a Palestinian Wednesday night after he was spotted near the Gaza Strip security fence.

The army said that troops spotted a suspicious figure digging a pit near the fence. The troops fired a warning shot in the air and when the suspect did not heed to the call, they fired at him. The army said that from an initial investigation, it appears that the suspect was digging a pit to lay inside an explosive device.

The Eurasia Daily Monitor reports that eyewitnesses to the recent attacks in Ingushetia were carried out, at least in part, by locals:

An Ingushetian traffic policeman who was briefly detained by some of the fighters told the independent Ingushetiya.ru website that all of them spoke Ingush and that while their faces were covered by masks, he could tell by their voices that they were young. The traffic policeman said that after he was released, fighters who were also Ingush stopped him several times on the way into Nazran. “They said that they were getting revenge for murders and kidnappings of their friends,” the traffic policeman told the website. “And that they were killing employees of [the Ingushetian police’s] criminal investigation [department], spetsnaz and OMON [special police units] for helping the Russian special services”. (Ingushetiya.ru, June 22)

Likewise, Rossiiskaya Gazeta cited local residents as saying that the attackers were Ingush, “which partially refutes the version about the invasion from Chechnya,” and quoted a Russian special services source as denying that they had also crossed over from North Ossetia. “According to our source, most likely no one came from anywhere,” the government newspaper reported. “In the evening, people simply put on camouflage clothing, took weapons out of hiding places and went out to the streets to fight”. (Rossiiskaya Gazeta, June 23)

It is difficult to sort news from rumor in reports from this part of the world, but if locals were a large part of the attacking group, Russia appears to have a much bigger problem than Chechnya on its hands.

HAARETZ: Security forces thwart major terror attack in Jerusalem

The Shin Bet internal security service and police thwarted a suicide bombing attack in Jerusalem on Tuesday after they caught a Tanzim cell from the West Bank city of Nablus that was being directed by Hezbollah in Lebanon.

News of the thwarted attack was released to the media only on Wednesday.

Precise intelligence information led security services to the village of A-Ram north of Jerusalem where they arrested three individuals involved in the planned terror attack. The suicide bomber himself as well as his operator were among those arrested by security forces.

The bomber had been transferred by his operators from Nablus to A-Ram where he received instructions to carry out a suicide attack in Jerusalem.

Roger Simon is here at AEI this week and was kind enough to bring along a camera, so if any of you are interested in seeing what I or Dr. Ledeen look like, feel to take a look here. Don’t worry, we censored everything within proper security precautions, though who would have ever suspected that Michael Ledeen had a Darth Vader mask on his desk?

Now, onto the more substantive stuff…

• Ingushetia (near Chechnya) where extremely brutal fighting is in progress.
• Algeria’s al-Qaeda ally the GSPC has its leader Nabil Sahraoui killed - what are the implications?
• Saddam Fedayeen & al-Qaeda.
• Dumb assumptions people still believe.

Read The Rest…

Saudi Arabia has offered one month of amnesty to all terrorists in the kingdom.

AP: Saudis Offer Militants One-Month Amnesty

Saudi Arabia announced an amnesty for Muslim militants who turn themselves in in the next month, saying they will not face the death penalty and will only be prosecuted if they committed acts that hurt others.

(more information and refinement of the actual statement as it comes available)

JERUSALEM POST: IDF kills Islamic Jihad terrorist in Nablus

A Palestinian terrorist was killed in Nablus Wednesday morning, and at least four Palestinians were killed in the northern Gaza Strip by IDF forces in the past two days.

IDF Special Forces in Nablus shot dead a Palestinian gunman in the city’s Rafadiyeh neighborhood on Wednesday, during an operation to nab the head of the Islamic Jihad in the area, Muhanad Mahmoud Mohammed Abu Aisha. During the arrest operation one of his assistants, Shadi Haled Mahmoud Salim, 26 from Salfit, was shot and killed when he attempted to draw a pistol and fire at soldiers.

Abu Aisha, 24, was taken in for interrogation. Security officials said he was responsible for manufacturing explosive belts used by Islamic Jihad suicide bombers from Nablus and responsible for numerous shooting attacks in the Nablus area.

Nick Berg was beheaded in Iraq early in May and it received a great deal of attention because of the video.

More recently, Robert Jacob was murdered in Saudi Arabia on tape, but he was shot to death. It didn’t receive quite the same amount of attention as the videotaped beheadings - either in the mainstream media or the blogosphere.

The Saudi arm apparently learned their lesson from this and proceeded to behead Paul Johnson on video and it received a great deal of media attention.

The news of today’s beheading of Kim Sun-il means beheading on videotape is probably now cemented as the method of choice of Al Qaeda in the region. With 10 hostages reportedly still being held, I am reminded of something someone said recently (I think it was either James Joyner or Steven Taylor - I’ll update this to reflect who said it when I find it again.) The beheadings may become smaller news stories in the future if they keep happening with frequency was the gist of it as I remember it. Al Qaeda terrorists in the region may adapt and change methods again if that ever happens.

UPDATE: Bryan also discusses the P.R. savvy of the terrorists and mentions that the video is getting heavy play on South Korean television. He reminds me that it was Steven Taylor who discussed what I mentioned above. Bryan also previously discussed the evolving tactics of the terrorists dealing with the media.

Taylor:

All very tragic, and yet again underscoring the barbaric nature of this enemy. One wonders if the beheading routine will continue, or if they will have to find new and more terrible methods of execution to maintain the attention of the public/to maintain the appropriate level of fear.

Cross-posted at Backcountry Conservative.

al Jazeera TV is reporting that the South Korean man being held hostage by an Iraqi militant group has been killed.

More as we get it.

Update from Fox:

South Korean businessman held hostage in Iraq was beheaded Tuesday, in spite of promises of an extended deadline on his execution, according to Al-Jazeera television.

The report couldn’t immediately be confirmed, and Al-Jazeera declined to say how it got its information. The Arab television station said it would have more information at 1 p.m. EDT.

More here from AP

Update: Fox is reporting that Seoul has confirmed the death of Kim Sun-il.

MAARIV: Palestinian security officer who aided terrorists detained

An officer in the Palestinian Preventive Security Service was arrested about two weeks ago on suspicion of helping the two suicide bombers who carried out the attack at the Ashdod Port to infiltrate into Israel. The story has been released for publication today. The attack in Ashdod claimed the lives of 10 people and wounded 12 others.

Security authorities apprehended the 39 year-old Mua’in Atallah, a northern Gaza Strip resident, at the Karni crossing on June 4. In the framework of his position, Atallah was responsible for security at the crossing, which is used to transfer merchandize traveling between Israel and the Strip.

During interrogation, the officer revealed that he was the one who assisted the Hamas as well as the Fatah’s military wing, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades”, to smuggle the two suicide bombers into Ashdod.

According to the officer, several days after the attack in the Ashdod Port, the Hamas planned to carry out a double suicide bombing in an Israeli city. The plan was to smuggle the terrorists through the Karni Crossing but it was canceled after the crossing had been shut down and the opening thorough which the terrorists infiltrated was discovered.

The officer also disclosed information about the intention of the terror organizations to establish a truck company for the alleged transfer of goods from Gaza to Israel, while in practice it would smuggle suicide bombers into the country by hiding them in a false bottom.

(Would the truck company get grants from USAID?)

An update from the story posted here late last night EDT. From Reuters:

Suspected Chechen rebels rampaged through a southern Russian region in attacks early on Tuesday that killed 48 people and raised new doubts about Moscow’s ability to stamp out Chechnya’s separatist violence.

In a brazen operation, the rebels seized the interior ministry building in Ingushetia region and held it for several hours, raided police arms depots and reduced police headquarters and a building housing border guards to gutted wrecks.

The large-scale offensive was the biggest armed operation by rebels in Ingushetia since war between separatists and Moscow erupted in neighboring Chechnya a decade ago.

Bob Harmon is a former military policeman, and currently a Democratic Party official and Director of the Marin County, California ACLU.

“Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence.”
— Justice Tom Clark, Mapp v. Ohio, 1961

Some commentators of late, notably Jonah Goldberg at National Review Online – and see this rejoinder to him in NRO The Corner — as well as some correspondents on Winds of Change.NET, seem to have the idea that the Geneva Conventions are reciprocal, some kind of contract that Osama bin Laden is not a party to (and thus, we don’t have to obey it either, allegedly). In addition, Robin Burk’s “The Discussion We Need to Start Having” (see also her questions in The Command Post’s comments section, and the follow-up debate) raises a number of issues associated with these subjects.

In order to put these discussions on a sound footing, it’s worthwhile to discuss America’s legal obligations as they relate to the War on Terror and illegal combatants.

The Geneva Conventions, briefly, are not a single document but four conventions, and two protocols. IIIGC deals with PW; IVGC deals with civilians (including armed and dangerous ones). The confusion may arise from reading only IIIGC:

Read The Rest…

100-300 armed men seized Interior Ministry and police buildings and killed the acting Interior Minister of Ingushetia, a North Caucasian region bordering Chechnya.

In nearly simultaneous attacks, assailants armed with grenade- and rocket-launchers seized the Interior Ministry headquarters and police buildings in Ingushetia, a Russian region bordering warring Chechnya, local officials said Tuesday.

Ingushetia’s acting Interior Minister was killed, and witnesses reported at least six other people dead. Emergency and military officials estimated 100 to 300 armed assailants were involved in the attacks, which took place in the city of Nazran and at least one village, Karabulak.

An official from the Ingush Interior Ministry said it was not immediately clear who the attackers were, but said some of them were shouting “Allahu akhbar” - a frequent cry of Chechnya’s separatist rebels as their insurgency increasingly comes under the influence of radical Islam.

Fighting from the 4-year-old Chechen war has occasionally spilled into Ingushetia, highlighting the Russian military’s ineffectiveness against the rebels despite having heavier weapons and far superior manpower.

But the latest attack comes after recent statements by separatist leaders indicating plans to step up military actions outside of Chechnya.

Russian journalists report an encounter with the men.

A three-man crew from Russia’s NTV television said they came upon some of the attackers at a border crossing as the crew tried to reach Nazran from neighboring North Ossetia.

“Out of the dark, a voice says ‘Stop, put your hands on the hood,’ said NTV correspondent Maxim Berezin. “A man carrying an automatic weapon came up. ‘Who are you?’ ‘We’re from NTV.’ He took a few steps back, as if to shoot us.

“Then he said, ‘Say that we are the Martyr’s Brigade,’ I don’t remember of whom, Abu, Alyua, I don’t remember what he said. ‘We have shot everyone here. Go and announce that.’”

HAARETZ: PA militants strongly oppose Egypt’s Gaza role

The Palestinian Authority officially supports the disengagement plan and Egypt’s involvement in helping to implement it, but Fatah, Hamas, the Popular and Democratic Fronts, and other Palestinian political groupings Monday issued a joint statement strongly opposed to the “security role” proposed for Egypt and Jordan in the territories.

The statement said: “We are amazed by, and deplore, the talk of a ‘security role’ for some Arab parties in Gaza and the West Bank, because our people expect the Arab nation to act according to the logic of supporting the Palestinians and not the logic of ‘security,’ which cannot be used with regard to the Palestinian people defending its land and its holy places. The references [to security] turn things on their heads, making the problem the Palestinian people and not the occupation.”

HAARETZ: Thai killed in Gaza; Tanzim man nabbed in ambulance

Meanwhile, one of the suspects arrested was senior Tanzim official Imad Faraj. He and two other wanted Palestinians were arrested at a surprise roadblock in Bethlehem while traveling in an ambulance. Tanzim is an offshoot of Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement.

Faraj said he needed the ambulance because he was suffering from appendicitis, but according to the intelligence information that led to Faraj’s arrest, he was using the ambulance as a way to escape from Israeli security forces.

Faraj was brought to Hadassah University Hospital, Ein Karem (Jerusalem), for a medical check. He was then transferred to the Shin Bet security service for questioning.

(Apparently, Peter Hansen forgot to write that memo reminding his workers not to allow UN and UNRWA resources to be used by armed terrorists. Feel free to remind him.)

(Associated Press) Tehran — “Iran said Monday it has seized 3 British naval vessels in Iranian waters and arrested 8 crew members. The Royal Navy acknowledged that it had lost contact with three small patrol boats on a routine mission in the waterway between Iraq and Iran.”

Well, isn’t that a nice thank-you for Britain’s accomodationist policy toward Iran and its nuclear program. FYI, The vessels in question were small river/coastal patrol boats seized in the narrow Shatt al-Arab waterway between Iran and Iraq, hence the small crew totals. The Sky News UK report notes:

“The report said that weapons and maps were found on board the vessels.”

Well, I should hope so. A patrol boat with no weapons and no maps would be a pretty ridiculous thing.

• Globe & Mail Link
• Full Google News roundup
• Scotsman.com discusses the troubled history of the Shatt-al-Arab waterway where the sailors were seized.

Amidst the weekend’s barrage of news that the Bush Administration and the 9/11 Commission were disagreeing over whether there were connections between al Qaeda, the NYT admitted, in an easily-overlooked item, that the Bush Administration indeed never> claimed that Iraq was involved in the terrorist actions on September 11:

Critics of the Bush administration argue that it falsely created a link between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks to help justify the war. Last week, the administration countered that it had never made such an assertion — only that there were ties, however murky, between Iraq and Al Qaeda. A survey of past public comments seems to bear that out — although whether there was a deliberate campaign to create guilt by association is difficult to say.

You can see the NYT’s words for yourself in this NYT graphic.

While the NYT takes a look at connections between Iraq and al Qaeda, they may want to dig through their own archives. On 11/5/1998, the NYT reported that bin Laden had been indicted by the US Attorneys office, which claimed that he had collaborated with Iraq:

Both indictments offer new information about Mr. bin Laden’s operations, including one deal he is said to have struck with Iraq to cooperate in the development of weapons in return for Mr. bin Laden’s agreeing not to work against that country.

No details were given about whether the alleged deal with Iraq led to the development of actual weapons for Mr. bin Laden’s group, which is called Al Qaeda.

You can read the indictment for yourself:

Al Qaeda also forged allieances with the National Islamic Front in the Sudan and with the government of Iran and its associated terrorist group Hebollah for the purpose of working together against the perceived common enemies in the West, particularly the United States. In addition, al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperateively with the Government of Iraq.

Not surprisingly, the good folks at The Free Republic are going apeshit over this. Apparently Rush Limbaugh talked about it on Friday, too.

JERUSALEM POST: Ya’alon: Destroying terrorists’ homes works

IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Moshe Ya’alon has defended the destruction of terrorists’ houses, saying Sunday that neighbors and family members of Palestinian would-be suicide bombers have often come forward with information to prevent the pending attacks, in an effort to spare their homes from demolition.

Israel has come under harsh international criticism for demolishing homes of Palestinian suicide bombers.

Speaking to cabinet ministers on Sunday, Ya’alon said that the recent calm is deceptive, and that the motivation of terror groups to carry out attacks is higher than usual.

Ya’alon also reported to the cabinet over 70 incidents of terror attacks in the last week: seven shootings on the highways; one instance of shooting at Kfar Darom; 32 shootings attacks on security forces; 12 cases of mortar fire in the Gaza Strip; five rocket attacks, including one at Sderot; and 19 mine and anti-tank attacks on forces in the Philadelphi Corridor on the border with Egypt.

(Just because buses aren’t blowing up, it doesn’t mean that the Palestinians aren’t trying to kill Jews and destroy Israel.)

JERUSALEM POST: Al Aksa Martyrs brigade head ready for ceasefire

The Al Aksa Martyr’s Brigade is willing to consider a cease-fire with Israel, according to its Jenin commander Zakkariya Zbeidi.

Quoted on ynet, Zbeidi said that his organizations terms are the granting of free movement to Chairman Yasser Arafat, the retreat by Israel to pre-1967 borders, the release of all Palestinian detainees and the return of all Palestinian bodies for burial.

Zbeidi was the target of an IDF targeted killing attempt last January, when an undercover unit attempted to arrest Zbeidi. A gun battle erupted, and Zbeidi fled, was treated in the local hospital for his wounds, and disappeared. In retaliation for the attack an Israeli motorist was shot at two weeks later as he traveled on the road between Nahliel and Neveh Tsuf (Halamish), northwest of Ramallah.

HAARETZ: IAF planes strike Hezbollah position in south Lebanon

Israel Air Force planes on Sunday evening struck a Hezbollah position in south Lebanon in response to the organization’s firing anti-aircraft shells earlier in the day which fell inside Israeli territory.
The pilots reported that the target was hit.

The anti-aircraft shells had hit an Israel Defense Forces base, causing no casualties, security sources said.

The Hezbollah salvo came shortly after IAF warplanes flew over the frontier. The Shi’ite militant group did not immediately comment.

The attack, during which shell fragments landed in an army base east of the border town of Shlomi, came amid heightened tensions between the Jewish state and Hezbollah.

(BACKGROUND: Hezbollah regularly fires anti-aircraft rounds into Israel, aiming the salvos so that the debris and shells rain down on Northern Israeli towns. They claim that the anti-aircraft fire is in response to Israeli overflights, but the anti-aircraft fire is rarely aimed at the IAF planes and is often fired when no planes are in the area. Also, artillery is often fired at Israeli civilian locations along with the anti-aircraft fire, using the anti-aircraft fire as cover.)

UPDATE:
IAF/IDF Statement:

“Following the Hizbollah attack, the Israeli air force targeted and destroyed a Hizbollah outpost in the western sector of southern Lebanon, from which a canon was used to fire on northern Israel…under the guise of anti-aircraft fire,” the army said in a statement.

AP: Home Surrounded in Saudi Militant Search

Saudi security forces surrounded a house in central Riyadh where suspected militants were believed to have fled after trading fire with security forces Sunday, security officials said.

Police cars and armored vehicles filled the area, and blockades were set up at all the entrances to the al-Malaz district — a neighborhood that has been a focus in a widescale security sweep against militants following the slaying of American hostage Paul M. Johnson Jr.

Witnesses told The Associated Press that they saw shooting between suspects and police before some men fled on foot, seeking refuge in a house.

CNN: Saudi al Qaeda cell names new leader

Al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia announced Sunday that Saleh al-Oufi will replace slain leader Abdel Aziz al-Muqrin, according to the Islamist Web site where the group posts its messages.

Al-Oufi, a former prison guard, holds the number five spot on Saudi Arabia’s list of 26 most wanted terrorists, although Saudi security sources told CNN that he lacks some of the operational experience of al-Muqrin, who was killed in a shoot-out with Saudi security after the murder of American hostage Paul Johnson.

JERUSALEM POST: Qurei: PA will not dismantle Aska Brigades

Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ahmed Qurei announced on Sunday that the PA has no plans to dismantle the Aksa Martyrs Brigades, the armed wing of Fatah. He acknowledged that the group was part of Fatah and said its gunmen were entitled to play a political role in the future.

“We have clearly declared that the Aksa Martyrs Brigades are part of Fatah,” Qurei said in an interview with the London-based Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper. “We are committed to them and Fatah bears full responsibility for the group.”

(So is Fatah responsibile for all those that Al-Aksa has killed in the past few years?)

SEATTLE POST-INT: Al-Qaida: Sympathizers aided abduction

The al-Qaida cell that kidnapped and killed American Paul M. Johnson Jr. said in an online periodical Sunday that sympathizers in the kingdom’s security forces supplied it with police uniforms and vehicles and set up fake checkpoints to facilitate last week’s abduction.

The details of the kidnapping appeared in Sawt al-Jihad, or Voice of Holy War, a semimonthly online periodical published by al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. A separate article, the final one written by cell leader Abdulaziz al-Moqrin, killed in a shootout Friday night, justified Johnson’s slaying.

The first article said militants wearing police uniforms and using police cars set up a fake checkpoint on al-Khadma Road, leading the airport, near Imam Mohammed bin Saud University.

When Johnson’s car approached the checkpoint June 12, the militants in police uniforms stopped his car - a Camry - detained him, anesthetized him and carried him to another car, the article said.

It said they then blew up Johnson’s car.

AP: Algerian Terror Leader Reportedly Killed

Algerian troops killed one of North Africa’s most-wanted terrorist leaders, who allied his group with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network, the military said Sunday.

Nabil Sahraoui, one of his key right-hand men and a “good number” of his other lieutenants were killed in a military sweep, the army said in a radio broadcast.

The death of Sahraoui, head of the armed Salafist Group for Call and Combat, marked a major coup for Algerian government efforts to suppress Islamic militants. Newspapers said the military cornered them in the Kabylie region east of the capital, Algiers.

REUTERS: Saudi Arabia Tells Militants to Repent or Die

Saudi Arabia warned Muslim militants they would share the fate of their slain leader unless they repented, as al Qaeda vowed renewed “holy war” in the kingdom.

Al Qaeda’s leader in Saudi Arabia, Abdulaziz al-Muqrin, was shot dead by Saudi forces on Friday along with three other prominent militants hours after they beheaded American hostage Paul Johnson, whose body has still not been found.

Saudi analysts who have contacts with militants said on Sunday they expected al Qaeda to name Saleh al-Awfi, a former Interior Ministry employee, as Muqrin’s successor.

“We tell this deviant group and others that if they do not return to the right path, they will meet the same fate or worse,” Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler Crown Prince Abdullah said late on Saturday.

“Security forces will deal with them, God willing, and with every aggressor inside or abroad,” he added.

An al Qaeda cell in Saudi Arabia has issued a statement vowing revenge for the death of its leader Abdel Aziz al-Muqrin, who was killed along with three other al Qaeda operatives.

Saudi officials said al-Muqrin’s group was behind the June 12 kidnapping and Friday’s beheading of American engineer Paul Johnson.

Before his death, Al-Muqrin claimed responsibility, and his group posted photographs of the beheading on the Islamic Web site “Voice of Jihad.”

JERUSALEM POST: IAF hits Gaza weapons labs

IAF helicopter gunships hit two metal workshops and a third empty building in a crowded Gaza Strip neighborhood Saturday night, a day after a similar strike.

The buildings were suspected of being used in the manufacture of Kassam rockets for Palestinian terrorist organizations, the army said.

Ambulances and fire engines raced to the scene of the attack Saturday in the area of Mughazi, about 7 kilometers (4 miles) south of Gaza City. Palestinian security sources said no one was injured in the strike, which caused a small fire.

From Reuters via the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) :

Saudi Arabia’s security forces have arrested 10 supporters of slain Al Qaeda militant Abdulaziz al-Muqrin, Al Arabiya television reported on Saturday.

From the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) :

The Saudi Interior Ministry has confirmed the killing of the Al Qaeda leader in Saudi Arabia after his group gruesomely beheaded a US hostage.

The ministry has aired a photo on state TV to support the death of Abdulaziz al-Muqrin, the top Al Qaeda leader in Saudi Arabia.
[…]
Shortly after the news broke of Mr Johnson’s death Saudi security forces reported killing four militants, including Muqrin - the mastermind of Johnson’s kidnapping - and at least two other most wanted terror suspects.

The four were gunned down at a gas station in central Riyadh in a shootout that left two security officers dead, security sources said.

Two suspects fled.

The shootout erupted after Muqrin and the other militants, driving in three cars, were followed by security men apparently acting on a lead from the house where Mr Johnson’s body was found in east Riyadh.

Brothers Bandar and Faisal Abdul Rahman al-Dakheel, who figured on a most wanted list, were shot dead.

A posting on an Islamist website has denied that the militant chief is dead.

Muqrin topped the most wanted list which included 26 suspects when it was released by Saudi authorities last December, but had gone down to 18 after eight were killed by security forces or turned themselves in.

The latest events bring the list further down to 14.

From the AFP via The Australian :

The leader of al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia, Abdulaziz al-Muqrin, is not dead, according to a statement posted today on a website which regularly publishes statements from the al-Qaeda terrorist network.
[…]
“Following the lies … about the death of Abdulaziz al-Muqrin, we affirm that such allegations, spread by the tyrants in Saudi Arabia, are intended to undermine the morale of the mujahideen on the Arabian peninsula,” said the communique.

Posted on the site http://alsaha.fares.net, its authenticity could not be ascertained immediately.

But the statement said another more detailed communique would be released.

Climing it’s all a Conspiracy by those well-known Zionists, the Saudi Royal Family, the photos are all Photoshopped fakes, he’s pining for the Fjords etc.

UPDATE : From the ABC :

Saudi television has broadcast footage of the body of Abdulaziz al-Muqrin, the man named as the Kingdom’s Al Qaeda leader and the person responsible for the beheading of American engineer Paul Johnson.
[…]
One of the dead is Turki al-Muteiri, a militant who escaped after the attack on Khobar at the end of May in which 22 people were killed.

A third has been named by police as being involved in the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen’s port of Aden nearly four years ago.

Security forces have also arrested twelve suspected militants and seized three cars, one of which is believed to have been used in an attack on a BBC team two weeks ago.

The official announcement has put an end to confusion aroused by a statement posted on the Internet in which Al Qaeda is alleged to have denied that Muqrin has been killed.

Via AP, Al-Arabiya is reporting that three terrorists have been killed in the vicinity of the kidnapping/murder scene.

More as it comes available…

REUTERS: Saudi Forces Kill 3 Militants in Riyadh - Arabiya TV

Saudi security forces killed three suspected militants in the Saudi capital Riyadh Friday, Saudi-owned Al Arabiya television said.

It said the three were killed in the al-Malazz district but gave no further details. The Riyadh suburb has been the scene of a massive security search after al Qaeda militants shot dead a U.S. contractor there last week.

The television did not say whether the militants were killed during a search for the body of U.S. hostage Paul Johnson, who al Qaeda said it beheaded earlier Friday.

UPDATE:
According to CNN and AP banners, “Leading Al-Qaida figure in Saudi Arabia Abdulaziz Issa Abdul-Mohsin al-Moqrin has been killed”

Reuters — Al Qaeda Beheads U.S. Hostage in Saudi

Al Qaeda militants beheaded an American engineer they had held hostage since last week, Al Arabiya television reported Friday.

The network was quoting its correspondent in Saudi Arabia and gave no further details. Al Qaeda had given the Saudi government a Friday deadline to free jailed militants or it would kill Paul Johnson

UPDATE: CNN — U.S. hostage beheaded

An Arabic TV news network said Friday that American hostage Paul Johnson Jr. has been beheaded by his Saudi captors.

Al Arabiya said its bureau chief had been shown the video of the killing.

A Saudi security source said, “From our end, we cannot confirm this. We have not found a body yet.”

Earlier Friday, Al Arabiya had aired an emotional statement from the wife of Johnson.

Johnson’s wife, Noom, who is Thai, said she hoped the Saudi government “can help my husband.”

U.S. and Saudi investigators concluded an intensive meeting Friday, Saudi officials said, as security forces spread all over the kingdom searching for Johnson.

Johnson, 49, a Lockheed Martin Corp. employee, had been kidnapped Saturday in the Saudi capital of Riyadh. He helped maintain U.S.-built Apache helicopter gunships for the Saudi military.

Johnson’s captors had threatened to kill him by Friday unless the Saudi government released al Qaeda prisoners and Westerners leave the Arabian Peninsula.

Abdel Aziz al-Muqrin, the self-proclaimed military leader of al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia, claimed responsibility for Johnson’s kidnapping and the death of another American on the same day on behalf of a group called the Al Falluja Squadron, which says it has ties to al Qaeda.

The State Department has urged all Americans to leave Saudi Arabia, but Johnson’s sister, Donna Mayeux, said her brother “always felt safe in Saudi Arabia.”

“My brother is an honorable man,” she said. “He has always treated people with dignity and respect.”

Cross-posted from OTB

From Reuters, Al-Arabiya is reporting that Paul Johnson, the American hostage in Saudi Arabia, has been beheaded.

(More to follow)

MAARIV: Two armed terrorists arrested near Jenin

An IDF unit arrested two armed terrorists this morning in Kfar Mitlon south of Jenin.

The suspects were found to be carrying guns and ammunition, and were transferred to an IDF installation for questioning.

REUTERS: Indonesia Orders Pirates, Sea Terrorists Shot on Sight

Indonesia’s naval chief has ordered his commanders to shoot dead armed terrorists or pirates operating in key waterways including the busy Strait of Malacca, which carries a third of world trade.

Navy Chief of Staff, Bernard Kent Sondakh, would also meet soon with his counterparts from Malaysia and Singapore to seek ways to increase joint patrols in the Strait, officials said on Friday.

The Malacca Strait is a 500-mile channel through which about 50,000 commercial vessels pass each year, including ships ferrying 80 percent of Japan’s oil needs.

“In the future, every thief or terrorist at sea has to be shot dead and this should be publicized by the mass media to teach a lesson,” Sondakh said in a statement.

An American, who admits being part an alleged plot to blow up London pubs, rail stations and restaurants, faces 30 years to life in prison under an agreement with federal prosecutors in New York.

Mohammed Junaid Babar, who quit a £40,000 a year computer job in the hope of joining the fight against US troops in Afghanistan, has admitted terrorism charges.

He was arrested in New York by the Joint Terrorism Task Force in April as a material witness – a person whose testimony is required in a criminal investigation before a grand jury or in a trial – and has been in custody ever since.

Babar, 29, the grandson of Pakistani immigrants, has not been publicly charged.

JERUSALEM POST: Advanced Kassam rocket falls in family backyard in Sderot

An advanced Kassam rocket fell Friday morning in the backyard of a house in Sderot, in the western Negev.

No one was wounded in the attack. The family’s mother was treated for shock.

The rocket caused damage to several windows and a shed.

“My girls were standing just two meters from where the rocket fell,” Eyal Khakham, the father, told Army Radio. “We were very lucky that no one was wounded; it’s a big miracle.”

(If Saeb Erekat is to be believed that Gaza is a gigantic prison, then how many prisons let the inmates launch rocket attacks on the people living severlam iles away outside the prison?)

President Bush’s statement at today’s cabinet meeting:

The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda, because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda. This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al Qaeda. We did say there were numerous contacts between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. For example, Iraqi intelligence officers met with bin Laden, the head of al Qaeda, in the Sudan. There’s numerous contacts between the two.

I always said that Saddam Hussein was a threat. He was a threat because he had used weapons of mass destruction against his own people. He was a threat because he was a sworn enemy to the United States of America, just like al Qaeda. He was a threat because he had terrorist connections — not only al Qaeda connections, but other connections to terrorist organizations; Abu Nidal was one. He was a threat because he provided safe-haven for a terrorist like Zarqawi, who is still killing innocent inside of Iraq.

No, he was a threat, and the world is better off and America is more secure without Saddam Hussein in power.

The response from Senator Kerry:

Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said the commission’s report is evidence that Bush misled the nation in setting out the case for war against Iraq.

“The president and the vice president, on a number of occasions, have asserted very directly to the American people that the war against al-Qaeda, the war against terror, is the war against Iraq,” Kerry said after arriving at Detroit Metropolitan Airport this afternoon. “It is clear the president owes the American people a full explanation” for the war.

[snip]

Kerry, a four-term U.S. senator from Massachusetts, said the report by the Sept. 11 commission, a 10-member bipartisan panel, bolsters his argument that the war in Iraq was a distraction from the hunt for al-Qaeda.

“This administration took it’s eye off the real war on terrorism — al- Qaeda, Afghanistan — for reasons of its own choosing,” Kerry, 60, said.

A contractor working for the CIA has been indicted on charges stemming from the death of a prisoner at a prison in Afghanistan, Justice Department officials said.

It is the first time charges have been brought against a civilian since the reports of alleged prison abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan surfaced in the past few months.

The four-count indictment says the contractor, David Passaro, 38, beat an Afghan prisoner identified as Abdul Wali, who had surrendered voluntarily at the front gate of a U.S. detention facility near Asadabad in the northeastern Kunar Province on June 18, 2003.

Plagued by miscommunication and confusion, the Pentagon’s air-defence command missed an opportunity to possibly intercept at least one of the hijacked planes on September 11, the federal panel reviewing the attacks said today.

A report released by the commission at its final public hearing offered a chilling account of the day America suffered its worst terrorist attack.

It details a series of missteps by aviation and military officials that squandered precious moments between the time air traffic controllers became aware of the first hijacking and the crash of United Airlines Flight 93 into a Pennsylvania field more than an hour later.

More:

The report largely blamed inadequate emergency procedures that contemplated more time to react to a traditional hijacking rather than a suicide hijacking.

“NORAD and the FAA were unprepared for the type of attacks launched against the United States on September 11, 2001,” the report said. “They struggled, under difficult circumstances, to improvise a homeland defense against an unprecedented challenge they had never encountered and had never trained to meet.”

[Read commission statements here. PDF files]

MAARIV: “Philadelphi tunnel” tender published

The security establishment is starting to prepare for the day after the IDF withdraws from the Gaza Strip. Today, the Defense Ministry published a tender calling on contractors to submit proposals for the excavation of a tunnel in the southern Gaza Strip. The tender apparently refers to the Philadelphi route.

According to the tender, the 4-kilometer tunnel’s depth will vary between 15 to 25 meters. The Defense Ministry notes that proposals should be submitted no later than July 12, which can attest to the great urgency of construction the tunnel.

The Philadelphi route presents a serious headache to security authorities and politicians alike. The route, which separates the southern Gaza Strip from Egypt, is used by terror organizations to smuggle weapons and terrorists. The security establishment is concerned that once the IDF withdraws from the route, terrorists would be able to utilize it for their advantage uninterrupted.

JERUSALEM POST: Two Palestinians wounded in ongoing round-ups

Two Palestinians - a suspected bomb planter and an Islamic Jihad member - were shot and wounded by IDF troops during ongoing operations in the West Bank on Thursday to locate and capture suspected terrorists and others wanted for questioning.

The Islamic Jihad fugitive was lightly-to-moderately wounded in Jenin when he fled from IDF soldiers as they were trying to arrest him and he failed to heed calls to stop.

He was given first aid at the scene by IDF paramedics and later transferred to a hospital in Israel. Military sources said that after he recovered from treatment he would be questioned.

Staff Statement No. 16: Outline of the 9/11 Plot.

[Ed note: Long, but very interesting reading]

Members of the Commission, your staff is prepared to report its preliminary findings regarding the conspiracy that produced the September 11 terrorist attacks against the United States. We remain ready to revise our understanding of this subject as our work continues. Dietrich Snell, Rajesh De, Hyon Kim, Michael Jacobson, John Tamm, Marco Cordero, John Roth, Douglas Greenburg, and Serena Wille did most of the investigative work reflected in this statement.

We are fortunate to have had access to the fruits of a massive investigative effort by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other law enforcement agencies, as well intelligence collection and analysis from the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the State Department, and the Department of Defense.

Much of the account in this statement reflects assertions reportedly made by various 9/11 conspirators and captured al Qaeda members while under interrogation. We have sought to corroborate this material as much as possible. Some of this material has been inconsistent. We have had to make judgment calls based on the weight and credibility of the evidence. Our information on statements attributed to such individuals comes from written reporting; we have not had direct access to any of them.

Plot Overview

Origins of the 9/11 Attacks

The idea for the September 11 attacks appears to have originated with a veteran jihadist named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM). A Kuwaiti from the Baluchistan region of Pakistan, KSM grew up in a religious family and claims to have joined the Muslim Brotherhood at the age of 16. After attending college in the United States, he went to Afghanistan to participate in the anti-Soviet jihad. Following the war, he helped run a non-governmental organization in Pakistan assisting the Afghan mujahidin.

KSM first came to the attention of U.S. authorities as a result of the terrorist activity of his nephew Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. KSM provided a small amount of funding for that attack. The following year, he joined Yousef in the Philippines to plan what would become known as the “Bojinka” operation, the intended bombing of 12 U.S. commercial jets over the Pacific in a two-day period. That plot unraveled, however, when the Philippine authorities discovered Yousef’s bomb-making equipment in Manila in January 1995. During the course of 1995, Yousef and two of his co-conspirators in the Bojinka plot were arrested overseas and were brought to the United States for trial, but KSM managed to elude capture following his January 1996 indictment for his role in the plot.

By the middle of 1996, according to his account, KSM was back in Afghanistan. He had met Usama Bin Ladin there in the 1980s. Now, in mid-1996, KSM sought to renew that acquaintance, at a point when Bin Ladin had just moved to Afghanistan from the Sudan. At a meeting with Bin Ladin and Mohamed Atef, al Qaeda’s Chief of Operations, KSM presented several ideas for attacks against the United States. One of the operations he pitched, according to KSM, was a scaled-up version of what would become the attacks of September 11. Bin Ladin listened, but did not yet commit himself.

Bin Ladin Approves the Plan

According to KSM, the 1998 East Africa embassy bombings demonstrated to him that Bin Ladin was willing to attack the United States. In early 1999, Bin Ladin summoned KSM to Kandahar to tell him that his proposal to use aircraft as weapons now had al Qaeda’s full support. KSM met again with Bin Ladin and Atef at Kandahar in the spring of 1999 to develop an initial list of targets. The list included the White House and the Pentagon, which Bin Ladin wanted; the U.S. Capitol; and the World Trade Center, a target favored by KSM.

Bin Ladin quickly provided KSM with four potential suicide operatives: Nawaf al Hazmi, Khalid al Mihdhar, Walid Muhammad Salih bin Attash, also known as Khallad, and Abu Bara al Taizi. Hazmi and Mihdhar were both Saudi nationals—although Mihdhar was actually of Yemeni origin—and experienced mujahidin, having fought in Bosnia together. They were so eager to participate in attacks against the United States that they already held U.S. visas. Khallad and Abu Bara, being Yemeni nationals, would have trouble getting U.S. visas compared to Saudis. Therefore, KSM decided to split the operation into two parts. Hazmi and Mihdhar would go to the United States, and the Yemeni operatives would go to Southeast Asia to carry out a smaller version of the Bojinka plot.

In the fall of 1999, training for the attacks began. Hazmi, Mihdhar, Khallad, and Abu Bara participated in an elite training course at the Mes Aynak camp in Afghanistan. Afterward, KSM taught three of these operatives basic English words and phrases and showed them how to read a phone book, make travel reservations, use the Internet, and encode communications. They also used flight simulator computer games and analyzed airline schedules to figure out flights that would be in the air at the same time. Kuala Lumpur

Following the training, all four operatives for the operation traveled to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Khallad and Abu Bara were directed to study airport security and conduct surveillance on U.S. carriers, and Hazmi and Mihdhar were to switch passports in Kuala Lumpur before going on to the United States. Khallad—who traveled to Kuala Lumpur ahead of Hazmi and Mihdhar—attended a prosthesis clinic in Kuala Lumpur. He then flew to Hong Kong aboard a U.S. airliner and was able to carry a box cutter, concealed in his toiletries bag, onto the flight. He returned to Kuala Lumpur, where Hazmi and Mihdhar arrived during the first week in January 2000. The al Qaeda operatives were hosted in Kuala Lumpur by Jemaah Islamiah members Hambali and Yazid Sufaat, among others. When Khallad headed next to a meeting in Bangkok, Hazmi and Mihdhar decided to join him to enhance their cover as tourists.

Khallad had his meetings in Bangkok and returned to Kandahar. Khallad and Abu Bara would not take part in a planes operation; in the spring of 2000, Bin Ladin cancelled the Southeast Asia part of the operation because it was too difficult to coordinate with the U.S. part. Hazmi and Mihdhar spent a few days in Bangkok and then headed for Los Angeles, where they would become the first 9/11 operatives to enter the United States on January 15, 2000.

Four Students in Hamburg

While KSM was deploying his initial operatives for the 9/11 attacks to Kuala Lumpur, a group of four Western-educated men who would prove ideal for the attacks were making their way to the al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. The four were Mohamed Atta, Marwan al Shehhi, Ziad Jarrah, and Ramzi Binalshibh. Atta, Shehhi, and Jarrah would become pilots for the 9/11 attacks, while Binalshibh would act as a key coordinator for the plot. Atta, the oldest of the group, was born in Egypt in 1968 and moved to Germany to study in 1992 after graduating from Cairo University. Shehhi was from the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and entered Germany in 1996 through a UAE military scholarship program. Jarrah was from a wealthy family in Lebanon and went to Germany after high school to study at the University of Greifswald. Finally, Binalshibh, a Yemeni, arrived in Germany in 1995.

Atta and Binalshibh were the first of the four to meet, at a mosque in Hamburg in 1995. In 1998, Atta and Binalshibh moved into a Hamburg apartment with Shehhi, who had been studying in Bonn; after several months, the trio moved to 54 Marienstrasse, also in Hamburg. How Shehhi came to know Atta and Binalshibh is not clear. It is also unknown just how and when Jarrah, who was living in Greifswald, first encountered the group, but we do know that he moved to Hamburg in late 1997.

By the time Atta, Shehhi, and Binalshibh were living together in Hamburg, they and Jarrah were well known among Muslims in Hamburg and, with a few other like-minded students, were holding extremely anti-American discussions. Atta, the leader of the group, denounced what he described as a global Jewish movement centered in New York City which, he claimed, controlled the financial world and the media. As time passed, the group became more extreme and secretive. According to Binalshibh, by sometime in 1999, the four had decided to act on their beliefs and to pursue jihad against the Russians in Chechnya.

The Hamburg Students Join al Qaeda

As Binalshibh is the only one of the four still alive, he is the primary source for an explanation of how the Hamburg group was recruited into the 9/11 plot. Binalshibh claims that during 1999, he and Shehhi had a chance meeting with an individual to whom they expressed an interest in joining the fighting in Chechnya. They were referred to another individual named Mohamedou Ould Slahi—an al Qaeda member living in Germany. He advised them that it was difficult to get to Chechnya and that they should go to Afghanistan first. Following Slahi’s advice, between November and December of 1999, Atta, Jarrah, Shehhi, and Binalshibh went to Afghanistan, traveling separately. When Binalshibh reached the camps in Kandahar, he found that Atta and Jarrah had already pledged bayat, or allegiance, to Bin Ladin, and that Shehhi had already left for the UAE to prepare for the anti-U.S. mission the group had been assigned. Binalshibh followed suit, pledging bayat to Bin Ladin in a private meeting. Binalshibh, Atta, and Jarrah met with Bin Ladin’s deputy, Mohamed Atef, who directed them to return to Germany and enroll in flight training. Atta was chosen as the emir, or leader, of the mission. He met with Bin Ladin to discuss the targets: the World Trade Center, which represented the U.S. economy; the Pentagon, a symbol of the U.S. military; and the U.S. Capitol, the perceived source of U.S. policy in support of Israel. The White House was also on the list, as Bin Ladin considered it a political symbol and wanted to attack it as well. KSM and Binalshibh have both stated that, in early 2000, Shehhi, Atta, and Binalshibh met with KSM in Karachi for training that included learning about life in the United States and how to read airline schedules.

By early March 2000, all four new al Qaeda recruits were back in Germany. They began researching flight schools in Europe, but quickly found that training in the United States would be cheaper and faster. Atta, Shehhi, and Jarrah obtained U.S. visas, but Binalshibh—the sole Yemeni in the group—was rejected repeatedly. In the spring of 2000, Atta, Shehhi, and Jarrah prepared to travel to the United States to begin flight training. Binalshibh would remain behind and help coordinate the operation, serving as a link between KSM and Atta.

California

While the Hamburg operatives were just joining the 9/11 plot, Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar were already living in the United States, having arrived in Los Angeles on January 15, 2000. It has not been established where they stayed during the first two weeks after their arrival. They appear to have frequented the King Fahd Mosque in Culver City, possibly staying in an apartment nearby. Much remains unknown about their activities and associates while in Los Angeles and our investigation of this period of the conspiracy is continuing.

KSM contends that he directed the two to settle in San Diego after learning from a phone book about language and flight schools there. Recognizing that neither Hazmi nor Mihdhar spoke English or was familiar with Western culture, KSM instructed these operatives to seek help from the local Muslim community.

As of February 1, 2000, Hazmi and Mihdhar were still in Los Angeles, however. That day, the two al Qaeda operatives met a Saudi named Omar al Bayoumi. Bayoumi told them that he lived in San Diego and could help them if they decided to move there. Within a few days, Hazmi and Mihdhar traveled to San Diego. They found Bayoumi at the Islamic Center and took him up on his offer to help them find an apartment. On February 5, Hazmi and Mihdhar moved into a unit they rented in Bayoumi’s apartment complex in San Diego. While it is clear that Bayoumi helped them settle in San Diego, we have not uncovered evidence that he did so knowing that they were terrorists, or that he believed in violent extremism.

Hazmi and Mihdhar also received assistance from various other individuals in the Muslim community in San Diego. Several of their new friends were foreign students in their early 20’s who worshipped at the Rabat Mosque in La Mesa. One of them, an illegal immigrant named Mohdar Abdullah, became particularly close to Hazmi and Mihdhar and helped them obtain driver’s licenses and enroll in schools. When interviewed by the FBI after 9/11, Abdullah denied knowing about the operatives’ terrorist plans. Before his recent deportation to Yemen, however, Abdullah allegedly made various claims to individuals incarcerated with him about having advance knowledge of the operatives’ 9/11 mission, going so far as to tell one inmate that he had received instructions to pick up the operatives at Los Angeles International Airport, and had driven them from Los Angeles to San Diego. Abdullah and others in his circle appear to have held extremist sympathies.

While in San Diego, Hazmi and Mihdhar also established a relationship with Anwar Aulaqi, an imam at the Rabat Mosque. Aulaqi reappears in our story later. Another San Diego resident rented Hazmi and Mihdhar a room in his house. An apparently law abiding citizen with close contacts among local police and FBI personnel, the operatives’ housemate saw nothing in their behavior to arouse suspicion. Nor did his law enforcement contacts ask him for information about his tenants.

Hazmi and Mihdhar were supposed to learn English and then enroll in flight schools, but they made only cursory attempts at both. Mihdhar paid for an English class that Hazmi took for about a month. The two al Qaeda operatives also took a few short flying lessons. According to their flight instructors, they were interested in learning to fly jets and did not realize that they had to start training on small planes. In June 2000, Mihdhar abruptly returned to his family in Yemen, apparently without permission. KSM was very displeased and wanted to remove him from the operation, but Bin Ladin interceded, and Mihdhar remained part of the plot.

The Hamburg Group Arrives in the United States

On the East Coast, in May and June 2000, the three operatives from Hamburg who had succeeded in obtaining visas began arriving in the United States. Marwan al Shehhi arrived first, on May 29, 2000, at Newark Airport in New Jersey. Mohamed Atta arrived there five days later, on June 3. He and Shehhi had not yet decided where they would train. They directed inquiries to flight schools in New Hampshire and New Jersey, and, after spending about a month in New York City, visited the Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma, where Zacarias Moussaoui would enroll the following February. For some reason, Atta and Shehhi decided not to enroll there. Instead, they went to Venice, Florida, where Ziad Jarrah had already started his training at Florida Flight Training Center, having arrived in the United States on June 27. Atta and Shehhi enrolled in a different flight school, Huffman Aviation, and began training almost daily. In mid-August, Atta and Shehhi both passed the Private Pilot Airman test. Their instructors described Atta and Shehhi as aggressive and rude, and in a hurry to complete their training.

Meanwhile, Jarrah obtained his single engine private pilot certificate in early August 2000. In October, Jarrah went on the first of five foreign trips he would take during his time in the United States. He returned to Germany to visit his girlfriend, Aysel Senguen, the daughter of Turkish immigrants, whom Jarrah had met in 1996 and married in a 1999 Islamic ceremony not recognized under German law.

The Fourth Pilot: Hani Hanjour

By this point, in the fall of 2000, three 9/11 pilots were progressing in their training. It was clear, though, that the first two assigned to the operation, Hazmi and Mihdhar, would not learn to fly aircraft. It proved unnecessary to scale back the operation, however, because a young Saudi with special credentials arrived at an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan.

Hani Hanjour had studied in the United States intermittently since 1991, and had undergone enough flight training in Arizona to obtain his commercial pilot certificate in April 1999. His friends there included individuals with ties to Islamic extremism. Reportedly a devout Muslim all his life, Hanjour worked for a relief agency in Afghanistan in the 1980s. By 2000, he was back in Afghanistan where he was identified among al Qaeda recruits at the al Faruq camp as a trained pilot and who should be sent to KSM for inclusion in the plot.

After receiving several days of training from KSM in Karachi, Hanjour returned to Saudi Arabia on June 20, 2000. There he obtained a U.S. student visa on September 25, before traveling to the UAE to receive funds for the operation from KSM’s nephew, a conspirator named Ali Abdul Aziz Ali. On December 8, 2000, Hanjour traveled to San Diego to join Nawaf al Hazmi, who had been alone since Mihdhar’s departure six months earlier.

Once Hanjour arrived in San Diego and joined Hazmi, the two quickly relocated to Arizona, where Hanjour had spent most of his previous time in the United States. On December 12, 2000, they were settling in Mesa, Arizona, and Hanjour was ready to brush up on his flight training. By early 2001, he was using a Boeing 737 simulator. Because his performance struck his flight instructors as sub-standard, they discouraged Hanjour from continuing, but he persisted. He and Hazmi then left the Southwest at the end of March, driving across the country in Hazmi’s car. There is some evidence indicating that Hanjour may have returned to Arizona in June of 2001 to obtain additional flight training with some of his associates in the area.

9/11 Operatives on the Move

Back in Florida, the Hamburg pilots—Atta, Shehhi, and Jarrah—continued to train. By the end of 2000, they also were starting to train on jet aircraft simulators. Around the beginning of the New Year, all three of them left the United States on various foreign trips. Jarrah took the second and third of his five foreign trips, visiting Germany and Beirut to see his girlfriend and family respectively. On one trip, Jarrah’s girlfriend returned with him to the United States and stayed with him in Florida for ten days, even observing one of Jarrah’s training sessions at flight school.

While Jarrah took these personal trips, Atta traveled to Germany for an early January 2001 meeting with Ramzi Binalshibh. Atta reported that the pilots had completed their training and were awaiting further instruction from al Qaeda. After the meeting, Atta returned to Florida and Binalshibh headed to Afghanistan to brief the al Qaeda leadership. As soon as Atta returned to Florida, Shehhi took his foreign trip, an unexplained eight-day sojourn to Casablanca.

After Atta and Shehhi returned to Florida, they moved on to the Atlanta area, where they pursued some additional training. The two rented a small plane with a flight instructor and may have visited a flight school in Decatur, Georgia. By February 19, Atta and Shehhi were on the move again, traveling to Virginia Beach, Virginia. Here is a shot of Atta on February 20, withdrawing $4,000 from his account at a SunTrust Bank branch in Virginia Beach. A bit later, Jarrah spent time in Georgia as well, staying in Decatur in mid-March. At the end of March, he left again for Germany to visit his girlfriend. At about this time, Hanjour and Hazmi were driving from Arizona toward the East Coast. After being stopped for speeding in Oklahoma on April 1, they finally arrived in Northern Virginia. At the Dar al Hijra mosque in Falls Church, they met a Jordanian man named Eyad al Rababah, possibly through Anwar Aulaqi, the imam whom they had known in San Diego and who, in the interim, also had moved east in early 2001.

With Rababah’s help, Hanjour and Hazmi were able to find a room in an apartment in Alexandria, Virginia. When they expressed interest in the greater New York area, Rababah suggested they accompany him to Connecticut, where he was in the process of moving. On May 8, the group—which by now included al Qaeda operatives Ahmad al Ghamdi and Majed Moqed—traveled to Fairfield, Connecticut. The next day, Rababah took them to Paterson, New Jersey to have dinner and see the area. Soon thereafter, they moved into an apartment in Paterson. At this time, we have insufficient basis to conclude that Rababah knew the operatives were terrorists when he assisted them. As for Aulaqi, there is reporting that he has extremist ties, and the circumstances surrounding his relationship with the hijackers remain suspicious. However, we have not uncovered evidence that he associated with the hijackers knowing that they were terrorists.

While Hanjour and Hazmi were settling in New Jersey, Atta and Shehhi were returning to southern Florida. We have examined the allegation that Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague on April 9. Based on the evidence available—including investigation by Czech and U.S. authorities plus detainee reporting—we do not believe that such a meeting occurred. The FBI’s investigation places him in Virginia as of April 4, as evidenced by this bank surveillance camera shot of Atta withdrawing $8,000 from his account. Atta was back in Florida by April 11, if not before. Indeed, investigation has established that, on April 6, 9, 10, and 11, Atta’s cellular telephone was used numerous times to call Florida phone numbers from cell sites within Florida. We have seen no evidence that Atta ventured overseas again or re-entered the United States before July, when he traveled to Spain and back under his true name. Shehhi, on the other hand, visited Cairo between April 18 and May 2. We do not know the reason for this excursion.

The Muscle Hijackers

While the pilots trained in the United States, Bin Ladin and al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan started selecting the muscle hijackers—those operatives who would storm the cockpit and control the passengers on the four hijacked planes. (The term “muscle” hijacker appears in the interrogation reports of 9/11 conspirators KSM and Binalshibh, and has been widely used to refer to the non-pilot hijackers.) The so-called muscle hijackers actually were not physically imposing, as the majority of them were between 5’5” and 5’7” in height and slender in build. In addition to Hazmi and Mihdhar, the first pair to enter the United States, there were 13 other muscle hijackers, all but one from Saudi Arabia. They were Satam al Suqami, Wail and Waleed al Shehri (two brothers), Abdul Aziz al Omari, Fayez Banihammad (from the UAE), Ahmed al Ghamdi, Hamza al Ghamdi, Mohand al Shehri, Saeed al Ghamdi, Ahmad al Haznawi, Ahmed al Nami, Majed Moqed, and Salem al Hazmi (the brother of Nawaf al Hazmi).

The muscle hijackers were between 20 and 28 years of age and had differing backgrounds. Many were unemployed and lacked higher education, while a few had begun university studies. Although some were known to attend prayer services regularly, others reportedly even consumed alcohol and abused drugs. It has not been determined exactly how each of them was recruited into al Qaeda, but most of them apparently were swayed to join the jihad in Chechnya by contacts at local universities and mosques in Saudi Arabia.

By late 1999 and early 2000, the young men who would become the muscle hijackers began to break off contact with their families and pursue jihad. They made their way to the camps in Afghanistan, where they volunteered to be suicide operatives for al Qaeda. After being picked by Bin Ladin himself for what would become the 9/11 operation, most of them returned to Saudi Arabia to obtain U.S. visas. They then returned to Afghanistan for special training on how to conduct hijackings, disarm air marshals, and handle explosives and knives. Next KSM sent them to the UAE, where his nephew, Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, and another al Qaeda member, Mustafa al Hawsawi, would help them buy plane tickets to the United States.

In late April 2001, the muscle hijackers started arriving in the United States, specifically in Florida, Washington, DC, and New York. They traveled mostly in pairs and were assisted upon arrival by Atta and Shehhi in Florida or Hazmi and Hanjour in DC and New York. The final pair, Salem al Hazmi and Abdulaziz al Omari, arrived New York on June 29 and likely were picked up the following day by Salem’s brother, Nawaf, as evidenced by Nawaf’s minor traffic accident while heading east on the George Washington Bridge. Finally, on July 4, Khalid al Mihdhar, who had abandoned Nawaf al Hazmi back in San Diego 13 months earlier, re-entered the United States. Mihdhar promptly joined the group in Paterson, New Jersey.

Summer of Preparations

In addition to assisting the newly-arrived muscle hijackers, the pilots busied themselves during the summer of 2001 with cross-country surveillance flights and additional flight training. Shehhi took the first cross-country flight, from New York to San Francisco and on to Las Vegas on May 24. Jarrah was next, traveling from Baltimore to Los Angeles and on to Las Vegas on June 7. Then, on June 28, Atta flew from Boston to San Francisco and on to Las Vegas. Each flew first class, in the same type of aircraft he would pilot on September 11.

In addition to the test flights, some of the operatives obtained additional training. In early June, Jarrah sought to fly the “Hudson Corridor,” a low altitude “hallway” along the Hudson River that passed several New York landmarks, including the World Trade Center. Hanjour made the same request at a flight school in New Jersey. The 9/11 operatives were now split between two locations: southern Florida and Paterson, New Jersey. Atta had to coordinate the two groups, especially with Nawaf al Hazmi, who was considered Atta’s second-in-command for the entire operation. Their first in-person meeting probably took place in June, when Hazmi flew round-trip between Newark and Miami.

The next step for Atta was a mid-July status meeting with Binalshibh at a small resort town in Spain. According to Binalshibh, the two discussed the progress of the plot, and Atta disclosed that he would still need about five or six weeks before he would be able to provide the date for the attacks. Atta also reported that he, Shehhi, and Jarrah had been able to carry box cutters onto their test flights; they had determined that the best time to storm the cockpit would be about 10-15 minutes after takeoff, when they noticed that cockpit doors were typically opened for the first time. Atta also said that the conspirators planned to crash their planes into the ground if they could not strike their targets. Atta himself planned to crash his aircraft into the streets of New York if he could not hit the World Trade Center. After the meeting, Binalshibh left to report the progress to the al Qaeda leadership in Afghanistan, and Atta returned to Florida on July 19.

In early August, Atta spent a day waiting at the Orlando airport for one additional muscle hijacker intended for the operation, Mohamed al Kahtani. As noted in Staff Statement No. 1, Kahtani was turned away by U.S. immigration officials and failed to join the operation. On August 13, another in-person meeting of key players in the plot apparently took place, as Atta, Nawaf al Hazmi, and Hanjour gathered one last time in Las Vegas. Two days later, the FBI learned about the strange behavior of Zacarias Moussaoui, who was now training on flight simulators in Minneapolis.

The Final Days

In addition to their last test flights and Las Vegas trips, the conspirators had other final preparations to make. Some of the pilots took practice flights on small rented aircraft, and the muscle hijackers trained at gyms. The operatives also purchased a variety of small knives that they may have used during the attacks. While we can’t know for sure, some of the knives the terrorists bought may have been these, which were recovered from the Flight 93 crash site. On August 22, Jarrah attempted to buy four Global Positioning System (GPS) units from a pilot shop in Miami. Only one unit was available, and Jarrah purchased it along with three aeronautical charts.

Just over two weeks before the attacks, the conspirators purchased their flight tickets. Between August 26 and September 5, they bought tickets on the Internet, by phone, and in person. Once the ticket purchases were made, the conspirators returned excess funds to al Qaeda. During the first week in September, they made a series of wire transfers to Mustafa al Hawsawi in the UAE, totaling about $26,000. Nawaf al Hazmi attempted to send Hawsawi the debit card for Mihdhar’s bank account, which still contained approximately $10,000. (The package containing the card would be intercepted after the FBI found the Express Mail receipt for it in Hazmi’s car at Dulles Airport on 9/11.) The last step was to travel to the departure points for the attacks. The operatives for American Airlines Flight 77, which would depart from Dulles and crash into the Pentagon, gathered in Laurel, Maryland, about 20 miles from Washington, DC. The Flight 77 team stayed at a motel in Laurel during the first week of September and spent time working out at a nearby gym. On the final night before the attacks, they stayed at a hotel in Herndon, Virginia, close to Dulles Airport. Further north, the operatives for United Airlines Flight 93, which would depart from Newark and crash in Stony Creek Township, Pennsylvania, gathered in Newark. Just after midnight on September 9, Jarrah received this speeding ticket as he headed north through Maryland along Interstate 95, towards his team’s staging point in New Jersey.

Atta continued to coordinate the teams until the very end. On September 7, he flew from Fort Lauderdale to Baltimore, presumably to meet with the Flight 77 team in Laurel, Maryland. On September 9, he flew from Baltimore to Boston. By this time, Marwan al Shehhi and his team for Flight 175 had arrived in Boston, and Atta was seen with Shehhi at his hotel. The next day, Atta picked up Abdul Aziz al Omari, one of the Flight 11 muscle hijackers, from his Boston hotel and drove to Portland, Maine. For reasons that remain unknown, Atta and Omari took a commuter flight to Boston during the early hours of September 11 to connect to Flight 11. As shown here, they cleared security at the airport in Portland and boarded the flight that would allow them to join the rest of their team at Logan Airport.

The Portland detour almost prevented Atta and Omari from making Flight 11 out of Boston. In fact, the luggage they checked in Portland failed to make it onto the plane. Seized after the September 11 crashes, Atta and Omari’s luggage turned out to contain a number of telling items, including: correspondence from the university Atta attended in Egypt; Omari’s international driver’s license and passport; a video cassette for a Boeing 757 flight simulator; and this folding knife and pepper spray, presumably extra weapons the two conspirators decided they didn’t need.

On the morning of September 11, after years of planning and many months of intensive preparation, all four terrorist teams were in place to execute the attacks of that day.

Financing of the 9/11 Plot

We estimate that the 9/11 attacks cost somewhere between $400,000 and $500,000 to execute. The operatives spent over $270,000 in the United States, and the costs associated with Zacarias Moussaoui—who is discussed at greater length below—were at least $50,000. Additional expenses included travel to obtain passports and visas; travel to the United States; expenses incurred by the plot leader and facilitators outside the United States; and expenses incurred by the people selected to be hijackers but who ultimately did not participate. For many of these expenses, we have only fragmentary evidence and/or unconfirmed detainee reports and can make only a rough estimate of costs. Our $400,000-$500,000 estimate does not include the cost of running the camps in Afghanistan where the hijackers were recruited and trained, or the cost of that training. We have found no evidence that the Hamburg group received funds from al Qaeda before late 1999. They apparently supported themselves before joining the conspiracy. Thereafter, according to KSM, they each received $5,000 to pay for their return to Germany from Afghanistan plus funds for travel from Germany to the United States. KSM, Binalshibh, and plot facilitator Mustafa al Hawsawi, each received money— perhaps $10,000—to cover their living expenses while they fulfilled their roles in the plot.

In the United States, the operatives’ primary expenses consisted of flight training, living expenses (room, board and meals, vehicles, insurance, etc.), and travel (casing flights, meetings, and the flights on 9/11). All told, about $300,000 was deposited into the 19 hijackers’ bank accounts in the United States. They received funds in the United States through a variety of unexceptional means. Approximately $130,000 arrived via a series of wire transfers from Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, who sent approximately $120,000 from Dubai, and Binalshibh, who sent just over $10,000 from Germany. Shown here is the receipt for the largest wire transfer sent to the conspirators in the United States, $70,000 that Ali wired Marwan al Shehhi on September 17, 2000, just when Shehhi, Atta and Jarrah were in the middle of their flight training. In addition to receiving funds by wire, the operatives brought significant amounts of cash and travelers checks with them into the United States, the largest amount coming with the 13 muscle hijackers who began arriving in April 2001. Finally, several of the operatives relied on accounts in overseas financial institutions, which they accessed in the United States with ATM and credit cards.

The conspiracy made extensive use of banks in the United States, both branches of major international banks and smaller regional banks. All of the operatives opened accounts in their own names, using passports and other identification documents. There is no evidence that they ever used false social security numbers to open any bank accounts. Their transactions were unremarkable and essentially invisible amidst the billions of dollars flowing around the world every day.

No credible evidence exists that the operatives received substantial funding from any person in the United States. Specifically, there is no evidence that Mihdhar and Hazmi received funding from Saudi citizens Omar al Bayoumi and Osama Bassnan, or that Saudi Princess Haifa al Faisal provided any funds to the conspiracy either directly or indirectly.

To date, the U.S. government has not been able to determine the origin of the money used for the 9/11 attacks. Compelling evidence traces the bulk of the funds directly back to KSM, but from where KSM obtained the money remains unknown at this time. Ultimately the question is of little practical significance. Al Qaeda had many avenues of funding and a pre-9/11 annual budget estimated at $30 million. If a particular source of funds had dried up, al Qaeda could have easily found enough money to fund an attack that cost $400,000-$500,000 over nearly two years.

A Closer Look at Specific Aspects of the Plot

Given the catastrophic results of the 9/11 attacks, it is tempting to depict the plot as a set plan executed to near perfection. This would be a mistake. The 9/11 conspirators confronted operational difficulties, internal disagreements, and even dissenting opinions within the leadership of al Qaeda. In the end, the plot proved sufficiently flexible to adapt and evolve as challenges arose.

Initial Changes in the Plot

As originally envisioned, the 9/11 plot involved even more extensive attacks than those carried out on September 11. KSM maintains that his initial proposal involved hijacking ten planes to attack targets on both the East and West coasts of the United States. He claims that, in addition to the targets actually hit on 9/11, these hijacked planes were to be crashed into CIA and FBI headquarters, unidentified nuclear power plants, and the tallest buildings in California and Washington State. The centerpiece of his original proposal was the tenth plane, which he would have piloted himself. Rather than crashing the plane into a target, he would have killed every adult male passenger, contacted the media from the air, and landed the aircraft at a U.S. airport. He says he then would have made a speech denouncing U.S. policies in the Middle East before releasing all of the women and children passengers.

KSM concedes that this ambitious proposal initially received only a lukewarm response from the al Qaeda leadership in view of the proposal’s scale and complexity. When Bin Ladin finally approved the operation, he scrapped the idea of using one of the hijacked planes to make a public statement but provided KSM with four operatives, only two of whom ultimately would participate in the 9/11 attacks. Those two operatives, Nawaf al Hamzi and Khalid al Mihdhar, had already acquired U.S. visas in their Saudi passports by the time they were picked for the operation. According to KSM, both had obtained visas because they wanted to participate in an operation against the United States, having been inspired by a friend of theirs who was a suicide bomber in the August 1998 attack on the U.S. embassy in Kenya.

It soon became clear to KSM that the other two operatives, Khallad bin Attash and Abu Bara al Taizi—both of whom had Yemeni, not Saudi, documentation—would not be able to obtain U.S. visas. Khallad, in fact, had already been turned down in April 1999, at about the same time that Hazmi and Mihdhar acquired their U.S. visas in Saudi Arabia. Although he recognized that Yemeni operatives would not be able to travel to the United States as readily as Saudis like Hazmi and Mihdhar, KSM wanted Khallad and Abu Bara to take part in the operation. Accordingly, by mid-1999, KSM made his first major adjustment, splitting the plot into two parts so that Yemeni operatives could participate without having to obtain U.S. visas. He focused in particular on Southeast Asia because he believed it would be easier for Yemenis to travel there than to the United States. The first part of the operation would remain as originally planned—operatives including Hazmi and Mihdhar would hijack commercial flights and crash them into U.S. targets. The second part, however, would now involve using Yemeni operatives in a modified version of the Bojinka plot: operatives would hijack U.S. commercial planes flying Pacific routes from Southeast Asia and explode them in mid-air instead of crashing them into particular targets. (An alternate scenario, according to KSM, involved flying planes into U.S. targets in Japan, Singapore or Korea.) All planes in the United States and in Southeast Asia, however, were to be crashed or exploded more or less simultaneously, to maximize the psychological impact of the attacks.

Khallad has admitted casing a flight between Bangkok and Hong Kong in early January 2000 in preparation for the revised operation. According to his account, he reported the results from this mission to Bin Ladin and KSM. By April or May 2000, however, Bin Ladin had decided to cancel the Southeast Asia part of the planes operation because he believed it would be too difficult to synchronize the hijacking and crashing of flights on opposite sides of the globe. Deprived of the opportunity to become a suicide operative, Khallad was re-deployed, first helping KSM communicate with Hazmi in California and later assisting in the Cole bombing, much as Binalshibh was assigned to assist the Hamburg pilots after failing to obtain a visa himself.

Hazmi and Mihdhar were particularly ill-prepared to stage an operation in the United States. Neither had any significant exposure to western culture; Hazmi barely spoke English, and Mihdhar spoke none. Given this background, KSM had real concerns about whether they would be able to fulfill their mission. In fact, he maintains that the only reason the two operatives were included in the 9/11 plot was their prior acquisition of visas and Bin Ladin’s personal interest in having them participate.

Unlike the other 9/11 hijackers—who were instructed to avoid associating with others in the local Muslim community—Hazmi and Mihdhar received specific permission from KSM to seek assistance at mosques when they first arrived in the United States. According to KSM, he also directed them to enroll in English language classes as soon as possible so that they could begin flight training right away. As KSM tells it, Hazmi and Mihdhar attempted to enroll in three language schools upon arriving in Los Angeles but failed to attend classes at any of them. Once they moved to San Diego, Hazmi enrolled in English classes and, a little later, both took some flight training, but they failed to make progress in either area.

According to their flight instructors, Hazmi and Mihdhar said they wanted to learn how to control an aircraft in flight, but took no interest in take-offs or landings. One Arabicspeaking flight instructor has recalled that the two were keen on learning to fly large jets, particularly Boeing aircraft. When the instructor informed them that, like all students, they would have to begin training on single engine aircraft before learning to fly jets, they expressed such disappointment that the instructor thought they were either joking or dreaming.

KSM says now that he was surprised by the failure of Hazmi and Mihdhar to become pilots. This failure, however, had little impact on the plot. The setback occurred early enough to permit further adjustment. Al Qaeda’s discovery of new operatives—men with English language skills, higher education, exposure to the West, and, in the case of Hani Hanjour, prior flight training—soon remedied the problem.

Additional Saudi Participants in the Plot

In addition to the reassignment of operatives, the plot saw a variety of potential suicide hijackers who never participated in the attacks. These al Qaeda members either backed out of their assignment, had trouble acquiring the necessary travel documentation, or were removed from the operation by al Qaeda leadership.

According to KSM, al Qaeda intended to use 25 or 26 hijackers for the 9/11 plot, as opposed to the 19 who actually participated. Even as late as the summer of 2001, KSM wanted to send as many operatives as possible to the United States in order to increase the chances for successful attacks, contemplating as many as seven or more hijackers per flight. We have identified at least nine candidate hijackers slated to be part of the 9/11 attacks at one time or another:

— Ali Abd al Rahman al Faqasi al Ghamdi and Zuhair al Thubaiti were both removed from the operation by al Qaeda leadership.

— Khalid Saeed Ahmad al Zahrani and Saeed Abdullah Saeed al Ghamdi, whom we discussed in Staff Statement No. 1, failed to acquire U.S. visas.

— Saeed al Baluchi and Qutaybah al Najdi both backed out after Najdi was stopped and briefly questioned by airport security officials in Bahrain.

— Saud al Rashid and Mushabib al Hamlan apparently withdrew under pressure from their families in Saudi Arabia.

— And, as discussed in Staff Statement No. 1, Mohamed Mani Ahmad al Kahtani was denied entry by U.S. officials at the airport in Orlando on August 4, 2001.

For the most part, these operatives appear to have been selected by Bin Ladin in Afghanistan and assigned to KSM in much the same manner as the others. All nine were Saudi nationals. A tenth individual, a Tunisian named Abderraouf Jdey, may have been a candidate to participate in the 9/11 attack, or he may have been a candidate to participate in a later attack. He withdrew, and we will discuss him later in connection with plans involving Moussaoui. None of these potential hijackers succeeded in joining the 19.

Internal Disagreement: Atta, Jarrah, and Moussaoui

Internal disagreement among the 9/11 plotters may have posed the greatest potential vulnerability for the plot. It appears that, during the summer of 2001, friction developed between Atta and Jarrah—two of the three Hamburg pilots—and that Jarrah may even have considered dropping out of the operation. What is more, it appears as if KSM may have been preparing another al Qaeda operative, Zacarias Moussaoui, to take Jarrah’s place.

Jarrah was different from the other Hamburg pilots, Atta and Shehhi. Given his background and personality, Jarrah seemed a relatively unlikely candidate to become an al Qaeda suicide operative. From an affluent family, he studied at private, Christian schools in Lebanon before deciding to study abroad in Germany. He knew the best nightclubs and discos in Beirut, and partied with fellow students in Germany, even drinking beer—a clear taboo for any religious Muslim. His serious involvement with his girlfriend, Aysel Senguen, and close family ties resulted in almost daily telephone conversations with them while he was in the United States. He took five overseas trips within a ten-month span before September 11.

Jarrah also appears to have projected a friendly, engaging personality while in the United States. Here he is, hair frosted, proudly displaying the pilot’s certificate he received during his flight training in Florida. Yet, this is the same person who, only a year earlier, had journeyed from Hamburg to Afghanistan and pledged to become one of Bin Ladin’s suicide operatives.

Both KSM and Binalshibh have reported that Atta and Jarrah clashed over the extent of Jarrah’s autonomy and involvement in planning the operation. Binalshibh believes the dispute stemmed, at least in part, from Jarrah’s frequent visits to and contact with his girlfriend and his family. Further, unlike Atta and Shehhi—who had attended flight school together—Jarrah spent much of his time in the United States alone. Binalshibh was supposed to have trained with Jarrah but failed to obtain a U.S. visa. As a result, according to Binalshibh, Jarrah felt isolated and excluded from decision-making. Binalshibh claims he had to mediate between Atta and Jarrah.

Jarrah’s final trip to see his girlfriend, from July 25 to August 5, 2001, is of particular interest. In contrast to his prior trips, this time Senguen bought him a one-way ticket to Germany. Moreover, it appears that Atta drove him to the airport in Miami, another unusual circumstance suggesting that something may have been amiss. Finally, according to Binalshibh, who met Jarrah at the airport in Duesseldorf, Jarrah said he needed to see Senguen right away. When he had time to meet with Binalshibh a few days later, the two of them had an emotional conversation during which Binalshibh encouraged Jarrah to see the plan through.

Perhaps the most significant evidence that Jarrah was reconsidering his participation in the 9/11 plot resides in communications that took place between KSM and Binalshibh in mid-July 2001. During the spring and summer of 2001, KSM had a number of conversations that appear to have concerned the 9/11 plot. Both KSM and Binalshibh confirm discussing the plot during their mid-July conversation, which occurred just a few days before Jarrah embarked on his last trip to Germany. At this point, Binalshibh had just returned from his meeting with Atta in Spain and was now reporting to KSM on the status of the plot. Concerned that Jarrah might drop out of the operation, KSM emphasized to Binalshibh the importance of ensuring peace between Jarrah and Atta. In the course of discussing this concern and the potential delay of the plot, moreover, KSM instructed Binalshibh to send “the skirts” to “Sally”—a coded reference instructing Binalshibh to send funds to Zacarias Moussaoui. Atta and Jarrah were referred to as an unhappy couple. KSM warned that if Jarrah “asks for a divorce, it is going to cost a lot of money.”

There is good reason to believe that KSM wanted money sent to Moussaoui to prepare him as a potential substitute pilot in the event Jarrah dropped out. Moussaoui attended al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. Sent to Malaysia in September 2000 by Bin Ladin and KSM to obtain pilot training, Moussaoui told terrorist associates there about his plans to crash a plane into the White House. He came to the United States in February 2001— armed with the fruits of Atta’s flight school research—and started taking flight lessons at the Airman Flight School in Norman, Oklahoma, but stopped that training by early June. Shortly after he received $14,000 from Binalshibh in early August, however, Moussaoui rushed into an intensive flight simulator course at Pan Am International Flight Academy in Eagan, Minnesota. At about this same time, he also purchased two knives and inquired of two GPS manufacturers whether their units could be converted for aeronautical use— actions that closely resembled those of the 9/11 hijackers during their final preparations for the attacks. Moussaoui’s August 16, 2001 arrest ended his simulator training and may have prevented him from joining the 9/11 operation.

The reports of the interrogations of Binalshibh and KSM regarding Moussaoui are not entirely consistent. According to Binalshibh, he understood that KSM was instructing him to send the money to Moussaoui in July 2001 as part of the 9/11 plot. Moreover, recounting a post-9/11 discussion he had with KSM in Kandahar, Binalshibh says KSM referred to Moussaoui as if he had been part of the 9/11 plot, noting that Moussaoui was arrested because he was not sufficiently discreet and had been an exception to Bin Ladin’s strong overall record of choosing the right operatives for the plot.

KSM, on the other hand, denies that Moussaoui was ever intended to be part of the 9/11 operation and was slated instead to participate in a so-called “second wave” of attacks on the West Coast after September 11. KSM also claims that Moussaoui never had any contact with Atta in the United States, and we have seen nothing to the contrary. Notably, however, KSM also claims that by the summer of 2001 he was too busy with the 9/11 plot to plan the second wave attacks. Moreover, he admits that only three potential pilots were recruited for the alleged second wave, Moussaoui, Abderraouf Jdey, also known as Faruq al Tunisi (a Canadian passport holder), and Zaini Zakaria, also known as Mussa. By the summer of 2001, both Jdey and Zaini already had backed out of the operation. The case of Jdey holds particular interest, as some evidence indicates that he may have been selected for the planes operation at the same time as the Hamburg group. In any event, Moussaoui’s arrest did not cause the plot any difficulty. Jarrah returned to the United States on August 5 and, as subsequent events would demonstrate, clearly was resolved to complete the operation.

Timing and Targets

The conspirators’ selection of both the date and the targets for the attacks provides another opportunity to examine the plot from within. Although Atta enjoyed wide discretion as tactical commander, Bin Ladin had strong opinions regarding both issues. The date of the attacks apparently was not chosen much more than three weeks before September 11. According to Binalshibh, when he met with Atta in Spain in mid-July, Atta could do no more than estimate that he would still need five to six weeks before he could pick a date. Then, in a mid-August phone call to Binalshibh, Atta conveyed the date for the attacks, which Binalshibh dutifully passed up his chain of command in a message personally delivered to Afghanistan by Hamburg associate Zakariya Essabar in late August.

Bin Ladin had been pressuring KSM for months to advance the attack date. According to KSM, Bin Ladin had even asked that the attacks occur as early as mid-2000, after Israeli opposition party leader Ariel Sharon caused an outcry in the Middle East by visiting a sensitive and contested holy site in Jerusalem that is sacred to both Muslims and Jews. Although Bin Ladin recognized that Atta and the other pilots had only just arrived in the United States to begin their flight training, the al Qaeda leader wanted to punish the United States for supporting Israel. He allegedly told KSM it would be sufficient simply to down the planes and not hit specific targets. KSM withstood this pressure, arguing that the operation would not be successful unless the pilots were fully trained and the hijacking teams were larger.

In 2001, Bin Ladin apparently pressured KSM twice more for an earlier date. According to KSM, Bin Ladin first requested a date of May 12, 2001, the seven-month anniversary of the Cole bombing. Then, when Bin Ladin learned from the media that Sharon would be visiting the White House in June or July 2001, he attempted once more to accelerate the operation. In both instances, KSM insisted that the hijacker teams were not yet ready. Other al Qaeda detainees also confirm that the 9/11 attacks were delayed during the summer of 2001, despite Bin Ladin’s wishes. According to one operative, Khalid al Mihdhar disclosed that attacks had been delayed from May until July, and later from July until September. According to another al Qaeda member in Kandahar that summer, a general warning—much like the alert issued in the camps two weeks before the Cole bombing and ten days before the eventual 9/11 attacks—was issued in July or early August of 2001. As a result of this warning, many al Qaeda members dispersed with their families, internal security was increased, and Bin Ladin dropped out of sight for about 30 days until the alert was cancelled.

KSM claims he did not inform Atta or the other conspirators that Bin Ladin wanted to advance the date because he knew they would move forward when they were ready. Atta was very busy organizing the late arriving operatives, coordinating the flight teams, and finalizing the targets. In fact, target selection appears to have influenced the timing of the attacks. As revealed by an Atta-Binalshibh communication at this time, recovered later from a computer captured with KSM, Atta selected a date after the first week of September so that the United States Congress would be in session.

According to KSM, the U.S. Capitol was indeed on the preliminary target list he had initially developed with Bin Ladin and Atef in the spring of 1999. That preliminary list also included the White House, the Pentagon, and the World Trade Center. KSM claims that while everyone agreed on the Capitol, he wanted to hit the World Trade Center whereas Bin Ladin favored the Pentagon and the White House.

Binalshibh confirms that Bin Ladin preferred the White House over the Capitol, a preference he made sure to convey to Atta when they met in Spain in the summer of 2001. Atta responded that he believed the White House posed too difficult a target, but that he was waiting for Hani Hanjour and Nawaf al Hazmi to assess its feasibility. On July 20, Hanjour—likely accompanied by Hazmi—rented a plane and took a practice flight from Fairfield, New Jersey to Gaithersburg, Maryland, a route that would have allowed them to fly near Washington, DC. When Binalshibh pressed Atta to retain the White House as a target during one of their communications in early August, Atta agreed but said he would hold the Capitol in reserve as an alternate target, in case the White House proved impossible. Based on another exchange between Atta and Binalshibh, as late as September 9—two days before the attacks—the conspirators may still have been uncertain about which Washington target they would strike.

Dissent Among al Qaeda Leaders

The attitude of the al Qaeda leadership toward the 9/11 plot represents one last area for insight. As Atta made his final preparations during the summer of 2001, dissent emerged among al Qaeda leaders in Afghanistan over whether to proceed with the attack. Although access to details of the plot was carefully guarded, word started to spread during the summer of 2001 that an attack against the United States was imminent. According to KSM, he was widely known within al Qaeda to be planning some kind of operation against the United States. Many were even aware that he had been preparing operatives to go to the United States, as reported by a CIA source in June 2001. Moreover, that summer Bin Ladin made several remarks hinting at an upcoming attack, which spawned rumors throughout the jihadist community worldwide. For instance, KSM claims that, in a speech at the al Faruq training camp in Afghanistan, Bin Ladin specifically urged trainees to pray for the success of an upcoming attack involving 20 martyrs.

With news of an impending attack against the United States gaining wider circulation, a rift developed within al Qaeda’s leadership. Although Bin Ladin wanted the operation to proceed as soon as possible, several senior al Qaeda figures thought they should follow the position taken by their Afghan host, Taliban leader Mullah Omar, who opposed attacking the United States. According to one al Qaeda member, when Bin Ladin returned after the general alert in late July, he spoke to his confidants about problems he was having with Omar’s unwillingness to allow any further attacks against the United States from Afghanistan.

KSM claims that Omar opposed attacking the United States for ideological reasons but permitted attacks against Jewish targets. KSM denies that Omar’s opposition reflected concern about U.S. retaliation but notes that the Taliban leader was under pressure from the Pakistani government to keep al Qaeda from engaging in operations outside Afghanistan. While some senior al Qaeda figures opposed the 9/11 operation out of deference to Omar, others reportedly expressed concern that the U.S. would respond militarily.

Bin Ladin, on the other hand, reportedly argued that attacks against the United States needed to be carried out immediately to support the insurgency in the Israeli occupied territories and to protest the presence of U.S. military forces in Saudi Arabia. Bin Ladin also thought that an attack against the United States would reap al Qaeda a recruiting and fundraising bonanza. In his thinking, the more al Qaeda did, the more support it would gain. Although he faced opposition from many of his most senior advisers—including Shura council members Shaykh Saeed, Sayf al Adl, and Abu Hafs the Mauritanian—Bin Ladin effectively overruled their objections, and the attacks went forward.

In a chilling report that sketched the history of Osama bin Laden’s network, the commission said his far-flung training camps were “apparently quite good.” Terrorists-to-be were encouraged to “think creatively about ways to commit mass murder,” it added.

Bin Laden made overtures to Saddam for assistance, the commission said in the staff report, as he did with leaders in Sudan, Iran, Afghanistan and elsewhere as he sought to build an Islamic army.

While Saddam dispatched a senior Iraqi intelligence official to Sudan to meet with bin Laden in 1994, the commission said it had not turned up evidence of a “collaborative relationship.”

Guardian:

In a report released today, the commission found that Osama bin Laden considered cooperating with Saddam even though he opposed the Iraqi leader’s secular regime. A senior Iraqi intelligence official reportedly met with Bin Laden in 1994 in Sudan, the panel found, and Bin Laden “is said to have requested space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded”.

MAARIV: Army detains 2 teens planning suicide attack

Palestinian terror groups are continuing their efforts to utilize youngsters as human bombs. For the first time since the beginning of the Intifada, the IDF has detained two teenaged girls, aged 14 and 15, who were recruited to carry out a suicide attack in Israel. The two were arrested overnight in Nablus.

Security authorities estimate that the girls were recruited by the same terror operative who also recruited Palestinian boys for the same purpose several months ago.

(It’s Take Your Daughter To “Work Accident” Day in the Occupied Territories, apparently.)