The Die Is Cast – But It Will Be a
 Long Haul                                                                           http://www.debka.com/


15 September:: The United States if going to war to avenge itself for the catastrophic hijack-suicide attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
The first stage of the conflict, according to initial, conservative estimates, could last two to three years. Its success will determine the scope and timeframe of the second phase.
DEBKAfile’s military experts can disclose that the U.S.  82nd and 101st airborne divisions, or nearly half of the airborne combat forces at the immediate disposal of U.S. President George W. Bush, are currently being airlifted to bases in Pakistan.
The bulk of these forces will be moved to the northern Punjab region of Pakistan and take up position near the city of Dera Ismail and in the valleys at the foot of the Suleiman mountain range, across from their main target – the Afghan city of Kandahar.
The United States also intends to lay siege to, or capture, the Afghan cities of Medan, Galdek and Maroof as well as the Arghastan Valley, where, according to intelligence provided by Russia, India and Israel, Osama bin Laden’s forces have been concentrated in recent months.
The U.S. operations will include air bombardments and missile strikes against Afghanistan’s principal cities: Kabul, Jalalabad and Kandahar.
Afghanistan is not the only target. Washington is planning a three-stage offensive against Iraq with the participation of U.S., British and Turkish forces.
DEBKAfile’s military sources reported back on Friday, September 9, that the Turkish army is on a state of war alert.
Now, our sources add that the Turkish army is poised along its border with Kurdish northern Iraq. It intends to invade the Shouman region and capture the cities of Biyar and Tiwal in the Urman district. The two cities are controlled by Jund al-Islam, a radical Muslim group funded by bin Laden.
The United States now understands that the 200 Taleban fighters who arrived there in mid-July, puzzling many observers, were members of Bin Laden’s general staff, pulled out of Afghanistan two months earlier as part of his preparations for Tuesday’s terror attacks in New York and Washington. Now they will be quarries of a US-Turkish hunt in one prong of the thrust into Iraq.
A simultaneous attack second attack will be spearheaded in the Basra area by some 30,000 British soldiers, currently being airlifted into bases in Oman.
DEBKAfile’s military sources report that two-thirds of that force was present in Oman Saturday. U.S. and British planes already based in Kuwait, and in Saudi Arabia will provide air cover for the British forces operating Basra - if the Saudi government agrees to its air bases being used in the U.S. operation.
Prong three of the Iraqi wing of the multiple offensive will target the central region, including Baghdad. Airlifted infantry and armor, as well as missiles and tanks, will be used in an effort to destroy the Iraqi infrastructure and topple Saddam Hussein’s regime. No final decision has been made on a timetable for the three assault waves into Iraq.
These operations, lasting between two and three weeks, are only the first steps in the coming conflict, which Bush has described as “the first war of the 21st century”.
Bin Laden had not been blind to the likelihood of U.S. retaliation. According to U.S. intelligence estimates, he and his cohorts have been preparing for months for the assaults and have readied their response.
Intelligence specialists believe Bin Laden and his associates, including the Egyptian Islamic Jihad – the terror master’s main operational arm – will carry out a series of attacks on U.S. army bases, especially air and naval facilities, in the United States, Europe and the Middle East.
For the first time, the Americans have acknowledged the presence of an enemy within.
Members of bin Laden’s group have been trained by the U.S. army and some still serve in various U.S. military units, raising the prospect that attacks could be launched from within the bases themselves. (See also separate item on this page.).
Bin Laden’s men will make a supreme effort to attack aircraft carriers, along with such strategic targets in the United States, such as CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia or FBI headquarters in Washington. Before the Tuesday’s calamities, this scenario would have sounded fantastic. Other targets may include atomic energy stations, where the highest state of alert is already in effect. U.S. military units rushed to the stations have set up defensive perimeters around them. Oil fields and terminals – including, for the first time, fields in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait -- are other potential targets.
Bush’s ability to wage a drawn-out war will largely depend on the toll Bin Laden’s reprisals take in terms of lives and U.S. public support for the president’s military campaign.
The main question will be - not who will win, but the price the victor will pay for his victory – and the loser’s winnings, if any, on his way to defeat. That defeat may not even be final or lasting.
It’s also important to consider two potential features of the first stage of this war.
1. It is only a start. Even if the U.S. military actions in Afghanistan and Iraq are successful – and there is no guarantee of this – Bin Laden and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad will still have large pockets at their command in Yemen, Bosnia, Kosovo, Albania, Macedonia and several former Soviet Moslem republics. The largest contingent of Bin Laden-funded Islamic extremist fighters are deployed in the Faragna Valley which lies athwart regions of Krygyzstan, Tadjikistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Last year, Bin Laden’s forces opened up a corridor from Faranga to the Sinkiang province of northern China, linking up the Moslem fighters in that strategic valley and militant Chinese Moslem groups of the Chinese Uighur tribes. This tribes are undergoing combat training in special training camps that Bin Laden established in Afghanistan and Kazakhstan.
There is no knowing now how US strategists mean to deal with these the forces Bin Laden maintains in these far-flung regions. They cannot be left out of the American equation because as long as they exist, Bin Laden retains an operational capability. Will they be left to the Russians and Chinese? Perhaps the Moslem governments of Central Asia will invite the U.S. forces or NATO to do the job?
2. This war opens up the potential for nuclear, chemical and biological weapons us.
U.S. leaders have emphasized since Friday night that the United States will employ its “entire arsenal” in the coming campaign. Even British prime minister Tony Blair, speaking in parliament on Friday, September 14, noted the danger the West faces from terror attacks could include nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.
Israel has voiced strong support for the formation of an anti-terror coalition. But at this stage, the Bush administration prefers to bring Syria in – which means excluding Israeli from - its anti-Bin Laden alliance, in the hope of providing maneuvering room for Saudi Arabia to collaborate. Getting Damascus on board would also sever the Syrian-Iraqi link that has recently grown stronger, as well as snapping its connection with the militant Lebanese Hizballah. Those Shiite extremists would have no option but to break away from a Syrian government that goes to war against Bin Laden.
The US war scenario carries advantages for Israel, but is an ill wind for the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat and the relentless campaign of violence he launched a year ago..
Some Israeli media reported, inaccurately, that Washington wants the Palestinians in the coalition fighting Bin Laden.
According to DEBKAfile’s Washington sources, that view is confined mainly to secretary of state Colin Powell, who believes Palestinian participation might pave the way for other Arab countries to join. It might even help encourage certain European nations made cagey by their large Moslem populations and economic and strategic links to oil states in North Africa and the Middle East, to take up arms against the Saudi terrorist leader.
Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, who strongly opposes a Palestinian role in the US-led bloc of nations against Bin Laden, made his views clear to President Bush when they talked over the telephone on Friday.
The next day, Abu Ala, Palestinian parliament Speaker, termed the suicide terror attacks in New York and Washington saddening. But, he said, the world must understand that the real terrorism was that committed by Israel against the Palestinians. Addressing a Palestinian cabinet meeting, Abu Ala said Sharon was well aware that a meeting between foreign minister Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat would be tantamount to Israeli recognition of the legitimacy of the Palestinian struggle.
That was the point Sharon made to Bush over the phone and the reason why he was prepared for a major row with Peres to prevent the meeting taking place.
It is his understanding too that Israel will not be called upon for an active role in the first stage of the American confrontation with Iraq and the Bin Laden terrorist movement. But he expects to be called upon in the next stage.  
In an extraordinary encounter in Washington Friday, September 14, Arab ambassadors bombarded Secretary Powell and other administration officials with questions about the nature, form and objectives of the planned US military retaliation. US officials rapped out that they did not want questions only a single answer from all the Arab governments: Were they for or against America.
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Beware the Second Wave
14 September: DEBKAfile’s intelligence sources report that Islamic militants under the command of Saudi multimillionaire terrorist Osama Bin Laden, the radical Egyptian Jihadi Islami, Iraqi military intelligence and other Middle East groups, stand poised for a second wave of horrendous attacks in America. An estimated 30 to 50 suicide-killers are waiting inside the US for their orders to strike.
This time, while again aiming for the US President, the White House and Capitol Hill, they will also go for a broad spectrum of what they consider strategic targets, such as airports, oil fields and oil installations, sensitive military and intelligence facilities, warships and carriers. The last were indeed ordered out to sea shortly after the first assaults on Tuesday.
Aware that flushing out the terrorists in waiting, many of whom may be US nationals, is akin to finding a needle in a haystack, US leaders quickly resorted to a short cut. Two days ago, they turned to a number of world leaders, including Europeans, the Russian president and Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, to request a pooling of intelligence. They were asked to share every scrap of information they had on international terror movements, in support of the US effort to eradicate the blight. Quick crosschecking between the services strongly confirmed the second wave thesis. It has kept US security services at the highest level of suspense they have ever known.
Therefore the FBI’s dragnet on the trail of the conspiracy behind he deadly airliner suicide attacks on America are moving fast, so that the country is not caught off guard again. US security authorities are concerned to strengthen the two lines of defense against terrorist attack: the first-line barrier, advance intelligence, and the second-line defense, security. Both broke down when New York’s landmark the World Trade Center, and America’s military nerve center, the Pentagon in Washington, were crushingly assaulted by suicidal terrorists last Tuesday.
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Creating Red Herrings
14 September: Deception and misdirection are keywords in the Bin Laden’s jihad against America. The red herrings were planted well in advance of the suicide assaults in New York and Washington. DEBKAfile picks up the false trail from the time it was laid. On August 8, RIA Novosty news agency in Moscow reported a strange story: The Taleban government in Afghanistan had appointed Bin Laden commander-in-chief of its armed forces - not only in Afghanistan but also in the Peshawar region of Pakistan, where the Taleban maintain several thousand weapons-trained recruits.
The report did not go unnoticed by intelligence experts in Washington, Moscow and Jerusalem, who traded information but reached no consensus on what it all meant.
Bin Laden, they knew, has prided himself on maintaining a low profile. For the past decade, his mysterious ways have nourished the psychological threat he poses to the West. It has also kept him out of harm’s way.
The experts could not figure out what prompted his personal friend, Mullah Mohammed Omar, supreme leader of the Taleban government to offer him the post. Both men go back a long time, to the mid-1980s, when they used to pray together in the Karachi mosque.
It wasn’t Bin Laden’s only surprise. DEBKAfile’s terrorism experts believe that story was made of whole cloth and planted as a piece of misdirection.
By then, intelligence experts were scratching their heads over another odd piece of information appearing a week earlier.
Bin Laden had just named Jumma Mamangani, an Uzbeki, as right-hand man and operations chief of the Al Qaeda terrorist movement.
EBKAfile ’s terrorism experts report that, until three years ago, Mamangani, commanded the Moslem Army for the Liberation of Kyrgyzstan and managed to take over parts of the Batkan valley in eastern Kyrgyzstan, whence he threatened the approaches to the capital city of Bishkek. At the beginning of the year, Mamangani moved to Afghanistan, where Bin Laden gave him the command of three Al Qaeda special forces training camps near Jalalabad, Farmada and Daronta.
The odd aspect of that tale was that Bin Laden had handed the Uzbeki militia chief a job traditionally reserved for his closest allies, the al-Zawahar family, leaders of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Their pact had been sealed in the terror world’s wedding of the century last year, when Bin Laden’s son married Ayaman Al Zawahar’s daughter. Al-Zawahar was then appointed Bin Laden’s first deputy and heir; the coveted operations officer post was left open – until Mamangani filled it this year.
 None of the terror experts in the US, Russia or Israel imagined that Bin Laden’s reshuffle was a prelude to a major operation. However, after the airliner attacks in New York and Washington, they noted that Bin Laden and his Egyptian deputy had gone into hiding. It was as if the earth had swallowed them. The only senior man left in command of Al Qaeda and bases was the new operations officer, Mamangani.
It was then that the penny dropped.
Al Zawahari was “blown” to Western intelligence after personally commanding past operations, including the failed 1995 assassination attempt against Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in Ethiopia, and the sabotage of the U.S.S. Cole last October in Aden harbor, the last known Bin Laden terrorist attack till this week. Appointing a new operations officer from Central Asia was a red herring to misdirect Western terrorist watchers attention from the assault to come.
Central Asia was indeed on everyone’s mind in the weeks leading up to the assaults in America. It came up in conversations between Russian president Putin and U.S. defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld just two weeks ago in Moscow, and between Putin and the visiting Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon last week in the Kremlin.
Putin even sent a special emissary to Washington to meet CIA director George Tenet and explain the dangers hanging over Moslem countries in Central Asia and northern China – home to a Moslem minority of no less than 60 million people -- from Mamangani’s new appointment. No one gave a thought to New York and its twin towers.
Some of the experts estimate Bin Laden’s pre-planning period for an operation as two years or more. Up until October 1998, Bin Laden and his staff officers had used satellite communications and encoded e-mail, moving through protected channels operated by an Addis Ababa-registered communications company he owns.
After the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, the terror chief stopped using electronic communications and turned to human couriers. They often posed as immigrant laborers or itinerant businessmen, usually connected with the fishing trade. It was a group of such “fishermen” who carried out the attack on the USS Cole last year.
But the FBI investigation has been stymied till now because no telephones, computers or any other devices were found in the house the raiders rented across from Aden harbor.
Since the end of 1998, not one transmission to or from Bin Laden has been picked up by US intelligence eavesdroppers, leaving American surveillance agencies completely deaf and blind to his activities. 

Washington Shakes Big Stick on
Way to War
16 September: US President George W. Bush is straining at the leash.
DEBKAfile ’s Washington sources report that, although the White House and secretary of state Colin Powell are conducting intensive diplomatic bargaining to broaden the US-led bloc for the coming military offensive against the international terror blight, Bush and Vice President Richard Cheney are determined to march on the enemy without waiting for the bargaining to run its course.
Their plan is to launch round one of the campaign against Iraq and the Saudi Islamic terrorist Osama Bin Laden’s Afghan strongholds - expected to last a month or two.  When the second round, which will also be directed at terrorist movements other than Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda, is in full flight  - only then will the US seek the cooperation of countries hosting the terrorist bases or bordering on them.
US leaders are pushing ahead, even while taking into account that the first US troop advance on terrorist strongholds could unleash a second wave of terrorist violence against US military bases, in an attempt to disrupt the US war effort, maximize American war casualties at the front and at home and demoralize the American people.
Israel is making its own preparations for the coming US campaign. Its air force, navy, missile and air defense units, as well as its air force and navy units based in Turkey are on the ready. So too is the home front. Israelis are terrified of a repetition of the 1991 Gulf War, when 39 Iraqi Scud missiles rained down on the country and the Shamir Government bowed to Washington’s demand not to respond.  No one is ruling out an Iraqi counter-strike against Israel if attacked by the United States, but DEBKAfile ’s sources strongly doubt that Israel will stay out of the fray if attacked.
DEBKAfile’s Washington sources reveal that one of the most drastic steps taken by the US today was to hand a blunt ultimatum to President Bashar Assad, demanding that he close down the offices and headquarters of the extremist Palestinian terrorist organizations operating out of Damascus under the auspices of Syrian military intelligence: the Islamic Hamas and Jihad Islami, both of which habitually practice suicide bomb attacks on Israeli civilians, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine led by George Habash, Naif Hawatmeh’s Democratic Popular Front, The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command, headed by Ahmed Jibril, as well as the PKP, the violent Kurdish Democratic Party.
Assad was presented with a named list of the men to be detained forthwith, some of whom the FBI would request for questioning for leads into the Palestinian terror labyrinth. Assad faces a tough choice here since Syrian military intelligence, an important prop of his regime, is an integral part of that labyrinth. On the other hand, failing to comply with the US ultimatum will count against the Damascus regime as a refusal to cooperate with the American war against terrorism.
Interestingly, DEBKAfile’s intelligence sources note, the American ultimatum does not include the Lebanese Shiite Hizballah. At this point, the US prefers not to view that extremist group as no part of the Syrian problem. At some stage, the Hizballah will be reviewed in the context of any cooperation developing with Iran and Lebanon. Powell told the CNN Sunday that anti-terror cooperation with Syria and Iran is “worth exploring”.
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The Palestinian Angle
16 September: According to DEBKAfile ’s Palestinians sources, the imminentUS strike against Iraq and its ultimatum to Syria are making the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat extremely jumpy. He is doing some hard thinking about his next steps and in what direction he should be steering his Palestinian Authority and his confrontation with Israel. The Americans have struck very close to home. The Damascus-based Palestinian organizations targeted by the US for breakup are all members of Arafat’s own Palestinian Liberation Front – the PLO. After the US demand of Assad, Arafat is uncomfortably tensed for a similar American ultimatum. He can expect to face an uncompromising demand to detain or extradite to the United States activists of pro-Syrian Palestinian groups and leaders and operations chiefs of the Hamas and Jihad Islami – not to mention the Hizballah cells they harbor in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Non-compliance could carry the stiff penalty of having his Tanzim militia and presidential guard, Force 17, designated terrorist groups and therefore targeted by America’s international anti-terror offensive.
Aware of the threat hanging over his head, Arafat has suddenly changed his tune. Instead of giving the Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres a farcical runaround over a rendezvous, Arafat is now practically begging to be allowed to meet Peres. If a senior Israeli official is prepared to sit down and talk to him, Arafat thinks he can argue he is no terrorist and does not deserve American ultimatums.
The Moslem clergy is meanwhile getting set to undermine the US-led alliance for military action. The Supreme Islamic Religious Council of Jordan published an edict today, forbidding any Moslem faithful to take part in the “unbelievers war” against fellow Moslems. Similar edicts are to be expected in other Arab states. 
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The Enemy Within
15 September:  Mohamed Atta and his cousin Marwan Ashehri, two of the 19 hijackers named by the US Justice Department, as perpetrators of the New York World Trade Center and Pentagon, Washington suicide attacks, have been variously described as Egyptian and Saudi nationals.
DEBKAfile’s intelligence sources have turned up their real identity: they were Palestinian-Americans. Atta was implicated in a series of bus bombings that hit Jerusalem in 1996. He evaded Israeli capture by going to ground among his relatives in America. The US authorities at the time turned down Israel’s request to extradite this US national. Our sources further identify Atta as the scion of a prominent, affluent family in El-Bireh, Ramallah, one of whose members is a former mayor and most of whom carry American citizenship, as do many elite Palestinian families in Ramallah and its environs.
The latest information coming out of the FBI investigation traces Atta, Ashehri and another of the 7 suicide pilots, Ziad Jarrah, from the Lebanese Beqaa Valley, to Hamburg four years ago, where they established an Islamic terrorist cell. DEBKAfile ’s terrorist experts note that this cell based itself on a much older German-based terrorist group – the one involved in the 1988 PanAm 103 terrorist disaster over Lockerbie, Scotland, in which 270 died.
Atta, who set up an Islamic prayer room in the local university, was known in Hamburg as “Mohamed el-Amir”. Ashihri registered for studies, but never turned up. Jarrah, who flew aboard the plane that crashed near Pittsburgh, went from Germany to Afghanistan eighteen months ago and from there to Miami, Florida. 
It now appears that some of the 7 suicide pilots may have trained not only in private flying schools in Florida, but at US military schools. That is yet another pointer to how well Islamic jihadists were able to secretly place themselves in American society and its institutions.
The most recent penetration dates back 11 years at least, although its roots go back much earlier.  In 1990, when the Afghan war ended with the Red Army’s defeat, Osama Bin Laden, who led the international Islamic brigade America raised to fight the Red Army, turned coat.   “Afghan Arabs” - as those volunteers came to be known - were allowed to settle in the United States with their families. Some stayed loyal to their former commander and enlisted to the Al Qaeda, the militant movement Bin Laden created to fight the second surviving secular superpower, America.
Those Afghan Arabs form the American-based core of Al Qaeda.
A second important branch that buried its operatives inside the United States was the fanatical and violent Egyptian Jihad Islami movement, Bin Laden’s foremost ally.
 In the latter half of the nineties, those two groups working hand in glove were joined by a younger generation of Arab Moslem militants from the Middle East, brought up in the tradition of suicide for the cause.
According to DEBKAfile’s intelligence sources, those three branches, numbering no more than some 2,500 activists in all, form the engine powering contemporary international terrorism. They gained entry into the United States in the last 11 years with the help of moles and agents inside America’s governing institutions, including its intelligence machinery. Those agencies emphatically deny such penetrations. This is only partly true. Whereas it is inconceivable that US counterintelligence would directly hire Moslem terrorists, there are known cases of US double agents, who by definition serve two services, knowingly aiding an alien agency, which is close to the Bin Laden network.
Furthermore, US counterintelligence has strived for two decades at least to penetrate the militant Islamic fundamentalist world by planting its own moles and double agents  – with very little success. In most cases, those plants remained faithful to their religious tenets, not their American handlers, using their covert American connections to spread the fundamentalist net inside US intelligence itself.
The Egyptian American, Aly Mohamed (see earlier article on this page), was certainly not the only terrorist in disguise to be accepted into the American military, where he pretended to serve US interests while actually working for Bin Laden. There must be hundreds of double agents like him burrowed under US security, some in a position to thwart the United States’ attempts to guard itself against the jihad menace.  
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Bin Laden’s Scattered Legions
14 September: Al Qaeda (“the Base”), the militant Islamic movement the Saudi terrorist tycoon Osama Bin Laden founded in 1990, is estimated by DEBKAfile ’s terror experts to number no more than 12,000 fighting men in all. They are scattered round the world, mainly in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kashmir, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia, Chechenya, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgistan, Tadjikistan and Lebanon. Some 2,500 live in the United States, many of them US nationals, counting also members of Al Qaeda’s fraternal terrorist group, the fundamentalist Egyptian Jihad Islami. Many are “Afghan Arabs” who fought with Bin Laden against the Russians in Afghanistan in the eighties.
Either involved in local conflicts, like the Balkans, or organized as a sort of international rapid strike force for terror, Bin Laden moves his troops from site to site as needed, usually by chartered commercial flights. Together with reserves, he can field some 17,000 Islamic militants to pursue what he conceives as his mission:  to defeat the United States and its dominant influence as a world superpower. Most Bin Laden operations are large-scale yet precisely pinpointed to achieve that end.
His annual operational budget is estimated as $125 million, which comes out of revenues from family-owned companies. His relatives are close to Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah. So as to save them and the Saudi ruler embarrassment, he has invested his stock in front companies registered in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital. Most of his investments are in satellite networks and cell phone companies.
Bin Laden is the first terrorist chief to operate in global strategic terms. All his operations – and there have been no more than a dozen - are meticulously prepared and executed and always aim at damaging US superpower standing. His only regional or local targets are Saudi relations with the United States and the American infidel presence in the kingdom, which for him is anathema and profane.  Bin Laden differs substantially from Yasser Arafat in that his thinking and targeting are global and ideological. Al his associations are with radical Islamic groups and figures. 
Digging into his roots, DEBKAfile has discovered Bin Laden’s first mentor to have been an obscure Palestinian sheikh who lived in Hableh near Tulkarm and Jenin, called Abdallah Azzam. Founder of an Islamic liberation movement called Haraketh al-Tahariyeh al-Islami, this sheikh, for the first time in the 20th century, called for an Islamic struggle on a global, not merely a national, footing. He urged Moslems to fight for world domination and the eclipse of infidel rule. Although a Palestinian himself, Azzam mocked Yasser Arafat’s PLO as inconsequential.
This doctrine actuated Bin Laden in founding his Al Qaeda (The base) a decade ago. It is his guiding light to this day.
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A Vast Conspiracy Hatched in the Dark?
September 12: Given the scale in time and dimensions of this last appalling conspiracy against America, none of DEBKAfile’s intelligence experts can explain how it came to fruition without any Western intelligence community noticing what was going on. The pre-planning must have taken years and involved hundreds if not thousands of strategists, activists, helpers, spotters, couriers, sleepers, controllers and spiritual leaders – and their families. Large sums of cash must have moved between countries.
And indeed, on Wednesday, scant hours after the shocking disasters in New York and Washington, the FBI was bursting with newfound information. It swung into action, knowing exactly where to lay hands on crowds of suspects in Boston and Florida.  In record time, its agents had identified all the hijackers, estimating three to six on each of the passenger planes involved.
 At least two of the hijackers were on the authorities’ “watch list”. Most were Egyptian or Saudi nationals. There was evidence to connect the conspiracy to the Saudi tycoon-terrorist ex-Saudi Osama Bin Laden. After all, there cannot be many organizations in the world capable of recruiting 12 to 24 volunteer suicides – and the odds are that it will be based in the Arab and Moslem world
Even before finding the black boxes, the FBI knew that out of five targets, the terrorists hit two, the Twin Towers landmark, and missed three. They had been aiming for the White House, the President’s Maryland resort at Camp David and the presidential Boeing, Air Force One. Instead they hit the Pentagon and a place in Pennsylvania. 
In record time, the investigators discovered that two of the hijackers were Egyptians, who took private flying courses in Venice, Florida, and that a dense network of Jihad Islami and Bin Laden cells flourished undisturbed in many of
America’s cities.
Suddenly, too, thousands of Boston’s Logan
 airport personnel were suspected of abetting in the conspiracy after exactly 800 staff name-tags were found to have gone missing last year. The FBI has now identified five Arab men as suspects, two of them believed to have entered the US and Canada and made several trips to “case” Logan.
But how did the terrorists make it to the two flights armed with knives and cans of mace? Hundreds of suspected accomplices are to be detained for interrogation in Boston and Florida.
All these discoveries, certain to be followed by many more, came tumbling out after the multiple disaster, raising the question of why were they not made before?
Why did no one in the vast security administration of the United States raise the alarm?
The only logical answer to this, in the view of DEBKAfile ’s intelligence experts, is that the system was muffled, disarmed from the inside. Osama Bin Laden or perhaps the senior partner of his Qaeda (“The Base”) group, the fundamentalist Egyptian Jihad Islami, must have been able to plant agents inside the US military and intelligence services.
It would not be the first time. 
DEBKAfile ’s counter-terrorist experts recall the extraordinary appearance of the Egyptian-American Ali Mohamed, 48 as state witness at the trial in the Manhattan County court last April of the ring which carried out the 1988 US embassy bombings in Nairobi and Daar e-Salaam, causing 224 deaths, including 12 Americans. As one of Bin Laden’s chief lieutenants, Mohamed’s testimony enabled the US government to use the trial for building a comprehensive indictment against the entire Bin Laden terrorist machine. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for his role in the conspiracy, but was let off the death sentence.
An expert in the art of “invading the Western society” targeted for terrorism, he was a skilled double agent.  Mohamed became a naturalized US citizen and penetrated the US army’s Special Forces facility at the Fort Bragg, and given the rank of US sergeant.
During his army stint, Mohamed organized and built up the pervasive network of Islamic “societies” operating with apparent innocuous intent in so many corners of America, with an anti-American agenda, which is far from pious. They provide the infrastructure to support Islamic fundamentalist terrorist dedicated to “opposing non-Islamic governments with force and violence” - in the prophetic words of the US prosecutor at the embassy trial.
Bin Laden was charged in absentia with endorsing a fatwah, or religious decree, ordering devout Muslims to kill Americans, including civilians, anywhere in the world.

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