May 9, 2007 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - Mohammed Sidique Khan, one of the suicide bombers who struck London on July 7, 2005, planned to visit the United States in February 2003. The National Security Agency (NSA), which closely monitors suspect e-mails and phone calls, warned the CIA that a man named Mohammed Sidique Khan was planning to make a visit to the United States.
This British national had sent e-mails and made phone calls to "persons of interest" in the United States. Khan was a man to be watched, the CIA concluded from the information it had obtained from the NSA, but the CIA is not allowed to conduct surveillance upon a person inside the United States, so the Agency requested the FBI to follow the man from Britain as soon as he arrived. The FBI was hesitant to do that and wanted to know why Khan was so dangerous.
Just a name, a photo and a flight number did not suffice to trigger the Bureau's interest. The CIA's Counter Terrorism Center (CTC) was unwilling to share sensitive information with the Bureau. It became a matter which the bosses in the Agency and Bureau had to deal with themselves and finally, "the file on the British suspect was sent to FBI's New York Office," Ron Suskind writes in his excellent book "The One Percent Doctrine.
"[1] One of the Americans Khan had contact with was Ahmed Omar Abu Ali. He was an Islamic radical who was planning something violent. It was not the first time Khan visited the United States.
Between 2001 and 2003, he paid at least three visits, meeting with other radicals. But those in charge of tracking Khan after his arrival did not want to be blamed if something went wrong, so after a lot of bureaucratic bungling Khan was finally put on a no-fly list: "The next day, he arrived at Heathrow for his flight to the United States. At the ticket counter, he was informed that the United States had a problem with him.
He was on a no-fly list. He wouldn't be going anywhere. Befuddled, and alerted for the first time that he was known to U.
S. authorities, Khan quietly returned to his home in Leeds. He knew, now, that he'd have to keep an especially low profile, not do anything that would arouse suspicion, and not talk on phones or send e-mails that might be traceable.
.. Instead, Mohammed Sidique Khan returned to his job as a schoolteacher in Leeds, worked intently with three young Muslim men he recruited.
On July 7, 2005, he masterminded a series of terrorist attacks in London subways that killed 56, injured 700, and brought England to its knees."[2] The British Security Service MI5 and the police also had interesting files on Khan. They knew that he had been in touch with radical Pakistani groups since 2001.
[3] In Britain, though, he was a well integrated second generation immigrant from Pakistan, a teaching assistant in Leeds. He was also a strong admirer of Osama bin Laden. A man with two faces and a secret jihadist agenda.
In the summer of 2001, Khan befriended Omar Sharif and Asif Hanif, two other second generation Pakistani immigrants. At that time Mohammed Sidique Khan was actively recruiting young Muslims for jihadist trips to Pakistan.[4] In October 2001, Omar Sharif and Asif Hanif joined the Taliban in Afghanistan.
They received assistance from a Madrassah (koranic school) in Pakistan as well as from "Al-Mujahiroun," a jihadist network with headquarters in London. In 2003, the two British Muslims traveled to Israel and blew themselves up in a bar in Tel Aviv. Soon after, the Israelis found the British passports of Britain's first suicide bombers.
In November 2004, Khan and his friend Shehzad Tanweer (another London suicide bomber) traveled to Pakistan. They would stay there for five months. They visited training camps and Khan contacted friends from Al-Qaeda.
Khan had also traveled to Pakistan in 2003 to meet with Al-Qaeda figures. He was then known as "Ibrahim." Shortly after the July 7 attacks in London, British authorities claimed that "the bombers were clean skinned, they came from out of the blue.
" There were even official reports suggesting there were no prior terrorism links. These statements and reports proved to be completely inaccurate. Rachel North, one of the survivors of the 7/7 bombings, told BBC Newsnight recently: "I've heard from the police officer working on the London bombings that when they inputted Mohammed Sidique Khan's details into a computer within 48 hours of the bombings, he came up as a known terorist.
" Question: "Is that what you were being told?" Mohammed Sidique was a dangerous individual whose potential for violence nonetheless was underestimated before the attack against the London subway. Recently, MI5 admitted that Khan and Tanweer first came to the Security Service's attention as "unidentified individuals on the periphery of the fertilizer plot," a dangerous plot in which a group of individuals planned to detonate a huge fertilizer bomb in Britain.
Due to timely arrests ("Operation Crevice") this plot failed. "During February and March 2004, an unknown man subsequently identified as Khan met with five members of the fertilizer plot on five occasions. He was accompanied by another unknown man, subsequently identified as Tanweer, on three of these occasions.
The meeting took place in Crawley, the home of several of the fertilizer plot conspirators...
Conversations record Khan and Tanweer discussing how to raise cash through a variety of fraud scams, such as purchasing and selling the goods on for cash. There is no record of Khan and Tanweer discussing terrorist activity or bomb building."[6] The fateful decision was then taken by MI5 and the police not to focus on Khan and Tanweer as they were not seen as key plotters.
There was simply not enough money and manpower "to give greater investigative priority to these two individuals."[7] But did Khan never really discuss any terrorist activity in his meetings with the fertilizer plotters? He was in close touch with the leader of the plot, Omar Khyam, another Pakistani immigrant.
A 10-page transcript, taken from a bugged meeting between Khan and Khyam on February 21, 2004, reveals that Khan was talking about traveling to Pakistan and "operations" (a codeword for planning terrorist attacks). Khan, in fact, wanted to visit a terrorist training camp, Khyam told him to be careful to obey the "emir" (=leader) at the camp. Only two pages of the transcript refer to fraud.
Khan asked Khyam: "Are you really a terrorist?" Khyam replied: "They are working with us."[8] Who are "they"?
In retrospect it is always easy to blame the security services for their failures or embrace conspiracy theories about "inside jobs" and the like (reality, though, is often too complex for that).[9] There are also many successes of which many people are unaware . Two Dutch security experts, Rob de Wijk en Carla Relk wrote the noteworthy book "Doelwit Europa" (Target Europe).
[10] They show how Muslim extremists failed to carry out terrorist attacks in quite a number of cases just because the police and the security services were aware of their plans and intervened in time. Terrorism, crime and illegal immigration are threatening the very existence of Western nations. Governments must really tackle these problems, otherwise the nations so dear to us will be overwhelmed by those who seek to destroy them.
Fortunately, France has elected a new president who seems to be aware of values worth defending. Emerson Vermaat is a specialist on terrorism and crime in the Netherlands.
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