NEWSWEEK COVER: Al Qaeda in America How the Terrorists Are Recruiting -- and Plotting -- Here
Documents Show Al Qaeda Leader Khalid Shaikh Mohammed Revealed Operatives Living in the Heartland With Orders to Bring Down Brooklyn Bridge, Blow Up Gas
Stations
Terror Group Recruited Citizens With Western Passports, Who Could Move Freely; Not Be Easily Detected By Post 9-11 Security; Sought African-American, Female
Muslims Sympathetic to Islamic Extremism
NEW YORK, June 15 /PRNewswire/ -- Informed sources tell Newsweek that captured Al Qaeda director of global operations Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, or "KSM" as FBI documents call him, offered up nothing but evasions and disinformation during interrogation. But confronted by the contents of his computer and his cell-phone records, he began speaking more truthfully. According to intelligence documents obtained by Newsweek, many of the names, places and plots he revealed have checked out. After 9-11 Osama bin Laden's terror network "was clearly here," a top U.S. law-enforcement official tells Newsweek. "It was organized, it was being directed by the leaders of Al Qaeda."
In the June 23 Newsweek exclusive cover story, "Al Qaeda in America" (on newsstands Monday, June 16), Washington Bureau Chief Daniel Klaidman, Assistant Managing Editor Evan Thomas, with Investigative Correspondents Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball and Correspondent Kevin Peraino, examine how Osama bin Laden's network has been working in America and how federal officials have thwarted plots to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge, blow up gas stations around the country and drive trucks full of explosives into trains and airplanes. Thanks to some real breakthroughs by the Feds, the Qaeda plots do not appear to have made it past the planning stage. The inside story of the war at home on Al Qaeda, reconstructed by Newsweek reporters from intelligence documents and interviews with top officials, has been marked by good luck and good work. Still, no one in the intelligence community is declaring victory. Newsweek reports:
* KSM revealed an over-haul of Al Qaeda's approach to penetrating America.
To foil the heightened security after 9-11, Al Qaeda began to rely on
operatives who would be harder to detect. They recruited U.S. citizens
or people with legitimate Western passports who could move freely in the
United States. They used women and family members as "support
personnel," and made an effort to find African-American Muslims who
would be sympathetic to Islamic extremism. Using "mosques, prisons and
universities throughout the United States," KSM reached deep into the
heartland, lining up agents in Baltimore, Columbus, Ohio, and Peoria,
Ill.
* According to Justice Department documents describing KSM's
interrogation, he "tasked" a former resident of Baltimore named Majid
Khan, to "move forward" on Khan's plan to destroy several U.S. gas
stations by "simultaneously detonating explosives in the stations'
underground storage tanks." When Khan reported that the storage tanks
were unprotected and easy to attack, KSM wanted to be sure that
explosive charges would cause a massive eruption of flame and
destruction. Khan -- a "confessed AQ [Al Qaeda] member" who was
apparently captured in Pakistan, according to intelligence sources --
traveled at least briefly to the United States, where he tried
unsuccessfully to seek asylum. His family members, intelligence
documents say, are longtime Baltimore residents and own gas stations in
that city (a detail Newsweek was able to confirm). KSM told
investigators that he and Khan discussed a plan to use a Karachi-based
import-export business to smuggle explosives into the United States.
* KSM had more diabolical plans for another of Majid Khan's American
relatives, a commercial truckdriver named Iyman Faris. The truckdriver
is a naturalized U.S. citizen, a longtime resident of Columbus, Ohio.
KSM told interrogators that he wanted Faris to case the Brooklyn Bridge
and to obtain "gas cutters" (presumably, metal-cutting torches) that
could be used to cut the Brooklyn Bridge's suspension wires. And more:
the truck driver was assigned to obtain "torque tools" to bend railroad
tracks, the better to send a passenger train hurtling off the rails. And
still more: Faris recommended driving a small truck with explosives
beneath a commercial airliner as it sat on the tarmac. A licensed
truckdriver, he said, could easily penetrate airport security. None of
these plots ever came off. Faris has disappeared. No one was home when
Newsweek knocked on the door of his apartment in a run-down section of
Columbus last week.
* During his interrogation, KSM identified a man named Ali S. Al-Marri as
"the point of contact for AQ operatives arriving in the US for September
11 follow-on operations." KSM described Al-Marri as "the perfect sleeper
agent because he has studied in the United States, had no criminal
record, and had a family with whom he could travel." The Qatari
national had returned to the U.S. on September 10, 2001, to pick up a
graduate degree in computer information systems from Peoria's Bradley
University. He was accused by the FBI of phoning an alleged Qaeda
operative in the United Arab Emirates, Qaeda paymaster Mustafa Ahmed
al-Hawsawi, and lying about it that same December. U.S. officials were
outraged when the Saudi embassy helped Al-Marri's wife obtain a passport
to leave the United States in November (U.S. officials say she was still
under subpoena; Saudi lawyers disagree). Al-Marri, who pleaded not
guilty to charges of lying to investigators and credit-card fraud, is in
prison in Peoria, awaiting trial.
Newsweek also reports on the handling of Al Qaeda suspects by the Justice Department. By putting suspects in what one top law-enforcement official described to Newsweek as "a kind of limbo detention" -- essentially living with FBI agents who could charge them at any time -- the Feds are pushing the legal envelope. "We're making this up as we go along," says the official. "It's a brave new world out there." When FBI agents confront Qaeda suspects, they give them a choice: cooperate or face the consequences, which could include a life in prison and possibly even the death penalty. (Justice Department spokeswoman Barbara Comstock declined to discuss any specific cases, but said that the department has deployed legal tactics that have been "historically used in organized crime and drug cases and proven effective in breaking down conspiracies.")
(Read Newsweek's news releases at
www.Newsweek.MSNBC.com. Click "Pressroom.")
SOURCE Newsweek
CO: Newsweek
ST: New York, Ohio, Illinois, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Canada
SU:
Web site: newsweek.msnbc.com
prnewswire.com
06/15/2003 13:38 EDT |
