Missing Link

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This is one of many documents on the 9/11 summary to have disappeared since the WantToKnow.info site was established. The link became inactive sometime in October or November 2003. Because this information appears to have disappeared, we are providing both the text of the article (below) and the full original article that we downloaded previously. To see the original article, please click here. The text on the 800 subjects detained and on Lionel Dumont are highly in bold below.

 

 

Bin Laden's Invisible Network

            Al Qaeda's camps are under assault. But thousands of bin Laden's

            trainees have long since moved on, and they have taught many more

            recruits worldwide. Can we find them in time? A NEWSWEEK

            investigation

 

 

            NEWSWEEK INTERNATIONAL

 

          Oct. 29 issue —  He is a shadowy figure, lurking on the edges of the

      Sept. 11 attack. Federal investigators know that Omar al-Bayoumi helped

      pay the rent for two of the American Airlines Flight 77 hijackers, Nawaf

      Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar, on their apartment in San Diego. The Feds

      also know that al-Bayoumi is well educated and ambitious. 

          

              IN COMPLETING AN APPLICATION for admission to a doctoral program

      at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, al-Bayoumi listed himself

      as "assistant to the director of finance" at Dallah AVCO, an

      aviation-services company based in Saudi Arabia. The FBI is investigating

      possible ties between Dallah AVCO and Al Qaeda terror network. Asked about

      these ties by NEWSWEEK, Dallah AVCO's owner, Saudi billionaire Saleh

      Abdullah Kamel, responded, "This is not true at all." U.S. intelligence

      suspects that wealthy Saudis are funding Islamic extremist groups. Asked

      if he supported terrorist groups, Kamel replied, "I am a real Muslim.

      Islam is the religion of peace." (Arrested but released by Scotland Yard,

      al-Bayoumi is now living in England, where he remains under investigation

      by U.S. and British authorities.)

      Newsweek On Air: Searching For "Sleepers"

 

             Just how rich and deep—and diabolical—is the global terror network

      of Al Qaeda? Since Sept. 11, the FBI's manhunt has rounded up more than

      800 people, but only 10 have been linked in any way to the hijackings—and

      those 10 are not talking. (Most of the suspects probably will turn out to

      be innocent.) Federal law-enforcement officials estimate that there are

      perhaps a thousand people in the United States who have ties to terrorist

      organizations abroad. With cells in at least 60 countries, Al Qaeda has

      thousands more awaiting orders to strike. Rooting them out is going to be

      exceedingly difficult. Clues are always clearer in hindsight. One FBI

      official noted, a little ruefully, that the bureau's Phoenix, Ariz., field

      office cabled headquarters last summer about an unusual number of Arabs

      who seemed to be taking flight lessons. "But that was all they could tell

      us—Jeez, there are a lot of Arabs taking flying lessons!" said the

      official.

            

      DEEP-COVER AGENTS

             Instant experts talk and write ominously about "sleepers," secret

      agents who have burrowed deep into American life, invisible and possibly

      lethal. Actually, the Sept. 11 hijackers were not sleepers in the pure,

      cold-war sense: they were not passively waiting to be "awakened" by an

      order from their spymasters. With perhaps one exception (Hani Hanjour, who

      traveled in and out of the United States for almost 11 years), the

      hijackers came to the United States with a mission: to finish up their

      flying lessons and find a good target. Federal investigators tell NEWSWEEK

      that Mohamed Atta, the ringleader, visited Norfolk, Va., site of a huge

      U.S. Navy base, at least twice in February and April. The Feds believe

      that Atta was scoping out an aircraft carrier as a target. Most of the

      hijackers were slipped into the country last summer as muscle, to slit the

      throats of passengers. The more worrisome kind are like Atta: well

      educated, independent, patient, fanatical. Investigators do not know how

      many other Attas are out there. But they are beginning to have a better

      feel for the variety, cunning and determination of the terrorists who may

      in fact be living next door.

            
             American warplanes have flattened a half-dozen Al Qaeda

      terrorist-training camps in Afghanistan. But the camps were probably empty

      when the bombs fell, and their graduates—an estimated 20,000 men—have long

      since moved on. Many of them became cannon fodder for the endless Afghan

      civil war, but thousands have filtered out to dozens of countries around

      the world. The training camps are but one source of Al Qaeda's manpower.

      Indeed, only three or four of the 19 hijackers spent time in Al Qaeda

      camps. Long before Osama bin Laden began declaring fatwas on America, a

      diffuse network of Islamic terror was planting evil seeds in the United

      States.

              Bin Laden's brainy number two, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has been selling

      global jihad for over a decade. Al-Zawahiri is a kind of black prince of

      Islam. His paternal grandfather was the grand imam at Al-Azhar, the

      Harvard of the Sunni world, in the early 1900s. His father was a

      pharmacology professor at the University of Cairo. Young al-Zawahiri grew

      up in an upper-class neighborhood in Cairo; it may have been telling that

      as a young man at the Maadi Sporting Club, the shy, bespectacled

      al-Zawahiri "liked to watch others play, rather than playing himself,"

      recalled a former classmate. Al-Zawahiri was trained to be a surgeon. Yet

      rather than embrace modernity, he became an Islamic extremist, earning his

      stripes as a minor collaborator in the plot to assassinate Egypt's

      pro-Western President Anwar Sadat in 1981. Though sentenced to death in

      absentia by Egypt, al-Zawahiri appeared to move easily around the world,

      raising money in such seemingly benign settings as a mosque in Santa

      Clara, Calif.

            

      WEEKEND TERRORISM TRAINING

             Al-Zawahiri's terrorist organization, the brutal Egyptian Islamic

      Jihad, began planting agents in America almost two decades ago. When he

      moved to America from Egypt in 1984, Ali Mohamed was in such a hurry to

      assimilate that he married a woman he met on the plane. Incredibly, for a

      time in the late 1980s, Ali Mohamed served as an instructor to U.S.

      Special Forces at Fort Bragg, N.C.—while training future Islamic

      terrorists in Brooklyn, N.Y., and Jersey City, N.J., on the weekends.

      Mohamed later worked directly for Osama bin Laden on the 1998 bombings of

      the U.S. Embassies in Africa. Mohamed persuaded a friend, Khaled Dahab, to

      quit medical school in Cairo and move to California. There, Dahab drove a

      Volvo, joined Blockbuster, shopped at Sears—and allegedly handled

      logistics for terrorists. From his home in Santa Clara, he patched through

      calls for Egyptian Islamic Jihad members and transferred money around the

      globe. Al-Zawahiri called Dahab from time to time, once to price

      telephone-surveillance equipment. (Mohamed is now in a U.S. prison; Dahab,

      who claims he is innocent, is in jail in Egypt.)

     

             Virtually all the men detained for questioning by the FBI are from

      Middle Eastern ethnic groups. But anxious citizens who quietly countenance

      racial profiling to slow down Islamic terrorists may be in for a surprise.

      Al Qaeda is a rainbow coalition. Along with almost every other

      nationality, Al Qaeda training camps have attracted blond, blue-eyed

      Swedes and Germans. Lost youth of any race or nationality can be drawn to

      Islam's certainties. Once in the mosque, they can become bait for

      traveling imams preaching jihad. With its cultlike qualities, Al Qaeda has

      become a catchall for the disaffected.

              Consider the odyssey of David and Jerome Courtailler, born of

      solid French stock, sons of a butcher in the quiet town of Bonneville,

      nestled in the Alps near the Swiss border. The Courtailler boys were

      raised as Roman Catholics and avidly played soccer. But they started using

      drugs and felt trapped in a dead-end existence. "I couldn't see a way

      out," David told Le Nouvel Observateur. Drifting to England looking for a

      job, David "visited a mosque for the first time. It was impressive, all

      these people in the process of finding themselves. There was a serenity

      that showed on their faces." Both boys were recruited to go to

      Afghanistan. "Going there was going to be great," said David. "I had never

      traveled ... I was taken care of totally." They found out they were headed

      for terrorist-training camps only when they got there, David claims. "I

      considered the training to be sort of military service," said David,

      though it grew "tiresome," and David returned home to Bonneville. His

      brother Jerome took a different path: he is now in prison in the

      Netherlands as a prime suspect in an Al Qaeda plot to blow up the American

      Embassy in Paris last summer.

            

      ‘PATIENCE, PRUDENCE, PRECISION'

             Relative innocents can be swept up in the jihad. Dennis Justen is a

      19-year-old blond, unemployed high-school grad from suburban Frankfurt. As

      a young teen, he surprised his parents by fasting for Ramadan, wearing a

      caftan, cutting off his girlfriend and hogging the family bathroom for

      hours-long "ritual cleansing." The Justens were told by counselors that

      their son was "just going through a phase." But on Sept. 22, Justen was

      caught trying to cross the border illegally from Afghanistan to Pakistan.

      Before flying home to Germany, he was interrogated by the FBI. Some

      Europeans join the jihad for more than spiritual relief and a chance to

      see the world. Some very violent types have signed on, like Lionel Dumont,

      29, described by the French press as "the invisible Public Enemy No. 1."

      Growing up in a grimy industrial town in the north of France, he began

      attending a local mosque before doing his time in the French Army in

      Somalia, where he saw vast suffering by Muslims. He drifted to the Bosnian

      civil war, where he joined an extremist faction, called Takfir wal Hijra

      (Expiation and Exile), which is now seen as a core sect in the bin Laden

      network. Dumont and some buddies returned to France and went on a rampage,

      attacking police with assault rifles and grenade launchers. When they

      placed a car loaded with explosives and bottled-gas canisters in front of

      police headquarters in Lille on the eve of a G7 ministers' meeting in

      1996, a violent shoot-out ensued. Dumont escaped, presumably back to

      Bosnia. Among his effects found by police was an explosives manual that he

      had inscribed with the words "Patience, Prudence, Precision."

      "We will have victory like there was in Afghanistan and we will have total

      Islamic law. Not only in Chechnya, but reaching as far as Moscow, New York

      and Washington, D.C."

      — PHYS-ED TRAINER IN MANCHESTER, ENGLAND

              The various civil wars pitting Muslims against infidels around the

      world offer a perfect proving ground for jihad. A videotape obtained by

      the Russian intelligence service, the FSB, shows a muscular black man,

      speaking in perfect English, discussing how he left his work as a phys-ed

      trainer in Manchester, England, to join the mujahedin fighting the

      Russians in Chechnya. "We will have victory like there was in

      Afghanistan," he says, "and we will have total Islamic law. Not only in

      Chechnya, but reaching as far as Moscow, New York and Washington, D.C."

      Another video shows some rebels discussing the attack on the World Trade

      Center. Says one: "It seems that America, between two oceans, cannot

      defend itself. With a few small knives you can take hundreds of thousands

      of lives. The Americans are hiding the real number of casualties so we

      won't celebrate."

            

      ANCIENT HATREDS IN THE INTERNET AGE

             In the loosely linked underworld of Al Qaeda, ancient ethnic

      struggles can turn into modern recruiting posters via the Internet. In the

      Moluccas, the former Spice Islands in Indonesia, Muslims and Christians

      are slaughtering each other, as they have from time to time over the

      centuries. But the Laskar Jihad fighters are using not only

      medieval-looking scimitars but a Web site. It attracts up to 2,500 hits a

      day from like-minded Netizens who view gory photos of anti-Muslim

      atrocities ("His body was cut, his penis was put in his mouth"). "We are

      especially popular in California," says Laskar communications head Hardi

      Ibnu Harun.

 
            Bin Laden's training camps help sort the tourists from the true

      terrorists. In France, police are concerned about a half-dozen cases of

      "missing sons" who told their families they were going to fight "in Bosnia

      in the Muslim struggle" and have not been heard from since. Officials now

      think that some of them may have found their way to Afghanistan and, once

      there, were essentially taken prisoner or brainwashed by cultists. "The

      leaders in these camps separate out the strong from the weak," says one

      French authority. "Those who are strong go on to fight and perhaps become

      leaders themselves. The weak may be simply eliminated."

 

             Some Al Qaeda operatives take their learning with them in a handy

      manual. A mixture of Quran quotes and practical tips for killing, the

      handbook has lessons on kidnapping and assassination using rifles and

      pistols (chapter 14), assassination using explosives (chapter 15) and

      assassination using poisons and cold steel (chapter 16). There is training

      in code (for example, how to encipher the instruction "kill this devil")

      and training in the proper posture for shooting someone ("the body should

      be normal, not tense, and the joints relaxed, not too tight, not too

      loose").

              The manual instructs Al Qaeda fighters to lie low, not to visit

      mosques or publicly praise Allah, and it teaches them how to obtain false

      documents and aliases. As a practical matter, moving in and out of Western

      countries, with their porous borders and civil-rights sensitivities, has

      been a breeze. In 1997, New York police, tipped off by a neighbor, were

      able to foil a plot by Ghazi Ibrahum Aby Mezer to bomb the New York

      subway. It turned out Mezer had already been apprehended three times by

      the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service in the past 13 months for

      illegally entering the United States from Canada. The INS had begun a

      formal deportation proceeding, but he was free on bail and had filed a

      request for political asylum. The ground: he was afraid the Israeli

      government would arrest him for his membership in the Palestinian

      terrorist group Hamas.

            

              To a greater degree than they will ever want to admit, the

      intelligence and law-enforcement authorities of several Western countries

      have tolerated terrorists in their midst. The rationalization has always

      been that it's better to keep an eye on terror cells than drive them

      underground. Radical imams sometimes act as informants for law

      enforcement. In the murky world of terror cells, however, it is sometimes

      hard to tell who is an informant—and who is a double (or triple) agent.

      When Al Qaeda networks moved into the Bosnian civil war, the CIA argued

      against expelling the extremists, insisting that it was more important to

      watch them and monitor their communications.

              The British have not been above tolerating some terrorists of

      their own. For years British authorities have permitted a rabid imam named

      Abu Qatada to preach at a social club in London. But when 18 videos of Abu

      Qatada's rants turned up in the Hamburg apartment of a fugitive member of

      Mohamed Atta's terrorist cell, the fiery imam became an instant candidate

      for new British laws designed to detain potential terrorists without

      trial. All over the world, America and its allies are trying to strangle

      the sleeper cells from within. But in the difficult war on terror,

      squeezing one end of the network may only push the poison in another

      direction. The war on the Taliban has created a flood of refugees. Some of

      them are holy warriors, who pay $20,000 to $30,000 to "travel agents,"

      professional smuggling syndicates that set them up with new identities and

      passports. Newly minted, the jihadists can go back into the world and

      start spreading terror all over again.

     

 

            Bin Laden's Invisible Network

               1 of 5

 

                   1. Bin Laden's Invisible Network

                   2. An Afghan Defector's Story

                   3. ‘I'm Through With Arafat'

                   4. ‘We'll Clap Our Hands'

                   5. Next: Special Ops

            

             © 2003 Newsweek, Inc.

 

 

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