9/11 Cover-up Document

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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.)

 

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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