Cyrus Nowrasteh, scriptwriter for ABC’s docudrama The Path
to 9/11, defends the film’s controversial, invented scenes,
noting that the first attack on the World Trade
Center occurred one month after Bill Clinton took office, and eight
years passed in which Clinton did little to thwart the growing
menace. Nowrasteh makes a crucial point, but it is not necessary to
resort to fiction. Our understanding of the terrorist attacks —
going back to the 1993 Trade Center bombing — has become loaded
with errors obscuring Clinton’s fecklessness. Correct those errors,
which, unfortunately the film reproduces, and this essential point
is far clearer.
The film links Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 bombing, to
Osama bin Ladin. But, in fact, Yousef and bin Ladin had nothing to
do with each other. Bin Laden is not indicted for the Trade Center
bombing — intended to topple the towers and kill 250,000 people —
despite an extensive effort to discover such links. Nor is that
attack included in the military charges against Guantanamo Bay detainees, which outline
al Qaeda’s conspiracy against America. Indeed, bin Laden was not
indicted until June 1998, when he was charged with one
count: “conspiracy to attack defense utilities of the
United States.” The target is not identified, and no actual attack
occurred.
Al Qaeda was long a small, secretive organization. There is
virtually no public mention of it during its first decade — a
Lexis-Nexis search produces five articles — until the August 1998
bombings of two U.S. embassies. Only after those attacks,
is al Qaeda added to the official U.S. list of terrorist groups.
The 9/11 Commission notes, “While we now know that al Qaeda was
formed in 1988, at the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan,
the Intelligence Community did not describe this organization
in documents we have seen, until 1999 (emphasis added.)
It would have been a truly massive failure of virtually every
U.S. agency responsible for fighting terrorism if bin Laden had
backed a plot to kill 250,000 Americans in 1993, but the Justice
Department only charged him with any crime five years later and the
intelligence community only began to analyze his organization the
following year.
Terrorist Family Extraordinaire
George Tenet told the Congressional Joint Inquiry, “We now
believe that a common thread runs between the first attack on the
World Trade Center in February 1993 and the 11 September
attacks….Mukhtar is the uncle of Ramzi Yousef, who masterminded
the 1993 bombing plot against the World Trade Center. Following the
1993 attack, Yousef and Mukhtar plotted in 1995 to blow up [twelve]
U.S. planes flying East Asian routes.”
“Mukhtar” was an alias for Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM), the
9/11 mastermind. “Since September 11, the CIA has come to believe
that KSM may have been responsible for all bin Laden operations
outside Afghanistan,” the Joint Inquiry reports. Yet U.S.
authorities only learned of KSM’s key role after the capture and
interrogation of a senior al Qaeda figure in 2002. A U.S.
intelligence official later told the Washington Post, “It
wasn’t until recently that any of us even realized he was part of
al Qaeda….The big problem nailing him down is that the informants
that we relied on, especially before 9/11, were mujaheddin. They’d
been in Afghanistan, in Sudan, back in Afghanistan. Khalid was
never a part of any of that” (emphasis added)
Ammar al-Baluchi (aka Ali Abdul Aziz Ali) — Ramzi Yousef’s
first cousin and another KSM nephew — was KSM’s “right-hand man.” Al-Baluchi sent the “primary funding” to the hijackers and coached
nine of them on how to behave in America.
Following KSM’s capture in 2003, U.S. authorities told the
Washington Post they were “concerned that his nephews —
the brothers of imprisoned terrorist Ramzi Yousef — may be
positioned to take over planning of future terror attacks.” They
named two men: Abdul Munim and Abdul Karim. Nothing further has
been reported about Abdul Munim, but Abdul Karim proved a key
figure. Captured in May 2004, his interrogation led to further
arrests and the discovery of a major plot against US financial
centers.
Thus, the official U.S. position holds that a family
essentially forms the core expertise for the major attacks that
began with the 1993 Trade Center bombing, culminated in 9/11, and
even continued afterwards. Yet no precedent exists for a single
family to be the sole, or even the key, source of expertise for a
major terrorist group.
According to U.S. intelligence, this family is Baluch, a Sunni
Muslim people, living in Eastern Iran and Western Pakistan (The
Path to 9/11 erroneously identifies Yousef as Palestinian.)
Following Yousef’s arrest in Islamabad, the New York Times
reported:
The Pakistan newspaper, The News, which is
said to have good sources in the Pakistani military’s
Inter-Services Intelligence agency, said that “if features could
betray geography,” Mr. Yousef appeared to Pakistani investigators
“as if he is from the coastal belt of Baluchistan.”…[They] had
noted that President Saddam Hussein’s Government in Iraq had tried
to exploit animosities against the Iran Government among Baluch
tribal people in southeastern Iran during the Iran-Iraq war in the
1980s. The newspaper said this could explain how Mr. Yousef came
into possession of the Iraqi passport that he used when he arrived
in New York in September 1992, six months before the World Trade
Center bombing. “If Ramzi is in fact of Iranian Baluch origin, it
would not have been big problem for him to get an Iraqi passport,”
the newspaper said. [February 13, 1995]
Yet the Clinton administration did not want to hear this. (In the
1992 presidential campaign, I was Clinton’s adviser on Iraq; in
later encounters with the White House, I found it strongly
resistant to hearing about evidence linking Saddam to terrorism.)
An Alternative Explanation
An alternative explanation for al Qaeda’s terrorism exists. After
bin Laden was expelled to Afghanistan in 1996, two groups joined
forces: 1) the original al Qaeda, represented by bin Laden and
those around him; and 2) the Baluch: KSM and his extended “clan,”
which is probably not a family, but an elite squad. Probably, these
individuals were selected in the same way we would recruit such a
group: they were chosen for their special aptitudes from a much
larger pool and then given additional training — most likely, by
Iraq.
The path to 9/11 really began with the Baluch before
their alliance with al Qaeda — with the 1993 Trade Center bombing
and the 1995 plane bombing plot. Only after KSM joined
with bin Laden, bringing with him the skills of his group, did al
Qaeda’s major attacks against the U.S. begin — starting with the
1998 embassy bombings. This would help explain how a virtually
unknown organization like al Qaeda managed to bomb two U.S.
embassies nearly simultaneously and then carry out the most lethal
single attack in U.S. history a mere three years later.
