Pakistani connection?
The Hindu, one of India’s national newspapers, is questioning whether Pakistan’s September 11 connection has been investigated sufficiently.
UPDATE — 30 July: There’s a full refutation and discussion of the truth of the article in the comments here.
Ecto blogging software
30 July 2004 at 12:56 pm.
A followup — from Thomas Beal, a WSJ reporter in my acquaintance, who sets out to refute and dispute the charges of this article in the following.
Anyone who knows the views of Michael Meacher knows his loathsome claim,
also in the Guardian, that the U.S. knowingly and willfully let the 9/11
attacks occur because it fit into a grander and more sinister effort to
procure future supplies of Middle East oil, and thus also knows he is a
scoundrel and a liar. This piece seems to suggest such a thesis again before
it veers off the road altogether.
I take exception to the following:
I knew Danny Pearl, and while Mariane has many grievances (justifiably
against The Wall Street Journal management, the CIA, the ISI, the Pakistani
lawyer who hit her up for $70,000 in legal fees, Kamran Khan, the Washington
Post’s Pakistani freelancer, to name but a few) I would bet the fact that
Omar Sheik isn’t getting a fair trial in one of General Musharaff’s kangaroo
courts is not among them. Who or what is the source of Meacher’s contention
that Mariane “has since acknowledged that Sheik was not responsible” for
Danny’s death? Read Mariane’s book and subsequent interviews and you’ll
discover she believes Omar Sheik is indeed responsible — responsible enough
to deserve the death penalty, which she had previously opposed.
“When I heard Omar Sheik was sentenced to death, I didn’t rejoice,” she told
the Washington Post in October. “I thought he should die. Omar Sheik did
what he did in full knowledge of what he was doing. He should die. But
that’s not making me feel better. It’s just sad.”
And this statement in May from Mariane and Danny’s parents, Ruth and Judea,
following further revelations about Danny’s hideous murder: “We are eager to
see justice served and the truth come out. We are especially waiting to see
a just conclusion of Omar Saeed Sheikh’s conviction and the apprehension of
all those involved.” Just conclusion.
Furthermore, when did the U.S. government also “acknowledge” Omar Sheik’s
innocence? Meacher doesn’t say and I would suggest he’s made it up. The
Justice Department under the evil John Ashcroft has not rescinded a May 2002
New Jersey grand jury indictment of Omar Sheik, under which he was charged
with Danny’s kidnapping and murder, and the armed kidnapping of Bela Nuss,
an American, in India in 1994. If Saeed were to ever stand trial in a U.S.
court and be found guilty of the crimes he is charged with committing
against Danny, he could receive the death penalty. Conviction in the Nuss
case carries life in prison.
And what of General Ahmed? And what of the $100,000, a story Meacher
apparently accepts as fact but which has never properly been confirmed as
true. In October 2001, the Journal and many other news organizations
reported that Ahmed, was fired by Musharaff after being linked to a $100,000
payment that had been wired to Atta to pay for the 9/11 attacks. But the
Journal story Meacher mentions never actually named Gen. Ahmed as the source
of the money. Quoting an unamed U.S. official, it said only that several
wire transfers totaling $100,000 came from the United Arab Emirates to a
Atta’s Florida bank roughly a year before the attacks. “The money is
believed to come originally from Pakistan, an official said.”
Indeed, the 9/11 Commission claimed it was unable to determine who funded
the stay in the U.S. of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers. It appears to ignore the
information that Atta received the bank transfer from Karachi through Dubai
precisely because it cannot confirm with any certainty the money’s origins.
In the July 2003 edition of Foreign Affairs, Harvard’s Jessica Stern related
this plausibile alternative: that Omar Sheikh had a mutually beneficial
relationship with an ambitious Indian gangster named Aftab Ansari. Asif Reza
Khan, the “chief executive” for Ansari’s Indian operations, told
interrogators after his arrest that he received military training at a camp
in Khost, Afghanistan, belonging to Lashkar-e-Taiba, and that “leaders of
different militant outfits in Pakistan were trying to use his network for
the purpose of jihad, whereas [Ansari] was trying to use the militants’
networks for underworld operations.”
Khan told his interrogators that the don provided money and hideouts to his
new partners, in one case transferring $100,000 to Omar Sheik — money that
Omar Sheik, in turn, wired to Atta. Stern wrote: “According to Khan, Ansari
viewed the $100,000 gift as an ‘investment’ in a valuable relationship.”
Moreover, contrary to what Meacher suggests, the 9/11 hijackers appear to
have been rolling in money from more than just one source. As part of their
investigation into al-Qaida’s Hamburg cell, German authorities arrested the
Moroccan electrical engineering student Moumir el Motassadeg, alleging he
had deposited “large sums” into a bank account he shared with the hijacker
Marwan Al-Shehhi, who passed the money along to Atta and another hijacker,
Ziad Samir Jarrah.
But the estimated cost for the entire 9/11 operation has been pegged at
nearly a half million dollars. Where did it all come from? Most of it, we
think, came from the plot mastermind, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, whom Meacher
mentions in passing as having been “allegedly” arrested in Rawalpindi last
year. In any event, the money was passed from KSM to the hijackers by
electronic transfer and courier through the United Arab Emirates. But where
he got the money is still unknown.
As for Gen. Ahmed, an investigation of his activities might be hard pressed
to implicate him directly in the 9/11 attacks, if that is what Meacher is
getting at, unless it could prove the general was on a suicide mission. I
recall a Washington Post feature about Sen. Graham, chairman of the Senate
Intelligence Committee, whom Meacher also mentions. His first foreign trip
as chairman was a late-August 2001 journey with House intelligence Chairman
Goss and Republican Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona focusing almost entirely on
terrorism. It ended in Pakistan, where Gen. Ahmed’s intelligence agents
briefed them on the growing threat of al-Qaida, according to Graham. The
general hadn’t said all that much, but the group agreed to discuss the issue
more when he visited Washington in September.
And so Ahmed did meet with them again on Sept. 11. According to Graham they
all reconvened in a top-secret conference room on the fourth floor of the
U.S. Capitol, which was in fact the target of the fourth hijacked plane.
United Airlines Flight 93, in which passengers fought back against the
hijackers but never actually made it into the cockpit, crashed in
Pennsylvania.
Regards,
Thom