The 1993 World Trade Center Bombing: Decoys, Aliases and NeoConspiracy Theories
Like so many major terrorist
attacks, the World Trade Center (WTC) bombing of February 1993 occurred
shortly after the US presidential election. The incoming Bill Clinton
was confronted with a new menace: Islamic terror had for the first time
carried out a major strike on US soil. The first new president after
the end of the Cold War and the previous president’s announcement of a
‘new world order’ was within weeks given a stark reminder that with the
Soviet Union out of the way the US still faced a clear and present
danger.
Of course, I speak rhetorically. Six
people died in the blast, and while it was tragic for their bereaved
families and painful for the over 1000 people injured, the bark was
worse than the bite in this attack. The bomb built by Ramzi
Yousef shocked many, and managed to destroy a surprisingly large amount
of the underground parking garage at the WTC, but given that the idea
was to topple one tower into the other potentially killing 250,000
people, it was a miserable failure. Nonetheless, the bombing remains the
subject of much conjecture, some well evidenced and some not, and
served to implant the idea in the American and Western consciousness of
Islamic terrorists attacking the WTC.
The Blind Sheikh
The first major port of call in any
investigation of the bombing, or telling of the story, is the Blind
Sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman. He was the leader of the Egyptian Islamic
Group (IG, or al-Gama’a
al-Islamiyya), at the time perhaps the largest overtly militant Islamic
group in the country. The crackdown following the assassination of Anwar
Sadat had produced in typically polarising fashion a backlash in favour
of Islamic radicalism. That this happened at the same time as the
extremely well-funded NATO effort to use radical Islam as a weapon
against the Soviet Union is no coincidence.
Towards
the end of the 1980s, as the Soviet-Afghan war was coming to its
inevitable conclusion, the Blind Sheikh escaped from house arrest in
Egypt and paid several visits to the US. Specifically, he fostered a
following at the Al-Kifah Refugee Centre at the Al Farooq moseque in New
York. Al-Kifah was the local branch of the Maktab Al-Khidamat or
Services Office for the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, and was central to
the process by which young men were recruited, moved around the world
for training and ultimately deployed against the Soviets.
The CIA has remained tight-lipped about
their involvement in Al-Kifah but given the timing of its development,
its location and the fact that their agents posing as consular officials
arranged the visas that allowed the Blind Sheikh to enter the US, it is
obvious that they were at the least happy about Rahman’s growing
influence there. In April and May 1989 US officials secretly met with
followers of the Blind Sheikh in Egypt, including a lawyer representing
the group. The cables recording these meetings were signed by Frank
Wisner — the US ambassador to Egypt and the son of the veteran of CIA
black ops. A year later the Blind Sheikh moved to New York permanently.
Six months after that El Sayyid Nosair, a
follower of Rahman, assassinated prominent rabbi Meir Kahane, founder
of the Jewish Defence League and a former FBI informant. A few weeks
later the State Department revoked all of the Blind Sheikh’s visas, but
nothing else happened to him. Nosair was arrested but the investigation
didn’t reach into the question of what was going on at the Al-Kifah.
Rahman was never arrested or deported.
A couple of months later the Emir of the
Farooq mosque Mustafa Shalabi was murdered, almost 2 years to the day
prior to the WTC bombing. Rahman effectively took over the mosque and
the Al-Kifah center at that point. Meanwhile, notorious triple agent
Ali Mohamed had been providing training sessions in intelligence and
paramilitary operations to those who frequented the mosque, including
Nosair. He also trained virtually the entire group involved in and
ultimately convicted for the WTC bombing.
The Decoy
It is at this point in the story that
the alternative explanations of the bombing focus on one Emad Salem — a
former Egyptian army officer recruited as an informant by the FBI. He
had infiltrated the Al-Kifah and the circle around the Blind Sheikh and
was provided regular intelligence on what they were doing. However,
what almost every alternative theory about WTC93 gets wrong is that they
claim Salem built the bomb that was used, usually based on a few
seconds of audio of Salem talking to one of his FBI handlers, John
Anticev.
In reality, Salem was fired by the FBI
in bizarre circumstances in the summer of 1992. He didn’t build the
bomb – terrorists do not build a bomb and then wait around for six
months before using it. Exactly why Salem was fired is not clear, but
when his original handler Nancy Floyd started asking questions the FBI
leaked stories to the press that she was sleeping with Salem and
ultimately subjected her to a career-damaging internal affairs
investigation. As a result, six months before the bombing the FBI lost
their eyes and ears inside the Blind Sheikh’s group.
After the bombing, Salem was
re-recruited by the FBI to infiltrate the Al-Kifah once more, which he
did. At that point he was paid a large sum of money to act as a sting
operator, encouraging the Blind Sheikh to make incriminating statements
that Salem secretly recorded, and encouraging Rahman’s followers to
develop plans for terrorists attacks that they were then arrested for,
and prosecuted and convicted. The recordings of Salem talking with
Anticev come from this period, spring-summer 1993. When the FBI swooped
in the summer of ’93, they arrested the Blind Sheikh and most of the
group around him, and Salem’s evidence became the basis of the
prosecution case.
At this point the State Department,
having revoked the Blind Sheikh’s visas 2 1/2 years earlier in late 1990
but done nothing to him in the meantime, carried out a Office of the
Inspector General (OIG) investigation of the decision to grant him the
visas in the first place. This involved trying to see the files in
Cairo from the period when CIA agents were granting the visas, but the
papertrail from the State Department is heavily redacted and it appears
the 1993 OIG investigation never actually got to see the Cairo files.
Ultimately the OIG concluded that they didn’t know whether the decisions
to grant the visas was correct because they couldn’t definitely say
what was known at the time. No one got blamed, everyone kept their
jobs, it was business as usual.
With Salem functioning as something of a decoy in this story, the question remains: who did build the bomb used in the WTC?
A.K.A.
According to the official story, and his
own extended confession, and much of the evidence, the real bomb-maker
was Ramzi Yousef, born Abdul Basit but also known as Dr Paul Vijay, Dr
Adel Sabah, Muhammud Azan, Rashid Rashid, Kamal Ibraham among many other
pseudonyms. Ramzi arrived in New York in September 1992, following six
months training in Afghanistan in explosives. He conveniently turned
up just after Emad Salem had been removed from watching the Al-Kifah.
Trained in Britain in electrical engineering, Yousef was smart and
capable and found in the Al-Kifah a willing reception committee for his
plan to blow up something in New York.
That said, it wasn’t plain sailing. In
particular, Mohammed Salameh (convicted in the first of the three WTC
trials) was a complete moron, managing to crash a car loaded with
chemicals for making the bomb which resulted in Yousef ending up in
hospital. He also forgot to give Yousef the planned early
morning wake-up call on the day of the bombing. Nonetheless, this
relatively ragtag group who were inspired by CIA asset the Blind Sheikh
and trained by triple agent Ali Mohamed managed to pull off the bombing.
However, that is far from the end of the
story. For one thing the damage to the WTC was considerable — several
floors were partly destroyed, including a 5000 square foot hole on one
floor. This suggests that the truck bomb may not have been the only
explosive used at the WTC, that as in Oklahoma City there is a case for
the prosecution case being true but being only part of the story. What
is certain is that there was no trace of the main explosive charge found
in the rubble of the WTC explosion, and that the FBI explosives
examiner David Williams essentially guessed at what explosive was used,
and then modified his guesses to fit the prosecution evidence, and
he repeatedly gave untrue testimony against Salameh et al in the 1994
trial.
Due to the whistle blowing efforts of
Fred Whitehurst the Department of Justice OIG carried out an
investigation into the crime lab, including Williams role in the WTC
investigation which concluded that, ‘Williams
gave inaccurate and incomplete testimony and testified to invalid
opinions that appear tailored to the most incriminating result.’ While
not all of Whitehurst’s complaints were upheld, it does put a few cracks
in the official WTC bombing story.
For another, who was Ramzi Yousef?
This international man of mystery was certainly not particularly
religious, and enjoyed B-girls and brothels on his travels around the
world. He may well have been trained by Ali Mohamed, who according to
multiple testimonies from trainees was in the same area of Afghanistan
as Yousef for much of 1992. When Yousef left New York on the evening of
the WTC bombing he spent the next two years on the run from the FBI,
travelling all over Asia carrying out various acts of terrorism before
being brought to ground in February 1995. How did he manage this?
It appears he had help from the ISI. Simon Reeve’s remarkably prescient and accurate book The New Jackals,
based on an extraordinary degree of access to the security services
around the case only a year or two after Yousef had been convicted,
records several instances of this. When Yousef landed in Pakistan in
May 1992 his fake Iraqi passport had the wrong seal on the visa, and yet
he was waived through. Similarly, when he and Ahmed Ajaj first entered
the US on badly faked passports, Ajaj was arrested but Yousef was not,
despite it being clear they were travelling together. When Yousef’s
Pakistani immigration records were checked as part of the WTC
investigation, much of the paperwork had disappeared. The implication
is that someone was clearing a path for him.
NeoConspiracy Theories
Another misdirection in this story is
the theory propounded by NeoConservative mouthpiece Laurie Mylroie, who
claimed that Yousef was in fact an Iraqi spy. Prior to the Iraq
invasion of Kuwait, Yousef (then known as Abdul Basit) and his family
lived in Kuwait, though ethnically they were Baluchi. This is why
another of Yousef’s pseudonyms, given to the FBI when he signed a waiver
of his miranda rights, was Adam Baloch. Due to discrepancies in
official records on Yousef/Basit, Mylroie claimed that the invading
Iraqi army killed Basit and his family and replaced him with a spy using
the Basit/Yousef identity. Who was between 4 and 6 inches taller and
has never mentioned anything about being an Iraqi secret agent even
though he’s now languishing in solitary confinment serving prison
sentences amounting to hundreds of years and therefore has nothing to
lose.
Mylroie has been widely criticised for
this rather ridiculous theory, but she was still hired in 2005 to write a
History of Al Qaeda for the Pentagon, and paid $75,000 for her
trouble. She once again put forth the theory that Iraq and Al Qaeda
were closely related, that Yousef was an Iraqi spy, that Iraq bombed the
WTC. The problem was that following the NATO invasion of Iraq in 2003 a
lot of Iraqi government files were seized, and they were published
alongside two Pentagon studies in 2006-2008.
One file in particular is an audio
recording and a transcript of a meeting between Saddam and his ministers
where they discuss the WTC bombing. There was no mention of Yousef, no
hint of Iraqi involvement in the attack, nothing that would
substantiate Mylroie’s daft and misguiding allegations, and quite a lot
that contradicts her. For one thing, one of the conspirators named
Abdul Yasin fled to Iraq after the bombing but he was arrested by the
Iraq authorities in 1994 and held until at least 2002, though he has not
been heard from since then.
In the meeting, Saddam expressed how
important it was that Yasin remain alive in custody, and not be killed
or commit suicide. Hussein did try to use Yasin as a bargaining chip
with the Americans, but this always failed. Saddam also discussed how
it was possible that the American, Israeli or Saudi governments were
really behind the WTC blast, and how the Iraq government should find
ways to exploit the bombing through propaganda. It was a remarkably
explicit conversation, and yet nothing in any way backed up Mylroie’s
contentions.
So what the hell happened?
With this concrete example of the story
(or legend) of Ramzi Yousef being used to bolster a politically useful
myth we are left to wonder what else in his story is not true. After
his arrest he provided extensive confessions, all of which fits in with
most of the prosecution case against the WTC accused. He even had a
proffer session, recorded in an FBI 302, with the State’s Attorney’s
office in New York where he outlined how he built and delivered the
bomb. It seems that he did actually bomb the WTC, though exactly why he
did that, and why those who helped him did so remains something of a
mystery.
That the WTC bombing in 1993 has been
used to substantiate the Al Qaeda myth, and in particular the Iraq-Al
Qaeda fantasy, does show that there is a degree of spook theatre to all
of this. The FBI were blindsided for reasons that have never been
adequately explained, in largely the same way as happened in the run up
to 9/11. Whatismore, the 9/11 Commission’s records at the National
Archives are woefully incomplete on the subject of the Blind Sheikh,
with over 200 pages of CIA and State Department material withdrawn for
National Security reasons. The 9/11 Commission barely even acknowledged
Ali Mohamed’s existence, let alone the importance of a triple agent who
was close friends with Ayman Zawahiri and was so trusted by Bin Laden
that he trained Osama’s bodyguards.
With a cover-up now lasting 20 years (20
years tomorrow at the time of writing) it is difficult to know exactly
what happened and why the WTC was bombed in February 1993. Nonetheless
there is abundant material available on the case, which I have sought
to whittle down to the key source material in the WTC93 Document Collection,
a free e-book comprising nearly 250 pages of material and featuring an
introduction explaining the relevance of each document. There is no
smoking gun, though it is interesting that in recent days a story has
hit the headlines that Ramzi Yousef is suing for an explanation of why
he is still subject to ‘special administration measures’, such as not
being allowed to communicate with other people. Unsurprisingly the news
coverage has portrayed Yousef solely as an inhuman bomber who deserves
to be treated inhumanely and has ignored the bigger picture, and maybe
that was the point all along.
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