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Abu Abbas: Planning Suicide Attacks Against Israel
USS Cole: 17 dead mourned as experts piece together attack
Julian Borger in Washington
The
Guardian
Thursday October 19, 2000
Investigators in Yemen yesterday uncovered evidence suggesting the bomb attack on the warship USS Cole had been a meticulously organised conspiracy, which a leading US terrorism expert said may have been the first joint operation between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Under an overcast sky at the Norfolk naval base in Virginia, President Clinton led thousands of US servicemen in mourning the 17 victims of last week's blast, as the state department warned that more attacks against US citizens could be on the way in the Middle East or Turkey.
In Aden, Yemeni police and FBI agents were examining a flat apparently rented by the bomb makers four days before the attack. Bomb-making materials were found in the flat, which was rented by two non-Yemeni Arabs, at least one of whom had a Gulf accent, local residents said. They kept a fibre glass boat parked nearby.
It was not clear whether the missing suspects were the two men who manoeuvred their small boat alongside the USS Cole and blew themselves up, or whether they were technicians spirited out of the country after the attack.
Paying tribute to the Cole victims, Mr Clinton said: "To those who attacked them we say: You will not find a safe harbour. We will find you and justice will prevail. America will not stop standing guard for peace, for freedom or stability in the Middle East or around the world."
Vincent Cannistraro, the CIA's former head of counter-terrorist operations and a respected expert on Middle Eastern terrorism, said the timing, location and method of the attack pointed to Bin Laden's terrorist network, al-Qaeda. He said it was the only group in the area which has issued a fatwa (a religiously inspired death sentence) against US and British citizens.
Bin Laden, a Saudi national based in Afghanistan, has Yemeni family roots and close links with some of the local tribal warlords. A few weeks before the attack, he distributed a video in which he issued familiar calls for a holy war against the "forces of evil". He was wearing Yemeni tribal costume and a Yemeni dagger.
"He's puckish like that. On one hand he does not want to give out his address, but on the other hand, he likes to let his followers know he is leading the fight," Mr Cannistraro said.
He argued that the sophistication of the bomb - an estimated 272kg of high explosive shaped and placed within a metal container to channel the blast and penetrate the armoured hull of the USS Cole - suggested the involvement of a state.
"The Iraqis have wanted to be able to carry out terrorism for some time now," Mr Cannistraro said. "Their military people have had liaison with al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and could well have supplied the training."
He said the theory was still speculative but was consistent with the series of recent contacts between Baghdad and the Bin Laden organisation.
Harvey Kushner, a terrorism expert at Long Island University, said there was reason to believe Bin Laden had been investigating ways of launching attacks by sea. "He's been looking around for small, personal submarines. One of his relatives in the United States had an order in for one of these personal submarines, and it was stopped," Mr Kushner said.
Other terrorism experts agreed the boat bomb was a significant technical advance on earlier terrorist attacks, such as the bombing of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania two years ago.
The bodies of six of the US sailors killed in the blast were still being extracted from the wreckage left by the blast, which punched a 12-metre hole in the ship.
Investigators in Aden were studying video surveillance tapes of the port from the hours leading up to the attack.
Washington Post
The terrorists who bombed the USS Cole in Aden climbed an important rung on the ladder of terrorism. Americans can no longer turn away from the ugly realities of the shadow war directed against their nation. Nor can they ignore the ineptness of U.S. responses.
The Aden massacre was an intelligence success of major proportions for at least one of America's enemies in the Middle East. The tradecraft used shows it was not executed by a band of freelancers who got lucky. It is no longer possible to treat a dozen years of high-profile terror attacks on U.S. targets as random, episodic and self-contained events that can be left to the normal procedures of criminal justice and government bureaucracy.
Modern terrorists climb the ladder of technology with determination. They progress from car bombs to truck bombs to nerve gas, as experts like David Kay have pointed out. They have moved on to packing a ton of sophisticated explosives on a small boat to slaughter U.S. sailors.
But a ladder of objectives is being climbed as well. American airliners, the World Trade Center in New York, United Nations headquarters, U.S. military barracks and embassies abroad--and now a warship--have been the actual or intended targets of bombers with roots in the Middle East.
Easy explanations are available: That's the price of being a global superpower. Somebody somewhere is always going to be angry at you for treading on his culture. Bring the boys back home, or grin and bear it. Either answer will seemingly do.
But what if these targets are being attacked because of the principles and policies of the United States? What if the extensive state resources needed to infiltrate the Aden port operation and gather intelligence on the Cole's movements were mobilized by a state friendly enough to Yemen and hostile enough to the United States to achieve the bombing of the Cole?
The outgoing administration has not made a serious effort to confront and answer similar questions in the earlier attacks. It has appointed ineffectual commissions and left anti-terror policy to mid-level bureaucrats at the National Security Council. A policy heavyweight, a Sam Nunn or a Warren Rudman, should be named to head up a blue-ribbon panel to investigate the operational failures that exposed the Cole to disaster and the larger questions about terrorism.
Bureaucracies instinctively understand when they are being asked to avoid forcing hard choices on leaders. And no president welcomes evidence that may require him to undertake acts of warfare in such murky circumstances.
President Bush faced such a choice shortly after his election in 1988 when Pan Am 103 was blown up over Scotland. His administration responded to evidence implicating Libya's intelligence service by ruling out military retaliation and opting for economic sanctions and the slow path of criminal justice.
The sanctions, and the legal case finally brought against two Libyan underlings under Scottish law, were both unraveling as the Cole tragedy happened.
Investigative author Laurie Mylroie's new book, "Study of Revenge," argues that significant leads that tie the Feb. 26, 1993, bombing of the World Trade Center to Iraq have not been followed up effectively either.
Her case is far from airtight. But she advances what former CIA director James Woolsey calls "a testable hypothesis" that has studiously not been tested by the administration. After the attack on the Cole--on its way to enforce U.N. sanctions against Iraq--such views cannot be dismissed as Iraqophobia or paranoia.
Iraqi intelligence has long maintained a significant presence in the former British coaling station of Aden. The CIA upgraded its presence there in recent years to try to penetrate Saddam Hussein's operations. And Saddam has long-standing political and financial ties with Yemeni leader Ali Abdallah Salih, who initially insisted the Cole explosion was just an accident.
That explanation echoes uncomfortably in my ears. In 1987 an Iraqi jet hit the USS Stark with an Exocet missile and killed 37 sailors. Saddam insisted that was an accident, and the Reagan administration quickly accepted his apology rather than aggressively pursue a difficult inquiry. The U.S. team sent to Baghdad meekly accepted the Iraqi refusal to allow it to question the attacking jet's pilot.
Covering that pseudo investigation was my last trip to Baghdad. Three years later Saddam went to war against Kuwait and dared an American nation he was convinced would never respond. Somewhere someone is watching the American response to the attack on the Cole and thinking about the future. So must America, without further illusion.
Saddam Hussein - battered, humiliated and increasingly isolated - plans to resort to terrorism in revenge for U.S. airstrikes against his country, the Clinton administration believes.
U.S. officials say the CIA has received "credible and reliable" intelligence reports that Saddam is forging alliances with some of the Middle East's most bloodthirsty terrorists - including Osama Bin Laden and Abu Nidal - as part of an apparently new campaign to strike American targets and possibly destabilize Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.
News of Saddam's terrorist strategy comes as American efforts to contain him with sanctions and arms inspections appear to be unraveling in the United Nations.
The United States has squelched Saddam's attempts to launch terrorist strikes - most notably an alleged plot to assassinate former President Bush in Kuwait in 1993.
Now, analysts say, it appears the desperate despot is reaching out for new allies in the region, including vagabond Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal, who turned up last week in Baghdad.
Even more alarming to U.S. experts is an emerging alliance between Saddam and Saudi millionaire Bin Laden, mastermind of the bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa.
Government counterterrorism specialists say emissaries of the two men have been secretly meeting in the Sudan, where both have extensive ties.
U.S. intelligence agencies are concerned about the possibility that Saddam could not only help with funding and logistics for Bin Laden's far-flung network, known as al-Qada, but he could also help the group acquire chemical and biological weapons through the Sudanese connection.
The CIA believes Iraq moved large amounts of precursor chemicals for weapons into the Sudan through Libya before the Gulf War.
Bin Laden has been accused by the Clinton administration of investing in the Sudanese factory that the United States suspected of manufacturing chemical weapons and destroyed with missile attacks last August.
The Islamic Sunni fundamentalist Bin Laden and the secular Saddam would appear to have little in common. But they now have a shared goal: the removal of U.S. forces from the Persian Gulf region and the overthrow of the Saudi monarchy.
Earlier this month, Saddam appeared to move even further ideologically toward Bin Laden when he lashed out at the Saudi and Kuwaiti governments.
"Saudi rulers have caused great calamities to the Arab nation and committed aggression against its rights ever since they became a bridge for the foreigner," Saddam said in a written statement.
Terrorism is the Iraqi ruler's new strategy, said Kenneth Katzman, a former CIA analyst now with the Congressional Research Service.
"Saddam hasn't been much of a player on the terrorism scene lately. But now he's clearly trying to advertise himself in the Arab world as a victim of American aggression in hopes of attracting Bin Laden's supporters and others to his cause," Katzman said.
1 Posted on 10/19/2000 20:41:37 PDT by Spirit Of Truth (spiritof truth@mail.com)
Yup, No evidence. Sort of like that TWA 800 crash. We found those guys didn't we. The Egyptian airliner??? No facts or make the facts to fit the politicl needs.
Some have suggested the Mossad had the capability and the incentive to do it to get us more invoved on Israel's side.
2 Posted on 10/19/2000 20:46:43 PDT by A+Bert
"WHAT 'A' SURPRISE..LET ME 'GET THIS RITE'..THE RAT FINK'S QUISLING..'FBI' AND 'RATS' THAT ARE..ALL 'DRESSED-UP' JUST LIKE 'REAL' US.NAVY OFFICER(S)..AND THESE QUISLING RATS.. SAY..IRAQ..AND SOME FLEA-BITTEN BUM DID IT?..RITE AFTER.. DIVERSION #2..WAS A GESTAPO FLOP..THAT RAT GOVERNORS.. ONE-WAY FLIGHT TO STIFF CITY..FAILED TO DE-RAIL THE DEBATE"... mr spike
3 Posted on 10/19/2000 21:00:43 PDT by mr spike
Thanks to this administration's utter lack of credibility, any announcement about "intelligence reports" must be taken with a whole shaker of salt. After all, we had "credible and reliable" evidence that Osama bin Laden was linked to the Sudanese "chemical weapons" factory, and we even subjected a civilian population in Yugoslavia to a bombing campaign on the "credible and reliable" evidence of 100,000 Albanian deaths.
Again thanks to this administration, almost any conspiracy theory put out about government involvement in provoking or even creating incidents for political gain merits a second look, as it is probably backed by more facts than many of the government's assertions. This sad state of affairs is compounded by a lack among most of the media to search for the truth behind the spin...often, one has to rely on overseas news for the rest of the story!
4 Posted on 10/19/2000 21:08:21 PDT by The_Expatriate
Well, you know, what's the death of 17, when 100 Palestinians have been killed.
5 Posted on 10/19/2000 21:36:48 PDT by brat
'Some' have suggested the Mossad were responsible 'they' should get medication for those voices.
6 Posted on 10/19/2000 21:38:08 PDT by Saint George
Total bull manure..."armoured hull of the USS Cole"
7 Posted on 10/19/2000 22:26:02 PDT by philman_36
There was a post which implied that the Mossad may have shot down the plane to keep Egyptian military, trained in the US, from returning home and using that knowledge against Israel. i.e. missile defense systems, etc.
8 Posted on 10/19/2000 22:30:57 PDT by philman_36
Sorry dude, but at least we should consider all points of
view. Who has the most to gain by committing an act of Terrorism against the US
right now?? Qui bono..... Israel of course. Read history, it is not beyond them.
Look what happened to the British in pre-Israel. How many were executed by the
Irgun terrorsists only to become statesmen later in life.
also i have a
good friend who was responsible for training the Afghani resistance and Osama-Bin laden. He told me that
'this'-the cole is not
Osamas Style. He should know. he spent more time then you or i over there and
knows this CIA made terrorist.
Another thing that made my BS meter rise
was the new news regarding the iraqi connection to the OKC bombing and the whole
dossier that followed on this individual... where was all of this info before. I
have followed this made by government domestic terrorist activity since the
beginining and never have i seen so much released on any of the
conspirators.
no , me thinks this is a setup to turn the American peoples
mindset to go one way. Pure unadulterated support for israel. I dont buy it. We
need to go neutral to either side. No pro or arab posturing. It would do us no
good to do otherwise. America first. Americas Interest first. If they jews and
the arabs cant play nicy nicy with each other then let them blow the hell out of
each other. may be then after the mad dogs on both sides are dead, then maybe we
wont hear anymore crap coming out of there. Now this is a sane
policy.
lastly... how many places is osama from or has roots or
has family... Is it saudi, is it iraq, is it afghanistan, is
it sudan now yemen... come on now . Damn and i am santa claus, just because 'I
SAID SO' that makes it so. Please people dont be so clueless look beyond the
preprogrammed emotional response that is being solicited from us now.
9 Posted on 10/19/2000 22:47:26 PDT by HappyAndFree
I expect King Klinton to launch air strikes against Irag and Afghanistan any day now. The kosher media will drum up a war frenzy. Full-scale war may erupt in the Middle East.
This time American cities will not escape terrorist attacks. The casualties could be enormous.
Nothing can stop King Klinton from inflicting his evil legacy upon the American people.
Regards,
10 Posted on 10/19/2000 22:54:19 PDT by Zoroaster
I certainly hope you're wrong, but it does seem more than coincidental that, although we've been bombing Iraq on a seemingly daily basis for the past few years (enforcing the "no-fly zone"), Iraq has garnered little mainstream media attention until just recently. I would like to believe that there is enough skepticism among the American people that any escalation would be seen as a "Hail Mary pass" attempt to salvage a contemptuous legacy of scandal but, given how so many sheeple are content to believe whatever they are spoon-fed by the media, this could be wishful thinking.
If Clinton really wants to make the news, perhaps we could strap him Dr. Strangelove-style to one of our few remaining cruise missiles and send him on a one-way trip to eternal fame...anyone have the address of the nearest Chinese embassy?
11 Posted on 10/19/2000 23:11:03 PDT by The_Expatriate
I hope I'm wrong, too. Although I'm not a religious person, at times I believe Klinton derives his political strength from occult powers. This guy is pure evil. He reminds me of Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger, which protrays the devil as a benevolent kind of guy.
Regards,
12 Posted on 10/19/2000 23:43:29 PDT by Zoroaster
Wow..both boogey men working in cahoots together.
13 Posted on 10/20/2000 01:28:10 PDT by riri
Why the hell is the FBI investigating this? This is under the jurisdiction of the Naval Investigative Service, (NIS,) Department of Defense!
14 Posted on 10/20/2000 01:55:10 PDT by Born on the Storm King
It's all talk, and Bad Ben has to be the one behind it all. He probably is, but the loonies in Washingtoon are only guessing. It must really frustrate Klintoon, as well, Algor, because it couldn't have happened at a worst time. No doubt we will soon learn the Commander in Chicken has once again sent a few missiles into some well known secret hide out that has been under observation for quite some time (bla, bla, bla), and was directly responsible for the terrorist attack on the Cole. That should show the public that the Clinton-Gore malignancy has everything under control once again. Of course, the sheepie will believe it, but I doubt that any body else will, especially if we experience another terrorist attack and have even a greater number of people killed and injured.
What frightens me the most is, we may well be seeing only the beginning of these terrorist attacks, and we have a very incapable and stagnant present administration which is the main cause of it.
15 Posted on 10/20/2000 03:10:57 PDT by Reschev
The language of this piece is somewhat deceptive.
Bin Laden's father was a Saudi contractor, but Bin Laden went to Afganistan when he was 19 to drive a bull-dozer and work with the freedom fighters against the Communists there.
He may still be considered by some to be a Saudi National, however he was exiled from Saudi many years ago.
16 Posted on 10/20/2000 04:48:52 PDT by passin pilgrim
Well said.. Your view is probably the closest to the truth as one can get.
17 Posted on 10/20/2000 04:51:08 PDT by passin pilgrim
Beelzebubba.
18 Posted on 10/23/2000 19:18:57 PDT by SmithW6079
Why not add the schoolbuses and airplanes that these "palestinians" have murdered?
19 Posted on 10/23/2000 19:22:06 PDT by SmithW6079
BTTT
20 Posted on 09/11/2001 13:45:01 PDT by Uncle Bill
BUMP!!
21 Posted on 09/15/2001 13:28:13 PDT by SamAdams76
BTTT
22 Posted on 09/15/2001 22:13:44 PDT by Uncle Bill
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
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