Please begin by watching the following brief video segment:

Today young Americans are fighting and dying in the Iraq War, and increasingly these soldiers feel their sacrifices are without just cause because the principal bases for which war was initially waged were undermined by subsequent revelations from the U.S. intelligence community that suggested Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction and was not involved in terrorism against America. But did U.S. intelligence come clean on previous failures, or did this elite community succumb to the persuasion of political forces whose agenda is contrary to our national interests? There is substantial reason to believe that the U.S. intelligence community has recently been lying to the American people, as well as itself, in a way that could be considered treasonous.

The American people pay some $50 billion a year for U.S. 'intelligence'. Yet, U.S. intelligence is dangerously incompetent at best and potentially treacherous at worst.

The job of U.S. intelligence is pretty straightforward:

"The United States intelligence effort shall provide the President and the National Security Council with the necessary information on which to base decisions concerning the conduct and development of foreign, defense and economic policy, and the protection of United States national interests from foreign security threats. All departments and agencies shall cooperate fully to fulfill this goal." - Executive Order 12333

Yet somehow the various intelligence agencies are consistently wrong on issues of the greatest importance to American national security. These government employees simply aren't doing their jobs.

If you have troubles understanding this, consider the following...

Please examine the pictures below taken of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM), the admitted mastermind of 9/11, right after his capture on March 1st of 2003:

How old does this man appear to be to you?

Now let's consider some excerpts from the transcript of Khalid Mohammed's military tribunal at which he confessed to masterminding 9/11 and most of the terrorist attacks against America up to his capture that were attributed to "al Qaeda". (In the tribunal Khalid opted to testify in English and his words were transcribed verbatim.)

Here is the key paragraph where KSM says "Yes" to 31 stated confessions including responsiblity for the 9/11 attacks (from A to Z) and the first terrorist attempt to destroy the World Trade Center towers in 1993:

BEGIN DETAINEE ORAL STATEMENT Yes. And I want to add some of this one just for some verification. It like some operations before I join al Qaida. Before I remember al Qaida which is related to Bojinka Operation I went to destination involve to us in 94, 95. Some Operations which means out of al Qaida. It's like beheading Daniel Pearl. It's not related to al Qaida. It was shared in Pakistani. Other group, Mujahadeen. The story of Daniel Pearl, because he stated for the Pakistanis, group that he was working with the both. His mission was in Pakistan to track about Richard Reed trip to Israel. Richard Reed, do you have trip? You send it Israel to make set for targets in Israel. His mission in Pakistan from Israeli intelligence, Mosad, to make interview to ask about when he was there. Also, he mention to them he was both. He have relation with CIA people and were the Mosad. But he was not related to al Qaida at all or UBL. It is related to the Pakistan Mujahadeen group. Other operations mostly are some word I'm not accurate in saying. I'm responsible but if you read the heading history. The line there [Indicating to Personal Representative a place or Exhibit D-c]. [Transcript PDF]

Very little information has been released to the public by U.S. intelligence regarding the al Qaeda terrorists who have been apprehended thus far that were behind 9/11 and other terrorism against America to-date. In the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, as far as I know the only information released to the public since his capture are the photos above and the transcript from the military tribunal excerpted above in which he confessed to masterminding 9/11 and most of al Qaeda's terrorism to-date.

Here's the problem.

According to the Kuwaiti Interior Ministry, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was born on April 14th, 1965, making him 37-years-old when the photos above were taken following his capture. Does the man above look like he's 37 years old?

What's more, according to his official biography, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed studied in the U.S. for three years between 1983 and 1986 and received a college degree in mechanical engineering. As Time magazine reported regarding KSM : "His English is flawless, and his intelligence formidable. He raced through an engineering degree at the North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University in Greensboro in just two and a half years, graduating in 1986".

Is the tortured English spoken in the confession above consistent with someone known to speak "flawless" English who earned a four-year degree in mechanical engineering in less than three years at an American college?

If you are of sound and open mind, the answer to these questions should be NO and NO.

Now, given that KSM masterminded the 9/11 attacks, given that he was behind almost all the terrorism against America up to his capture that has been attributed to al Qaeda, and given that the War On Terror was effectively provoked by the actions of this one man, you would think U.S. intelligence would be concerned with the suspicious points I'm addressing here regarding just who KSM really is. The man captured and considered to be Khalid Sheikh Mohammed by U.S. authorities may, in fact, be someone else. In other words, the person now in custody at Guantanamo is quite possibly using a LEGEND, i.e., a false identity, stolen from a real individual named Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

On March 1st, 2003, I met with Dr. Laurie Mylroie, author of War Against America: Saddam Hussein and the World Trade Center Attacks - A Study Of Revenge and BUSH VS. THE BELTWAY: How the CIA and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror, at the Pentagon City Ritz-Carlton for lunch to discuss Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

We were meeting because I had earlier uncovered, upon reading a lengthy article which appeared in the Los Angeles Times, that Khalid Mohammed was the uncle of Abdul Basit, rather than the terrorist mastermind Ramzi Yousef as was being widely reported at the time. This is critical because in her work, Dr. Mylroie posits that Abdul Basit is a Kuwaiti that Ramzi Yousef sought to assume the identity of in pursuing his terrorist operations against the U.S. including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the first attempt to destroy the Twin Towers [See Chapter 5 from Study Of Revenge - note that, even though Abdul Basit was born in Kuwait, he still was technically a Pakistani living in Kuwait because of the emirate's laws regarding foreigners....the same goes for KSM]. If Khalid Mohammed was Yousef's "uncle", then the odds were that Khalid Mohammed was likewise a Kuwaiti identity being used falsely by a state-sponsored operative to conduct terror operations against the U.S. in a surreptitious manner. One would think a nephew and uncle would recognize if the other was eliminated and a terrorist infamous around the world was assuming their identity.

Before going public with this information, Laurie wanted to have lunch with me to discuss what I had figured out as she wished to preempt publication of the case regarding Iraqi complicity in 9/11 with an article that appeared seventeen days later, just before the Iraq War commenced, in the Wall Street Journal dubbed, The Baluch Connection: Is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed tied to Baghdad? (see below).

As it turned out, just before I left my hotel room at the Ritz-Carlton to meet Dr. Mylroie for lunch that day, news broke that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had been arrested in Pakistan. Indeed, I got to break the news to Dr. Mylroie and she responded "that's huge".

The critical point is that the same argument that Dr. Mylroie made regarding Ramzi Yousef in Study Of Revenge can be applied to Khalid Mohammed [again, see Chapter 5 from Study Of Revenge]. Accordingly, in the same way Dr. Mylroie established Saddam Hussein's complicity in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the first attempt to take down the Twin Towers, one can establish Saddam's involvement in 9/11.

Dr. Mylroie, in her most recent book, Bush vs. The Beltway, spells out the case as follows:

. . . instead of a loose network of radical Muslim terrorists, we now have the picture of a single family located at the center of almost all the major terrorist assaults against American targets over the past decade, starting with the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 - an attack undertaken with no evident source of outside funding or training - and culminating in the September 11 strikes. Scarcely mentioned is the existence of intelligence ties between the Baluch and Iraq, though an insider such as General Samarrai has insisted that they are serious and longstanding. The notion that one family lies behind this unprecedented campaign of increasingly spectacular terrorism is difficult to credit. It is without any precedent. No terrorist organization has had a family at its heart, and there has never been a string of major terrorist attacks directed by a wayward family, such as Yousef et al. - The Kuwait Files - THE IDENTITIES OF ALL these individuals - Ramzi Yousef; Yousef's uncle Khalid Shaikh Mohammed; Yousef's two brothers, Abd al Munim and Abd al Karim; and Yousef's childhood friend, Abdul Hakim Murad - are all based on documents from Kuwait. (That may be true also for Yousef's cousin, Ali Abdul Aziz.) And these documents all come from files that predate Kuwait's liberation. But, of course, nothing in Kuwait's files from that time can be assumed to be reliable. Iraq occupied the country from August 2, 1990, until its liberation on February 28, 1991. During that time, Iraqi intelligence had ample opportunity to tamper with Kuwait's files, if it so chose. It is a standard practice of Soviet-style intelligence agencies to develop a false identity, or "legend," for agents involved in "wet" or illegal operations. The purpose, of course, is to avoid retaliation for an act of aggression by preventing it from being traced back to the sponsor. There exists an alternative explanation to the theory that these Baluch terrorists represent a single, uniquely violent (and - from a certain perspective - an unusually talented) family: that is, these people are elements of Iraq's Baluch network who were given legends by the Iraqi mukhabarrat (intelligence) during Iraq's occupation of Kuwait. The Baluch network was actively used by Iraq throughout the Iran-Iraq war; it would still have been available two years later, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. At that time, 95,000 Pakistanis lived in Kuwait. Shortly after the invasion, Iraqi forces seized some two dozen Pakistani nationals and held them hostage. This was, of course, a very violent period, and there has been no real accounting of what happened to third world nationals then. Legends could easily have been developed for Iraqi intelligence agents, using the Kuwaiti Interior Ministry files of individuals who died in that period. Indeed, it would not have been beyond the Iraqis to have killed people for that purpose; or, they could have made up entire files. - Who Is Khalid Shaikh Mohammed? - THERE REALLY WAS an individual named Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, born to Pakistani parents in Kuwait on April 24, 1965. He grew up in Kuwait, attended high school there, and graduated in 1983. In January 1984 he traveled to the United States to enroll at Chowan College in Murfreesboro, North Carolina, a small Baptist school that had begun aggressively recruiting foreign students to boost its enrollment. After one semester at Chowan, Mohammed transferred to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (A&T), a historically black college in Greensboro. He graduated in December 1986, with a bachelor of science in mechanical engineering. Is the September 11 terrorist mastermind, now in U.S. custody, the same person as the individual described above? Or did the real Khalid Shaikh Mohammed die, and was his identity then assumed by a terrorist agent? At the time of the terrorist's arrest, Mohammed would have been only thirty-seven years old - but the arrest photo, with its grizzled side-burns and heavy jowls, suggests an older man. That, however, is a subjective judgment. Yet it would be easy enough to investigate the question much more thoroughly and reliably. Three sets of information exist regarding Mohammed: (1) information from U.S. and Kuwaiti sources from the 1980s, before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. (This would include U.S. immigration records and college documents, as well as information to be obtained from individuals who might remember Mohammed.) (2) Documents from Kuwait. (3) Information since the liberation of Kuwait (including evidence from the terrorist's arrest and interrogation; from the interrogation of other al Qaeda prisoners, and from the investigation into the 1995 plane bombing plot). The Kuwaiti documents should be scrutinized for internal consistency, and for any irregularities that would suggest the file was doctored. The information about Mohammed from the 1980s should be compared with the information about him that has emerged since Kuwait's liberation. The terrorist may prove to be taller (or shorter) than the student. His U.S. interrogators might ask him what he remembers about the American colleges he is supposed to have attended. If he cannot recall anything about them - especially personal information, like the classes he took or some of the teachers he had - that would be a significant indicator that he is not who he purports to be. There may be individuals who remember Mohammed from his time in America, who would be able to say whether the terrorist is really the student or not. There may also be individuals in Kuwait who would remember him from before Iraq's invasion. (This sort of statement always has to be carefully vetted, possibly by polygraph, particularly in the context of a high-profIle investigation.) There do appear to be some individuals who have a genuine memory of Mohammed. Professor Gaith Faile heads the science department of Chowan College and recalls Mohammed as "a B-type student" who "wasn't unusually radical. I didn't notice anything different about him." Mohammed al Bulooshi, a fellow Baluch from Kuwait, studied with Mohammed at Chowan. He states, "We lived in one building, had breakfast, lunch and dinner together, us and thirty Arab students. We all became quite close." Al Bulooshi also said that Mohammed "was so quiet, there was no indication that he was involved in [religious extremism]. I would never have thought in a million years that he could be involved in these terrorist things." These and other acquaintances should be allowed to meet with Mohammed, to try to provide an authoritative answer to the question as to whether the terrorist is really the same person as the student or not. (Mylroie, pp.152-155)

Now here's what is key....with both Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Mohammed in U.S. custody, America's. intelligence services can establish whether or not they are related through DNA testing. Such a DNA comparison is even more potentially tell-tale today because, as Laurie Mylroie points out in a recent American Spectator article dubbed "How Little We Know", the U.S. has nabbed three of Khalid Mohammed nephews other than Ramzi Yousef: Ali Abdul Aziz Ali, the 9/11 money man, and two of Ramzi's brothers, Abdul Munim Yousef and Abdul Karim Yousef. The DNA of all the members of this mysterious Baluchi family from Kuwait should be compared to determine whether or not these terrorists are related, because, if they are not, it follows that they are most likely operatives using assumed identities from a likely dead Kuwaiti family. In other words, U.S. intelligence is currently in a position to uncover a forensic SMOKING GUN of Iraqi complicity in 9/11 and almost all of the terrorism against the U.S. to-date that's been attributed to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. If such a smoking gun is found, one can well argue that the Iraq War is a JUST CAUSE because Saddam Hussein's Iraq was behind 9/11 and other acts of terror against the U.S. that caused the deaths of thousands of innocent Americans.

To see just how prophetic Laurie Mylroie's views have proven to be, please watch the following video which includes two segments from appearances of Dr. Mylroie on the PBS program Charlie Rose....one segment before 9/11 and one after:

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, is a Pakistani Baluch. So is Ramzi Yousef, who masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. In 1995, together with a third Baluch, Abdul Hakam Murad, the two collaborated in an unsuccessful plot to bomb 12 U.S. airplanes. Years later, as head of al Qaeda's military committee, Mohammed reportedly planned the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings, as well as the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000.

Why should the Baluch seek to kill Americans? Sunni Muslims, they live in the desert regions of eastern Iran and western Pakistan. The U.S. has little to do with them; there is no evident motive for this murderous obsession. The Baluch do, however, have longstanding ties to Iraqi intelligence, reflecting their militant opposition to the Shiite regime in Tehran. Wafiq Samarrai, former chief of Iraqi military intelligence, explains that Iraqi intelligence worked with the Baluch during the Iran-Iraq war. According to Mr. Samarrai, Iraqi intelligence has well-established contacts with the Baluch in both Iran and Pakistan.

Mohammed, Yousef and Murad, supposedly born and raised in Kuwait, are part of a tight circle. Mohammed is said to be Yousef's maternal uncle; Murad is supposed to be Yousef's childhood friend. And U.S. authorities have identified as major al Qaeda figures three other Baluch: two brothers of Yousef and a cousin. The official position is thus that a single family is at the center of almost all the major terrorist attacks against U.S. targets since 1993. The existence of intelligence ties between Iraq and the Baluch is scarcely noted. Indeed, these Baluch terrorists began attacking the U.S. long before al Qaeda did.

Notably, this Baluch "family" is from Kuwait. Their identities are based on documents from Kuwaiti files that predate Kuwait's liberation from Iraqi occupation, and which are therefore unreliable. While in Kuwait, Iraqi intelligence could have tampered with files to create false identities (or "legends") for its agents. So, rather than one family, these terrorists are, quite plausibly, elements of Iraq's Baluch network, given legends by Iraqi intelligence.

SOMEONE NAMED Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was born in Kuwait to Pakistani parents on April 19, 1965. After high school in Kuwait, he enrolled at Chowan College in North Carolina in January 1984, before transferring to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, where he received his degree in December 1986. Is the Sept. 11 mastermind the same person as the student? He need not be. Perhaps the real Mohammed died (possibly during Iraq's occupation of Kuwait), and a terrorist assumed his identity.

Mohammed should now be just under 38, but the terrorist's arrest photo, showing graying sideburns and heavy jowls, seems to suggest an older man (admittedly, a subjective judgment). Yet this question can be pursued more reliably. Three sets of information exist regarding Mohammed: information from U.S. sources from the 1980s (INS and college documents, as well as individuals who may remember him); Kuwaiti documents; and information since the liberation of Kuwait (from his arrest, the interrogation of other al Qaeda prisoners, and the investigation into the 1995 plane-bombing plot).

The Kuwaiti documents should be scrutinized for irregularities that suggest tampering. The information about Mohammed from the '80s needs to be compared with the information that has emerged since Kuwait's liberation. The terrorist may prove to be taller (or shorter) than the student. Interrogators might ask him what he remembers of the colleges he is claimed to have attended. Acquaintances--like Gaith Faile, who taught Mohammed at Chowan and who told the Journal, "He wasn't a radical"--should be asked to provide a positive identification.

Along these lines, Kuwait's file on Yousef is telling. Yousef entered the U.S. on an Iraqi passport in the name of Ramzi Yousef, but fled on a passport in the name of Mohammed's supposed nephew, Abdul Basit Karim. But Kuwait's file on Karim was tampered with. The file should contain copies of the front pages of his passport, including picture and signature. They are missing. Extraneous information was inserted--a notation that he and his family left Kuwait on Aug. 26, 1990, traveling from Kuwait to Iraq, entering Iran at Salamcheh on their way to Pakistani Baluchistan. But people do not provide authorities an itinerary when crossing a border. Moreover, there was no Kuwaiti government then. Iraq occupied Kuwait and would have had to put that information into the file.

KARIM ATTENDED college in Britain. His teachers there strongly doubted that their student was the terrorist mastermind. Most notably, Karim was short, at most 5-foot-8; Yousef is 6 feet tall. Nevertheless, Yousef's fingerprints are in Karim's file. Probably, the fingerprint card in Karim's file was switched, the original replaced by one with Yousef's prints on it. James Fox, who headed the FBI investigation into the 1993 WTC bombing, has been quoted as affirming that Iraqi involvement was the theory "accepted by most of the veteran investigators." Pakistani investigators were likewise convinced that Yousef had close links with the MKO, an anti-Iranian terrorist group run by Iraq, and conducted a bomb attack in Mashhad, Iran, in 1994.

U.S. authorities may unravel the story very quickly if they pursue the question of Mohammed's identity, instead of assuming they know who their captive really is. As for the larger issue of these murderously anti-American Baluch, that matter may become clear soon, once U.S. forces take Baghdad--and take possession of Iraq's intelligence files.

Ms. Mylroie is the author of "The War Against America" (HarperCollins, 2001). A related editorial appears here.

---

ALSO SEE:

Against All Enemies: PROVING IRAQ WAS BEHIND 9/11

IRAQI LINKS TO TERRORISM AGAINST AMERICA