The Globalists and the Islamists: Fomenting the "Clash of Civilizations" for a New World Order
VI. World Trade Center 1993
Under Hassan al-Turabi Sudan had achieved a great victory for the Muslim Brotherhood by evicting the United States from Somalia. But even prior to the Somalia engagement the Muslim Brotherhood was involved in a major strike at the heart of the United States. On February 26, 1993 the World Trade Center bombing occurred in which six people were killed and up to a thousand more were wounded, with the cost of damages over $250 million. The intention of the bomber, Ramzi Yousef, was to topple one tower onto the other, and at the same time disperse a cloud of cyanide gas over New York City. Fortunately the explosion in the underground parking structure was not enough to topple the tower, but it was enough to burn up the cyanide gas making it ineffective.
The mainstream media focused on the blind sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman, who was arrested, tried and convicted for being involved in the conspiracy. He was the leader of the Jamaat al-Islamiyya (the Islamic Group), who had been imprisoned in Egypt for his moral support of the murderers of Anwar Sadat. When he was released in 1985 he made his way to Pakistan where he linked up with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Abdullah Azzam. He became a very famous cleric within Islamist circles, well known for his fearless militant preaching, and for his hatred of President Mubarak of Egypt. Throughout the late '80s he constantly traveled preaching in Islamic centers throughout Saudi Arabia and even in Britain, Germany and the United States, with the blessing of the CIA. He also met several times with Hassan al-Turabi in Khartoum and London. (1)
In May of 1990 he acquired a visa from the American consulate in Khartoum, from a CIA agent posing as an official, despite the fact that his name was on a State Department list of terrorist suspects. Rahman settled in New Jersey where he began to preach the same militant message that he had always preached. In November of 1990 the State Department revoked Sheikh Rahman's visa and advised the INS to be on the lookout for him. Five months later the INS, instead of deporting him, issued Rahman a green card. (2)
Sheikh Rahman's move to the United States was sponsored by the Muslim Brotherhood through at least two individuals. One was Mahmud Abouhalima, a member of the Brotherhood who had worked with the CIA in Afghanistan and networked with radical Muslims and Black Panthers in the United States. The other was Mustafa Shalabi who was the director of Abdullah Azzam's Al Kifah Center in Brooklyn. (3)
After Rahman set up his mosque in New Jersey he and his associates began to pressure Shalabi to turn over control of the Al Kifah Center and its $2 million in assets to Sheikh Rahman. Shalabi backed down in the face of this threat and made plans to leave Brooklyn for Peshawar, Pakistan in March of 1991. The man chosen to succeed Shalabi as director of the Center was a Lebanese-American named Wadih el-Hage, a man closely-affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood (most likely a member) who lived at the time in Arlington, Texas. The transition was complicated however, by the murder of Shalabi on February 26, and although el-Hage was in Brooklyn at the time he did not take over the Al Kifah Center after Shalabi's sudden death. Instead he returned to his home in Arlington where he continued his work brokering auto deals to the Middle East. About two years later he was called to Sudan where he worked for Osama bin Laden traveling and selling the agricultural merchandise from bin Laden's businesses. Eventually he became bin Laden's personal secretary. Today he is in a U.S. jail for his involvement with Al Qaeda and connection to the African embassy bombings of 1998, even though he returned to the United States in 1997. (4)
In Brooklyn the Al Kifah Center came under the complete control of Sheikh Rahman's network. In September of 1992 the network brought Ramzi Yousef into the United States. Yousef is now generally recognized as the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and his case presents an interesting challenge. He entered the United States as Ramzi Yousef on an Iraqi passport. He had no visa, but was given political asylum. Some months later he visited the Pakistani consulate and, after presenting the required documentation, was given a passport under the name Abdul Basit Karim. The U.S. Government's investigation of Ramzi Yousef concluded that Abdul Basit Karim was indeed his true identity.
Abdul Basit Karim was born in Kuwait in 1968 to a Pakistani father and Palestinian mother. His father was an employee of Kuwait Airlines. In 1984 Karim moved to Britain and began his college education. He took English language courses at the Oxford College of Further Education and attended the West Glamorgen Institute in Swansea, where he graduated with a degree in electronic engineering in 1989. According to Ramzi Yousef's own confession, taken after he was finally arrested and brought to the U.S. in 1995, he was recruited into the Islamist movement in 1987 while living in Swansea after he was approached by local members of the Muslim Brotherhood. In the summer of 1988 he traveled to Pakistan where he attended one of the many Brotherhood-sponsored mujahedin training camps. After graduating with his degree in 1989 he was injured in a bomb blast in Karachi while he was trying to perfect his skills as a bomb-maker. During Iraq's invasion of Kuwait he was in Kuwait collaborating with the Iraqis, as charged by the Kuwaiti Interior Minister, and then prior to Desert Storm he fled to the Philippines where he offered his expertise in bomb-making to the fledgling Islamist groups that were beginning to make their presence known. Abdul Basit Karim, a.k.a. Ramzi Yousef, was a Muslim Brotherhood operative and expert bomb maker, and the network brought him to the United States in late 1992 for the sole purpose of destroying the World Trade Center. (5)
A different theory on Ramzi Yousef's true identity that has unfortunately achieved wide-spread coverage must also be addressed. In the aftermath of the 1993 attack there was a serious effort on the part of many conservatives to implicate Saddam Hussein's Iraq as the state-sponsor of the 1993 bombing. This theory was spearheaded by well-respected analyst Laurie Mylroie, and subsequently supported by former head of the CIA James Woolsey, who was grasping for anything to mask the CIA's own involvement in the bombing that occurred while he was director. The Iraq theory claims that Abdul Basit Karim was a mild-mannered academic who was murdered by Iraqi Intelligence during their occupation of Kuwait in 1990, and that Karim's identity was stolen and given to "Iraqi super-agent" Ramzi Yousef. This theory is almost entirely based on the fact that the Kuwaiti documents of Karim had been obviously tampered with prior to 1993 when they were brought forward during the investigation of the WTC bombing. Mylroie and company concluded that the Iraqis must have been responsible for this and that the tampering had been done to allow Yousef to take over Karim's identity. The fingerprints between Karim and Yousef matched, and so the tampering was alleged by Mylroie to have also included switching fingerprints. This theory was quickly supported by a number of conservatives in the United States, and also by several prominent journalists in Great Britain. (6)
Mylroie does not consider the possibility that the documents may have been tampered with to cover up Karim's collaboration with the Iraqi invaders and his involvement with the Muslim Brotherhood which supported Iraq during the invasion. Mylroie's elaborate theory was also understandably supported by several members of the faculty of Karim's Swansea university. Ken Reid, the deputy principle, claimed that Karim's height and weight were different than Yousef's. He also stated that Yousef's deformed eye and smaller ears and mouth did not match Karim's.(7) Brad White, a former Senate investigator and CBS newsman also took up Mylroie's cause and interviewed teachers who had known Karim. "Two people had a good memory of Abdul Basit but, shown photos of Yousef, were unable to make a positive identification. They both felt that while there was some similarity in looks, it was not the same person. 'Our feeling is that Ramzi Yousef is probably not Basit', White was told."(8) However, these alleged differences can be partly explained by Yousef's bomb-making accident in Karachi in 1989 that resulted in facial injuries and a lengthy hospitalization.
Another angle was attempted by a British journalist who described Yousef's command of the English language as "appalling" and theorized that he could not be the same Karim who had lived in Britain for four years and attended language courses at Oxford.(9) This theory falls flat when faced with Yousef's performance during his trial: "He insisted on representing himself at the first trial; he cut a sharp figure in a tailored, double-breasted suit, frequently turned on the charm and generally represented himself surprisingly well, even getting hostile witnesses to contradict themselves."(10) Could his English have been that "appalling" for him to represent himself so well at his American trial?
Simon Reeve in his book The New Jackals confronts the allegations that Yousef was not Karim. He mentions Neil Herman, the head of the FBI investigation into the 1993 bombing, and he also quotes from several of Basit's friends from his days at Swansea,
"...Neil Herman and the FBI are convinced Yousef and Karim are one and the same, and several former students remember and identify 'Ramzi,' their 'temperamental' and 'volatile' former mate. 'One minute he was your friend, and the next . . .' said one Welsh student. Another former student from South Wales remembers a mutual friend of his and Yousef's - a Briton from an Asian family - mentioning a political conversation the two men had. 'He's a real nutter,' the man was told. Another student cut out and kept newspaper articles from Yousef's trial. When Yousef was still on the run he remembers comparing the newspaper pictures with those in his albums. 'That's my friend Jane, she's a teacher,' he would say to friends looking at the albums, 'that's my friend Phil, he's an engineer, and then [turning to the articles] that's my friend Ramzi, the international terrorist and most wanted man in the world.' " (10b)
In any case, it is understandable that the faculty of Karim's university would like to distance their institution from Yousef the terrorist mastermind, and it is understandable that conservatives like Mylroie were so willing to look for a "higher power" responsible for the WTC bombing. A higher power did exist, but it was not Iraq, and most conservatives are so completely anglophile in their outlook that they find it impossible to look critically at Britain, which is where the Muslim Brotherhood is based.
The question of Yousef's true identity was finally settled in the few weeks after September 11, 2001. Former CIA chief James Woolsey was dispatched to London to gather whatever proof he could that Iraq was at least partially responsible for the attacks. His trip was independently sponsored by Paul Wolfowitz, the hawkish deputy defense secretary, creating a rift within the Bush Administration and angering the state department and the CIA.(11) Woolsey focused on the allegations that lead hijacker Mohammed Atta had met with Iraqi Intelligence in Prague, and he also looked into Yousef's alleged Iraqi connection: "Another bit of intrigue that Woolsey has been exploring while in Britain involves a convicted Kuwaiti terrorist known as Ramzi Yousef, whose real name is Abdul Basit. Woolsey claims that Yousef is an Iraqi agent who kidnapped Basit and stole his identity. Woolsey's sleuthing has made him something of a laughingstock among British police and intelligence, who are "bemused" by his activities, according to one British official. But Woolsey's own lack of credibility hasn't stopped the mainstream media from quoting him extensively to whip up anti-Iraq hysteria." (12)
Woolsey met with British Intelligence who, to Woolsey's dismay, agreed with the long-standing conclusion of the American investigators in Yousef's trial and confirmed that Ramzi Yousef really was Abdul Basit Karim, and not an Iraqi impostor. The matter has since been dropped, although Laurie Mylroie continues to believe that the British are going out of their way to cover for Saddam, (12a) even while Tony Blair scrambles for reasons to support Bush's plans to invade Iraq.Abdul Basit Karim, a.k.a. Ramzi Yousef, fled the United States immediately after the February 26, 1993 bombing to Karachi, Pakistan. In 1994 he appeared back in the Philippines where he joined up with the Muslim Brotherhood cell that had been established to support the new Abu Sayyaf terrorist group in Mindanao. Karim met up with Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, a brother-in-law of Osama bin Laden, who had helped to finance the initial creation of the Abu Sayyaf group that is named after militant Islamist Dr. Abdurrab Rasul Sayyaf.(13) Dr. Sayyaf received his doctorate from Cairo's Al Azhar University and became one of the most important theologians in Afghanistan. He founded the University of Sawal al-Jihad in Peshawar around 1990 and is today an outspoken militant critic of the new Karzai government in Afghanistan and an enemy of the United States. Abu Sayyaf is seen by many as an Al Qaeda front group, but in reality it is a Muslim Brotherhood group that was planned long before Osama bin Laden emerged as the "international terrorist mastermind."
In the Philippines Abdul Basit Karim, a.k.a. Yousef, also interacted closely with his uncle Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is now understood to be the operational mastermind of the attacks of September 11, and suspected as the mastermind of WTC 1993. Like Karim, Mohammed was born in Kuwait, but moved to Pakistan.(14) Kuwaiti records show that Karim's entire family moved from Kuwait to Pakistan on August 26, 1990 during the Iraqi occupation.(15) Indian Intelligence believes that the entire family is originally from the Balochistan province of Pakistan and that Karim was only raised in Kuwait.(16) In any case, Karim and his uncle Khalid, who once attended a North Carolina college,(17) are the terrorists who originally conceived of the operation that was finally pulled off on September 11. Philippine Police uncovered the plot, known as Operation Bojinka, after raiding Karim's apartment due to an alarm raised from a bomb-making accident. A computer was recovered which contained plans to place bombs on eleven U.S. jetliners timed to go off simultaneously. One of the captured members of the cell, Abdul Hakim Murad, later admitted under interrogation that phase two of the plan was to hijack jetliners and fly them into targets such as the CIA headquarters, the White House, the Pentagon and possibly some skyscrapers. Murad was sure of this because he had attended several American flight schools, in Texas, New York and North Carolina, and he was to be one of the suicide pilots. (18)
Uncovering the plot and disrupting the terrorist cell was a triumph for Philippine Intelligence, and the CIA awarded Senior Inspector Aida D. Fariscal a certificate of merit "In recognition of your personal outstanding efforts and co-operation."(19a) The CIA then promptly forgot all about Operation Bojinka.
Karim, a.k.a. Ramzi Yousef, was able to barely escape from the Philippines and avoid arrest, but he did leave behind several technical reference books that he had stolen from the Swansea library (further confirming his identity as Karim)(19b). He made his way back to Pakistan where he easily went underground in the extensive Islamist network. He would have continued to have been a key figure in the global terror network, but he was betrayed by one of his closest associates. A South African Muslim recruited by Karim offered information on Karim's whereabouts in return for the $2 million reward offered by the American government for his arrest. Karim was apprehended in his apartment by U.S. and Pakistani security officials on February 7, 1995. The informant collected the $2 million reward and now lives in the United States under a new identity with his family, sheltered by the Witness Protection Program.(20) Karim was subsequently deported to the United States and tried and convicted for the WTC bombing. "Ramzi Yousef" now serves a life sentence of 240 years.
Karim's uncle escaped out of the Philippines as well. However, in 1996 while he was in the Persian Gulf kingdom of Qatar a deal was struck between the Qatar government and the FBI to detain Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and turn him over to the United States. The FBI dispatched a team to Qatar who waited for their prize in a hotel, but at the last minute the deal fell through. Apparently a "higher power" had intervened at the last moment and Mohammed was spirited away. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed escaped to Prague, of all places, where he set up a new headquarters under the name Mustaf Nasir. Who could have possibly intervened to disrupt an important deal that was at the final stage between two sovereign governments? The person who intervened in the deal was reportedly the government minister in charge of religious affairs.(21) The other factor that must be considered is that Qatar is the home of one of the most prominent and outspoken Muslim Brotherhood theologians, Dr. Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Dean of Islamic Studies at the University of Qatar, who also works out of London as head of the Islamic Council of Europe.(22) Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's stay in Qatar had to have been hosted by the Muslim Brotherhood, and only the Muslim Brotherhood possessed the influence and power necessary to disrupt the deal to deport Mohammed to American authorities.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is the key to uncovering the entire conspiracy surrounding September 11, yet investigative journalists around the world are unable to uncover hardly anything about the man's life. Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was kidnapped and brutally murdered for pursuing his investigation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed into Pakistan, and the dramatically edited high-tech video of his execution by beheading was disseminated worldwide via the internet as a warning. When the US Congress began its inquiry into the events of September 11 they found that CIA chief George Tenet prevented the declassification of all information regarding Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and Mohammed's name was not even allowed to be mentioned in the inquiry's report. Tenet knows that a critical examination of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will reveal Mohammed's close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, and subsequently the Muslim Brotherhood's ties to the elite intelligence organizations of the West. Mohammed was a CIA asset, as was "Ramzi Yousef." They were a part of the Muslim Brotherhood organization but they were Muslims in name only. The Philippine investigation revealed that Mohammed and his nephew "Yousef" both enjoyed drinking, partying, visiting strip bars and pursuing the local women.(24) It was the same thing with many of the hijackers of 9-11 as they passed the time in Florida up to their operation. This stands in stark contrast to Osama bin Laden, who would put his fingers to his ears when music played while out in public in Sudan.(24) Osama bin Laden was loosely connected to the events of September 11, but only because the international Islamist movement is so small, and he played little if any part in planning and executing the operation. The truth may only be found through Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and too many powerful interests are determined to hide that truth.
Section Notes and Sources
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Further reading:
Muslim Brotherhood did nothing to achieve social justice - expert
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