The Mystery Of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and His 'Family'

This week I was in D.C. urging my legislators to investigate a critical matter concerning intelligence in the War On Terror.

What I'm about to share with you could be the most important issue regarding intelligence in the War On Terror and yet it is hardly recognized in the intelligence community, by the Bush Administration and by members of Congress.

At the core of the major acts of terrorism against the United States to date, seemingly by al Qaeda, there is a mysterious family from the little known territory of Baluchistan (in Iran/Pakistan). This family has been the focus of a critical analysis by Dr. Laurie Mylroie, an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Study of Revenge: The First World Trade Center Attack and Saddam Hussein's War Against America.

Dr. Mylroie testified before the 9/11 Commission in July of 2003:

http://www.9-11commission.gov/hearings/hearing3/witness_mylroie.htm

I have been working with Dr. Mylroie on her investigation since the early 1990s.

In March of 2003, I met Laurie for lunch in Washington D.C. to discuss intelligence surrounding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) and his possible linkage to Iraq’s Mukhabarrat (Baath party secret police). Low and behold, just before going to meet her that day, news broke of Khalid Mohammed's arrest – a very important point for our work.

What I met with her to discuss, she spelled out in an article published by the Wall Street Journal on the eve of the Iraq War, "The Baluch Connection":

http://www.spiritoftruth.org/ksm.htm

The case she presents is further elaborated on in a New York Sun article, "All In The Family":

http://www.benadorassociates.com/article/5451

and an American Spectator article, "Al Qaeda's Hidden Roots":

http://www.spectator.org/util/print.asp?art_id=10379.

The most important and recent article regarding the case she is making is the American Spectator article dubbed, "How Little We Know":

http://www.lauriemylroie.com/files/Mylroie_How_Little_We_Know_TAS.pdf.

The two most notorious terrorist figures from this Baluch family are Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the mastermind of 9/11:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalid_Shaikh_Mohammed

and his “nephew”, Ramzi Yousef, who masterminded the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 and the first attempt to take down the Twin Towers:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramzi_Yousef

Other “nephews” of KSM from this mysterious family integrally involved in the terrorist operations against the U.S. by al Qaeda are:

Ammar al-Baluchi (aka Ali Abdul Aziz Ali) – Ramzi Yousef’s first cousin and KSM’s right-hand man and the money man behind 9/11.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ali_Abdul_Aziz_Ali

Abdul Karim (captured in May 2004; his interrogation led to further arrests and the discover of the terrorist plot against U.S. financial centers.)

Abdul Munim (little known) - Brother of Ramzi Yousef and nephew of Khalid Mohammed

Abdul Qadir (little known) - Brother of Ramzi Yousef and nephew of Khalid Mohammed (captured in November 2004)

The problem is that this extraordinary family at the core of al Qaeda’s major terrorist operations against the U.S. to-date may have ceased to exist in 1990. KSM and his nephews may be “legends”, i.e. false identities, stolen from an actual family that lived in Kuwait when Iraq invaded in 1990. This family, which had easy access to the West because of the prior schooling of the REAL KSM and Ramzi Yousef in the U.S. and U.K., respectively, was eliminated and these IDs were provided toterrorist operatives from Baluchistan trained by the Mukhabarrat and possibly other state intelligence organizations. It is unlikely that these operatives are even related to each other.

While this might seem difficult to fathom, it is a point that the U.S. intelligence community is now in a position to verify….something that will likely not occur without prodding by influential political figures.

Since KSM, Ramzi Yousef, Ammar al-Baluchi, Abdul Karim and Abdul Qadir (don’t know about Abdul Munim) are now all in U.S. or Pakistani custody, a DNA comparison is possible. If these individuals are genetically compared and are found not to be related, then the arguments being made by Dr. Mylroie will be substantially corroborated and the central case based upon which the War On Terror is being waged will be radically changed with decisive implications for the viewpoint of the U.S. intelligence community and, in turn, American foreign policy.

-J. Adams
March 15th, 2007
 
Last edited:

jed turtle

a brother in the Lord
huh?

does that mean we're fighting the right people for the wrong reasons or that we're fighting the wrong people for the right reasons?
 
huh?

does that mean we're fighting the right people for the wrong reasons or that we're fighting the wrong people for the right reasons?

If KSM and his family are stolen identities from a Kuwaiti family that was eliminated when Iraq occupied Kuwait in 1990, then this proves Saddam's Iraq was behind 9/11 and much of the terrorism against the U.S. attributed to al Qaeda. In this case, the war against Iraq has been fully justified. However, I also suspect Iraq's Mukhabarrat has been operating at the behest of its creator....the KGB. That's why Litvinenko was taken out. Litvinenko was revealing the truth that al Qaeda is a false front for underhanded strikes against the U.S. by Russia:

http://www.axisglobe.com/article.asp?article=252

My related site is at:

http://www.litvinenkomurder.org
 

Rams82

Inactive
I remember reading about this a couple years ago. It may have been on your website. I wonder if the MSM would ever report on this? Probably not, it would destroy what little credibility they had left given their Bush bashing of the last 4 years over Iraq...
 
Well, well, well... look who is failing to investigate things!
AND
Casting aspersions as well....
Typical!:shk:

Really?

Have you read any of Dr. Mylroie's books....nevermind help write them?!

Have you even bothered to read one of her articles in entirety? Doubtful.

But then again, how many Americans ever will, since this nation is being run asunder by a plague of irrational, Leftist, Bush-hating, self-defeating dimwits that won't be satisfied until America is toppled from its pedestal.

Why ever consider the possibility that Saddam and the like might actually have been out to attack the U.S. underhandedly with specially-trained terrorist operatives using false IDs?

That would justify the Iraq War and this is unacceptable!!!
 

milkncookies

Inactive
Well, well, well... look who is failing to investigate things!
AND
Casting aspersions as well....
Typical!:shk:

"Laurie Mylroie is an internationally recognized expert on Iraq and terrorism.

Dr. Mylroie received her Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard University and her B.A. from Cornell. She was an Assistant Professor in Harvard's Political Science Department, before becoming an Associate Professor in the Strategy Department at the U.S. Naval War College. Subsequently, she was a member of the staff of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. She also served as advisor on Iraq to the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign and has worked as a consultant on terrorism to the Departments of Defense and Energy; ABC News, the BBC, and Newsweek; as well as several law offices. She is presently an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and publisher of Iraq News.

Her first book, Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf, (co-authored with Judith Miller) was a number one New York Times bestseller, translated into 13 languages."

Now what are your credentials .........."Rider of the storm"?:lkick:
 

moocollins

Rider of the storm!
Really?

Have you read any of Dr. Mylroie's books....nevermind help write them?!

Have you even bothered to read one of her articles in entirety? Doubtful.

But then again, how many Americans ever will, since this nation is being run asunder by a plague of irrational, Leftist, Bush-hating, self-defeating dimwits that won't be satisfied until America is toppled from its pedestal.

Why ever consider the possibility that Saddam and the like might actually have been out to attack the U.S. underhandedly with specially-trained terrorist operatives using false IDs?

That would justify the Iraq War and this is unacceptable!!!

Oh you of little memory!

We have both been down this road before on another thread, you know, the one that originally piqued my interest in this story.

I do so detest re-visiting such weak arguments and fantastic conspiracies.
Chief of which is casting irrelevant, untrue and hurtful aspersions toward anyone who doesn't wholeheartedly accept your theories, let alone anyone who dares question them.
The fact is I have done the reading, here, at your site, frontline and on other sites as well, not all of them sympathetic toward your cause.

As I have already stated, I don’t doubt Mylroie’s research is exhaustive and I am quite certain a majority of her suppositions are in fact provable as any competent political scientist work will be. What I disagree with is her (and your) conclusions. The attempt by Mylroie to justify, ex post facto, the war in the Middle East based on her research is a stretch, a huge stretch and ultimately that is just what this conjecture is about.
The problems with Mylroie’s writings and ideas are ones of source and logical extension.
The sources she uses are as extremely “right” as her detractors are “left”. It is almost as though she blinded herself to considering that her sources may well have been serving their own purposes by serving her carefully crafted half-truths and fabrications. Many of her sources, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, and Scooter Libby just to name the more prominent are demonstrably extreme right wing theorist, tacticians and active front men for the powers that be. What is more, the sources that her sources site have been proven unreliable in the past few years. She also glorifies and over emphasizes the ineffectual actions of bumbling and religiously blinded political lackeys of maniacal and deluded Middle Eastern dictator. The real reasons for waging war in the middle east have very little to do with her machinations of Saddam’s plots of revenge and so much more to do with MONEY. All the while our government has the standard mantras of “We are liberating the people of Iraq”, or “We are waging a war against terrorism” even these claims change depending on time of day, who is questioning our actions and on the political climate. I am afraid that Mylroie’s conjectures are nothing more than secondary “justification du-juor” for the powers that be.
Ideas that are provably true are not indicative of meaning. Not all of Mylroie’s story is provable and the bits that are do not necessarily support her conclusions. Not everybody who reads them will buy them and not everybody who disagrees with them is a left wing, commie, pinko, fag, hell bent to destroy America.

Bottom line, American hegemony comes at a cost that is too great to bear.

Those people we are “liberating” in the Middle East are simply not worth a single American dollar, not a single American life!
 

milkncookies

Inactive
The New York FBI office strongly believed Iraq was behind the 1993 Trade Center attack. (They apparently failed to consult moocollins)

Mylroie's book is based on an examination of the trial documents related to the 1993 bombing.

Pakistani authorities-who understand the peoples of that region far better than Americans-suspected a link between Iraqi intelligence on the basis of his Baluch ethnicity. American journalist Mary Anne Weaver visited Pakistani Baluchistan and was told there are some four thousand Iranian Baluch living in the central Makran Range [in Pakistan], fully armed and supported by Iraq, who are running cross-border operations into Iran. No one can touch them, not the army, not the government.
 
Oh you of little memory!

We have both been down this road before on another thread, you know, the one that originally piqued my interest in this story.

I do so detest re-visiting such weak arguments and fantastic conspiracies.
Chief of which is casting irrelevant, untrue and hurtful aspersions toward anyone who doesn't wholeheartedly accept your theories, let alone anyone who dares question them.
The fact is I have done the reading, here, at your site, frontline and on other sites as well, not all of them sympathetic toward your cause.

As I have already stated, I don’t doubt Mylroie’s research is exhaustive and I am quite certain a majority of her suppositions are in fact provable as any competent political scientist work will be. What I disagree with is her (and your) conclusions. The attempt by Mylroie to justify, ex post facto, the war in the Middle East based on her research is a stretch, a huge stretch and ultimately that is just what this conjecture is about.
The problems with Mylroie’s writings and ideas are ones of source and logical extension.
The sources she uses are as extremely “right” as her detractors are “left”. It is almost as though she blinded herself to considering that her sources may well have been serving their own purposes by serving her carefully crafted half-truths and fabrications. Many of her sources, Paul Wolfowitz, John Bolton, and Scooter Libby just to name the more prominent are demonstrably extreme right wing theorist, tacticians and active front men for the powers that be. What is more, the sources that her sources site have been proven unreliable in the past few years. She also glorifies and over emphasizes the ineffectual actions of bumbling and religiously blinded political lackeys of maniacal and deluded Middle Eastern dictator. The real reasons for waging war in the middle east have very little to do with her machinations of Saddam’s plots of revenge and so much more to do with MONEY. All the while our government has the standard mantras of “We are liberating the people of Iraq”, or “We are waging a war against terrorism” even these claims change depending on time of day, who is questioning our actions and on the political climate. I am afraid that Mylroie’s conjectures are nothing more than secondary “justification du-juor” for the powers that be.
Ideas that are provably true are not indicative of meaning. Not all of Mylroie’s story is provable and the bits that are do not necessarily support her conclusions. Not everybody who reads them will buy them and not everybody who disagrees with them is a left wing, commie, pinko, fag, hell bent to destroy America.

Bottom line, American hegemony comes at a cost that is too great to bear.

Those people we are “liberating” in the Middle East are simply not worth a single American dollar, not a single American life!

Thanks for making my point.

Your recant is devoid of even the most cursory knowledge of Dr. Mylroie's work.

Her "sources" were mainly the court documents made public from the '93 WTC bombing trials and her own groundwork. "Scooter Libby"? :lkick:

Furthermore:

The attempt by Mylroie to justify, ex post facto, the war in the Middle East based on her research is a stretch, a huge stretch and ultimately that is just what this conjecture is about.


:lkick: :lkick: :lkick: :kk2:

Mylroie is not seeking to justify the war "ex post facto"....she formulated the justification for a war to remove Saddam from power before Bush did what had to be done. Her work centered around establishing Iraqi complicity in the '93 WTC Bombing. It just so happens that the same case she made for that works for 9/11 as well. If Washington had heeded her warnings, 9/11 WOULD NOT HAVE OCCURRED!
 

moocollins

Rider of the storm!
Thanks for making my point...
And thanks SO very much for making mine as well....

You are so fixated on "The Work" and your self-agrandizing role in contributing to the book, that you fail to understand that Mylroie has several works. Unfortunately for you together they comprise "Her Work". I have read sections and reports on the whole of them. It is a fact that the whole of her work is an ex post facto defense of Bush administration policy, and again, it is a STRETCH of the understanding to connect these events into a willful and well thought out collaboration between Al Queda and Saddam Hussein, especially based on her conjecture and lack of proof. It is evident to anyone who can think for themselves, without having to cling to party lines and goobermental policy and who is not afraid to be identified as a free thinking individual, who she is and what her work is directed toward. But then again I don't expect you to be as thorough and as diverse as to be able to think so broadly.

If I were you I would just go on believing things that have no real meaning or value in today’s world. Go right ahead and dwell in the past. Pay no attention to the waste of life and resources going on for people who don't deserve it and will never be thankful for it.
You just go right on thinking inside that box....
In fact don’t even acknowledge these facts in any form, just continue to personally attack those who disagree with you… it has worked out so nicely for you so far.
 
Free Objective Thinking

And thanks SO very much for making mine as well....

You are so fixated on "The Work" and your self-agrandizing role in contributing to the book, that you fail to understand that Mylroie has several works. Unfortunately for you together they comprise "Her Work". I have read sections and reports on the whole of them. It is a fact that the whole of her work is an ex post facto defense of Bush administration policy, and again, it is a STRETCH of the understanding to connect these events into a willful and well thought out collaboration between Al Queda and Saddam Hussein, especially based on her conjecture and lack of proof. It is evident to anyone who can think for themselves, without having to cling to party lines and goobermental policy and who is not afraid to be identified as a free thinking individual, who she is and what her work is directed toward. But then again I don't expect you to be as thorough and as diverse as to be able to think so broadly.

If I were you I would just go on believing things that have no real meaning or value in today’s world. Go right ahead and dwell in the past. Pay no attention to the waste of life and resources going on for people who don't deserve it and will never be thankful for it.
You just go right on thinking inside that box....
In fact don’t even acknowledge these facts in any form, just continue to personally attack those who disagree with you… it has worked out so nicely for you so far.

Dr. Mylroie's stolen identity hypothesis is thinking outside of the box if there was ever a case of it. It is one of the greatest examples of someone engaging in free thinking. Nobody in the government is willing to consider her arguments or raise them in public for fear of being derided for entertaining a crackpot conspiracy theory....not because what she's arguing lacks objective merit but because of the extreme subjective prejudices that have emerged in government and the media regarding the Bush Administration's decision to pursue the Iraq War.

If there were free, objective thinkers in society, there would be a pubic outcry to uncover the clearly available evidence to prove or disprove the stolen identity case. The Kuwaiti Ministry files for Khalid Mohammed and his nephews would be scrutinized for evidence of tampering like was found with Ramzi Yousef's (Abdul Basit's) paperwork. What's more, a DNA comparison would be carried out to see if this "family" is a family at all. Latent fingerprints would be searched for from Khalid Mohammed from when he was in college in North Carolina and compared to the fingerprints of the actual Khalid Mohammed now in U.S. custody. Etc., etc., etc.

But, alas, none of this is being done nor will likely ever be done and the only public outcry is from me....apparently the only free thinker not enclosed in the box of our society's suicidal, subjective biases.
 
What Is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Saying?

http://www.spectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=11163

What Is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed Saying?

By Laurie Mylroie
Published 3/19/2007 12:08:02 AM

After terrorist extraordinaire Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) acknowledged involvement in over 30 plots going back to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing at his Guantanamo Bay hearing (pdf), some pundits complained he was bragging. Yet although KSM may have padded his resume, U.S. authorities have long recognized his centrality. Already in December 2002, several months before his capture, the Congressional Joint Inquiry reported, "Since September 11, the CIA has come to believe that KSM may have been responsible for all bin Ladin operations outside Afghanistan."

KSM also explained that not all his terrorism was for al Qaeda; there were "operations," before he joined the organization. That, indeed, is the official U.S. position: neither the Trade Center bombing, nor a 1995 plot to bomb a dozen U.S. airliners, in which KSM was also involved, was the work of al Qaeda.


Is There More to This Than Islamic Militants?

When KSM was based in the Philippines, preparing the plot against U.S. airliners, he and his co-conspirators had girlfriends and otherwise enjoyed Manila's decidedly un-Islamic nightlife. At his hearing, KSM stated in broken English, "I consider myself, for what you are doing, a religious thing, as you consider us fundamentalists," but then proceeded to talk about George Washington, World Wars I and II, and other conflicts in U.S. history. Perhaps, KSM sought to relate to his American audience, but what other major Islamic figure has sought to explain himself without one reference to tyrants and wars in Islamic history?

A hearing was also held for a high-value detainee known as Abu Faraj al-Libi, captured in Pakistan in May 2005. The transcript (pdf) states: "In September 2004 several members of al Qaeda involved in terrorist operations, including the detainee, met in Syria to discuss a variety of terrorist operations, including planned operations in the United States, Europe and Australia." What were al Qaeda members doing in Syria? Was Syrian intelligence involved with them? What attacks did they plan? Did any materialize? Walid Jumblatt, a key figure in Lebanon's political reform movement, recently met with President George Bush and warned him about Syrian support for al Qaeda's growing presence in Lebanon.


Fighting the Last War

After Sudan expelled Osama bin Ladin to Afghanistan in 1996, a CIA officer went there to meet with Ahmed Shah Massoud. Head of the Northern Alliance, Massoud led the fight against the Taliban and was assassinated on the eve of the 9/11 attacks. As Steve Coll, former managing editor of the Washington Post, relates in Ghost Wars, Massoud cautioned the American against focusing too much on al Qaeda. It was just one element in a "poisonous coalition," Massoud explained, that included "Pakistani and Arab intelligence agencies; impoverished young students bused to their deaths as volunteer fighters from Pakistani religious schools; exiled Central Asian Islamic radicals; ... and wealthy sheikhs and preachers who jetted in from the Persian Gulf." (Emphasis added.)

Typically, Americans call all that complexity "al Qaeda" -- now essentially a "brand-name," as one former Congressman, himself an out-of-the-box thinker, puts it. In this category that we call "al Qaeda," we see figures like bin Ladin, his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the blind Egyptian cleric, Shaykh Omar Abdul Rahman, convicted of New York's "Landmarks" plot. We then go through an intellectual process that renders this novel foe familiar. We build a high-wall around the Islamic radicals, seeing them as an entity unto themselves. We then elevate their backward fanaticism into an "ideology," the successor threat to Nazi Germany and Soviet Communism. And, finally, we are fighting World War III against "Islamism" or "Islamofascism."

This enemy appeals, because we recognize it from our past, but does it accurately depict the current challenge? Communism and fascism were the official ideologies of major European powers. What power, indeed what state, is the United States fighting now? "There is no there, there," one thoughtful conservative publisher complains In fact, this understanding is rooted in Bill Clinton's law enforcement approach to terrorism, in which his administration could not recognize the involvement of states in major terrorist attacks. This is actually Clintonism, massaged and re-formulated, to appeal to the most patriotic Americans.

It is not only generals who can err by fighting the last war. We have been fighting the GWOT for over five years, but have yet to win one major conflict, even as radicalism's appeal to young Muslims remains undiminished. A senior Iraqi politician recently advised this author that there is no lack of suicide bombers there -- they are stacked up and ready to go.

Perhaps, our approach is fundamentally wrong, because the conventional wisdom about the nature of the enemy is wrong? Victory in the Cold War required establishing a "B" team to reassess the conventional wisdom about the Soviet Union. That reassessment produced a correct understanding of the enemy and helped Ronald Reagan develop a strategy for victory. We very much need to undertake a similar exercise regarding our foe in the GWOT. Meanwhile, perhaps we can give a little more thought to just what we mean, when we speak about "al Qaeda"?


Laurie Mylroie (http://www.lauriemylroie.com) is an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Study of Revenge: The First World Trade Center Attack and Saddam Hussein's War Against America (AEI Press, 2001).
 
Top