National Geographic Channel Presents Never-Before-Heard Revelations from U.S. Authorities on Plot to Blow Up Almost 10 Passenger Jets
The Liquid Bomb Plot Presents Exclusive Interviews With CIA and Homeland Security Agents on the Chilling and Tense Global Surveillance Operation That Uncovered a Plot to Kill More Than 2,000 People
August 16, 2011
The Liquid Bomb Plot Premieres This Sunday, August 21, 2011, at 9 P.M. EDT/PDT on National Geographic Channel
WASHINGTON, Aug. 16, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- In the summer of 2006, as many as 18 conspirators planned to simultaneously blow up almost 10 airplanes by bringing hydrogen peroxide-injected soda-bottles-turned-bombs onto flights bound from London to the U.S. and Canada. Now, National Geographic Channel (NGC) — with unprecedented access to undercover agents and top officials from the CIA, Homeland Security and British Counter-Terror Command — goes inside the true story behind the largest and most sophisticated terrorism plot since September 11, 2001, which changed airline security measures around the world.
The Liquid Bomb Plot details how a threat that began as a British counterterrorist investigation evolved into a global emergency. In the U.S., President Bush's administration, the CIA and the Department of Homeland Security worked feverishly to protect America from an attack on the scale of 9/11.
With remarkable access to the highest-level officials involved in foiling the terrorists — some of whom have given NGC their only interview on the plot — the complete details behind the operation are revealed. Interviews include, from the U.S., General Michael Hayden, former director, CIA; Michael Chertoff, former secretary, Department of Homeland Security; Robert Grenier, former Islamabad station chief, CIA; Kip Hawley, former director, Transportation Security Administration; and Charlie Allen, chief intelligence officer, Department of Homeland Security. Top U.K. interviews include Lord John Reid, former home secretary and former defense secretary, Britain; Andy Hayman, former assistant commissioner for specialist operations, Metropolitan Police; and Peter Clarke, OBE, former national co-coordinator of terrorist investigations, Metropolitan Police.
Now, for the first time, U.S. officials recount how they essentially forced the hand of the British to arrest the suspected terrorists ahead of schedule by making a secret trip to Pakistan. General Michael Hayden was working closely with the British government on Operation Overt, the largest surveillance operation in U.K history, with more than 200 agents involved in surveillance alone, not to mention the senior officials on both sides of the pond monitoring the situation.
General Hayden discusses on camera for the only time how he visited Pakistan and met with the head of the Pakistan Intelligence Agency without alerting the British, who had requested more time to gather evidence. During Hayden's trip, Rashid Rauf, the key Al Qaeda operative in the plot, was arrested by the Pakistani authorities, thus compelling the British to move into the "arrest phase" ahead of plan before those involved found out they might be compromised.
"The British had always suspected the Americans were behind Rauf's arrest, but this is the first and only time a senior U.S. figure has discussed the arrest publicly," explains Executive Producer Louise Norman, who worked for more than a year to gain access to the true details behind the terror plot from both the U.S. and British governments. "The Liquid Bomb Plot is by far the most comprehensive, detailed report on how this incredible terror plot was foiled. I thought I knew the full story, but what happened behind the scenes has never been fully reported until now."
The resulting arrests led to 11 terrorism-related convictions and a mountain of evidence, including 26,000 exhibits from 102 property searches, 80 seized computers and related devices, and 15,000 CDs, 500 disks and 14,000 gigs of data.
The arrests also made news around the world and changed air travel in the most substantial way since 9/11—including passengers not being allowed to go through airport security with more than 3.4 ounces of liquid.
For more information, visit www.natgeotv.com.
SOURCE National Geographic Channel
Showing posts with label liquid bombers. Show all posts
Showing posts with label liquid bombers. Show all posts
PRNewsWire : National Geographic Channel Presents Never-Before-Heard Revelations from U.S. Authorities on Plot to Blow Up Almost 10 Passenger Jets
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Filed under
Andy Hayman,
CIA,
John Reid,
liquid bombers,
Michael Chertoff,
Michael Hayden,
Pakistan,
Rashid Rauf
by Winter Patriot
on Tuesday, August 16, 2011
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National Geographic : Pakistan Undercover * Facts
Tuesday, August 16, 2011
Pakistan Undercover * Facts
Next Prime Time Airing Mon Aug 22
Founded in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency remains one of America's strongest defenses against terror and foreign threats. The attacks of September 11 focused the CIA on finding the persons responsible and preventing other attacks on the nation. Learn more about the origins of the CIA and how its operations today have helped protect us:
* The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was the precursor to the CIA, formed during World War II.
* The colloquial term “agent” for members of the CIA conducting clandestine operations is a misnomer; the actual term is CIA Officer. Agents are foreign nationals who are recruited by an officer and are traitors to their own countries.
* The CIA headquarters are located in an area of Virginia that was once called Langley. Although this area was renamed McLean in 1910, the neighborhood surrounding the CIA is still referred to as Langley. Initial construction on the headquarters began in 1959 and was completed in 1961.
* The Security Service, frequently referred to as MI5 (Military Intelligence section 5), is the UK's intelligence agency. Established in 1909, it underwent four name changes before becoming the Security Service in 1931.
* Human Intelligence or “humint” is a critical component of espionage, in which information is gathered and provided by human sources.
* The function of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISI, has been likened to that of the CIA. It was formed in the early days of Pakistan's independence in 1948. There is evidence that ISI operatives have ties with militant networks working against Western interests. Some ISI members were allegedly involved in the planning of the 2008 Indian Embassy bombing in Kabul, a claim that Pakistan denies.
* The August 6, 2001, President’s Daily Brief entitled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US,” provides a substantive warning of threats posed by Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda a month before the attacks on 9/11. A redacted copy of the brief was made public on April 10, 2004. With the help of computer software programs, cryptographers at a conference in Switzerland suggested it was highly probable that the word ‘Egyptian’ was redacted in the following sentence: “An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told an [redacted] service at the same time that Bin Ladin was planning to exploit the operative's access to the US to mount a terrorist strike.”
* Rashid Rauf was reportedly killed in a UAV strike in 2008. However, British Intelligence sources question whether Rauf is really dead. Some sources insist that he was involved in the Easter Manchester bomb plot of April 2009.
* Waterboarding is not a new interrogation technique. In fact, the method was used as early as the Spanish Inquisition.
* Abu Zubaydah still remains in U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. To date, no formal charges have been brought against him.
* The CIA has a history of interesting but failed projects. One such endeavor involved psychics who attempted “remote viewing” of covert foreign military facilities. Another operation, “Acoustic Kitty,” hoped to develop a mobile listening technique by implanting trained cats with microphones. The first such cat was released and promptly run over by a taxicab.
* The technique known as “dead drop” allows two parties to transfer goods or information without meeting in person. Former CIA officer Aldrich Ames used the method to interact with the Russian foreign intelligence agency. He made specific chalk marks on a mailbox on 37th and R St. NW. in Washington D.C., to arrange a meeting.
* A false flag operation is an intentional effort to mislead either the public or a detainee. In one account of Zubaydah's interrogation, CIA officers allegedly tricked him into thinking he had been turned over to the Saudi Arabian government.
* Some of the CIA gadgetry that exists in the movies has a real life counterpart. In 2000, the CIA built a swimming robot catfish named "Charlie." Other gadgets of interest include a remote-controlled dragonfly and pigeons fitted with cameras.
* The “liquid bomb plot” that was thwarted in August 2006 exposed a lack of readiness and detection capability for that type of explosive and ushered in a new set of security restrictions for traveling with liquids.
Next Prime Time Airing Mon Aug 22
Founded in 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency remains one of America's strongest defenses against terror and foreign threats. The attacks of September 11 focused the CIA on finding the persons responsible and preventing other attacks on the nation. Learn more about the origins of the CIA and how its operations today have helped protect us:
* The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was the precursor to the CIA, formed during World War II.
* The colloquial term “agent” for members of the CIA conducting clandestine operations is a misnomer; the actual term is CIA Officer. Agents are foreign nationals who are recruited by an officer and are traitors to their own countries.
* The CIA headquarters are located in an area of Virginia that was once called Langley. Although this area was renamed McLean in 1910, the neighborhood surrounding the CIA is still referred to as Langley. Initial construction on the headquarters began in 1959 and was completed in 1961.
* The Security Service, frequently referred to as MI5 (Military Intelligence section 5), is the UK's intelligence agency. Established in 1909, it underwent four name changes before becoming the Security Service in 1931.
* Human Intelligence or “humint” is a critical component of espionage, in which information is gathered and provided by human sources.
* The function of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISI, has been likened to that of the CIA. It was formed in the early days of Pakistan's independence in 1948. There is evidence that ISI operatives have ties with militant networks working against Western interests. Some ISI members were allegedly involved in the planning of the 2008 Indian Embassy bombing in Kabul, a claim that Pakistan denies.
* The August 6, 2001, President’s Daily Brief entitled “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in US,” provides a substantive warning of threats posed by Osama Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda a month before the attacks on 9/11. A redacted copy of the brief was made public on April 10, 2004. With the help of computer software programs, cryptographers at a conference in Switzerland suggested it was highly probable that the word ‘Egyptian’ was redacted in the following sentence: “An Egyptian Islamic Jihad (EIJ) operative told an [redacted] service at the same time that Bin Ladin was planning to exploit the operative's access to the US to mount a terrorist strike.”
* Rashid Rauf was reportedly killed in a UAV strike in 2008. However, British Intelligence sources question whether Rauf is really dead. Some sources insist that he was involved in the Easter Manchester bomb plot of April 2009.
* Waterboarding is not a new interrogation technique. In fact, the method was used as early as the Spanish Inquisition.
* Abu Zubaydah still remains in U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. To date, no formal charges have been brought against him.
* The CIA has a history of interesting but failed projects. One such endeavor involved psychics who attempted “remote viewing” of covert foreign military facilities. Another operation, “Acoustic Kitty,” hoped to develop a mobile listening technique by implanting trained cats with microphones. The first such cat was released and promptly run over by a taxicab.
* The technique known as “dead drop” allows two parties to transfer goods or information without meeting in person. Former CIA officer Aldrich Ames used the method to interact with the Russian foreign intelligence agency. He made specific chalk marks on a mailbox on 37th and R St. NW. in Washington D.C., to arrange a meeting.
* A false flag operation is an intentional effort to mislead either the public or a detainee. In one account of Zubaydah's interrogation, CIA officers allegedly tricked him into thinking he had been turned over to the Saudi Arabian government.
* Some of the CIA gadgetry that exists in the movies has a real life counterpart. In 2000, the CIA built a swimming robot catfish named "Charlie." Other gadgets of interest include a remote-controlled dragonfly and pigeons fitted with cameras.
* The “liquid bomb plot” that was thwarted in August 2006 exposed a lack of readiness and detection capability for that type of explosive and ushered in a new set of security restrictions for traveling with liquids.
Filed under
Abu Zubaydah,
CIA,
Easter Bombers,
liquid bombers,
National Geographic,
Rashid Rauf
by Winter Patriot
on Tuesday, August 16, 2011
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]
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]
BBC : 'Bomb plot' case jury dismissed
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
'Bomb plot' case jury dismissed
February 18, 2009
The jury in the trial of eight men accused of conspiring to murder by blowing up transatlantic airliners has been discharged for "legal reasons".
It is not yet known why the judge, Mr Justice Henriques, took his decision to discharge the jury.
The prosecution at Woolwich Crown Court had alleged that the men had planned to blow up at least seven aircraft.
All the men denied the alleged plot, which anti-terrorism police say they foiled in August 2006.
A new jury will be sworn in and the case re-started at a time to be fixed.
February 18, 2009
The jury in the trial of eight men accused of conspiring to murder by blowing up transatlantic airliners has been discharged for "legal reasons".
It is not yet known why the judge, Mr Justice Henriques, took his decision to discharge the jury.
The prosecution at Woolwich Crown Court had alleged that the men had planned to blow up at least seven aircraft.
All the men denied the alleged plot, which anti-terrorism police say they foiled in August 2006.
A new jury will be sworn in and the case re-started at a time to be fixed.
NYT : Second Trial Begins in U.K. Airliner Bomb Plot
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
Second Trial Begins in U.K. Airliner Bomb Plot
By JOHN F. BURNS | February 17, 2009
LONDON — Prosecutors began a second trial of eight men accused of a plot in 2006 to blow up several trans-Atlantic airliners with explosives hidden in soft-drink bottles by telling a jury on Tuesday that the accused planned to cause deaths on an “unprecedented scale” and to strike “a blow that would reverberate across the world.”
The trial, which prosecutors expect to last several months, is widely viewed among counterterrorist officials on both sides of the Atlantic as the most important to be held in Britain since the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States. The charges center on a suspected plot to simultaneously attack seven airliners flying from London’s Heathrow Airport to the United States and Canada, causing many hundreds of deaths.
A first trial ended last September with the jury failing to reach verdicts on the plane-bombing charges. But prosecutors announced almost immediately that they planned a new trial. No case here in years has drawn the same degree of attention from Washington, and officials say there has been close cooperation in preparing the case between intelligence and law enforcement officials in London and Washington.
The setting for both trials is a heavily guarded courthouse in Woolwich, in south London, which was chosen, officials say, because it presented fewer security challenges than better-known courthouses like the Old Bailey, in central London. The prosecution says the bombing plot had its origins in Pakistan and involved Islamic militants with links to Al Qaeda.
The accused in the case are all British residents from the London area, ages 22 to 30.
The seven flights that allegedly were their targets involved American Airlines, United Airlines and Air Canada, with Chicago, New York, Washington, San Francisco, Montreal and Toronto the destinations. A feature of the prosecution’s case is a computer memory stick, with the seven flights highlighted on pages downloaded from an online flight guide, which the authorities say was found on a man accused of being a ringleader, Abdulla Ahmed Ali, 28, when he was arrested in August 2006.
At the previous trial, Mr. Ali denied there had been a plot to bomb aircraft and said the plan had been to protest British and American policies in Afghanistan and Iraq by setting off minor blasts to “stir alarm,” not kill people, outside the offices of American Airlines operating out of Heathrow. He said that an earlier version of the plan had involved bombing the houses of Parliament at Westminster in central London, but that security there had proved too tight.
The chief prosecutor, Peter Wright, told the court Tuesday that the attacks were to have been carried out by means of bombs whose assembly would have been completed in midflight, with the bombers mating soft-drink bottles filled with a liquid explosive, based on hydrogen peroxide, with homemade detonators. The arrests of the men now on trial set off a worldwide tightening of airline carry-on restrictions that remains in force, including a ban on carrying most liquids in hand luggage.
Mr. Wright told the jury that the defendants were part of a wider terrorist network directed from Pakistan and dependent for its success on “young, radicalized Muslims prepared to lose their lives in a global act of jihad.” He added, “These men were indifferent to the carnage that was likely to ensue.”
By JOHN F. BURNS | February 17, 2009
LONDON — Prosecutors began a second trial of eight men accused of a plot in 2006 to blow up several trans-Atlantic airliners with explosives hidden in soft-drink bottles by telling a jury on Tuesday that the accused planned to cause deaths on an “unprecedented scale” and to strike “a blow that would reverberate across the world.”
The trial, which prosecutors expect to last several months, is widely viewed among counterterrorist officials on both sides of the Atlantic as the most important to be held in Britain since the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States. The charges center on a suspected plot to simultaneously attack seven airliners flying from London’s Heathrow Airport to the United States and Canada, causing many hundreds of deaths.
A first trial ended last September with the jury failing to reach verdicts on the plane-bombing charges. But prosecutors announced almost immediately that they planned a new trial. No case here in years has drawn the same degree of attention from Washington, and officials say there has been close cooperation in preparing the case between intelligence and law enforcement officials in London and Washington.
The setting for both trials is a heavily guarded courthouse in Woolwich, in south London, which was chosen, officials say, because it presented fewer security challenges than better-known courthouses like the Old Bailey, in central London. The prosecution says the bombing plot had its origins in Pakistan and involved Islamic militants with links to Al Qaeda.
The accused in the case are all British residents from the London area, ages 22 to 30.
The seven flights that allegedly were their targets involved American Airlines, United Airlines and Air Canada, with Chicago, New York, Washington, San Francisco, Montreal and Toronto the destinations. A feature of the prosecution’s case is a computer memory stick, with the seven flights highlighted on pages downloaded from an online flight guide, which the authorities say was found on a man accused of being a ringleader, Abdulla Ahmed Ali, 28, when he was arrested in August 2006.
At the previous trial, Mr. Ali denied there had been a plot to bomb aircraft and said the plan had been to protest British and American policies in Afghanistan and Iraq by setting off minor blasts to “stir alarm,” not kill people, outside the offices of American Airlines operating out of Heathrow. He said that an earlier version of the plan had involved bombing the houses of Parliament at Westminster in central London, but that security there had proved too tight.
The chief prosecutor, Peter Wright, told the court Tuesday that the attacks were to have been carried out by means of bombs whose assembly would have been completed in midflight, with the bombers mating soft-drink bottles filled with a liquid explosive, based on hydrogen peroxide, with homemade detonators. The arrests of the men now on trial set off a worldwide tightening of airline carry-on restrictions that remains in force, including a ban on carrying most liquids in hand luggage.
Mr. Wright told the jury that the defendants were part of a wider terrorist network directed from Pakistan and dependent for its success on “young, radicalized Muslims prepared to lose their lives in a global act of jihad.” He added, “These men were indifferent to the carnage that was likely to ensue.”
Independent : Terror plots & conspiracy theories: the hunt for Rashid Rauf
Friday, September 26, 2008
Terror plots & conspiracy theories: the hunt for Rashid Rauf
He is one of the world's most wanted men, linked to a July 21 attacker and implicated in the airline bomb plot. Yet Rashid Rauf is still at large. Kim Sengupta reveals the latest sighting of a notorious fugitive and asks: is he being sheltered by Pakistan's security services?
September 27, 2008
The rugged and beautiful valley of Balakot, rolling down to the blue-green waters of the Kunhar river near the Kashmir border in Pakistan, used to be a popular tourist destination before the devastating earthquake of three years ago wreaked havoc.
Reconstruction has been slow but one development which was back in business fast, supposedly with money siphoned from millions of pounds of international aid, has been a training camp used by Islamist militants.
It is in this area that Rashid Rauf, the 27-year-old from Birmingham accused of being a key organiser of a notorious plot to blow ten airliners out of the sky was said to have been spotted in March this year – his first sighting since his amazing escape from Pakistani police three months previously. The so-called "liquid bomb" plot was one of the most audacious terrorist conspiracies to be uncovered and led to sweeping security measures at airports around the world. The trial ended with seven men convicted of charges in relation to the plot, with a computer studies student Abdulla Ahmed Ali identified as the ringleader in court. They all face a retrial on more serious charges but the man described by law agencies as the real "mastermind", Rashid Rauf, remains on the run as Britain's most wanted terrorist.
He is reported to have broken cover again a month later around the 25th and 26th April. Looking thin and pale, with his once sparse beard down to his chest, he was spotted in Bahawalpur, around 400 miles south of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. If true this was a remarkably bold move, for this was the same town where he had been arrested by Pakistani police in August 2006 in connection with the airliner plot. He had also chosen to make his appearance at a meeting of the leadership of Jaish-e-Mohammed, a supposedly banned Muslim extremist group, which could have been raided by the country's security forces.
The Balakot camp, in the Manserah district, is run by Jaish-e-Mohammed, and has previous links with extremist UK Muslims, including Shahzad Tanweer, one of the 7/7 bombers. The reasons why Rauf, who is said to have been a conduit for al-Qa'ida in the "liquid bomb" plot, remains free to mix with a Jihadi group with continuing links to British Muslims is shrouded in the realpolitik of espionage and terrorism. It also raises questions about who are the real paymasters of the baker's delivery man from the Midlands who became such an important terrorist target.
Rauf first officially became a subject of police interest over the murder of his uncle Mohammed Saeed, stabbed to death on his way home from work in what was described as a frenzied attack, in Birmingham in 2002. Rashid, who had been working at a bakery in the Bordesley Green area of Birmingham, started by his father, Abdul Rauf, fled to Pakistan soon after his uncle's death and headed for Bahawalpur, a dusty backwater, where the extended family of his wife, the daughter of an imam, were based.
Among them was his brother-in-law, Maulana Masood Azhar who founded Jaish-e-Mohammed at the Binori mosque in Karachi. The terrorist group was outlawed by Pakistan's then ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, after pressure from the US following the 9/11 attack. In reality, like many other groups officially banned in Pakistan, Jaish continued to operate under other guises. It uses the Balakot camp, known as Harkat al-Mujaheddin, to supply fighters in Afghanistan, and carries out attacks in India and Pakistan, where it was responsible for the country's first sustained wave of suicide bombings.
Jaish-e-Mohammed was also suspected of attempting General Musharraf's assassination, which surprised analysts as it is said to have a close working relationship with elements within ISI, the Pakistani secret police. The group went on to forge links with a number of Islamist groups, including, say the Pakistani authorities, al-Qa'ida and its bombmakers, who are suspected of causing the devastating blast at the Marriot Hotel in Islamabad last weekend.
Rauf's radicalisation, according to those who knew him, had begun long before he went to Bahawalpur. There is believed to have been a political element to his uncle's murder and he was in contact with people from an extremist background. Rauf's father had helped set up Crescent Relief, a charity based at Ilford, in Essex, which raised and sent more than £100,000 to Pakistan following the earthquake of 2005. A significant portion of that was said to have been diverted to Islamic militants. There is, however, nothing to suggest that Mr Rauf senior, who stepped down as a director of the charity in 2003, knew about terrorists benefiting from donations.
The fugitive Rauf took the first name of Khalid while living in Bahawalpur, where he is said to have made contact with a senior al-Qa'ida operative, Abu Obadiah al-Masri, to plan the airliner attacks. The police then became aware of his identity. By that time British security agencies had uncovered the airliner plot and the Pakistani authorities were requested to track Rauf but not arrest him as it would have alerted the UK players in the illicit operation.
That is precisely what happened on 7 August 2006 before British investigators had gathered what they considered enough evidence to successfully prosecute the plotters. This was the prime reason given when the defendants, although convicted of other charges, were cleared of conspiracy to blow up the planes.
Peter Clarke, then the head of Counter Terrorism Command, said of Rauf's arrest: "This was not good news, we were at a critical point in building our case against them. If they got to hear that he had been arrested they might destroy evidence and scatter it to the four winds. More worrying still, if they were tipped off to the arrest they might panic and mount a desperate attack."
According to some sources within hours of Rauf's arrest someone connected with him had tried to contact the plotters in the UK asking them to launch the attacks as soon as possible. "The plotters received a very short message 'go now'," said Franco Frattini, the European Union's security commissioner, who was briefed by John Reid, then Home Secretary. "I was convinced by the British authorities this message exists." Why Rauf was arrested at that particular point is an issue of continuing controversy. The official Pakistani explanation was that there were fears that he may flee to Afghanistan. It is also said the Americans ordered his arrest because of concerns that the terrorists might slip through the net. There is another view that the arrest was ordered by the ISI to use Rauf to backs claims that the plot had originated in Afghanistan. This version of events was dismissed in the West as a desperate attempt to shift blame.
Britain had no extradition treaty with Pakistan, but the foreign minister said it might be willing to deport Rauf, who holds dual British and Pakistani nationality, if a request was made. In December 2006 a judge in Pakistan threw out terrorism charges against Rauf but he was remanded in custody, accused of possessing explosives and forged identity papers, regarded as holding charges while details were being sorted out for him to be sent back to the UK.
Rauf escaped in December 2007 while being taken back to his place of incarceration, Adiala prison, near Rawalpindi, after a court appearance in Islamabad. His jail record stated: "The accused is a dangerous person and involved in international activities. Therefore, he needs strict security. If any mishap happens while he is travelling, the in-charge police will be responsible." In the event his police escort, just two constables, allowed him to leave their van to travel in his uncle's car, stopped off for lunch at a branch of McDonald's and then allowed him to go into a mosque by himself for afternoon prayers.
Rauf was not seen again. The two constables, Mohammad Tufail and Nawabzada Khan, said they looked for him and were given a lift back to the police station by the uncle who then disappeared. An interim report into the escape concluded: "This is not a case of negligence but a case of criminal collusion."
Nine police officers were sacked over Rauf's escape. And that is where the matter appears to have ended. Al-Masri, the al-Qa'ida official Rauf had allegedly been working with, has, according to security sources, subsequently died of natural causes.
Few in the know in Pakistan accept that a bunch of provincial policemen were responsible for one of the most high profile prisoners in Pakistan, Rauf, fleeing with such ease. His lawyer, Hashmat Ali Habib, said in an interview: "You could call it a 'mysterious disappearance' if you like, but not an escape. The Pakistanis are simply not interested in handing him over to the British. They never have been, although it is not clear why not." Mr Habib says he is certain who was responsible, but like many in his country, he is afraid of publicly blaming the ISI for anything. One Pakistani official, who says he despairs of the Islamist "subversion" of his country, said: "It should not be difficult to understand why Rauf could not be sent to England... Can you imagine what kind of stuff Rauf may reveal under cross-examination in court in Britain?"
Previous experience has shown, however, that protection provided by a court does not necessarily lead to candour. At the 2006 trial of the group accused of plotting to blow up the Bluewater shopping centre and the Ministry of Sound nightclub one of the defendants, Omar Khayyam, 24, had given evidence at the Old Bailey that he was at a training camp in Pakistan where he had seen ISI officials giving lessons in bomb-making. Then, at the start of a day's proceedings, he said: "I just want to say that the ISI has had a word with my family in Pakistan regarding what I have been saying about them. I think they are worried I might end up revealing more about them and right now the priority for me has to be the safety of my family there. Much as I might want to go on and clarify matters I am going to stop. I am not going to discuss anything relating to the ISI any more."
He is one of the world's most wanted men, linked to a July 21 attacker and implicated in the airline bomb plot. Yet Rashid Rauf is still at large. Kim Sengupta reveals the latest sighting of a notorious fugitive and asks: is he being sheltered by Pakistan's security services?
September 27, 2008
The rugged and beautiful valley of Balakot, rolling down to the blue-green waters of the Kunhar river near the Kashmir border in Pakistan, used to be a popular tourist destination before the devastating earthquake of three years ago wreaked havoc.
Reconstruction has been slow but one development which was back in business fast, supposedly with money siphoned from millions of pounds of international aid, has been a training camp used by Islamist militants.
It is in this area that Rashid Rauf, the 27-year-old from Birmingham accused of being a key organiser of a notorious plot to blow ten airliners out of the sky was said to have been spotted in March this year – his first sighting since his amazing escape from Pakistani police three months previously. The so-called "liquid bomb" plot was one of the most audacious terrorist conspiracies to be uncovered and led to sweeping security measures at airports around the world. The trial ended with seven men convicted of charges in relation to the plot, with a computer studies student Abdulla Ahmed Ali identified as the ringleader in court. They all face a retrial on more serious charges but the man described by law agencies as the real "mastermind", Rashid Rauf, remains on the run as Britain's most wanted terrorist.
He is reported to have broken cover again a month later around the 25th and 26th April. Looking thin and pale, with his once sparse beard down to his chest, he was spotted in Bahawalpur, around 400 miles south of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad. If true this was a remarkably bold move, for this was the same town where he had been arrested by Pakistani police in August 2006 in connection with the airliner plot. He had also chosen to make his appearance at a meeting of the leadership of Jaish-e-Mohammed, a supposedly banned Muslim extremist group, which could have been raided by the country's security forces.
The Balakot camp, in the Manserah district, is run by Jaish-e-Mohammed, and has previous links with extremist UK Muslims, including Shahzad Tanweer, one of the 7/7 bombers. The reasons why Rauf, who is said to have been a conduit for al-Qa'ida in the "liquid bomb" plot, remains free to mix with a Jihadi group with continuing links to British Muslims is shrouded in the realpolitik of espionage and terrorism. It also raises questions about who are the real paymasters of the baker's delivery man from the Midlands who became such an important terrorist target.
Rauf first officially became a subject of police interest over the murder of his uncle Mohammed Saeed, stabbed to death on his way home from work in what was described as a frenzied attack, in Birmingham in 2002. Rashid, who had been working at a bakery in the Bordesley Green area of Birmingham, started by his father, Abdul Rauf, fled to Pakistan soon after his uncle's death and headed for Bahawalpur, a dusty backwater, where the extended family of his wife, the daughter of an imam, were based.
Among them was his brother-in-law, Maulana Masood Azhar who founded Jaish-e-Mohammed at the Binori mosque in Karachi. The terrorist group was outlawed by Pakistan's then ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, after pressure from the US following the 9/11 attack. In reality, like many other groups officially banned in Pakistan, Jaish continued to operate under other guises. It uses the Balakot camp, known as Harkat al-Mujaheddin, to supply fighters in Afghanistan, and carries out attacks in India and Pakistan, where it was responsible for the country's first sustained wave of suicide bombings.
Jaish-e-Mohammed was also suspected of attempting General Musharraf's assassination, which surprised analysts as it is said to have a close working relationship with elements within ISI, the Pakistani secret police. The group went on to forge links with a number of Islamist groups, including, say the Pakistani authorities, al-Qa'ida and its bombmakers, who are suspected of causing the devastating blast at the Marriot Hotel in Islamabad last weekend.
Rauf's radicalisation, according to those who knew him, had begun long before he went to Bahawalpur. There is believed to have been a political element to his uncle's murder and he was in contact with people from an extremist background. Rauf's father had helped set up Crescent Relief, a charity based at Ilford, in Essex, which raised and sent more than £100,000 to Pakistan following the earthquake of 2005. A significant portion of that was said to have been diverted to Islamic militants. There is, however, nothing to suggest that Mr Rauf senior, who stepped down as a director of the charity in 2003, knew about terrorists benefiting from donations.
The fugitive Rauf took the first name of Khalid while living in Bahawalpur, where he is said to have made contact with a senior al-Qa'ida operative, Abu Obadiah al-Masri, to plan the airliner attacks. The police then became aware of his identity. By that time British security agencies had uncovered the airliner plot and the Pakistani authorities were requested to track Rauf but not arrest him as it would have alerted the UK players in the illicit operation.
That is precisely what happened on 7 August 2006 before British investigators had gathered what they considered enough evidence to successfully prosecute the plotters. This was the prime reason given when the defendants, although convicted of other charges, were cleared of conspiracy to blow up the planes.
Peter Clarke, then the head of Counter Terrorism Command, said of Rauf's arrest: "This was not good news, we were at a critical point in building our case against them. If they got to hear that he had been arrested they might destroy evidence and scatter it to the four winds. More worrying still, if they were tipped off to the arrest they might panic and mount a desperate attack."
According to some sources within hours of Rauf's arrest someone connected with him had tried to contact the plotters in the UK asking them to launch the attacks as soon as possible. "The plotters received a very short message 'go now'," said Franco Frattini, the European Union's security commissioner, who was briefed by John Reid, then Home Secretary. "I was convinced by the British authorities this message exists." Why Rauf was arrested at that particular point is an issue of continuing controversy. The official Pakistani explanation was that there were fears that he may flee to Afghanistan. It is also said the Americans ordered his arrest because of concerns that the terrorists might slip through the net. There is another view that the arrest was ordered by the ISI to use Rauf to backs claims that the plot had originated in Afghanistan. This version of events was dismissed in the West as a desperate attempt to shift blame.
Britain had no extradition treaty with Pakistan, but the foreign minister said it might be willing to deport Rauf, who holds dual British and Pakistani nationality, if a request was made. In December 2006 a judge in Pakistan threw out terrorism charges against Rauf but he was remanded in custody, accused of possessing explosives and forged identity papers, regarded as holding charges while details were being sorted out for him to be sent back to the UK.
Rauf escaped in December 2007 while being taken back to his place of incarceration, Adiala prison, near Rawalpindi, after a court appearance in Islamabad. His jail record stated: "The accused is a dangerous person and involved in international activities. Therefore, he needs strict security. If any mishap happens while he is travelling, the in-charge police will be responsible." In the event his police escort, just two constables, allowed him to leave their van to travel in his uncle's car, stopped off for lunch at a branch of McDonald's and then allowed him to go into a mosque by himself for afternoon prayers.
Rauf was not seen again. The two constables, Mohammad Tufail and Nawabzada Khan, said they looked for him and were given a lift back to the police station by the uncle who then disappeared. An interim report into the escape concluded: "This is not a case of negligence but a case of criminal collusion."
Nine police officers were sacked over Rauf's escape. And that is where the matter appears to have ended. Al-Masri, the al-Qa'ida official Rauf had allegedly been working with, has, according to security sources, subsequently died of natural causes.
Few in the know in Pakistan accept that a bunch of provincial policemen were responsible for one of the most high profile prisoners in Pakistan, Rauf, fleeing with such ease. His lawyer, Hashmat Ali Habib, said in an interview: "You could call it a 'mysterious disappearance' if you like, but not an escape. The Pakistanis are simply not interested in handing him over to the British. They never have been, although it is not clear why not." Mr Habib says he is certain who was responsible, but like many in his country, he is afraid of publicly blaming the ISI for anything. One Pakistani official, who says he despairs of the Islamist "subversion" of his country, said: "It should not be difficult to understand why Rauf could not be sent to England... Can you imagine what kind of stuff Rauf may reveal under cross-examination in court in Britain?"
Previous experience has shown, however, that protection provided by a court does not necessarily lead to candour. At the 2006 trial of the group accused of plotting to blow up the Bluewater shopping centre and the Ministry of Sound nightclub one of the defendants, Omar Khayyam, 24, had given evidence at the Old Bailey that he was at a training camp in Pakistan where he had seen ISI officials giving lessons in bomb-making. Then, at the start of a day's proceedings, he said: "I just want to say that the ISI has had a word with my family in Pakistan regarding what I have been saying about them. I think they are worried I might end up revealing more about them and right now the priority for me has to be the safety of my family there. Much as I might want to go on and clarify matters I am going to stop. I am not going to discuss anything relating to the ISI any more."
Filed under
liquid bombers,
Rashid Rauf
by Winter Patriot
on Friday, September 26, 2008
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Dawn : The children of 9/11
Friday, September 19, 2008
The children of 9/11
By Irfan Husain | September 10, 2008
Another terrorist group tried and sentenced in Britain; another link with Pakistan as the training centre for terrorists established. This time, the group of eight accused of trying to blow up seven airliners over the Atlantic two years ago was in the spotlight following a lengthy trial. Three were found guilty of assorted terrorism charges, while the jury found insufficient evidence against the other five. The prosecution is now considering whether to request a re-trial.
All the members of the cell were young men of Pakistani origin, and several of them had travelled to Pakistan shortly before being arrested. In the newspapers and TV discussions that followed the trial, their trips to the country of origin were highlighted. On BBC’s flagship news programme, Newsnight, a security expert was asked to comment on the fact that so many terror plots seemed to originate in Pakistan. And when residents of the East London neighbourhood where most of the group came from were interviewed, they spoke of the suspicion they were viewed with after details about the plot became public.
While the defendants insisted that all they wanted to do was to set off an explosion in a public place to draw attention to the “wrongs Muslims were being subjected to”, the fact that several of them had recorded videos threatening death and destruction undercut their defence. Ahmed Ali, the leader of the gang, was shown on the screen fulminating:
“Sheikh Osama warned you many times to leave our lands or you will be destroyed, and now the time has come for you to be destroyed… We will take our revenge and anger [sic], ripping amongst your people and scattering the people and your body parts, and your people’s body parts responsible for these wars and oppression, and decorating the streets.”
Fortunately, their skills as terrorists did not match their intentions. When one of the suspects returned from Pakistan, his baggage was secretly searched at Heathrow, and was found to contain a large number of batteries and plastic liquid containers. This aroused the suspicion of intelligence officials from MI5, and the suspect was followed, and his flat bugged. The expanding surveillance became Britain’s biggest covert operation, as members of the group were followed to an apartment that turned out to be a bomb factory.
Every couple of months, some fresh terrorist plot is uncovered in the UK, and invariably, those involved turn out to be Muslims with links to Pakistan. Understandably, this leads to a high degree of profiling by the security services that antagonises ordinary Muslims who feel they are being unfairly singled out. But under the circumstances, what can the state do to protect its citizens? It must be said that the British government is doing its best under very trying circumstances.
Clearly, Pakistan needs to do much more to crack down on the training camps that are giving the country such a bad name. But instead of halting these activities, it seems our security services are hindering investigations. Rashid Rauf, the Pakistani suspected of being involved in the Atlantic airliner plot, was arrested in Pakistan on a tip-from British intelligence. But while being tried in Rawalpindi, and pending an extradition request from Britain, he mysteriously gave his police guards the slip last December, and remains at large. According to one theory, he is under the protection of one of our intelligence agencies.
The widespread impression in the West is that Pakistan is not doing enough to stamp out extremism on its soil, and has become a magnet for terrorists from around the world. These people, after acquiring the skills necessary to carry out operations, then travel abroad to kill and maim. This view is mirrored in the perception that the Taliban are allowed free rein in the tribal areas, and use this safe haven to stage attacks against Western forces in Afghanistan. As American and NATO casualties multiply, pressure builds up on Western governments to halt these attacks. The recent American ground attack on Pakistani soil might have been the first of its kind, but I doubt if it will be the last.
Unfortunately, most Pakistanis are unwilling to understand the seriousness of the situation. In their strident defence of our sovereignty, they forget that lives are being lost in Afghanistan and in other countries just because we cannot or will not control our own tribal areas and seal the border. Foreigners will only buy the argument about the difficult terrain up to a point. But how can we claim sovereignty without exercising any control over this territory?
Meanwhile, Muslims generally and Pakistanis especially are getting a bad name abroad. In Britain, the actions of a handful of hotheads are making life difficult for hundreds of thousands of peaceful, hard-working citizens with links to Pakistan. Immature and alienated, these terrorists seek the glory of newspaper headlines as they pursue their bumbling efforts to slaughter innocent people in the West. Had they succeeded in bringing down even one airliner as they had planned to, the repercussions for the Pakistani community in Britain would have been severe. But that is the last thought in the minds of these terrorists, as they seek ‘martyrdom’ for a brutal cause.
According to the previous head of MI5, the agency is currently tracking the activities of hundreds of suspects in Britain. Each time it finds evidence of a terrorist conspiracy, Muslims are dragged into the spotlight as the source of indiscriminate violence against their neighbours. The children of 9/11 are not doing their community any favours, and they are certainly not helping the cause of Muslims around the world.
Tomorrow will be the seventh anniversary of that fateful day in September when Al-Qaeda launched its attacks against the United States. Since then, other atrocities have been carried out from Madrid to London to Bali. Each attack has resulted in heightened security concerns, and more anger against the faith that is supposed to inspire the killers.
Those directly involved in the various extremist groups are clearly beyond reason and argument. But surely those who silently support them should understand that such tactics ultimately do more damage to peaceful Muslims than they do to the intended victims.
By Irfan Husain | September 10, 2008
Another terrorist group tried and sentenced in Britain; another link with Pakistan as the training centre for terrorists established. This time, the group of eight accused of trying to blow up seven airliners over the Atlantic two years ago was in the spotlight following a lengthy trial. Three were found guilty of assorted terrorism charges, while the jury found insufficient evidence against the other five. The prosecution is now considering whether to request a re-trial.
All the members of the cell were young men of Pakistani origin, and several of them had travelled to Pakistan shortly before being arrested. In the newspapers and TV discussions that followed the trial, their trips to the country of origin were highlighted. On BBC’s flagship news programme, Newsnight, a security expert was asked to comment on the fact that so many terror plots seemed to originate in Pakistan. And when residents of the East London neighbourhood where most of the group came from were interviewed, they spoke of the suspicion they were viewed with after details about the plot became public.
While the defendants insisted that all they wanted to do was to set off an explosion in a public place to draw attention to the “wrongs Muslims were being subjected to”, the fact that several of them had recorded videos threatening death and destruction undercut their defence. Ahmed Ali, the leader of the gang, was shown on the screen fulminating:
“Sheikh Osama warned you many times to leave our lands or you will be destroyed, and now the time has come for you to be destroyed… We will take our revenge and anger [sic], ripping amongst your people and scattering the people and your body parts, and your people’s body parts responsible for these wars and oppression, and decorating the streets.”
Fortunately, their skills as terrorists did not match their intentions. When one of the suspects returned from Pakistan, his baggage was secretly searched at Heathrow, and was found to contain a large number of batteries and plastic liquid containers. This aroused the suspicion of intelligence officials from MI5, and the suspect was followed, and his flat bugged. The expanding surveillance became Britain’s biggest covert operation, as members of the group were followed to an apartment that turned out to be a bomb factory.
Every couple of months, some fresh terrorist plot is uncovered in the UK, and invariably, those involved turn out to be Muslims with links to Pakistan. Understandably, this leads to a high degree of profiling by the security services that antagonises ordinary Muslims who feel they are being unfairly singled out. But under the circumstances, what can the state do to protect its citizens? It must be said that the British government is doing its best under very trying circumstances.
Clearly, Pakistan needs to do much more to crack down on the training camps that are giving the country such a bad name. But instead of halting these activities, it seems our security services are hindering investigations. Rashid Rauf, the Pakistani suspected of being involved in the Atlantic airliner plot, was arrested in Pakistan on a tip-from British intelligence. But while being tried in Rawalpindi, and pending an extradition request from Britain, he mysteriously gave his police guards the slip last December, and remains at large. According to one theory, he is under the protection of one of our intelligence agencies.
The widespread impression in the West is that Pakistan is not doing enough to stamp out extremism on its soil, and has become a magnet for terrorists from around the world. These people, after acquiring the skills necessary to carry out operations, then travel abroad to kill and maim. This view is mirrored in the perception that the Taliban are allowed free rein in the tribal areas, and use this safe haven to stage attacks against Western forces in Afghanistan. As American and NATO casualties multiply, pressure builds up on Western governments to halt these attacks. The recent American ground attack on Pakistani soil might have been the first of its kind, but I doubt if it will be the last.
Unfortunately, most Pakistanis are unwilling to understand the seriousness of the situation. In their strident defence of our sovereignty, they forget that lives are being lost in Afghanistan and in other countries just because we cannot or will not control our own tribal areas and seal the border. Foreigners will only buy the argument about the difficult terrain up to a point. But how can we claim sovereignty without exercising any control over this territory?
Meanwhile, Muslims generally and Pakistanis especially are getting a bad name abroad. In Britain, the actions of a handful of hotheads are making life difficult for hundreds of thousands of peaceful, hard-working citizens with links to Pakistan. Immature and alienated, these terrorists seek the glory of newspaper headlines as they pursue their bumbling efforts to slaughter innocent people in the West. Had they succeeded in bringing down even one airliner as they had planned to, the repercussions for the Pakistani community in Britain would have been severe. But that is the last thought in the minds of these terrorists, as they seek ‘martyrdom’ for a brutal cause.
According to the previous head of MI5, the agency is currently tracking the activities of hundreds of suspects in Britain. Each time it finds evidence of a terrorist conspiracy, Muslims are dragged into the spotlight as the source of indiscriminate violence against their neighbours. The children of 9/11 are not doing their community any favours, and they are certainly not helping the cause of Muslims around the world.
Tomorrow will be the seventh anniversary of that fateful day in September when Al-Qaeda launched its attacks against the United States. Since then, other atrocities have been carried out from Madrid to London to Bali. Each attack has resulted in heightened security concerns, and more anger against the faith that is supposed to inspire the killers.
Those directly involved in the various extremist groups are clearly beyond reason and argument. But surely those who silently support them should understand that such tactics ultimately do more damage to peaceful Muslims than they do to the intended victims.
Filed under
liquid bombers,
MI5,
Pakistan,
Rashid Rauf
by Winter Patriot
on Friday, September 19, 2008
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MSNBC : Inside the terror plot that 'rivaled 9/11'
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Inside the terror plot that 'rivaled 9/11'
What really happened in the case that led airlines to bans liquids and gels
By Richard Greenberg, Paul Cruickshank, and Chris Hansen | Dateline NBC | September 15, 2008
In one of the most significant terrorism cases since 9/11, a British jury last week convicted three British citizens, accused of plotting to blow up trans-Atlantic airliners, on a charge of conspiracy to murder. The plot, which disrupted air travel at the time, led authorities to impose permanent restrictions on liquids and gels on airplanes.
But in a decision that surprised many observers, the jury deadlocked on a second murder conspiracy charge that specifically alleged the men intended to detonate explosive devices on board a trans-Atlantic passenger aircraft. Prosecutors are seeking to retry the three men on that charge.
The five-month trial highlighted the continuing threat posed by British-born radicals and the potential for Britain to serve as a staging ground for attacks against the United States.
Authorities say the men, arrested in August 2006, planned to smuggle liquid explosives disguised as sports drinks aboard a half-dozen or more flights headed from London’s Heathrow Airport to cities in the United States and Canada. Counterterrorism investigators say that such an attack could have killed well over 1,500 on board the planes, and many more if detonated over densely populated urban areas.
In an interview, Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff told Dateline NBC that, if successful, the alleged plot "would have rivaled 9/11 in terms of the number of deaths and in terms of the impact on the international economy."
A review of the nearly 5,000 pages of trial transcripts and interviews with key British, American and Pakistani officials involved in the investigation offer insights into the current state of al-Qaida and the evolution of its operations, adding to the body of evidence that recruits from the West are being trained and directed by al-Qaida leaders in Pakistan.
The name al-Qaida was not spoken frequently in court, but it loomed over the entire trial.
Prosecutors did not produce any evidence explicitly linking the plot to al-Qaida, but privately, British officials have suggested that al Qaida’s number three at the time, Abu Ubaidah al Masri, authorized the alleged airline plot. Al Masri reportedly died last year of natural causes.
U.S. officials: Plotters trained by al-Qaida in Pakistan
A senior Bush administration official and two U.S. intelligence officials told Dateline that intelligence shows that some of the men convicted in this case – though the officials did not identify them by name – traveled to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, widely believed to be home to al-Qaida’s leaders, where they received explosives training “from al-Qaida specialists.”
Testifying before a Senate committee last year, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, described the plotters as “an al-Qaida cell, directed by al-Qaida leadership in Pakistan.”
While some have questioned whether an attack really was imminent or even viable, law enforcement and intelligence sources on both sides of the Atlantic insist that it was only weeks away. “This was no dress rehearsal,” says Andy Hayman, at the time Scotland Yard’s Assistant Commissioner Specialist Operations, whose command included counterterrorism. If the plotters had not been stopped, Hayman adds, “I believe they would have been successful.”
The three convicted of murder conspiracy – Abdulla Ahmed Ali, 27, Assad Sarwar, 28, and Tanvir Hussain, 27 – were among eight who went on trial last April. One defendant, Mohammed Gulzar, 27, was acquitted of all charges. The jury could not reach a verdict on the two murder conspiracy charges against four other men: Ibrahim Savant, 27, Arafat Waheed Khan, 27, Waheed Zaman, 24, and Umar Islam, 30. The four, whom prosecutors described as foot soldiers in the plot, earlier pleaded guilty to conspiracy to cause a public nuisance and now face a possible retrial on both murder conspiracy charges.
At trial, prosecutors characterized Ali and Sarwar and the acquitted man, Gulzar, as lead figures in the conspiracy.
Authorities described Ali, who lived in the east London community of Walthamstow and had a college degree in computer engineering, as the cell leader in Britain and the one responsible for developing the mechanics of the bomb design. Sarwar was essentially the bomb chemist; he purchased and stored the chemicals to make the liquid explosive and detonator. Authorities alleged that Gulzar “superintended” the plot, traveling into the U.K. on a fraudulent South African passport to oversee the final preparations for the attack.
Ali, Sarwar, and Gulzar all had significant links to Pakistan. Between 2002 and 2006, Ali and Sarwar made repeated trips there. In early 2003, according to court testimony, both traveled to a refugee camp in Chaman, Pakistan near the Afghan border, on behalf of a London-based Islamic medical charity. Ali testified that the suffering he saw in the refugee camps made him increasingly angry with U.S. and British foreign policy.
Gulzar, originally from Birmingham, England, fled to Pakistan in 2002 when, according to law enforcement sources, British police sought him for questioning in the murder of a friend’s uncle. That friend, Rashid Rauf, also fled to Pakistan around the same time and is believed by counterterrorism investigators to have played a critical role in the alleged airline plot, coordinating between the plotters in the U.K. and the al Qaida leadership in Pakistan.
On the stand, Ali, Sarwar, and Gulzar all acknowledged being in frequent communication with men in Pakistan. Counterterrorism officials say that Gulzar’s main contact was his old friend Rauf. Ali and Sarwar testified that they were in touch with a Kashmiri militant who went alternately by the names Yusuf and Jamil Shah. Sarwar told the court that he received explosives training from the man in Pakistan in early summer 2006.
Ali, who was in Pakistan during that same period, was already on the radar screen of British intelligence, according to British counterterrorism sources, who told Dateline that Ali’s name had surfaced in an intelligence analysis mapping out the associates of suspected terrorists. The British security service MI5 brought in Scotland Yard, the sources say, and the two agencies coordinated closely from that point on. The sources say that the first clues that Ali might be planning an attack on commercial aviation came to their attention in June 2006, though a more complete picture only emerged several weeks later, in mid-July.
British counterterrorism investigators suggest that the alleged airline plotters may have had links to individuals involved in other plots. If nothing else, they point to an intriguing set of coincidences. For instance, Mohammed Hamid, a radical preacher who called himself Osama bin London, worked in the same east London charity shop as Ali and Sarwar, the alleged airline plot leaders, and traveled to the same refugee camp in Pakistan. Earlier this year, the 50-year-old Hamid was convicted of arranging terrorist training in the British countryside for several of those plotting to bomb the London transport system on July 21, 2005.
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Furthermore, British court records reveal an intriguing coincidence in the timing of trips to Pakistan made by leaders of four major terrorist plots in Britain: a 2004 fertilizer bomb plot, the July 7 and July 21, 2005 London transit attacks, and the alleged airline plot. Some counterterrorism investigators wonder if these plots may have been part of a campaign by al-Qaida to hit Britain with a rolling sequence of attacks.
Andy Hayman refuses to comment directly on that possibility. “Until you absolutely know for sure through evidence, intelligence what happened when they went to Pakistan, you could never reliably answer that question. “But,” adds Hayman, “on the balance of probability, do you not find it rather strange that the country that they visited, and whatever went on there precipitated them coming back to the U.K. and committing acts of terrorism? I leave that open for others to draw their own conclusions.”
Piecing together a timeline
Testimony established that Ali, the alleged airline plot ringleader, was in Pakistan in the fall of 2004 and traveled back to Britain in early 2005. During that same period, additional court records show, key figures in the July 7 and July 21, 2005 bombings were also in Pakistan, including July 7 suicide bombers Mohammed Siddique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, and July 21 ringleader Muktar Said Ibrahim, who was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Ali may have been in communication with Said Ibrahim in the spring of 2005, according to British officials, who explain that a cell phone police recovered from Ali contained a number used by Said Ibrahim.
That information was not presented at trial, nor was the jury told that Mohammed Gulzar, the alleged airline plot supervisor, who was acquitted, met several times with Mohammed al Ghabra, 28, a British citizen, who has been designated an al-Qaida facilitator by the U.S. government. At the trial, al Ghabra was referred to only by a nickname, “Gabs, ” according to counterterrorism sources. Al Ghabra [...] and Gulzar’s meetings took place in South Africa and London in the spring and summer of 2006.
In announcing al Ghabra’s designation on December 19, 2006, the U.S. Treasury Department stated: “Al Ghabra has organized travel to Pakistan for individuals seeking to meet with senior al Qaida individuals and to undertake Jihad training.” It also stated that al Ghabra “maintains contact with… senior al Qaida officials in Pakistan.”
Al Ghabra has denied the allegations. In 2004, according to the Times of London, al Ghabra was acquitted on unrelated charges of fraud and “possession of a document or record that could be useful to terrorism.”
Al Ghabra is currently living openly in east London.
Ali, the alleged airline plot ringleader, made four trips to Pakistan between 2003 and 2006, according to trial testimony. Something about a trip he made there in the spring of 2006 – officials will not disclose exactly what – heightened their suspicion. According to the Daily Telegraph, when Ali arrived in London on June 24, 2006, British agents “were waiting at Heathrow to secretly open his baggage in a back room.”
Soon after Ali’s return, the probe became “red hot,” former Assistant Police Commissioner Hayman says. “This was, at that time, the only show in town.” Investigators began round-the-clock surveillance. Counterterrorism investigators say that following Ali led them to the others he was recruiting, which led to more surveillance.
British counterterrorism investigators say that it eventually became the biggest operation of its kind. At its peak, they say the investigation involved as many as a thousand intelligence and police officers, including surveillance teams that kept tabs on Ali, Sarwar, and the other suspected cell members. At trial, prosecutors introduced evidence of meetings in restaurants, parks, over games of tennis, and even by a Muslim cemetery. Security camera footage showed the operatives on a veritable shopping spree for what authorities alleged were parts to make the explosives.
While the plotters had not yet assembled a complete device, prosecutors stated that they had acquired all the constituent parts for the three key components: the liquid explosive, the detonator, and the trigger – enough to produce at least 20 bombs.
Their purchases included more than 40 liters of hydrogen peroxide, the main ingredient for the liquid explosive, which they bought from health food and hydroponics suppliers in Britain. Ali had brought some of the materials back from Pakistan, including packets of the sugar-based powdered drink Tang and AA batteries. Authorities alleged that the Tang would function as fuel for the hydrogen peroxide-based explosive; the AA batteries would conceal the chemical compound hexamethylene triperoxide diamine (HMTD) for the detonator. Sarwar purchased the key chemicals for that compound at local pharmacies.
Their bomb design, which has been widely reported, had striking similarities to explosives used in previous terrorist plots, authorities say. Hydrogen peroxide was the main ingredient in the explosives used in both the July 7 and July 21 plots, while HMTD was also used as the detonator in the July 7 attack, which killed 52 people in addition to the four suicide bombers.
In late July 2006, Ali set up shop in an east London apartment his brother had just purchased as an investment. Ali testified that he told his brother he would help fix it up for resale. According to further court testimony, Ali and one of his associates went to work experimenting with the bomb components. They drilled holes in the sports drink bottles to drain them; the plan was to refill them with the explosive mixture and reseal the bottles with superglue. Ali also figured out how to remove the AA battery contents in order to insert the HMTD. Beyond that, they were working on the trigger, for which they planned to use a disposable camera wired to the detonator.
Every move being watched
The plotters were unaware that by early August, the British secret service MI5 had broken into the apartment and installed video and audio probes to record their every move. On Aug. 3, 2006, investigators watched as two of the plotters made an apparent breakthrough in their bomb design. “That’s the boom,” one said, followed later by this phrase, “We’ve got our virgins.” In court, prosecutors said the comment referred to the rewards the men hoped to receive in the afterlife for carrying out their impending suicide mission.
John Reid, who oversaw the investigation as U.K. Home Secretary in 2006, says he had no doubt that the bomb could have worked. “They had the components. And they had them cunningly, very sophisticated, but very simply made as everyday commodities that you might take onto a plane with you.”
Dateline, in conjunction with the British broadcaster ITN, commissioned a demonstration by an explosives expert. It showed that a device similar to the one described in the court case – a half-liter hydrogen peroxide explosive with an HMTD detonator – could blow a hole in the side of an aircraft fuselage.
U.S. and British officials agree that the potential threat of the alleged airline plot drove them to new levels of trans-Atlantic cooperation. According to the senior Bush administration official, it also prompted “a new paradigm of counterterrorism intelligence sharing” among U.S. agencies, including CIA, NSA, FBI, DHS, and TSA, all of which played significant roles. The official declined to offer specifics, but made it clear that the CIA and NSA, for instance, gathered intelligence for the investigation “in real time” using “the intelligence tools available.”
Several counterterrorism sources say the CIA provided critical help in identifying and tracking people involved in Pakistan. “The Brits gave us a number or a name,” says one U.S. counterterrorism source speaking on condition of anonymity, “and we came back and said, ‘Here are these email addresses, these phone numbers, and more names.’”
On Aug. 6, 2006, authorities grew increasingly concerned when they monitored Ali, the cell leader, looking up timetables for transatlantic flights departing between August and October 2006. Adding to their worry: several of the plotters were seeking new British passports, apparently so they would have no trace of prior travel to Pakistan, making it easier to board flights to the United States. The passports had not been issued, but expedited applications were pending. Several of the men also had applied for loans they allegedly never intended to repay, a tactic used by previous terrorist cells.
The next day, Aug. 7, according to officials at the Department of Homeland Security, there was a tense moment when they feared an attack might be underway. Authorities discovered that a person on board an American Airlines flight from Heathrow to Boston was on the No Fly list. Secretary Chertoff says, “The first concern that we had was, have we either missed something, or has someone decided on their own they are going to accelerate an element of the plot and we therefore, we are perhaps a little bit late?” The airliner was sent back mid-flight to London; it turned out to be a false alarm.
On Aug. 8, 2006, at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, President Bush was briefed on the case. Chertoff would not disclose the President’s specific comments, but told Dateline, “Generally, the president's concerns were, first and foremost, ‘Let's make sure no lives get lost.’”
Counterterrorism sources say that, by that time, U.S. intelligence services were tracking the movements of Rashid Rauf, the suspected al-Qaida point man in Pakistan, and officials saw indications that Rauf might be heading into the tribal areas of Pakistan, where they feared he could evade capture.
According to counterterrorism investigators, the situation created some friction. U.S. officials did not want to risk losing Rauf and pressed the Pakistani authorities to arrest him immediately. British officials preferred to wait a few more days to gather more intelligence and evidence. The Pakistanis found themselves in the middle, says a former senior Pakistani official with knowledge of the investigation, who described the pressure from the U.S. as “enormous.”
On Aug. 9, the case reached critical mass: bugs planted in the terrorist safe house picked up audio of one of the men recording a suicide video, one of six such videos investigators eventually recovered. That evening, British police learned that Pakistani authorities had arrested Rauf. British officials feared that if the plotters found out about Rauf’s arrest, it could serve as a “go signal” to trigger an attack. “Given how high the stakes were, you couldn't second guess,” says Andy Hayman.
Overnight, British police arrested more than two dozen suspects, including the eight whose trial just concluded. Several were let go. Four other men are expected to face trial in the coming months on conspiracy murder charges. Ali’s wife, Cossar, was also charged with failure to disclose information about the plot. She is awaiting trial.
On the witness stand at the trial just ended, the defendants claimed that they never intended to kill anyone, only to set off a bomb inside an airline terminal as a publicity stunt, and then release those suicide tapes as propaganda to draw attention to “the plight of Muslims.” They also said they considered other targets in Britain, including the Parliament. But they were hard-pressed to explain several contradictions. For one, they claimed to disavow al-Qaida’s techniques; at the same time as they said they wanted the explosive to bear the hallmarks of al-Qaida, so they would be taken seriously.
During the trial, all the defendants except Gulzar pleaded guilty to conspiracy to cause a public nuisance. Three – Ali, Sarwar, and Hussain – pleaded guilty to an additional charge of conspiring to cause explosions. Those guilty pleas did not stop the jury from convicting the three men of murder conspiracy.
Jury's reaction came as a surprise to many
Still, many counterterrorism officials were surprised by the jury’s indecision, given what they believed was one of the strongest terrorism cases to date. Some suggested that the case would have been even stronger if prosecutors had been able to introduce intercept evidence. Currently, wiretaps cannot be introduced in British courts. In February this year, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he supports changing that law.
The mixed verdicts also have prompted some finger pointing in Britain, with critics accusing the U.S. government of forcing British police to shut down the operation too soon. The critics speculate that given more time, authorities could have obtained more evidence.
But both U.S. and British officials insist that the investigation was a success because it broke up the plot. In a televised statement last week, British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith thanked the police and security services for saving “countless lives.”
Could bin Laden himself have signed off on the alleged airline plot?
Back in January 2006, bin Laden did warn Americans of major attacks in the works: “And you will witness them, in your own land, as soon as preparations are complete.” It is not clear if he was referring to the alleged airline plot, but counterterrorism experts believe that is a possibility.
“I can't tell you whether operationally it went up to bin Laden,” Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff says, “but I think the links to the al-Qaida network are, in my mind, pretty clear.”
For now, British and U.S. authorities are satisfied they put all the main players out of action, at least in Britain.
In Pakistan, it is a different story. The one suspect arrested in the case there, Rashid Rauf, escaped from custody last December. “Unfortunately, he is now no longer in the custody of Pakistan government,” Pakistan’s former interior minister Aftab Sherpao told Dateline.
A spokesman for Rauf’s wife’s family in Pakistan told Dateline they do not know where Rauf is and they insist he is innocent. “They say he's not involved in this.”
U.S. officials are circumspect. Asked about Rauf, Secretary Chertoff says: “There I think we're getting into an issue that I probably can't get into.”
As for others involved in training and orchestrating the alleged airline plot from Pakistan, another senior administration official says they have been identified. “They could be in Pakistan still. Some might be in other countries. There are efforts underway to capture them.”
Richard Greenberg is Supervising Investigative Producer for NBC News, Paul Cruickshank is a Fellow at the NYU Center on Law and Security, and Chris Hansen is Correspondent for Dateline NBC.
NBC News Senior Investigative Producer Robert Windrem contributed to this report.
© 2007 MSNBC Interactive
What really happened in the case that led airlines to bans liquids and gels
By Richard Greenberg, Paul Cruickshank, and Chris Hansen | Dateline NBC | September 15, 2008
In one of the most significant terrorism cases since 9/11, a British jury last week convicted three British citizens, accused of plotting to blow up trans-Atlantic airliners, on a charge of conspiracy to murder. The plot, which disrupted air travel at the time, led authorities to impose permanent restrictions on liquids and gels on airplanes.
But in a decision that surprised many observers, the jury deadlocked on a second murder conspiracy charge that specifically alleged the men intended to detonate explosive devices on board a trans-Atlantic passenger aircraft. Prosecutors are seeking to retry the three men on that charge.
The five-month trial highlighted the continuing threat posed by British-born radicals and the potential for Britain to serve as a staging ground for attacks against the United States.
Authorities say the men, arrested in August 2006, planned to smuggle liquid explosives disguised as sports drinks aboard a half-dozen or more flights headed from London’s Heathrow Airport to cities in the United States and Canada. Counterterrorism investigators say that such an attack could have killed well over 1,500 on board the planes, and many more if detonated over densely populated urban areas.
In an interview, Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff told Dateline NBC that, if successful, the alleged plot "would have rivaled 9/11 in terms of the number of deaths and in terms of the impact on the international economy."
A review of the nearly 5,000 pages of trial transcripts and interviews with key British, American and Pakistani officials involved in the investigation offer insights into the current state of al-Qaida and the evolution of its operations, adding to the body of evidence that recruits from the West are being trained and directed by al-Qaida leaders in Pakistan.
The name al-Qaida was not spoken frequently in court, but it loomed over the entire trial.
Prosecutors did not produce any evidence explicitly linking the plot to al-Qaida, but privately, British officials have suggested that al Qaida’s number three at the time, Abu Ubaidah al Masri, authorized the alleged airline plot. Al Masri reportedly died last year of natural causes.
U.S. officials: Plotters trained by al-Qaida in Pakistan
A senior Bush administration official and two U.S. intelligence officials told Dateline that intelligence shows that some of the men convicted in this case – though the officials did not identify them by name – traveled to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, widely believed to be home to al-Qaida’s leaders, where they received explosives training “from al-Qaida specialists.”
Testifying before a Senate committee last year, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, described the plotters as “an al-Qaida cell, directed by al-Qaida leadership in Pakistan.”
While some have questioned whether an attack really was imminent or even viable, law enforcement and intelligence sources on both sides of the Atlantic insist that it was only weeks away. “This was no dress rehearsal,” says Andy Hayman, at the time Scotland Yard’s Assistant Commissioner Specialist Operations, whose command included counterterrorism. If the plotters had not been stopped, Hayman adds, “I believe they would have been successful.”
The three convicted of murder conspiracy – Abdulla Ahmed Ali, 27, Assad Sarwar, 28, and Tanvir Hussain, 27 – were among eight who went on trial last April. One defendant, Mohammed Gulzar, 27, was acquitted of all charges. The jury could not reach a verdict on the two murder conspiracy charges against four other men: Ibrahim Savant, 27, Arafat Waheed Khan, 27, Waheed Zaman, 24, and Umar Islam, 30. The four, whom prosecutors described as foot soldiers in the plot, earlier pleaded guilty to conspiracy to cause a public nuisance and now face a possible retrial on both murder conspiracy charges.
At trial, prosecutors characterized Ali and Sarwar and the acquitted man, Gulzar, as lead figures in the conspiracy.
Authorities described Ali, who lived in the east London community of Walthamstow and had a college degree in computer engineering, as the cell leader in Britain and the one responsible for developing the mechanics of the bomb design. Sarwar was essentially the bomb chemist; he purchased and stored the chemicals to make the liquid explosive and detonator. Authorities alleged that Gulzar “superintended” the plot, traveling into the U.K. on a fraudulent South African passport to oversee the final preparations for the attack.
Ali, Sarwar, and Gulzar all had significant links to Pakistan. Between 2002 and 2006, Ali and Sarwar made repeated trips there. In early 2003, according to court testimony, both traveled to a refugee camp in Chaman, Pakistan near the Afghan border, on behalf of a London-based Islamic medical charity. Ali testified that the suffering he saw in the refugee camps made him increasingly angry with U.S. and British foreign policy.
Gulzar, originally from Birmingham, England, fled to Pakistan in 2002 when, according to law enforcement sources, British police sought him for questioning in the murder of a friend’s uncle. That friend, Rashid Rauf, also fled to Pakistan around the same time and is believed by counterterrorism investigators to have played a critical role in the alleged airline plot, coordinating between the plotters in the U.K. and the al Qaida leadership in Pakistan.
On the stand, Ali, Sarwar, and Gulzar all acknowledged being in frequent communication with men in Pakistan. Counterterrorism officials say that Gulzar’s main contact was his old friend Rauf. Ali and Sarwar testified that they were in touch with a Kashmiri militant who went alternately by the names Yusuf and Jamil Shah. Sarwar told the court that he received explosives training from the man in Pakistan in early summer 2006.
Ali, who was in Pakistan during that same period, was already on the radar screen of British intelligence, according to British counterterrorism sources, who told Dateline that Ali’s name had surfaced in an intelligence analysis mapping out the associates of suspected terrorists. The British security service MI5 brought in Scotland Yard, the sources say, and the two agencies coordinated closely from that point on. The sources say that the first clues that Ali might be planning an attack on commercial aviation came to their attention in June 2006, though a more complete picture only emerged several weeks later, in mid-July.
British counterterrorism investigators suggest that the alleged airline plotters may have had links to individuals involved in other plots. If nothing else, they point to an intriguing set of coincidences. For instance, Mohammed Hamid, a radical preacher who called himself Osama bin London, worked in the same east London charity shop as Ali and Sarwar, the alleged airline plot leaders, and traveled to the same refugee camp in Pakistan. Earlier this year, the 50-year-old Hamid was convicted of arranging terrorist training in the British countryside for several of those plotting to bomb the London transport system on July 21, 2005.
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Furthermore, British court records reveal an intriguing coincidence in the timing of trips to Pakistan made by leaders of four major terrorist plots in Britain: a 2004 fertilizer bomb plot, the July 7 and July 21, 2005 London transit attacks, and the alleged airline plot. Some counterterrorism investigators wonder if these plots may have been part of a campaign by al-Qaida to hit Britain with a rolling sequence of attacks.
Andy Hayman refuses to comment directly on that possibility. “Until you absolutely know for sure through evidence, intelligence what happened when they went to Pakistan, you could never reliably answer that question. “But,” adds Hayman, “on the balance of probability, do you not find it rather strange that the country that they visited, and whatever went on there precipitated them coming back to the U.K. and committing acts of terrorism? I leave that open for others to draw their own conclusions.”
Piecing together a timeline
Testimony established that Ali, the alleged airline plot ringleader, was in Pakistan in the fall of 2004 and traveled back to Britain in early 2005. During that same period, additional court records show, key figures in the July 7 and July 21, 2005 bombings were also in Pakistan, including July 7 suicide bombers Mohammed Siddique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, and July 21 ringleader Muktar Said Ibrahim, who was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Ali may have been in communication with Said Ibrahim in the spring of 2005, according to British officials, who explain that a cell phone police recovered from Ali contained a number used by Said Ibrahim.
That information was not presented at trial, nor was the jury told that Mohammed Gulzar, the alleged airline plot supervisor, who was acquitted, met several times with Mohammed al Ghabra, 28, a British citizen, who has been designated an al-Qaida facilitator by the U.S. government. At the trial, al Ghabra was referred to only by a nickname, “Gabs, ” according to counterterrorism sources. Al Ghabra [...] and Gulzar’s meetings took place in South Africa and London in the spring and summer of 2006.
In announcing al Ghabra’s designation on December 19, 2006, the U.S. Treasury Department stated: “Al Ghabra has organized travel to Pakistan for individuals seeking to meet with senior al Qaida individuals and to undertake Jihad training.” It also stated that al Ghabra “maintains contact with… senior al Qaida officials in Pakistan.”
Al Ghabra has denied the allegations. In 2004, according to the Times of London, al Ghabra was acquitted on unrelated charges of fraud and “possession of a document or record that could be useful to terrorism.”
Al Ghabra is currently living openly in east London.
Ali, the alleged airline plot ringleader, made four trips to Pakistan between 2003 and 2006, according to trial testimony. Something about a trip he made there in the spring of 2006 – officials will not disclose exactly what – heightened their suspicion. According to the Daily Telegraph, when Ali arrived in London on June 24, 2006, British agents “were waiting at Heathrow to secretly open his baggage in a back room.”
Soon after Ali’s return, the probe became “red hot,” former Assistant Police Commissioner Hayman says. “This was, at that time, the only show in town.” Investigators began round-the-clock surveillance. Counterterrorism investigators say that following Ali led them to the others he was recruiting, which led to more surveillance.
British counterterrorism investigators say that it eventually became the biggest operation of its kind. At its peak, they say the investigation involved as many as a thousand intelligence and police officers, including surveillance teams that kept tabs on Ali, Sarwar, and the other suspected cell members. At trial, prosecutors introduced evidence of meetings in restaurants, parks, over games of tennis, and even by a Muslim cemetery. Security camera footage showed the operatives on a veritable shopping spree for what authorities alleged were parts to make the explosives.
While the plotters had not yet assembled a complete device, prosecutors stated that they had acquired all the constituent parts for the three key components: the liquid explosive, the detonator, and the trigger – enough to produce at least 20 bombs.
Their purchases included more than 40 liters of hydrogen peroxide, the main ingredient for the liquid explosive, which they bought from health food and hydroponics suppliers in Britain. Ali had brought some of the materials back from Pakistan, including packets of the sugar-based powdered drink Tang and AA batteries. Authorities alleged that the Tang would function as fuel for the hydrogen peroxide-based explosive; the AA batteries would conceal the chemical compound hexamethylene triperoxide diamine (HMTD) for the detonator. Sarwar purchased the key chemicals for that compound at local pharmacies.
Their bomb design, which has been widely reported, had striking similarities to explosives used in previous terrorist plots, authorities say. Hydrogen peroxide was the main ingredient in the explosives used in both the July 7 and July 21 plots, while HMTD was also used as the detonator in the July 7 attack, which killed 52 people in addition to the four suicide bombers.
In late July 2006, Ali set up shop in an east London apartment his brother had just purchased as an investment. Ali testified that he told his brother he would help fix it up for resale. According to further court testimony, Ali and one of his associates went to work experimenting with the bomb components. They drilled holes in the sports drink bottles to drain them; the plan was to refill them with the explosive mixture and reseal the bottles with superglue. Ali also figured out how to remove the AA battery contents in order to insert the HMTD. Beyond that, they were working on the trigger, for which they planned to use a disposable camera wired to the detonator.
Every move being watched
The plotters were unaware that by early August, the British secret service MI5 had broken into the apartment and installed video and audio probes to record their every move. On Aug. 3, 2006, investigators watched as two of the plotters made an apparent breakthrough in their bomb design. “That’s the boom,” one said, followed later by this phrase, “We’ve got our virgins.” In court, prosecutors said the comment referred to the rewards the men hoped to receive in the afterlife for carrying out their impending suicide mission.
John Reid, who oversaw the investigation as U.K. Home Secretary in 2006, says he had no doubt that the bomb could have worked. “They had the components. And they had them cunningly, very sophisticated, but very simply made as everyday commodities that you might take onto a plane with you.”
Dateline, in conjunction with the British broadcaster ITN, commissioned a demonstration by an explosives expert. It showed that a device similar to the one described in the court case – a half-liter hydrogen peroxide explosive with an HMTD detonator – could blow a hole in the side of an aircraft fuselage.
U.S. and British officials agree that the potential threat of the alleged airline plot drove them to new levels of trans-Atlantic cooperation. According to the senior Bush administration official, it also prompted “a new paradigm of counterterrorism intelligence sharing” among U.S. agencies, including CIA, NSA, FBI, DHS, and TSA, all of which played significant roles. The official declined to offer specifics, but made it clear that the CIA and NSA, for instance, gathered intelligence for the investigation “in real time” using “the intelligence tools available.”
Several counterterrorism sources say the CIA provided critical help in identifying and tracking people involved in Pakistan. “The Brits gave us a number or a name,” says one U.S. counterterrorism source speaking on condition of anonymity, “and we came back and said, ‘Here are these email addresses, these phone numbers, and more names.’”
On Aug. 6, 2006, authorities grew increasingly concerned when they monitored Ali, the cell leader, looking up timetables for transatlantic flights departing between August and October 2006. Adding to their worry: several of the plotters were seeking new British passports, apparently so they would have no trace of prior travel to Pakistan, making it easier to board flights to the United States. The passports had not been issued, but expedited applications were pending. Several of the men also had applied for loans they allegedly never intended to repay, a tactic used by previous terrorist cells.
The next day, Aug. 7, according to officials at the Department of Homeland Security, there was a tense moment when they feared an attack might be underway. Authorities discovered that a person on board an American Airlines flight from Heathrow to Boston was on the No Fly list. Secretary Chertoff says, “The first concern that we had was, have we either missed something, or has someone decided on their own they are going to accelerate an element of the plot and we therefore, we are perhaps a little bit late?” The airliner was sent back mid-flight to London; it turned out to be a false alarm.
On Aug. 8, 2006, at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, President Bush was briefed on the case. Chertoff would not disclose the President’s specific comments, but told Dateline, “Generally, the president's concerns were, first and foremost, ‘Let's make sure no lives get lost.’”
Counterterrorism sources say that, by that time, U.S. intelligence services were tracking the movements of Rashid Rauf, the suspected al-Qaida point man in Pakistan, and officials saw indications that Rauf might be heading into the tribal areas of Pakistan, where they feared he could evade capture.
According to counterterrorism investigators, the situation created some friction. U.S. officials did not want to risk losing Rauf and pressed the Pakistani authorities to arrest him immediately. British officials preferred to wait a few more days to gather more intelligence and evidence. The Pakistanis found themselves in the middle, says a former senior Pakistani official with knowledge of the investigation, who described the pressure from the U.S. as “enormous.”
On Aug. 9, the case reached critical mass: bugs planted in the terrorist safe house picked up audio of one of the men recording a suicide video, one of six such videos investigators eventually recovered. That evening, British police learned that Pakistani authorities had arrested Rauf. British officials feared that if the plotters found out about Rauf’s arrest, it could serve as a “go signal” to trigger an attack. “Given how high the stakes were, you couldn't second guess,” says Andy Hayman.
Overnight, British police arrested more than two dozen suspects, including the eight whose trial just concluded. Several were let go. Four other men are expected to face trial in the coming months on conspiracy murder charges. Ali’s wife, Cossar, was also charged with failure to disclose information about the plot. She is awaiting trial.
On the witness stand at the trial just ended, the defendants claimed that they never intended to kill anyone, only to set off a bomb inside an airline terminal as a publicity stunt, and then release those suicide tapes as propaganda to draw attention to “the plight of Muslims.” They also said they considered other targets in Britain, including the Parliament. But they were hard-pressed to explain several contradictions. For one, they claimed to disavow al-Qaida’s techniques; at the same time as they said they wanted the explosive to bear the hallmarks of al-Qaida, so they would be taken seriously.
During the trial, all the defendants except Gulzar pleaded guilty to conspiracy to cause a public nuisance. Three – Ali, Sarwar, and Hussain – pleaded guilty to an additional charge of conspiring to cause explosions. Those guilty pleas did not stop the jury from convicting the three men of murder conspiracy.
Jury's reaction came as a surprise to many
Still, many counterterrorism officials were surprised by the jury’s indecision, given what they believed was one of the strongest terrorism cases to date. Some suggested that the case would have been even stronger if prosecutors had been able to introduce intercept evidence. Currently, wiretaps cannot be introduced in British courts. In February this year, Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he supports changing that law.
The mixed verdicts also have prompted some finger pointing in Britain, with critics accusing the U.S. government of forcing British police to shut down the operation too soon. The critics speculate that given more time, authorities could have obtained more evidence.
But both U.S. and British officials insist that the investigation was a success because it broke up the plot. In a televised statement last week, British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith thanked the police and security services for saving “countless lives.”
Could bin Laden himself have signed off on the alleged airline plot?
Back in January 2006, bin Laden did warn Americans of major attacks in the works: “And you will witness them, in your own land, as soon as preparations are complete.” It is not clear if he was referring to the alleged airline plot, but counterterrorism experts believe that is a possibility.
“I can't tell you whether operationally it went up to bin Laden,” Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff says, “but I think the links to the al-Qaida network are, in my mind, pretty clear.”
For now, British and U.S. authorities are satisfied they put all the main players out of action, at least in Britain.
In Pakistan, it is a different story. The one suspect arrested in the case there, Rashid Rauf, escaped from custody last December. “Unfortunately, he is now no longer in the custody of Pakistan government,” Pakistan’s former interior minister Aftab Sherpao told Dateline.
A spokesman for Rauf’s wife’s family in Pakistan told Dateline they do not know where Rauf is and they insist he is innocent. “They say he's not involved in this.”
U.S. officials are circumspect. Asked about Rauf, Secretary Chertoff says: “There I think we're getting into an issue that I probably can't get into.”
As for others involved in training and orchestrating the alleged airline plot from Pakistan, another senior administration official says they have been identified. “They could be in Pakistan still. Some might be in other countries. There are efforts underway to capture them.”
Richard Greenberg is Supervising Investigative Producer for NBC News, Paul Cruickshank is a Fellow at the NYU Center on Law and Security, and Chris Hansen is Correspondent for Dateline NBC.
NBC News Senior Investigative Producer Robert Windrem contributed to this report.
© 2007 MSNBC Interactive
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Abdulla Ahmed Ali,
Andy Hayman,
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by Winter Patriot
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NYT : No One Convicted of Terror Plot to Bomb Planes
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
No One Convicted of Terror Plot to Bomb Planes
By JOHN F. BURNS and ELAINE SCIOLINO | September 8, 2008
LONDON — A lengthy trial centering on what Scotland Yard called a plot to blow up trans-Atlantic airliners ended Monday when the jury convicted three of eight defendants of conspiracy to commit murder.
But the jury failed to reach verdicts on the more serious charge of a conspiracy to have suicide bombers detonate soft-drink bottles filled with liquid explosives aboard seven airliners headed for the United States and Canada.
The failure to obtain convictions on the plane-bombing charge was a blow to counterterrorism officials in London and Washington, who had described the scheme as potentially the most devastating act of terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks seven years ago this week. British and American experts had said that the plot had all the signs of an operation by Al Qaeda, and that it was conceived and organized in Pakistan.
The arrest in August 2006 of two dozen suspects, including the eight put on trial, set off a worldwide alarm in the airline industry and led to a tightening of airport security, including time-consuming restrictions on passengers carrying liquids and creams in their carry-on luggage that remain in force at most airports around the globe.
But the case was hampered from the beginning, prosecutors said, by an investigation that was cut short, by the conflicting demands of intelligence agencies, and by problems with introducing evidence in the courtroom. To protect sources and methods, the prosecution was unable to introduce material from British or foreign intelligence agencies. In addition, Britain does not allow information in court that has been gathered from domestic wiretaps.
The arrest in Pakistan of Rashid Rauf, a Briton of Pakistani descent who American, British and Pakistani officials said was a liaison to Al Qaeda, set off a series of events that led the British police to roll up the London-based cell far earlier than they had intended. The haste in making sweeping arrests made it hard for prosecutors to persuade the jury that the bomb plot had reached the stage at which an attack on airliners was imminent.
Partly as a result, prosecutors never convinced the jury that the suspects were prepared to strike immediately, or even that they had chosen planes as their targets. Nor did they convict a man whom they had accused of having links to Al Qaeda in Pakistan.
Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service said it might decide to call for a retrial of the case if it decides it might win convictions on the most serious charges. A decision on that is expected within weeks. In addition, a number of other suspects will face trial related to the plot.
The British government, keenly disappointed, put a positive gloss on the trial’s outcome. “I am indebted to the police and the security services, who, by successfully disrupting this group, have saved countless lives,” Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, who is responsible for internal security, said in a statement.
The trial was one of the most protracted and complex ever held for a terrorism case in Britain, after what Scotland Yard described as one of the largest-scale criminal investigations ever mounted here.
After three months of evidence, the case against the eight men — all British Muslims aged 24 to 30, and six with family roots in Pakistan — went to the jury in late July. A two-week holiday break ordered by the judge was followed by what appeared to have been an impasse of more than three weeks among jurors on the most serious charges, even after the judge, David Calvert-Smith, allowed the jury to reach verdicts with at least 10 of the 12 jurors in agreement.
By exactly that margin, the jurors on Monday returned guilty verdicts on the murder conspiracy charges against three men who prosecutors said had been at the heart of the plot: Abdulla Ahmed Ali, 27, a husband and father who studied computer systems engineering; Assad Sarwar, 28, a college dropout who learned how to make the liquid hydrogen peroxide bomb in Pakistan; and Tanvir Hussain, 27, who helped in the purchase of materials and in making the suicide videos.
The defendants planned to drain 17-ounce plastic sports drink bottles by puncturing a tiny hole in the bottom, prosecutors said, then refilling the bottles with an explosive mix of concentrated hydrogen peroxide and food coloring to give the appearance of the original beverage.
The prosecution said the bottles were to have been resealed with instant glue, and then, once the bombers were aboard the flights, connected with detonators made of AA batteries filled with the explosive HMTD and disposable cameras acting as triggers. Scotland Yard said at the time of the arrests that it had found plastic drink bottles and large quantities of hydrogen peroxide on premises used by the defendants, along with “martyrdom” videos taped by six defendants, in the manner common among Islamic suicide bombers.
Also found was a computer memory stick belonging to Mr. Ali, who described himself in court as the leader of the plot, that had files with highlighted schedules for seven flights to New York, Washington, Chicago, San Francisco, Montreal and Toronto between July and October 2006 aboard aircraft operated by American Airlines, United Airlines and Air Canada. The computer files included information on baggage rules, guidance as to what could be carried as hand luggage and information about Heathrow Airport in London, Scotland Yard said.
But the jury failed to reach verdicts against seven of the eight men on the most serious charge, that of conspiring “to murder persons unknown by the detonation of improvised explosive devices on board trans-Atlantic passenger aircraft.” By finding three of the men guilty of plotting murder, but not of an airliner bombing conspiracy, the jury appeared to have concluded that they had the means and the intention of detonating bombs, but that the prosecution had failed to prove conclusively that they had planned to attack airliners.
Similarly, it failed to reach any decision on murder conspiracy charges against four other men described by prosecutors as foot soldiers in the plot: Ibrahim Savant, 27, a convert to Islam with Anglo-Indian roots, who worked in his British mother’s bookkeeping business; Umar Islam, 30, a convert and former Rastafarian of Caribbean origin; Arafat Waheed Khan, 27, a newly engaged former cellphone shop employee; and Waheed Zaman, 24, a former biomedical college student who once led his university’s Islamic organization.
Seven of the eight defendants pleaded guilty to conspiracy to create a public nuisance with their plan to produce and distribute the videos, and face long prison sentences.
British officials said a crucial role in the suspected plot was played by Mohammed Gulzar, 26, who declared his innocence throughout, and was the only defendant to be acquitted of all charges on Monday.
British intelligence and law enforcement officials say they believe that Mr. Gulzar was the facilitator between the plotters in London and Qaeda operatives in Pakistan, and pushed his co-conspirators to move forward more quickly with the attack.
The law enforcement officials said Mr. Gulzar was a close friend of Mr. Rauf, a Briton of Pakistani origin who was the main figure at the Pakistan end of the plot, according to British, American and Pakistani officials.
The officials said Mr. Rauf and Mr. Gulzar fled Britain for Pakistan after the murder of Mr. Rauf’s uncle in Birmingham in April 2002. But Mr. Rauf was arrested in Pakistan in August 2006, forcing the police in Britain to move against other figures in the plot sooner than they had wanted, and, in the end, weakening the prosecutors’ case. A further blow came when Mr. Rauf, facing extradition to Britain in the murder case, escaped from the Pakistani police last December after entering a mosque for prayers.
There were other weaknesses in the prosecution’s bid to prove that the men had an achievable plan to attack airliners. Among other things, the evidence failed to show that the defendants were prepared to strike immediately. There were doubts about whether they had the technical skills needed, including the ability to produce the concentrated version of hydrogen peroxide necessary to make the bombs effective, and to assemble them aboard aircraft in midflight.
The defense denied the men had chosen airplanes as their targets. No airline tickets had been bought. Some of the six who were accused of being suicide bombers had not obtained the “clean” passports, free of suspicious foreign stamps from Pakistan and elsewhere, that the prosecution said had been part of the planning for the attacks. Some of the suicide videos appeared unusually amateurish, and because of concerns not to disclose intelligence sources and methods no evidence was presented to support claims of a link to Al Qaeda in Pakistan.
At the trial, Mr. Ali, the self-described plot leader, said the plan had been to stir public alarm by setting off minor blasts at the check-in areas of Heathrow’s Terminal 3 to protest British and American policies in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Middle East and that there had been no intention to kill anybody. He said that the original target was the British Parliament, but that they had shifted to Heathrow after security at Westminster proved too tight.
Senior British and American officials have described Mr. Rauf as a protégé of Abu Faraj al-Libi, Qaeda’s director of operations until he was detained in Pakistan in 2005. After that, the officials said, operational control of the plot was taken over by Abu Ubaida al Masri, who was chief of operations for Al Qaeda until his death, the officials said.
British officials identified one of the people Mr. Gulzar met in South Africa and Britain as Mohammed Al Ghabra, suspected of being a Qaeda operative. British intelligence says it believes that Mr. Al Ghabra played an important role in the events leading up to the failed transit bombings in London on July 21, 2005, which took place two weeks after suicide bombings on London subway trains and a bus killed 56 people, including the four suicide bombers.
Mr. Al Ghabra, a Syrian-born British citizen living in Britain, has been identified by British and American officials as a banker for Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. The officials say he has been instrumental in arranging travel for prospective suicide bombers in Pakistan and Iraq. The United States and Britain froze his financial assets in December 2006 because of his alleged activities in support of terrorism. He remains under 24-hour surveillance by British authorities.
John F. Burns reported from London, and Elaine Sciolino from Paris.
By JOHN F. BURNS and ELAINE SCIOLINO | September 8, 2008
LONDON — A lengthy trial centering on what Scotland Yard called a plot to blow up trans-Atlantic airliners ended Monday when the jury convicted three of eight defendants of conspiracy to commit murder.
But the jury failed to reach verdicts on the more serious charge of a conspiracy to have suicide bombers detonate soft-drink bottles filled with liquid explosives aboard seven airliners headed for the United States and Canada.
The failure to obtain convictions on the plane-bombing charge was a blow to counterterrorism officials in London and Washington, who had described the scheme as potentially the most devastating act of terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks seven years ago this week. British and American experts had said that the plot had all the signs of an operation by Al Qaeda, and that it was conceived and organized in Pakistan.
The arrest in August 2006 of two dozen suspects, including the eight put on trial, set off a worldwide alarm in the airline industry and led to a tightening of airport security, including time-consuming restrictions on passengers carrying liquids and creams in their carry-on luggage that remain in force at most airports around the globe.
But the case was hampered from the beginning, prosecutors said, by an investigation that was cut short, by the conflicting demands of intelligence agencies, and by problems with introducing evidence in the courtroom. To protect sources and methods, the prosecution was unable to introduce material from British or foreign intelligence agencies. In addition, Britain does not allow information in court that has been gathered from domestic wiretaps.
The arrest in Pakistan of Rashid Rauf, a Briton of Pakistani descent who American, British and Pakistani officials said was a liaison to Al Qaeda, set off a series of events that led the British police to roll up the London-based cell far earlier than they had intended. The haste in making sweeping arrests made it hard for prosecutors to persuade the jury that the bomb plot had reached the stage at which an attack on airliners was imminent.
Partly as a result, prosecutors never convinced the jury that the suspects were prepared to strike immediately, or even that they had chosen planes as their targets. Nor did they convict a man whom they had accused of having links to Al Qaeda in Pakistan.
Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service said it might decide to call for a retrial of the case if it decides it might win convictions on the most serious charges. A decision on that is expected within weeks. In addition, a number of other suspects will face trial related to the plot.
The British government, keenly disappointed, put a positive gloss on the trial’s outcome. “I am indebted to the police and the security services, who, by successfully disrupting this group, have saved countless lives,” Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, who is responsible for internal security, said in a statement.
The trial was one of the most protracted and complex ever held for a terrorism case in Britain, after what Scotland Yard described as one of the largest-scale criminal investigations ever mounted here.
After three months of evidence, the case against the eight men — all British Muslims aged 24 to 30, and six with family roots in Pakistan — went to the jury in late July. A two-week holiday break ordered by the judge was followed by what appeared to have been an impasse of more than three weeks among jurors on the most serious charges, even after the judge, David Calvert-Smith, allowed the jury to reach verdicts with at least 10 of the 12 jurors in agreement.
By exactly that margin, the jurors on Monday returned guilty verdicts on the murder conspiracy charges against three men who prosecutors said had been at the heart of the plot: Abdulla Ahmed Ali, 27, a husband and father who studied computer systems engineering; Assad Sarwar, 28, a college dropout who learned how to make the liquid hydrogen peroxide bomb in Pakistan; and Tanvir Hussain, 27, who helped in the purchase of materials and in making the suicide videos.
The defendants planned to drain 17-ounce plastic sports drink bottles by puncturing a tiny hole in the bottom, prosecutors said, then refilling the bottles with an explosive mix of concentrated hydrogen peroxide and food coloring to give the appearance of the original beverage.
The prosecution said the bottles were to have been resealed with instant glue, and then, once the bombers were aboard the flights, connected with detonators made of AA batteries filled with the explosive HMTD and disposable cameras acting as triggers. Scotland Yard said at the time of the arrests that it had found plastic drink bottles and large quantities of hydrogen peroxide on premises used by the defendants, along with “martyrdom” videos taped by six defendants, in the manner common among Islamic suicide bombers.
Also found was a computer memory stick belonging to Mr. Ali, who described himself in court as the leader of the plot, that had files with highlighted schedules for seven flights to New York, Washington, Chicago, San Francisco, Montreal and Toronto between July and October 2006 aboard aircraft operated by American Airlines, United Airlines and Air Canada. The computer files included information on baggage rules, guidance as to what could be carried as hand luggage and information about Heathrow Airport in London, Scotland Yard said.
But the jury failed to reach verdicts against seven of the eight men on the most serious charge, that of conspiring “to murder persons unknown by the detonation of improvised explosive devices on board trans-Atlantic passenger aircraft.” By finding three of the men guilty of plotting murder, but not of an airliner bombing conspiracy, the jury appeared to have concluded that they had the means and the intention of detonating bombs, but that the prosecution had failed to prove conclusively that they had planned to attack airliners.
Similarly, it failed to reach any decision on murder conspiracy charges against four other men described by prosecutors as foot soldiers in the plot: Ibrahim Savant, 27, a convert to Islam with Anglo-Indian roots, who worked in his British mother’s bookkeeping business; Umar Islam, 30, a convert and former Rastafarian of Caribbean origin; Arafat Waheed Khan, 27, a newly engaged former cellphone shop employee; and Waheed Zaman, 24, a former biomedical college student who once led his university’s Islamic organization.
Seven of the eight defendants pleaded guilty to conspiracy to create a public nuisance with their plan to produce and distribute the videos, and face long prison sentences.
British officials said a crucial role in the suspected plot was played by Mohammed Gulzar, 26, who declared his innocence throughout, and was the only defendant to be acquitted of all charges on Monday.
British intelligence and law enforcement officials say they believe that Mr. Gulzar was the facilitator between the plotters in London and Qaeda operatives in Pakistan, and pushed his co-conspirators to move forward more quickly with the attack.
The law enforcement officials said Mr. Gulzar was a close friend of Mr. Rauf, a Briton of Pakistani origin who was the main figure at the Pakistan end of the plot, according to British, American and Pakistani officials.
The officials said Mr. Rauf and Mr. Gulzar fled Britain for Pakistan after the murder of Mr. Rauf’s uncle in Birmingham in April 2002. But Mr. Rauf was arrested in Pakistan in August 2006, forcing the police in Britain to move against other figures in the plot sooner than they had wanted, and, in the end, weakening the prosecutors’ case. A further blow came when Mr. Rauf, facing extradition to Britain in the murder case, escaped from the Pakistani police last December after entering a mosque for prayers.
There were other weaknesses in the prosecution’s bid to prove that the men had an achievable plan to attack airliners. Among other things, the evidence failed to show that the defendants were prepared to strike immediately. There were doubts about whether they had the technical skills needed, including the ability to produce the concentrated version of hydrogen peroxide necessary to make the bombs effective, and to assemble them aboard aircraft in midflight.
The defense denied the men had chosen airplanes as their targets. No airline tickets had been bought. Some of the six who were accused of being suicide bombers had not obtained the “clean” passports, free of suspicious foreign stamps from Pakistan and elsewhere, that the prosecution said had been part of the planning for the attacks. Some of the suicide videos appeared unusually amateurish, and because of concerns not to disclose intelligence sources and methods no evidence was presented to support claims of a link to Al Qaeda in Pakistan.
At the trial, Mr. Ali, the self-described plot leader, said the plan had been to stir public alarm by setting off minor blasts at the check-in areas of Heathrow’s Terminal 3 to protest British and American policies in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Middle East and that there had been no intention to kill anybody. He said that the original target was the British Parliament, but that they had shifted to Heathrow after security at Westminster proved too tight.
Senior British and American officials have described Mr. Rauf as a protégé of Abu Faraj al-Libi, Qaeda’s director of operations until he was detained in Pakistan in 2005. After that, the officials said, operational control of the plot was taken over by Abu Ubaida al Masri, who was chief of operations for Al Qaeda until his death, the officials said.
British officials identified one of the people Mr. Gulzar met in South Africa and Britain as Mohammed Al Ghabra, suspected of being a Qaeda operative. British intelligence says it believes that Mr. Al Ghabra played an important role in the events leading up to the failed transit bombings in London on July 21, 2005, which took place two weeks after suicide bombings on London subway trains and a bus killed 56 people, including the four suicide bombers.
Mr. Al Ghabra, a Syrian-born British citizen living in Britain, has been identified by British and American officials as a banker for Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. The officials say he has been instrumental in arranging travel for prospective suicide bombers in Pakistan and Iraq. The United States and Britain froze his financial assets in December 2006 because of his alleged activities in support of terrorism. He remains under 24-hour surveillance by British authorities.
John F. Burns reported from London, and Elaine Sciolino from Paris.
Filed under
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Rashid Rauf
by Winter Patriot
on Tuesday, September 16, 2008
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Times : Terror trial blown away - and it's all George Bush's fault
Sunday, September 14, 2008
Terror trial blown away - and it's all George Bush's fault
The collapse last week of the London trial against the men accused of a plot to blow up airliners can be traced back to a peevish president desperate for a poll fillip
Ron Suskind | September 14, 2008
‘Thank you, that’s fine for today,” George W Bush says, as he dismisses a half-dozen attendees of his morning intelligence briefing and settles behind the world’s most famous desk. He’s agitated, doing his best to get things in order before he leaves for his annual August vacation.
It is July 27, 2006. His best-laid plans for this summer are already in tatters. It was to be a season to focus on his strengths, with the mid-term elections just over three months away. Except everything, and everyone, has been conspiring against him. His poll numbers are in the basement. Casualties in Iraq have been steadily rising. Israel is sinking deeper each day into a disastrous engagement with a stronger-than-expected Hezbollah. It’s a mess.
What’s driving Bush’s calculations at the moment is the just-finished intelligence briefing. It involved a plot that he’s been hearing about for some time. The British have been working it since last year: a major terrorist cell in the suburbs of London. While it’s their case — they’ve made that very clear — US involvement has deepened as the tentacles of the cell have spread across Britain and into Pakistan.
With about 40 suspects sending plenty of e-mails and making calls, the Brits have had to rely on what Bush likes to call the “firepower of Fort Meade”, the massive National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance complex in the Maryland hills.
In the past few days, electronic surveillance has revealed, finally, the nature of the plot: airliners taking off from Heathrow carrying explosives and heading for the US east coast. Talk among the suspects has indicated that it could involve as many as a dozen planes blowing up over American cities. That would make it the biggest plot since 9/11 — the so-called second wave that Bush and his vice-president, Dick Cheney, have been waiting for all these years.
Reports of all kinds have been coming to Bush’s desk as the US anti-terrorism machine has secretly ratcheted up. Mike Chertoff, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, is working his intelligence unit around the clock; NSA’s working overtime; and the CIA is doing what it can, especially with its sources in Pakistan.
This morning’s briefers said, however, that the British are advising the United States to sit back and take a deep breath. The Brits have been stressing that this may be just early logistical talk, that they have these suspects so completely wired that they can’t sneeze without generating an electronic dispatch and that no one is doing anything that would pass for an active operation.
Bush has heard this before. Patience, patience. The British are saying that all the time; and that they’re better at intelligence work than the United States — they’ve been doing it longer, they have experience with the IRA’s terrorist network and they’re especially well placed in target communities such as the Pakistanis and the Saudis.
The United States is too anxious and trigger-happy, the Brits complain, given to picking up some bit of an overheard conversation and then sweeping up suspects. Tony Blair said in a recent conversation with Bush that this was “the error of relying on the capability you have rather than developing the capability you need”.
The Brits, after their experience in Northern Ireland, are starting to believe that the key is to treat this not as a titanic ideological struggle, but rather as a law enforcement issue. This requires being patient enough to get the evidence — usually once a plot has matured — with which to build a viable case in open court. But waiting doesn’t feel right to Bush, not now. It could take six months or longer — who knows? — until this plot becomes operational.
Blair is flying to Washington late tonight. They have a full morning planned for tomorrow, a long meeting and then a joint press conference. Blair is a good man, and they’ve covered for each other plenty of times. Blair will come through.
The meeting with Blair next morning happens not to go well, however. When Bush brings up the airliner plot and expresses his desire to snap the trap shut, Blair is unmoved. He says he’s quite clear about the position of his people — Eliza Manningham-Buller, the imperious head of MI5, domestic intelligence; and John Scarlett, the chief of MI6, the foreign service. They seem to have prepared Blair for just this kind of push from the Americans.
It’s not just that this is a UK operation, Blair says, and that nearly 2,000 British operatives have been working it for nearly a year. It’s also that if they’re patient, at some point they’ll be “at the ready” when the plotters seek “green light” approval from Al-Qaeda’s chiefs. It’s too large a plot for them not to.
After Blair leaves, Bush tells Cheney about his dissatisfaction. Cheney receives the message clearly, as he’s received many others over the years. No one needs to create any memos, which some historian might dig up. In a private two-man exchange, there is an understanding. This is the way their relationship works, especially on the most sensitive matters, which Bush will want to deny if he’s ever confronted.
So, as Bush packs up and arrives at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, Cheney makes provisions. It’s all tightly held. No one can know what’s under way — no one, certainly, in the foreign policy establishment and not even most top officials in the intelligence community.
If this were run on a split screen, one image would be a man slipping into Islamabad in darkness in early August. The man is Jose Rodriguez, the director of operations at the CIA, the agency’s number four and the head of all clandestine operations and CIA stations around the world.
Outside Cheney’s office, virtually no one knows that Rodriguez has been dispatched to Islamabad. It is not, however, Pakistan’s powerful Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, that Rodriguez and Cheney are concerned about. It’s that British intelligence will discover Rodriguez’s presence through its sources in Pakistan or those in the US intelligence community.
His mission is to pass information secretly to a selected Pakistani intelligence official, who will summarily arrest one Rashid Rauf, the man suspected of being the Pakistani contact for the British airline plotters. Rodriguez then has to get out of the country undetected.
He manages this, and Rauf is quietly apprehended. As a whisper of the arrest spreads to a few top officials in British intelligence — first in Islamabad and then in London — they curse, throw ashtrays and scream bloody murder. They know the Pakistanis would never have moved on Rauf without first checking with them. And, God knows, the Brits didn’t give the order.
This was their investigation. They might have made arrests in a week or in a month. Clearly the hijackers were moving into some next stage of planning, but many inside the British intelligence and law enforcement communities were beginning to suspect it was more experimentation than anything resembling a dry run. If so, taking them down too early would leave investigators with insufficient evidence to prosecute effectively.
As for Rauf, he was wanted for murder in the UK. The Brits had been preparing a case — with plenty of evidence — for the Pakistani police to arrest him and have him extradited to England for trial. Instead, he gets picked up by the notorious ISI, by which he’ll be either tortured or feted — depending on ISI’s complicated views of the matter — and rendered unsuitable for public trial in the UK or anywhere else. His arrest lights a fuse that will swiftly blow apart their entire investigation.
Top US officials are perplexed. No one, beyond a half-dozen people in the US government, several of them among Cheney’s national security team, knows who is responsible. Not everyone is upset, though. Bush suddenly is in a very good mood. He’d seemed a bit glum when he first arrived in Crawford, aides said. By Tuesday August 8, he is notably ebullient. Pumped up, Bush hits the phones, making preparations for some political jaunts over the coming days to assist beleaguered Republican candidates. He knows he’ll be able to deliver something for them, an August surprise, something very good for the protectors of America.
Next day Cheney decides he wants to do a surprise press briefing from his vacation home in the Wyoming hills. The previous evening, an anti-war candidate defeated Joe Lieberman, the pro-war senator, in Connecticut’s Democratic primary. Cheney, notably strident, says this will encourage “Al-Qaeda types”. He suggests Democrats think America “can retreat behind our oceans and . . . be safe here at home, which clearly we know we won’t — we can’t be”.
Now he just has to sit in his vacation home and wait for events to catch up with his words.
Everything becomes clear in the early hours of August 10. An associate of Rauf’s in Pakistan alerts one of his British contacts that Rauf has been arrested — a conversation that is picked up by electronic surveillance shared by the UK and the United States. As the plotters panic, British police race across metropolitan London, rounding up more than 20 suspects in a few hours, shutting down a year-long operation in what can only be called a frenzy.
The haul from a suburban safe house leads the police to believe the plotters had begun to experiment with ways to get explosives aboard the airliners. In a general way, they’d started to examine the pattern of flight schedules to the United States. In other words, early planning stages — the most valuable time for British agents to sit and wait, tug the net gently and watch for the arrival of “operational readiness”, when the plotters would seek permission from on high.
The most knowledgeable British anti-terrorism officials are the most outraged. Before dawn breaks in the UK, they’re already assessing the damage from what one calls a “forced, foolish hastiness”. But the White House already has a media strategy in place to leverage news of the thwarted attack, “the worst since 9/11”. All that’s left to do is wait a few hours until sunrise, when the arrests will hit the US news cycles and the president and vice-president can register surprise about how right they’ve been all along, about everything.
© Ron Suskind 2008
Extracted from The Way of the World by Ron Suskind, published by Simon & Schuster at £17.99. Copies can be ordered for £16.19, including postage, from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585
The collapse last week of the London trial against the men accused of a plot to blow up airliners can be traced back to a peevish president desperate for a poll fillip
Ron Suskind | September 14, 2008
‘Thank you, that’s fine for today,” George W Bush says, as he dismisses a half-dozen attendees of his morning intelligence briefing and settles behind the world’s most famous desk. He’s agitated, doing his best to get things in order before he leaves for his annual August vacation.
It is July 27, 2006. His best-laid plans for this summer are already in tatters. It was to be a season to focus on his strengths, with the mid-term elections just over three months away. Except everything, and everyone, has been conspiring against him. His poll numbers are in the basement. Casualties in Iraq have been steadily rising. Israel is sinking deeper each day into a disastrous engagement with a stronger-than-expected Hezbollah. It’s a mess.
What’s driving Bush’s calculations at the moment is the just-finished intelligence briefing. It involved a plot that he’s been hearing about for some time. The British have been working it since last year: a major terrorist cell in the suburbs of London. While it’s their case — they’ve made that very clear — US involvement has deepened as the tentacles of the cell have spread across Britain and into Pakistan.
With about 40 suspects sending plenty of e-mails and making calls, the Brits have had to rely on what Bush likes to call the “firepower of Fort Meade”, the massive National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance complex in the Maryland hills.
In the past few days, electronic surveillance has revealed, finally, the nature of the plot: airliners taking off from Heathrow carrying explosives and heading for the US east coast. Talk among the suspects has indicated that it could involve as many as a dozen planes blowing up over American cities. That would make it the biggest plot since 9/11 — the so-called second wave that Bush and his vice-president, Dick Cheney, have been waiting for all these years.
Reports of all kinds have been coming to Bush’s desk as the US anti-terrorism machine has secretly ratcheted up. Mike Chertoff, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, is working his intelligence unit around the clock; NSA’s working overtime; and the CIA is doing what it can, especially with its sources in Pakistan.
This morning’s briefers said, however, that the British are advising the United States to sit back and take a deep breath. The Brits have been stressing that this may be just early logistical talk, that they have these suspects so completely wired that they can’t sneeze without generating an electronic dispatch and that no one is doing anything that would pass for an active operation.
Bush has heard this before. Patience, patience. The British are saying that all the time; and that they’re better at intelligence work than the United States — they’ve been doing it longer, they have experience with the IRA’s terrorist network and they’re especially well placed in target communities such as the Pakistanis and the Saudis.
The United States is too anxious and trigger-happy, the Brits complain, given to picking up some bit of an overheard conversation and then sweeping up suspects. Tony Blair said in a recent conversation with Bush that this was “the error of relying on the capability you have rather than developing the capability you need”.
The Brits, after their experience in Northern Ireland, are starting to believe that the key is to treat this not as a titanic ideological struggle, but rather as a law enforcement issue. This requires being patient enough to get the evidence — usually once a plot has matured — with which to build a viable case in open court. But waiting doesn’t feel right to Bush, not now. It could take six months or longer — who knows? — until this plot becomes operational.
Blair is flying to Washington late tonight. They have a full morning planned for tomorrow, a long meeting and then a joint press conference. Blair is a good man, and they’ve covered for each other plenty of times. Blair will come through.
The meeting with Blair next morning happens not to go well, however. When Bush brings up the airliner plot and expresses his desire to snap the trap shut, Blair is unmoved. He says he’s quite clear about the position of his people — Eliza Manningham-Buller, the imperious head of MI5, domestic intelligence; and John Scarlett, the chief of MI6, the foreign service. They seem to have prepared Blair for just this kind of push from the Americans.
It’s not just that this is a UK operation, Blair says, and that nearly 2,000 British operatives have been working it for nearly a year. It’s also that if they’re patient, at some point they’ll be “at the ready” when the plotters seek “green light” approval from Al-Qaeda’s chiefs. It’s too large a plot for them not to.
After Blair leaves, Bush tells Cheney about his dissatisfaction. Cheney receives the message clearly, as he’s received many others over the years. No one needs to create any memos, which some historian might dig up. In a private two-man exchange, there is an understanding. This is the way their relationship works, especially on the most sensitive matters, which Bush will want to deny if he’s ever confronted.
So, as Bush packs up and arrives at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, Cheney makes provisions. It’s all tightly held. No one can know what’s under way — no one, certainly, in the foreign policy establishment and not even most top officials in the intelligence community.
If this were run on a split screen, one image would be a man slipping into Islamabad in darkness in early August. The man is Jose Rodriguez, the director of operations at the CIA, the agency’s number four and the head of all clandestine operations and CIA stations around the world.
Outside Cheney’s office, virtually no one knows that Rodriguez has been dispatched to Islamabad. It is not, however, Pakistan’s powerful Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, that Rodriguez and Cheney are concerned about. It’s that British intelligence will discover Rodriguez’s presence through its sources in Pakistan or those in the US intelligence community.
His mission is to pass information secretly to a selected Pakistani intelligence official, who will summarily arrest one Rashid Rauf, the man suspected of being the Pakistani contact for the British airline plotters. Rodriguez then has to get out of the country undetected.
He manages this, and Rauf is quietly apprehended. As a whisper of the arrest spreads to a few top officials in British intelligence — first in Islamabad and then in London — they curse, throw ashtrays and scream bloody murder. They know the Pakistanis would never have moved on Rauf without first checking with them. And, God knows, the Brits didn’t give the order.
This was their investigation. They might have made arrests in a week or in a month. Clearly the hijackers were moving into some next stage of planning, but many inside the British intelligence and law enforcement communities were beginning to suspect it was more experimentation than anything resembling a dry run. If so, taking them down too early would leave investigators with insufficient evidence to prosecute effectively.
As for Rauf, he was wanted for murder in the UK. The Brits had been preparing a case — with plenty of evidence — for the Pakistani police to arrest him and have him extradited to England for trial. Instead, he gets picked up by the notorious ISI, by which he’ll be either tortured or feted — depending on ISI’s complicated views of the matter — and rendered unsuitable for public trial in the UK or anywhere else. His arrest lights a fuse that will swiftly blow apart their entire investigation.
Top US officials are perplexed. No one, beyond a half-dozen people in the US government, several of them among Cheney’s national security team, knows who is responsible. Not everyone is upset, though. Bush suddenly is in a very good mood. He’d seemed a bit glum when he first arrived in Crawford, aides said. By Tuesday August 8, he is notably ebullient. Pumped up, Bush hits the phones, making preparations for some political jaunts over the coming days to assist beleaguered Republican candidates. He knows he’ll be able to deliver something for them, an August surprise, something very good for the protectors of America.
Next day Cheney decides he wants to do a surprise press briefing from his vacation home in the Wyoming hills. The previous evening, an anti-war candidate defeated Joe Lieberman, the pro-war senator, in Connecticut’s Democratic primary. Cheney, notably strident, says this will encourage “Al-Qaeda types”. He suggests Democrats think America “can retreat behind our oceans and . . . be safe here at home, which clearly we know we won’t — we can’t be”.
Now he just has to sit in his vacation home and wait for events to catch up with his words.
Everything becomes clear in the early hours of August 10. An associate of Rauf’s in Pakistan alerts one of his British contacts that Rauf has been arrested — a conversation that is picked up by electronic surveillance shared by the UK and the United States. As the plotters panic, British police race across metropolitan London, rounding up more than 20 suspects in a few hours, shutting down a year-long operation in what can only be called a frenzy.
The haul from a suburban safe house leads the police to believe the plotters had begun to experiment with ways to get explosives aboard the airliners. In a general way, they’d started to examine the pattern of flight schedules to the United States. In other words, early planning stages — the most valuable time for British agents to sit and wait, tug the net gently and watch for the arrival of “operational readiness”, when the plotters would seek permission from on high.
The most knowledgeable British anti-terrorism officials are the most outraged. Before dawn breaks in the UK, they’re already assessing the damage from what one calls a “forced, foolish hastiness”. But the White House already has a media strategy in place to leverage news of the thwarted attack, “the worst since 9/11”. All that’s left to do is wait a few hours until sunrise, when the arrests will hit the US news cycles and the president and vice-president can register surprise about how right they’ve been all along, about everything.
© Ron Suskind 2008
Extracted from The Way of the World by Ron Suskind, published by Simon & Schuster at £17.99. Copies can be ordered for £16.19, including postage, from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585
Filed under
liquid bombers,
MI5,
MI6,
Ron Suskind
by Winter Patriot
on Sunday, September 14, 2008
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NYT : No One Convicted of Terror Plot to Bomb Planes
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
No One Convicted of Terror Plot to Bomb Planes
By JOHN F. BURNS and ELAINE SCIOLINO | September 9, 2008
LONDON — A lengthy trial centering on what Scotland Yard called a plot to blow up trans-Atlantic airliners ended Monday when the jury convicted three of eight defendants of conspiracy to commit murder.
But the jury failed to reach verdicts on the more serious charge of a conspiracy to have suicide bombers detonate soft-drink bottles filled with liquid explosives aboard seven airliners headed for the United States and Canada.
The failure to obtain convictions on the plane-bombing charge was a blow to counterterrorism officials in London and Washington, who had described the scheme as potentially the most devastating act of terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks seven years ago this week. British and American experts had said that the plot had all the signs of an operation by Al Qaeda, and that it was conceived and organized in Pakistan.
The arrest in August 2006 of two dozen suspects, including the eight put on trial, set off a worldwide alarm in the airline industry and led to a tightening of airport security, including time-consuming restrictions on passengers carrying liquids and creams in their carry-on luggage that remain in force at most airports around the globe.
But the case was hampered from the beginning, prosecutors said, by an investigation that was cut short, by the conflicting demands of intelligence agencies, and by problems with introducing evidence in the courtroom. To protect sources and methods, the prosecution was unable to introduce material from British or foreign intelligence agencies. In addition, Britain does not allow information in court that has been gathered from domestic wiretaps.
The arrest in Pakistan of Rashid Rauf, a Briton of Pakistani descent who American, British and Pakistani officials said was a liaison to Al Qaeda, set off a series of events that led the British police to roll up the London-based cell far earlier than they had intended. The haste in making sweeping arrests made it hard for prosecutors to persuade the jury that the bomb plot had reached the stage at which an attack on airliners was imminent.
Partly as a result, prosecutors never convinced the jury that the suspects were prepared to strike immediately, or even that they had chosen planes as their targets. Nor did they convict a man whom they had accused of having links to Al Qaeda in Pakistan.
Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service said it might decide to call for a retrial of the case if it decides it might win convictions on the most serious charges. A decision on that is expected within weeks. In addition, a number of other suspects will face trial related to the plot.
The British government, keenly disappointed, put a positive gloss on the trial’s outcome. “I am indebted to the police and the security services, who, by successfully disrupting this group, have saved countless lives,” Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, who is responsible for internal security, said in a statement.
The trial was one of the most protracted and complex ever held for a terrorism case in Britain, after what Scotland Yard described as one of the largest-scale criminal investigations ever mounted here.
After three months of evidence, the case against the eight men — all British Muslims aged 24 to 30, and six with family roots in Pakistan — went to the jury in late July. A two-week holiday break ordered by the judge was followed by what appeared to have been an impasse of more than three weeks among jurors on the most serious charges, even after the judge, David Calvert-Smith, allowed the jury to reach verdicts with at least 10 of the 12 jurors in agreement.
By exactly that margin, the jurors on Monday returned guilty verdicts on the murder conspiracy charges against three men who prosecutors said had been at the heart of the plot: Abdulla Ahmed Ali, 27, a husband and father who studied computer systems engineering; Assad Sarwar, 28, a college dropout who learned how to make the liquid hydrogen peroxide bomb in Pakistan; and Tanvir Hussain, 27, who helped in the purchase of materials and in making the suicide videos.
The defendants planned to drain 17-ounce plastic sports drink bottles by puncturing a tiny hole in the bottom, prosecutors said, then refilling the bottles with an explosive mix of concentrated hydrogen peroxide and food coloring to give the appearance of the original beverage.
The prosecution said the bottles were to have been resealed with instant glue, and then, once the bombers were aboard the flights, connected with detonators made of AA batteries filled with the explosive HMTD and disposable cameras acting as triggers. Scotland Yard said at the time of the arrests that it had found plastic drink bottles and large quantities of hydrogen peroxide on premises used by the defendants, along with “martyrdom” videos taped by six defendants, in the manner common among Islamic suicide bombers.
Also found was a computer memory stick belonging to Mr. Ali, who described himself in court as the leader of the plot, that had files with highlighted schedules for seven flights to New York, Washington, Chicago, San Francisco, Montreal and Toronto between July and October 2006 aboard aircraft operated by American Airlines, United Airlines and Air Canada. The computer files included information on baggage rules, guidance as to what could be carried as hand luggage and information about Heathrow Airport in London, Scotland Yard said.
But the jury failed to reach verdicts against seven of the eight men on the most serious charge, that of conspiring “to murder persons unknown by the detonation of improvised explosive devices on board trans-Atlantic passenger aircraft.” By finding three of the men guilty of plotting murder, but not of an airliner bombing conspiracy, the jury appeared to have concluded that they had the means and the intention of detonating bombs, but that the prosecution had failed to prove conclusively that they had planned to attack airliners.
Similarly, it failed to reach any decision on murder conspiracy charges against four other men described by prosecutors as foot soldiers in the plot: Ibrahim Savant, 27, a convert to Islam with Anglo-Indian roots, who worked in his British mother’s bookkeeping business; Umar Islam, 30, a convert and former Rastafarian of Caribbean origin; Arafat Waheed Khan, 27, a newly engaged former cellphone shop employee; and Waheed Zaman, 24, a former biomedical college student who once led his university’s Islamic organization.
Seven of the eight defendants pleaded guilty to conspiracy to create a public nuisance with their plan to produce and distribute the videos, and face long prison sentences.
British officials said a crucial role in the suspected plot was played by Mohammed Gulzar, 26, who declared his innocence throughout, and was the only defendant to be acquitted of all charges on Monday.
British intelligence and law enforcement officials say they believe that Mr. Gulzar was the facilitator between the plotters in London and Qaeda operatives in Pakistan, and pushed his co-conspirators to move forward more quickly with the attack.
The law enforcement officials said Mr. Gulzar was a close friend of Mr. Rauf, a Briton of Pakistani origin who was the main figure at the Pakistan end of the plot, according to British, American and Pakistani officials.
The officials said Mr. Rauf and Mr. Gulzar fled Britain for Pakistan after the murder of Mr. Rauf’s uncle in Birmingham in April 2002. But Mr. Rauf was arrested in Pakistan in August 2006, forcing the police in Britain to move against other figures in the plot sooner than they had wanted, and, in the end, weakening the prosecutors’ case. A further blow came when Mr. Fauf, facing extradition to Britain in the murder case, escaped from the Pakistani police last December after entering a mosque for prayers.
There were other weaknesses in the prosecution’s bid to prove that the men had an achievable plan to attack airliners. Among other things, the evidence failed to show that the defendants were prepared to strike immediately. There were doubts about whether they had the technical skills needed, including the ability to produce the concentrated version of hydrogen peroxide necessary to make the bombs effective, and to assemble them aboard aircraft in midflight.
The defense denied the men had chosen airplanes as their targets. No airline tickets had been bought. Some of the six who were accused of being suicide bombers had not obtained the “clean” passports, free of suspicious foreign stamps from Pakistan and elsewhere, that the prosecution said had been part of the planning for the attacks. Some of the suicide videos appeared unusually amateurish, and because of concerns not to disclose intelligence sources and methods no evidence was presented to support claims of a link to Al Qaeda in Pakistan.
At the trial, Mr. Ali, the self-described plot leader, said the plan had been to stir public alarm by setting off minor blasts at the check-in areas of Heathrow’s Terminal 3 to protest British and American policies in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Middle East and that there had been no intention to kill anybody. He said that the original target was the British Parliament, but that they had shifted to Heathrow after security at Westminster proved too tight.
Senior British and American officials have described Mr. Rauf as a protégé of Abu Faraj al-Libi, Qaeda’s director of operations until he was detained in Pakistan in 2005. After that, the officials said, operational control of the plot was taken over by Abu Ubaida al Masri, who was chief of operations for Al Qaeda until his death, the officials said.
British officials identified one of the people Mr. Gulzar met in South Africa and Britain as Mohammed Al Ghabra, suspected of being a Qaeda operative. British intelligence says it believes that Mr. Al Ghabra played an important role in the events leading up to the failed transit bombings in London on July 21, 2005, which took place two weeks after suicide bombings on London subway trains and a bus killed 56 people, including the four suicide bombers.
Mr. Al Ghabra, a Syrian-born British citizen living in Britain, has been identified by British and American officials as a banker for Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. The officials say he has been instrumental in arranging travel for prospective suicide bombers in Pakistan and Iraq. The United States and Britain froze his financial assets in December 2006 because of his alleged activities in support of terrorism. He remains under 24-hour surveillance by British authorities.
John F. Burns reported from London, and Elaine Sciolino from Paris.
By JOHN F. BURNS and ELAINE SCIOLINO | September 9, 2008
LONDON — A lengthy trial centering on what Scotland Yard called a plot to blow up trans-Atlantic airliners ended Monday when the jury convicted three of eight defendants of conspiracy to commit murder.
But the jury failed to reach verdicts on the more serious charge of a conspiracy to have suicide bombers detonate soft-drink bottles filled with liquid explosives aboard seven airliners headed for the United States and Canada.
The failure to obtain convictions on the plane-bombing charge was a blow to counterterrorism officials in London and Washington, who had described the scheme as potentially the most devastating act of terrorism since the Sept. 11 attacks seven years ago this week. British and American experts had said that the plot had all the signs of an operation by Al Qaeda, and that it was conceived and organized in Pakistan.
The arrest in August 2006 of two dozen suspects, including the eight put on trial, set off a worldwide alarm in the airline industry and led to a tightening of airport security, including time-consuming restrictions on passengers carrying liquids and creams in their carry-on luggage that remain in force at most airports around the globe.
But the case was hampered from the beginning, prosecutors said, by an investigation that was cut short, by the conflicting demands of intelligence agencies, and by problems with introducing evidence in the courtroom. To protect sources and methods, the prosecution was unable to introduce material from British or foreign intelligence agencies. In addition, Britain does not allow information in court that has been gathered from domestic wiretaps.
The arrest in Pakistan of Rashid Rauf, a Briton of Pakistani descent who American, British and Pakistani officials said was a liaison to Al Qaeda, set off a series of events that led the British police to roll up the London-based cell far earlier than they had intended. The haste in making sweeping arrests made it hard for prosecutors to persuade the jury that the bomb plot had reached the stage at which an attack on airliners was imminent.
Partly as a result, prosecutors never convinced the jury that the suspects were prepared to strike immediately, or even that they had chosen planes as their targets. Nor did they convict a man whom they had accused of having links to Al Qaeda in Pakistan.
Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service said it might decide to call for a retrial of the case if it decides it might win convictions on the most serious charges. A decision on that is expected within weeks. In addition, a number of other suspects will face trial related to the plot.
The British government, keenly disappointed, put a positive gloss on the trial’s outcome. “I am indebted to the police and the security services, who, by successfully disrupting this group, have saved countless lives,” Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, who is responsible for internal security, said in a statement.
The trial was one of the most protracted and complex ever held for a terrorism case in Britain, after what Scotland Yard described as one of the largest-scale criminal investigations ever mounted here.
After three months of evidence, the case against the eight men — all British Muslims aged 24 to 30, and six with family roots in Pakistan — went to the jury in late July. A two-week holiday break ordered by the judge was followed by what appeared to have been an impasse of more than three weeks among jurors on the most serious charges, even after the judge, David Calvert-Smith, allowed the jury to reach verdicts with at least 10 of the 12 jurors in agreement.
By exactly that margin, the jurors on Monday returned guilty verdicts on the murder conspiracy charges against three men who prosecutors said had been at the heart of the plot: Abdulla Ahmed Ali, 27, a husband and father who studied computer systems engineering; Assad Sarwar, 28, a college dropout who learned how to make the liquid hydrogen peroxide bomb in Pakistan; and Tanvir Hussain, 27, who helped in the purchase of materials and in making the suicide videos.
The defendants planned to drain 17-ounce plastic sports drink bottles by puncturing a tiny hole in the bottom, prosecutors said, then refilling the bottles with an explosive mix of concentrated hydrogen peroxide and food coloring to give the appearance of the original beverage.
The prosecution said the bottles were to have been resealed with instant glue, and then, once the bombers were aboard the flights, connected with detonators made of AA batteries filled with the explosive HMTD and disposable cameras acting as triggers. Scotland Yard said at the time of the arrests that it had found plastic drink bottles and large quantities of hydrogen peroxide on premises used by the defendants, along with “martyrdom” videos taped by six defendants, in the manner common among Islamic suicide bombers.
Also found was a computer memory stick belonging to Mr. Ali, who described himself in court as the leader of the plot, that had files with highlighted schedules for seven flights to New York, Washington, Chicago, San Francisco, Montreal and Toronto between July and October 2006 aboard aircraft operated by American Airlines, United Airlines and Air Canada. The computer files included information on baggage rules, guidance as to what could be carried as hand luggage and information about Heathrow Airport in London, Scotland Yard said.
But the jury failed to reach verdicts against seven of the eight men on the most serious charge, that of conspiring “to murder persons unknown by the detonation of improvised explosive devices on board trans-Atlantic passenger aircraft.” By finding three of the men guilty of plotting murder, but not of an airliner bombing conspiracy, the jury appeared to have concluded that they had the means and the intention of detonating bombs, but that the prosecution had failed to prove conclusively that they had planned to attack airliners.
Similarly, it failed to reach any decision on murder conspiracy charges against four other men described by prosecutors as foot soldiers in the plot: Ibrahim Savant, 27, a convert to Islam with Anglo-Indian roots, who worked in his British mother’s bookkeeping business; Umar Islam, 30, a convert and former Rastafarian of Caribbean origin; Arafat Waheed Khan, 27, a newly engaged former cellphone shop employee; and Waheed Zaman, 24, a former biomedical college student who once led his university’s Islamic organization.
Seven of the eight defendants pleaded guilty to conspiracy to create a public nuisance with their plan to produce and distribute the videos, and face long prison sentences.
British officials said a crucial role in the suspected plot was played by Mohammed Gulzar, 26, who declared his innocence throughout, and was the only defendant to be acquitted of all charges on Monday.
British intelligence and law enforcement officials say they believe that Mr. Gulzar was the facilitator between the plotters in London and Qaeda operatives in Pakistan, and pushed his co-conspirators to move forward more quickly with the attack.
The law enforcement officials said Mr. Gulzar was a close friend of Mr. Rauf, a Briton of Pakistani origin who was the main figure at the Pakistan end of the plot, according to British, American and Pakistani officials.
The officials said Mr. Rauf and Mr. Gulzar fled Britain for Pakistan after the murder of Mr. Rauf’s uncle in Birmingham in April 2002. But Mr. Rauf was arrested in Pakistan in August 2006, forcing the police in Britain to move against other figures in the plot sooner than they had wanted, and, in the end, weakening the prosecutors’ case. A further blow came when Mr. Fauf, facing extradition to Britain in the murder case, escaped from the Pakistani police last December after entering a mosque for prayers.
There were other weaknesses in the prosecution’s bid to prove that the men had an achievable plan to attack airliners. Among other things, the evidence failed to show that the defendants were prepared to strike immediately. There were doubts about whether they had the technical skills needed, including the ability to produce the concentrated version of hydrogen peroxide necessary to make the bombs effective, and to assemble them aboard aircraft in midflight.
The defense denied the men had chosen airplanes as their targets. No airline tickets had been bought. Some of the six who were accused of being suicide bombers had not obtained the “clean” passports, free of suspicious foreign stamps from Pakistan and elsewhere, that the prosecution said had been part of the planning for the attacks. Some of the suicide videos appeared unusually amateurish, and because of concerns not to disclose intelligence sources and methods no evidence was presented to support claims of a link to Al Qaeda in Pakistan.
At the trial, Mr. Ali, the self-described plot leader, said the plan had been to stir public alarm by setting off minor blasts at the check-in areas of Heathrow’s Terminal 3 to protest British and American policies in Afghanistan, Iraq and the Middle East and that there had been no intention to kill anybody. He said that the original target was the British Parliament, but that they had shifted to Heathrow after security at Westminster proved too tight.
Senior British and American officials have described Mr. Rauf as a protégé of Abu Faraj al-Libi, Qaeda’s director of operations until he was detained in Pakistan in 2005. After that, the officials said, operational control of the plot was taken over by Abu Ubaida al Masri, who was chief of operations for Al Qaeda until his death, the officials said.
British officials identified one of the people Mr. Gulzar met in South Africa and Britain as Mohammed Al Ghabra, suspected of being a Qaeda operative. British intelligence says it believes that Mr. Al Ghabra played an important role in the events leading up to the failed transit bombings in London on July 21, 2005, which took place two weeks after suicide bombings on London subway trains and a bus killed 56 people, including the four suicide bombers.
Mr. Al Ghabra, a Syrian-born British citizen living in Britain, has been identified by British and American officials as a banker for Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. The officials say he has been instrumental in arranging travel for prospective suicide bombers in Pakistan and Iraq. The United States and Britain froze his financial assets in December 2006 because of his alleged activities in support of terrorism. He remains under 24-hour surveillance by British authorities.
John F. Burns reported from London, and Elaine Sciolino from Paris.
Star Tribune : 3 Britons convicted in plot to bomb jets
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
3 Britons convicted in plot to bomb jets
The jury failed to reach verdicts on the central charge that led to restrictions on liquids in carry-on luggage: that the eight planned to set off liquid explosives on flights.
By JOHN F. BURNS and ELAINE SCIOLINO New York Times == September 8, 2008
LONDON - A lengthy trial centering on what Scotland Yard called a plot to blow up trans-Atlantic airliners ended on Monday with the jury convicting three of eight defendants of conspiracy to commit murder.
But the jury failed to reach verdicts on the more serious charge of a conspiracy to have suicide bombers detonate soft-drink bottles filled with liquid explosives aboard seven airliners headed for the United States and Canada.
The failure to obtain convictions on the plane-bombing charge was a blow to counterterrorism officials in London and Washington, who had described the scheme as potentially the most devastating act of terrorism since 9/11. Experts had said that the plot had all the signs of an Al-Qaida operation and that it had been conceived and organized in Pakistan.
The arrest in 2006 of two dozen suspects, including the eight put on trial, set off a worldwide alarm in the airline industry, and led to a tightening of airport security, including time-consuming restrictions on passengers carrying liquids and creams in their carry-on luggage that remain in force at most airports around the globe.
But the case was hampered, prosecutors said, by an investigation that was cut short, the conflicting demands of intelligence agencies and problems with introducing evidence in the courtroom.
The arrest in Pakistan of Rashid Rauf, a Briton of Pakistani descent who U.S., British and Pakistani officials said was a liaison to Al-Qaida, set off a series of events that forced British police to roll up the London-based cell far earlier than they intended. The arrest led to the roundup of the others. Scotland Yard hoped to grill Rauf in London, but he escaped from Pakistani police under mysterious circumstances shortly before his expected extradition last fall.
The haste in making arrests made it hard for prosecutors to persuade the jury that the bomb plot had reached the stage where an actual attack on airliners was imminent.
Partly as a result, prosecutors never convinced the jury that the accused plotters were prepared to strike immediately, or even that they had chosen planes as their target.
In a statement Monday evening, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith welcomed the guilty verdicts for Abdullah Ahmed Ali, 27; Assad Sarwar, 28, and Tanvir Hussain, 27, all Britons of Pakistani descent. She said authorities "saved countless lives" by disrupting the group, which was exposed by British, U.S. and Pakistani investigators.
Britain's Crown Prosecution Service said it may decide to call for a retrial.
By finding three of the men guilty of plotting murder, but not of an airliner bombing conspiracy, the jury appeared to concluded that they had the means and the intention of detonating bombs but that the prosecution had failed to prove conclusively that they planned to attack airliners.
British officials said a crucial role in the suspected plot was played by Mohammed Gulzar, 26, who declared his innocence throughout, and was the only defendant to be acquitted of all charges on Monday.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
The jury failed to reach verdicts on the central charge that led to restrictions on liquids in carry-on luggage: that the eight planned to set off liquid explosives on flights.
By JOHN F. BURNS and ELAINE SCIOLINO New York Times == September 8, 2008
LONDON - A lengthy trial centering on what Scotland Yard called a plot to blow up trans-Atlantic airliners ended on Monday with the jury convicting three of eight defendants of conspiracy to commit murder.
But the jury failed to reach verdicts on the more serious charge of a conspiracy to have suicide bombers detonate soft-drink bottles filled with liquid explosives aboard seven airliners headed for the United States and Canada.
The failure to obtain convictions on the plane-bombing charge was a blow to counterterrorism officials in London and Washington, who had described the scheme as potentially the most devastating act of terrorism since 9/11. Experts had said that the plot had all the signs of an Al-Qaida operation and that it had been conceived and organized in Pakistan.
The arrest in 2006 of two dozen suspects, including the eight put on trial, set off a worldwide alarm in the airline industry, and led to a tightening of airport security, including time-consuming restrictions on passengers carrying liquids and creams in their carry-on luggage that remain in force at most airports around the globe.
But the case was hampered, prosecutors said, by an investigation that was cut short, the conflicting demands of intelligence agencies and problems with introducing evidence in the courtroom.
The arrest in Pakistan of Rashid Rauf, a Briton of Pakistani descent who U.S., British and Pakistani officials said was a liaison to Al-Qaida, set off a series of events that forced British police to roll up the London-based cell far earlier than they intended. The arrest led to the roundup of the others. Scotland Yard hoped to grill Rauf in London, but he escaped from Pakistani police under mysterious circumstances shortly before his expected extradition last fall.
The haste in making arrests made it hard for prosecutors to persuade the jury that the bomb plot had reached the stage where an actual attack on airliners was imminent.
Partly as a result, prosecutors never convinced the jury that the accused plotters were prepared to strike immediately, or even that they had chosen planes as their target.
In a statement Monday evening, Home Secretary Jacqui Smith welcomed the guilty verdicts for Abdullah Ahmed Ali, 27; Assad Sarwar, 28, and Tanvir Hussain, 27, all Britons of Pakistani descent. She said authorities "saved countless lives" by disrupting the group, which was exposed by British, U.S. and Pakistani investigators.
Britain's Crown Prosecution Service said it may decide to call for a retrial.
By finding three of the men guilty of plotting murder, but not of an airliner bombing conspiracy, the jury appeared to concluded that they had the means and the intention of detonating bombs but that the prosecution had failed to prove conclusively that they planned to attack airliners.
British officials said a crucial role in the suspected plot was played by Mohammed Gulzar, 26, who declared his innocence throughout, and was the only defendant to be acquitted of all charges on Monday.
The Associated Press contributed to this report
FDL : Bush and Cheney Responsible for Five Suspected Terrorists Going Free
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
Bush and Cheney Responsible for Five Suspected Terrorists Going Free
By: emptywheel -- September 8, 2008
A Court in the UK just convicted three men it had charged with plotting to make bombs from bottles of liquid and explode them on planes flying over the Atlantic.
But Bush and Cheney don't care. The GWOT for them is one rolling press conference, not a serious pursuit to be conducted as if the outcome--and not the media buzz--mattered.
====
note this comment:
Well, it’s not like they had not had any practice. From Ahmed Rashid’s Descent Into Chaos, an incident that took place in Afghanistan after the fall of Kabul:
By: emptywheel -- September 8, 2008
A Court in the UK just convicted three men it had charged with plotting to make bombs from bottles of liquid and explode them on planes flying over the Atlantic.
Three Britons were found guilty on Monday of plotting to kill people using homemade liquid bombs, but a jury failed to agree that they intended to blow up transatlantic airliners.But it failed to convict a majority of the eight men it had charged.
After a five-month trial, the jury found Abdulla Ahmed Ali, Assad Sarwar and Tanvir Hussain guilty of conspiring to kill "persons unknown" but were not convinced by the prosecution's case that they planned to target aircraft leaving London's Heathrow airport headed for North America.
The jury failed to reach a verdict in the case of four other defendants and an eighth was cleared on all counts.We'll never know, but there's a decent likelihood British officials could have convicted all the suspects had Bush and Cheney not prematurely trumped up these plans into a terror scare right before the 2006 elections. As Ron Suskind described, Bush and Cheney pushed the Pakistanis to break this, in spite of demands from the UK that the investigators allow their work to continue to fruition.
NPR: I want to talk just a little about this fascinating episode you describe in the summer of 2006, when President Bush is very anxious about some intelligence briefings that he is getting from the British. What are they telling him?As Suskind describes in his book,
SUSKIND: In late July of 2006, the British are moving forward on a mission they've been--an investigation they've been at for a year at that point, where they've got a group of "plotters," so-called, in the London area that they've been tracking...Bush gets this briefing at the end of July of 2006, and he's very agitated. When Blair comes at the end of the month, they talk about it and he says, "Look, I want this thing, this trap snapped shut immediately." Blair's like, "Well, look, be patient here. What we do in Britain"--Blair describes, and this is something well known to Bush--"is we try to be more patient so they move a bit forward. These guys are not going to breathe without us knowing it. We've got them all mapped out so that we can get actual hard evidence, and then prosecute them in public courts of law and get real prosecutions and long prison terms"...
Well, Bush doesn't get the answer he wants, which is "snap the trap shut." And the reason he wants that is because he's getting all sorts of pressure from Republicans in Congress that his ratings are down. These are the worst ratings for a sitting president at this point in his second term, and they're just wild-eyed about the coming midterm elections. Well, Bush expresses his dissatisfaction to Cheney as to the Blair meeting, and Cheney moves forward.
NPR: So you got the British saying, "Let's carefully build our case. Let's get more intelligence." Bush wants an arrest and a political win. What does he do?
SUSKIND: Absolutely. What happens is that then, oh, a few days later, the CIA operations chief--which is really a senior guy. He's up there in the one, two, three spots at CIA, guy named Jose Rodriguez ends up slipping quietly into Islamabad, Pakistan, and he meets secretly with the ISI, which is the Pakistani intelligence service. And suddenly a guy in Pakistan named Rashid Rauf, who's kind of the contact of the British plotters in Pakistan, gets arrested. This, of course, as anyone could expect, triggers a reaction in London, a lot of scurrying. And the Brits have to run through the night wild-eyed and basically round up 25 or 30 people. It's quite a frenzy. The British are livid about this. They talk to the Americans. The Americans kind of shrug, "Who knows? You know, ISI picked up Rashid Rauf."
DAVIES: So the British did not even get a heads-up from the United States that this arrest was going to happen?
SUSKIND: Did not get a heads-up. In fact, the whole point was to mislead the British...The British did not know about it, frankly, until I reported it in the book...
The British model is, after all, to be patient, gather sufficient evidence to try terror suspects in open court, and get long prison terms, treating it all as a criminal matter rather than a historic--and terrorist-glamorizing--clash of power and ideology. As for Rashid Rauf, the British had even more specific plans. He was wanted for murder in the UK. The Brits were preparing a case, for the Pakistani police to arrest him, and have him extradited to England for trial, just like any murderer on the lam. Instead, he gets picked up by the notorious ISI, where he'll be either tortured or feted--depending on the ISI's complicated views of teh matter--and rendered unsuitable for public trial in the UK or anywhere else.That frenzied attempt to salvage aspects of their investigation--caused by Bush's desire for an election season stunt--led way to today's convictions, certainly. But it also almost certainly led to an insufficient case against at least four or five suspected terrorists, not to mention the men the Brits didn't charge.
His arrest lights a fuse that will swiftly implode their entire investigation.
[snip]
British police slip into high gear. They race across metropolitan London, rounding up more than twenty suspects in a few hours, shutting down a yearlong operation in what can only be called a frenzy. The most knowledgeable British anti-terrorism officials are the most outraged. Before dawn breaks in the UK, they're already assessing the damage from what one calls a "forced, foolish hastiness."
But Bush and Cheney don't care. The GWOT for them is one rolling press conference, not a serious pursuit to be conducted as if the outcome--and not the media buzz--mattered.
====
note this comment:
Well, it’s not like they had not had any practice. From Ahmed Rashid’s Descent Into Chaos, an incident that took place in Afghanistan after the fall of Kabul:
One senior U.S. intelligence analyst told me, ‘The request was made by Musharraf to Bush, but Cheney took charge–a token of who was handling Musharraf at the time. The approval was not shared with anyone at State, including Colin Powell, until well after the event.’ Musharraf said Pakistan needed to save its dignity and its valued people. Two planes were involved, which made several sorties a night over several nights. They took off from air bases in Chotral and Gilgit in Pakistan’s northern areas, and landed in Kunduz, where the evacuees were waiting on the tarmac. Certainly hundreds and perhaps as many as one thousand people escaped. Hundreds of ISI officers, Taliban commanders, and foot soldiers belonging to the IMU and al Qaeda personnel boarded the planes. What was sold as a minor extraction turned into a major air bridge. The frustrated U.S. SOF who watched it from the surrounding high ground dubbed it ‘Operation Evil Airlift.’ (p. 92)As the author notes on the next page:
The ‘Great Escape,’ as one Pakistani retired army officer dubbed it, would have enormous implications on the subsequent U.S.-led war on terrorism. It is believed that more foreign terrorists escaped from Kunduz than made their escape later from Tora Bora. . . . After helping the ISI escape from Kunduz, Cheney took charge of all future dealings with Musharraf and the Pakistani army.Or, as Seymour Hersh quotes an SIO saying in retrospect:
Dirt got through the screenPretty much sums up the Bush/Cheney GWOT.
Filed under
liberal media,
liquid bombers,
manure
by Winter Patriot
on Tuesday, September 09, 2008
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