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Osama or the Lebanese Carlos? Dave Francis People in the USA who can’t name their kid’s schoolteacher, or the Prime Minister of Canada are all in a huff about Osama bin Ladin. Everybody is talking about this guy. In churches, bars, on the streets and in offices, bin Ladin is the man of the hour. With all the abilities and resources of a James Bond villain, he has caught the world’s attention, and now the search is on to find him. Who is Osama bin Ladin? Deported and stripped of his Saudi citizenship in 1994 for ‘irresponsible behavior,’ bin Ladin is a reclusive multi-millionaire, hiding in some of the most inaccessible spots on the earth. Osama bin Ladin was born in 1957 in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. He was the 17th son of 53 children of construction magnate Muhammad Awad bin Ladin. His mother was reportedly a Palestinian, and the least favored of his father’s ten wives. The elder bin Ladin moved to Saudi Arabia from Yemen and amassed a fortune. Most of this money came from a number of successful construction and contracting companies. Today, the bin Ladin family fortune is estimated at $5 billion. Osama was raised in AlMadina AlMunawwara and Hijaz, and received his education in the schools of Jedda, then studied management and economics in King Abdul Aziz University in Jedda. In 1979, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. Osama bin Ladin went to fight, then later used his considerable wealth and organizational talents to recruit and train Muslim mujahadeen to carry the war with the Soviets forward. The American CIA aided him in his efforts. The CIA budgeted 500 million dollars per year in aid to the Afghan resistance. While no one knows how much of that went into the hands of Bin Ladin, it is certain that he received large amounts of weapons, including stinger missiles, which his organization still has today. Bin Ladin and his cohorts were very effective at guerilla tactics, playing a major role in the Afghan resistance movement. In 1988, bin Ladin founded Al Qaeda, (The Base) and since the Soviets retired from Afghanistan, Al Qaeda has been honing its skills for attacks worldwide against groups or governments it considers to be its enemies. Al Qaeda has operatives worldwide. Algeria, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bosnia, Chechnya, China, Dagestan, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gaza, Indonesia, Iraq, Jordan, Kashmir, Kenya, Kosovo, Kuwait, Lebanon, Lybia, Malaysia, Mindanao, (Phillipines) Mexico, Morocco, Myanmar, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tajikistan, Tanzania, Tunisia, Turkey, Uganda, Uzbekistan, West Bank, and Yemen are home to chapters of Al Qaeda, , and that doesn’t count the contacts he has forged with other terrorist groups worldwide like Hizbollah, Hamas, and countless smaller organizations. Sheikh bin Ladin is at the top. He is the Emir, the commander of Al Qaeda. Below him is a council of war, called the Shura majlis. They oversee more directly the 24 divisions of Al Qaeda. There are also four committees which report to the Shura majlis. Those committees are Religious; Media; Finance, and last, Military. The groups are highly compartmentalized, and security is the primary consideration. The effectiveness of operational security of Al Qaeda is one of the hallmarks that separate it from other terror groups. A Sunni Muslim, bin Ladin has many times stated his willingness to kill women and children to achieve his goals, two of which are to drive Americans out of the middle east, and Jews out of Israel. When asked about this recently, he was quoted as saying, "Allah ordered us in this region to purify the Muslim land of all non-believers, and especially in the Arabian Peninsula... We believe that the biggest thieves in the world and the terrorists are the Americans ... We do not differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians; they are all targets in this Fatwa." Bin Ladin has been implicated in several attacks on Americans, and American interests. In 1993, four men were arrested for the bombing of the World Trade Center. They were tried and convicted. On February 8th, 1995, two years after the bombing Ramzi Ahmed Yousef was arrested in Pakistan. Yousef had been implicated in the bombing, and indicted two years earlier on March 11th, 1993. He was tried, convicted, and he was scheduled for sentencing the day of the second attack on the World Trade Center. The owner of the house in Pakistan where Yousef was arrested is the brother in law of Osama bin Ladin. In November 1995 a bomb exploded outside the Saudi National Guard facility in Riyadh. Bin Ladin was quoted as saying the bombers, who were caught, convicted, and executed for their crime, had “raised the head of the Muslim nation high, and washed away some of the dishonor we had to bear by the Saudi government's collaboration with the American government in the land of Allah” Bin Ladin is fanatical about the US leaving the Arabian peninsula. June 25, 1998 Dhahran, Al Khobar bombing. 19 US servicemen killed, more than 300 injured when a bomb exploded, devastating part of the King Abdul Aziz airbase in Saudi Arabia. The blast was so powerful that buildings 3 miles away suffered damage. Al Qaeda has been tagged as the responsible party for the bombing. Some other actions that are believed by intelligence professionals to bear the stamp of bin Ladin are: The December 1992 hotel bombings in Yemen that targeted U.S. servicemen on their way to Somalia as part of a U.N. force. The assassination attempt on Jordan’s Crown Prince Abdullah in June of 1993. The attempt on the life of Egyptian President Mubarak in Sudan, long a stomping ground of bin Ladin. The bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Pakistan in November of 1996. 17 people were killed in the attack. Other attacks on Americans, including the horrors in Somalia, Kenya, and Tanzania. Bin Ladin and his group were greatly buoyed by the success against the Soviet Union. One of bin Latin’s favorite claims is that the war in Afghanistan proved that there are no superpowers. Osama bin Ladin is a bad guy. He is capable, he is dangerous, and he should be hunted down and killed. The west should not feel safe as long as bin Ladin and his group are out there. But is he the guy behind this? Maybe so, but maybe not. Rumor in the intelligence community has bin Ladin as being very ill, and not able to mount an operation as serious as this.
There are other candidates out there. Take for example Imad Mughniyeh, head of the overseas branch for Hizbollah. Born in the town of Tir Dibas in southern Lebanon, he made Teheran his home for much of his life. Mughniyeh is one of the world’s most wanted men. Reports from Beirut say he has undergone plastic surgery in an effort to conceal his identity. According to Israeli intelligence, the government of Saddam Hussein has forged ties with Mughniyeh, long renowned as one of the cruelest men alive. An Israeli intelligence agent, speaking anonymously said, “We only got scraps of information… but it was good enough for us to send a warning six weeks ago to our allies that an unprecedented terror attack was expected. Mughniyeh met with some dormant agents on secret trips to Germany, and we believe that the brains behind the WTC attack are Mughniyeh and Zawahiri. They probably got financial and logistical support from Iraqi Intelligence.” Mughniyeh, known as the Lebanese Carlos, certainly has ambition. In April of 1997 he came close to blowing up an Israeli El-Al airliner above Tel Aviv. A Lebanese national carrying a forged British passport in the name of Andrew Neumann was severely injured when the bomb went off in his Jerusalem hotel room a mere two hours before he was due to board the plane. He admitted that Imad Mughniyeh was behind the plot. “Bin Ladin is a schoolboy in comparison with Mughniyeh,” says the Israeli Aman(Army Intelligence) officer. “We have studied him, and determined that he is a clinical psychopath. He had two brothers killed by the Americans, and that only inflamed his strong motivation.” Israeli intelligence has also noted a change in Iraq. They are now more involved in sponsoring terrorism than they had been before. On July 7th, the Iraqi Secret Service sent a suicide bomber who had been trained in Baghdad to attempt to blow up the airport in Tel Aviv. The chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service is Qusai Hessein, Saddams son, and it is believed he is breathing new life into the organization. In 1983, Mughniyeh was suspected of being involved in the suicide bombing of the American Embassy in Beirut, as well as the bombing in 1984 of the annex. In 1985 he was foiled in a plot to kill the Emir of Kuwait, and he was the mastermind behind the hijacking of a Kuwaiti airliner in 1988. That hijacking was done to affect the release of his brother in law, Mustafa Fouad Saad, who was languishing in a Kuwaiti cell awaiting a well-deserved death sentence. The Kuwaitis caved and let him go. He has also successfully kidnapped 4 Israeli soldiers. Three of them at the border, on Mount Dov. Omar Suweid, Binyamin Avraham, Adi Avitan and Elhanan Tannenbaum were all captured by Mughniyeh’s forces in October of 2000. In the 80’s, Mughniyeh made his name as “King of the Kidnappers.” He was behind the kidnapping of Terry Waite, Thomas Sutherland, and Terry Adams. He had basements of mosques bulging with captives in the 1980s. It was in March of 1984 that Mughniyeh made himself a target of the American intelligence community. (Incidentally, there is a reward for him of 2 million dollars posted by the US government.) He has been chased by the best of western intelligence services. MI6(British), SDECE(French), Aman, Mossad, DEA and the CIA have all been beating the bushes for him, to no avail. “Mughniyeh is a sick man,” says an intelligence officer who had supervised his file. He is the prime suspect in the kidnap, torture and murder of CIA station chief William Buckley in Beirut. The story goes that Mughniyeh tortured, then killed Buckley with his own hands. He is also suspected in the murder of US Marine Lieutenant Colonel William R. Higgins One year later, in a Mossad/CIA operation, a car exploded outside Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah. The Sheikh was a spiritual leader of Hizbullah, and 75 people were killed, including Mughniyeh’s brother. Mughniyeh fled to Iran. In 1992, Mughniyeh was back in action, blowing up the Israeli embassy in Argentina, killing 92 people. This was in response to the Israelis having killed the then head of Hizbullah, Sheikh Abas Musawi in Lebanon a month previous to the embassy bombing. The Argentineans issued an arrest warrant for Mughniyeh on Sept. 2, 1999. The Mossad, (Israeli Secret Service) responded in 1994 with a bombing in a Shi’ite section of Beirut. Four people died, one of them was Fuad Mughniyeh, Imad’s brother. There are also shadowy reports that Mughniyeh and bin Ladin have teamed up, and are holed up in Jowzjan, in Northern Afghanistan, not for from the border with Tajikistan. It is believed in some sources that the afore-mentioned Israeli soldiers were handed over to bin Ladin by Mughniyeh as a gift to begin their deadly pact. One way or the other, Israeli intelligence sources whisper that they see the fingerprints of Mughniyeh on the WTC and Pentagon attacks. DJF |