Whoops, like a marroon I originally tried posting the whole thing.
http://www.exile.ru/153/153010101.html
You Say "Terrorist", Washington says "Shuttup" America’s Dangerous Chechnya Game Aided 9/11 Terrorists By Mark Ames ( editor at exile.ru )
Last December, an incredible piece of evidence emerged in the indictment of accused 9-11 terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui.
While most of the media and Capitol Hill were focused on the CIA and FBI’s failure to “connect the dots,” a crucial clue has still been left unexplored: the Al Qaeda-Chechnya connection. If the US Government had been willing to explore the Chechen Connection, it could have prevented the terror attacks on September 11th.
Buried in the middle of the June 6th Washington Post article “Hill Probers Upgrade Evidence Gathered From Moussaoui” was proof that the failure to uncover the terrorist plot was not just a matter of poor coordination, but rather a direct result of deliberate U.S. foreign policy.
I’m going to quote a large chunk of the article here because it is so stunning, and because it has hitherto been so grossly overlooked.
A bit of background: on August 16th, 2001, Moussaoui was arrested in Minneapolis on immigration charges after an official at the Pan Am International flight school told the FBI he feared Moussaoui was planning a hijacking. Over the next few weeks, Minneapolis FBI agents tried to convince Washington to give them a warrant to search Moussaoui. Washington refused. The local agents’ frustration reached such a pitch that they even went to CIA for help, for which they were upbraided by Washington.
Here is why they couldn’t get the warrant:
“The main point of the dispute [between the Minneapolis FBI branch and Washington] was the value of information gathered about Moussaoui, a French national who had entered the United States in early 2001, and whether there was enough evidence to secure a warrant to search his belongings.
“The FBI received information from French intelligence, for example, including interviews with a family that blamed Moussaoui for inciting their son to fight and die with Muslim rebels in Chechnya, sources said.
“In her letter to Mueller, Rowley wrote that the French reports ‘confirmed his affiliations with radical fundamentalist Islamic groups and activities connected to Osama bin Laden.’ She argued that agents had enough evidence in hand ‘within days’ of Moussaoui’s arrest to provide probable cause for a warrant.
“Headquarters officials, however, insist that the French information detailed no direct ties between Moussaoui and any designated terrorist group, a requirement for obtaining a FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] warrant. The Chechen rebels, while believed to have links with bin Laden, were not considered a terrorist group by the State Department.
“‘The angle we consistently had with the French was the Chechnya angle,’ one U.S. official said. ‘There were no specifics about affiliations with al Qaeda, no reports of being in the [al Qaeda] camps in Afghanistan — nothing.’
“In the end, lawyers at FBI headquarters declined to approve the Minneapolis request for such a warrant. It wasn’t until Sept. 11, hours after the suicide attacks, that the FBI sought and obtained a search warrant, although it came from a criminal court rather than the intelligence panel.
“The evidence they allegedly found included a computer disk containing information related to crop-dusting; the phone numbers in Germany of Ramzi Binalshibh, an al Qaeda fugitive who allegedly helped finance the plot; and flight deck videos from an Ohio store where two of the hijackers, Mohammed Atta and Nawaf Alhazmi, had purchased the same equipment.
“...One of the most tantalizing pieces of information was correspondence identifying Moussaoui as a ‘marketing consultant’ for a Malaysian computer technology firm, Infocus Tech. The letters were signed by ‘Yazid Sufaat, Managing Director,’ and stipulated that Moussaoui was to receive a $2,500-per-month allowance.
“That connection, it now appears, could have proved critical. Sufaat, a Malaysian microbiologist, provided his Kuala Lumpur condominium for a ‘terrorism summit’ attended by Alhazmi and another Sept. 11 hijacker, Khalid Almihdhar, in January 2000, according to CIA and FBI officials [who monitored the summit]. The gathering was also attended by a man later identified as one of the leading suspects in the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen.
“...Knowledge of Sufaat’s letter to Moussaoui would have disclosed a possible al Qaeda connection, but it remained unexamined while the Minneapolis agents tried and failed to obtain a search warrant.”
In other words, had America agreed to list the Chechen separatists as “terrorists,” as the Russians have been urging them to do since 1999, the warrant would have been immediately obtained and evidence of the plot possibly uncovered. This was America’s best chance of foiling the September 11th attacks. However, official U.S. policy has refused to recognize the Chechen separatists as terrorists linked to Al Qaeda—despite the incredible wealth of evidence proving the connection. The Moussaoui evidence shows that America’s policy of refusing to view the Chechen separatists as “terrorists” was directly responsible for the failure to pursue Moussaoui. This was not mere human error or bureaucratic inefficiency. It was the result of a carefully-designed policy worked out by the Bush Administration.
Zacarias Moussaoui: Saved By Chechens Bush’s core foreign policy team—National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz—started boasting months before they took office about how tough on Russia they planned to get. And “tough on Russia” meant “soft on Chechnya”—after all, if the Chechens hated the Russians, they couldn’t be all bad.
One of the Bush administration’s first foreign-policy moves was deciding to meet representatives of the Chechen separatists at the highest level ever. In February of 2001, a ranking State Department official, John Beyrle, met with Ilyas Akhmadov, the foreign minister of the separatist Chechen leadership. (By comparison, the Clinton Administration had only allowed a Russian desk officer to meet with Akhmadov.)
The Russians were furious. Sergei Markov, one of the Kremlin’s leading talking tools, published an article, “Russia Can See Beyond Bush’s Cold-War Logic” on the Kremlin’s web site, strana.ru, in which he demanded that any US official who met with the Chechen rebels should be deemed persona non grata in Russia. Reading Markov’s article now, it’s clear the Russians were trying to make sense of this unprovoked humiliation:
“The team of Cold-War veterans and inexperienced diplomats who shape the diplomacy of the new U.S. administration is pushing Russia toward actions in keeping with Cold-War logic. But Russia cannot benefit from such logic: Russia seeks not confrontation, but integration with the West. Therefore, Russia should not accept Cold-War logic.”
It is a strange reversal of roles: America as the erratic belligerent, Russia as the sober negotiator, trying to calm the madman down.
The Chechen connection to International Islamic militants is nothing new. Chechens were one of the most visible ethnic groups among the foreign fighters in Afghanistan. Yet while Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Uighur separatists, the IMU and other groups fighting alongside Al Qaeda were labeled terrorists by the State Department and media, the Chechens were spared, simply because the Bush administration had a soft spot for any group which was anti-Russian.
and so forth,,,
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