Another Ali

One might think that understanding a terror group like al Qaeda would require some historical background.  Yet most seemed satisfied with the abbreviated picture provided by the 9/11 Commission Report, never wondering much about how the two WTC attacks tied together.  After all, there was that August 2001 PDB thing that Bush ignored.

But the history remains, waiting to be uncovered.  For instance, there was that whole thing with Ali Mohammad, an Egyptian double crosser, a story few have ever heard.  And Emad Salem, the Egyptian mole planted in the Brooklyn cell by the FBI but pulled before the group set off a bomb in the WTC on February 26, 1993.  Weird, wild, stuff, to the curious at least.  Not so much for the media, but perhaps they were distracted by the Waco standoff that began only days after the first WTC attack.

But the passage of time is producing more history.   About a year ago it was revealed that the FBI's Los Angeles office might have had a mole in contact with bin Laden way back in the early 90s:

On Wednesday, though, U.S. law enforcement sources were looking into a report in the The Washington Times and then elsewhere that the FBI had actively placed the source in direct contact with bin Laden and hid that fact from both the 9/11 Commission and congressional investigators. In fact, testimony in the lawsuit indicates the source had already met with bin Laden by the time an FBI agent recruited him.

In January 1993, a month before the first World Trade Center bombing, FBI agent Bassem Youssef began recruiting two sources from Los Angeles with strong ties to Omar Abdel Rahman, the so-called “Blind Sheikh” who masterminded that first attack on New York City, Youssef testified nearly four years ago in his discrimination case against the FBI. Within two years, one of the sources was handing over “highly sensitive information on the entire network in the U.S. as well as abroad,” Youssef told a federal jury in Washington on Sept. 15, 2010.

None of this was in the commission report because the FBI deemed it irrelevant. Today, another revelation emerged:

An American citizen who underwent al Qaeda training only to later quit the extremist group revealed he was asked to carry out a mid-air assassination against Hosni Mubarak back in 1995. Ihab Mohammad Ali, testifying against alleged al Qaeda leader Khaled al-Fawwaz, says he was asked by Osama bin Laden to use his private plane to ram a plane carrying the Egyptian president.

'It took me by surprise,' said 52-year old Ali while testifying in New York federal court. 'I responded, "Well, wouldn't I be killing myself?"'

Weird.  So there was an unknown mole named Youseff and a terrorist named Yousef, and now an unknown mole named Mohammad Ali and a triple agent named Ali Mohammad.  Scant few Google stories on Ihab Mohammad Ali, odd considering his aviation and terrorist background:

Ali, who had also instructed members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, a group that was later absorbed into al Qaeda, on reading flight maps and interpreting air traffic control radio transmissions. The group claimed responsibility for various bombings and attacks throughout the 1990s while it was fighting the Mubarak regime.

That would be the same EIJ who sent some leaders to Baghdad for a meeting before the US invaded in 2003.  The same EIJ who sent anthrax scare letters to Canadian authorities before 9/11 and before the US anthrax letter attacks.

So with all the talk since 9/11 of planes being used as weapons here's a pilot named Mohammad Ali, an EIJ terrorist who hobnobbed with bin Laden and taught jihadists about aviation and interpreting ATC lingo (which could come in handy in a 9/11 type attack) and the public has never been told until now.

It's a big story, after all, a plot to crash his aircraft into Hosni Mubarek's jet in 1995, performing a suicide attack at altitude (gotta love Ali's alleged response). Sounds kind of far-fetched, but then again so did Jack Cashill and James Sanders' scenario in their book "First Strike" about the demise of TWA 800 back in 1996.  If Ali is correct, the terrorists were actually discussing the Cashill/Sanders theory a year before 800.  Not fit to print, though.

At any rate, if this slow-walking history from the 90s seems strange it's really not.  Perhaps one day the true path to 9/11 will become clear but one thing seems clear already--especially with certain political figures from the 90s still vying for ultimate power--it's going to remain slow for awhile.