[CTRL] Fwd: [cia-drugs] 911 Porter Goss Mohammed Atta Saeed Sheikh

What is the true identity of the "al Qaeda finance committee head" in the Commission report?

The best that can be said about the 911 Report is that it is not a complete whitewash. But, among many other shortcomings, it fails to shed light on the bizarre tale of an alleged al-Qaeda paymaster and his controlling authority within Pakistani Inter Services Intelligence (ISI). This person was also at various times a student in the UK, a hijacker of an Indian airliner in a 1999 incident, and convicted (perhaps falsely) as a butcher of journalist Daniel Pearle. He is set to be hung in Pakistan for that last crime sometime soon.

I will go so far as to speculate that in the 911 Report there is a conscious effort to obscure the true identity of this person, who is really Saeed Sheikh a.k.a. Omar Sheikh. The report discusses very briefly a figure it calls "Sheikh Saeed al Masri, Egyptian; head of al Qaeda finance committee" [from appendix, page 436]. I speculate that this most likely is an alias for Omar Sheikh, who is actually Pakistani, not Egyptian.

Alternately, if Sheikh Saeed al Masri is in fact a separate person, he was a very close associate of Omar Sheikh. In this latter case, the 911 Report is seriously remiss for failing to discuss the significant role of Omar Sheikh.

I do not care at all for 911 conspiracy websites. Nor do I necessarily like the overall tone of the in-many-ways interesting book The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 by David Ray Griffin. I mean, a missile, not an airliner hit the Pentagon? The twin towers, controlled demolition? Please. (However, I'm forced to agree that the collapse of WTC Building 7 in the late afternoon of September 11 is not especially well-explained in the official account.)

But there is one invaluable, very-high-quality website that seeks to trace the truth about 911 and other mysteries of our time while avoiding journey into nutcase territory: the Center for Cooperative Research. This site is so good because it tries to tell a story by linking thousands of mainstream news stories into coherent timelines and biographical sketches. Using this method, the stories are told by officials, in their own words, as reported by professional journalists.

For now I want to focus on just the highly legitimate questions concerning the story of Saeed Sheikh a.k.a. Omar Sheikh.

911 Report on hijacker financing
In the 911 Report, there is a brief section on the financing of the 911 plot. The text in this section [page 169—173] says that:

The 9/11 plotters eventually spent somewhere between $400,000 and $500,000 to plan and conduct their attack. Consistent with the importance of the project, al Qaeda funded the plotters. KSM [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (a.k.a. Mukhtar); Pakistani; mastermind of 9/11 attacks; currently in U.S. custody] provided his operatives with nearly all the money they needed to travel to the United States, train, and live.... The origin of the funds remains unknown, although we have a general idea of how al Qaeda financed itself during the period leading up to 9/11.

Okay, there's a "general idea", and the report runs around the idea that with, "Al Qaeda appears to have relied on a core group of financial facilitators who raised money from a variety of donors and other fund-raisers, primarily in the Gulf countries and particularly in Saudi Arabia", but it ends up concluding that none of this is solid and neither is it important to know:

To date, the U.S. government has not been able to determine the origin of the money used for the 9/11 attacks. Ultimately the question is of little practical significance. Al Qaeda had many avenues of funding. If a particular funding source had dried up, al Qaeda could have easily tapped a different source or diverted funds from another project to fund an operation that cost $400,000–$500,000 over nearly two years.

Furthermore, the character they call Sheikh Saeed al Masri, "head of al Qaeda finance committee", does not even appear in this section on hijacker financing. There are only oblique references later on. For example, in Chapter 7, "The Attack Looms", we learn that:

There is evidence that Mullah Omar initially opposed a major al Qaeda operation directly against the United States in 2001. Furthermore, by July, with word spreading of a coming attack, a schism emerged among the senior leadership of al Qaeda. Several senior members reportedly agreed with Mullah Omar. Those who reportedly sided with Bin Ladin included Atef, Sulayman Abu Ghayth, and KSM. But those said to have opposed him were weighty figures in the organization—including Abu Hafs the Mauritanian, Sheikh Saeed al Masri, and Sayf al Adl.

A note for this text that suggests it is derived from several different interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but the note sheds no additional light on the role of "Sheikh Saeed al Masri". The next paragraph reiterates that this person "opposed the operation", but there are no more references to him in the entire report.

The biography of Saeed Sheikh a.k.a. Omar Sheikh
This page, "Sept. 11's Smoking Gun: The Many Faces of Saeed Sheikh", written by Paul Thompson at Cooperative Research, consolidates the trail of news stories left behind by the bizarre journeys of Saeed Sheikh. To fully appreciate my points in this post, readers must plow through this entire exposition. Here is a key paragraph:

Not only did Mahmood [General Mahmood Ahmad, chief of the Pakistani ISI as of September 2001] suddenly become persona non grata, but so did Saeed Sheikh, now that he was implicated in Mahmood's story. He was again mentioned as the 9/11 paymaster the day before the Mahmood story broke [CNN, 10/8/01], and then suddenly, all mention of him ceased (with one exception [CNN, 10/28/01]). Since then, the FBI has put forth a variety of alternates for the identity of the person in the 9/11 paymaster role. The story is too complicated to greatly detail here, but the FBI and media have variously filled Saeed Sheikh's shoes with an Egyptian named Shaykh Saiid [Sydney Morning Herald, 9/28/01, New York Times, 10/15/01, Los Angeles Times, 10/20/01], a Saudi named Sa'd Al-Sharif, said to be bin Laden's brother-in-law [Newsweek, 11/11/01, AP, 12/18/01], a Kenyan named Sheik Sayyid el Masry [CNN, 10/16/01, Trial Transcript, 2/20/01, Trial Transcript, 2/21/01], a Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi or al-Hisawi (suggesting no alias was used) [MSNBC, 12/11/01, Wall Street Journal, 6/17/02], a Shaikh Saiid al-Sharif [AP, 6/4/02], an Ali Abdul Aziz Ali (for some of the money transfers) [Congressional Intelligence Committee, 9/26/02], and so on. Most recently, the FBI said the most well-known candidate, Shaikh Saiid al-Sharif, doesn't actually exist, but is probably a composite of Mustafa Ahmed Al-Hisawi, Shaikh Saiid al-Masri, and Saad al-Sharif. [AP, 12/26/02, link broken] Newsweek, in describing yet another name variation, Mustafa Ahmad Adin Al-Husawi, says the person “remains almost a total mystery,” and no one is sure of his name or even if he is one person. [Newsweek, 9/4/02] (Note that Saeed appears to be a master of disguise, as can be seen by the bewildering number of names he is referred to in the media: Sheik Syed, Ahmad Umar Sheikh, Umar Sheikh, Sheik Omar Saeed, Omar Saiid Sheikh, Sheikh Omar, etc... He opened bank accounts using many of his name variations, or even completely unrelated names. [The News, 2/13/02])

While the FBI and media have been putting forth a series of names sounding remarkably similar to Saeed Sheikh or the aliases he used, they have been ignoring or forgetting solid evidence that links Saeed Sheikh to the funding of 9/11. To do so would mean confronting Saeed's ISI ties, and the possibility that he was acting on orders from Mahmood, or even President Musharraf.

According to an October 2001 report in the Times of India, the "story" in which Mahmood Ahmad (Mahmud Ahmed in the 911 report) is "implicated", leading to his dismissal from the ISI in October 2001, was the financing of 911 hijackers, specifically a $100,000 payment wired by Saeed Sheikh from Dubai to one of hijacker Mohamed Atta's two bank accounts in Florida.

A juicy additional detail is that on the morning of September 11, 2001, Mahmood Ahmad was in Washington, DC for a series of meetings with American officials. When the planes hit the buildings, Mahmood was having a leisurely breakfast with Republican Congressman Porter Goss (a possible nominee to replace George Tenet as Director of Central Intelligence) and Democratic Senator Bob Graham.

Whatever the truth of the identity of the 911 Report's Sheikh Saeed al Masri, it's clear that the 911 Commission desired the public not know all the details of how al Qaeda supported and financed the hijackers. Apparently, the long-standing entanglements between Washington and the Pakistani ISI— reaching far back into the US-Soviet proxy war in 1980s Afghanistan, through development of Pakistan's nuclear program to more recent US approval of Pakistan as a Terror War partner—are just too embarrassing for too many officials.

Please see also this July 22 Guardian commentary: The Pakistan connection: There is evidence of foreign intelligence backing for the 9/11 hijackers. Why is the US Government so keen to cover it up? (by Labor MP Michael Meacher)

Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at:

http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ <A HREF="">ctrl</A> ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]

To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]

[CTRL] Fwd: [cia-drugs] 911 Porter Goss Mohammed Atta Saeed Sheikh

Monday, July 26, 2004

A 911 unanswered question

Reply via email to