sm
COLUMN
SEVENTY-SEVEN, OCTOBER 15,
2002
(Copyright © 2002 The Blacklisted Journalist)
MORE EVIDENCE OF HOW OUR
GOVERNMENT FUCKED UP
TALIBAN MINISTER TRIED TO WARN U.S. OF
IMPENDING ATTACK
Subject: FW: 911
Date: Mon, 9 Sep 2002 21:47:13 -0700
From: "venire" <venire@znet.com>
To: info@blacklistedjournalist.com
Revealed: The Taliban
minister, the US envoy and the warning of September 11 that was ignored
By Kate Clark in Kabul
Weeks before the terrorist
attacks on 11 September, the United States and the United Nations ignored
warnings from a secret Taliban emissary that Osama bin Laden was planning a huge
attack on American soil.
The warnings were delivered
by an aide of Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil, the Taliban Foreign Minister at the time,
who was known to be deeply unhappy with the foreign militants in Afghanistan,
including Arabs.
Mr. Muttawakil, now in
American custody, believed the Taliban's protection of Mr.. bin Laden and the
other al-Qa'ida militants would lead to nothing less than the destruction of
Afghanistan by the US military. He told his aide: "The guests are going to
destroy the guesthouse."
The minister then ordered
him to alert the US and the UN about what was going to happen. But in a massive
failure of intelligence, the message was disregarded because of what sources
describe as "warning fatigue". At the same time, the FBI and the CIA
failed to take seriously warnings that Islamic fundamentalist students had
enrolled in flight schools across the US.
Mr. Muttawakil's aide, who
has stayed on in Kabul and who has to remain anonymous for his security,
described in detail to The Independent how he alerted first the Americans
and then the United Nations of the coming calamity of 11 September.
The minister learnt in July
last year that Mr. bin Laden was planning a "huge attack" on targets
inside America, the aide said. The attacks were imminent and would be so deadly
the United States would react with destructive rage.
Mr. bin Laden had been in
Afghanistan since May 1996, bringing his three wives, 13 children and Arab
fighters. Over time he became a close ally of the obscurantist Taliban leader
Mullah Mohammed Omar.
Mr. Muttawakil learnt of
the coming attacks on America not from other members of the Taliban leadership,
but from the leader of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Tahir Yildash. The
organisation was one of the fundamentalist groups that had found refuge on
Afghan soil, lending fighters for the Taliban's war on the Northern Alliance and
benefiting from good relations with al-Qa'ida in its fight against the Uzbek
government.
According to the emissary,
Mr. Muttawakil emerged from a one-to-one meeting with Mr. Yildash looking
shocked and troubled. Until then, the Foreign Minister, who had disapproved of
the destruction of the Buddhist statues in Bamian earlier in the year, had no
inkling from others in the Taliban leadership of what Mr. bin Laden was
planning.
"At first Muttawakil
wouldn't say why he was so upset," said the aide. "Then it all came
out. Yildash had revealed that Osama bin Laden was going to launch an attack on
the United States. It would take place on American soil and it was imminent.
Yildash said Osama hoped to kill thousands of Americans."
At the time, 19 members of
al-Qa'ida were in situ in the US waiting to launch what would be the deadliest
foreign attack on the American mainland.
The emissary went first to
the Americans, travelling across the border to meet the consul general, David
Katz, in the Pakistani border town of Peshawar, in the third week of July 2001.
They met in a safehouse belonging to an old mujahedin leader who has confirmed
to The Independent that the meeting took place.
Another US official was
also present---possibly from the intelligence services. Mr. Katz, who now works
at the American embassy in Eritrea, declined to talk about the meeting. But
other US sources said the warning was not passed on.
A diplomatic source said:
"We were hearing a lot of that kind of stuff. When people keep saying the
sky's going to fall in and it doesn't, a kind of warning fatigue sets in. I
actually thought it was all an attempt to rattle us in an attempt to please
their funders in the Gulf, to try to get more donations for the cause."
The Afghan aide did not
reveal that the warning was from Mr. Muttawakil, a factor that might have led
the Americans to downgrade it. "As I recall, I thought he was speaking from
his own personal perspective," one source said. "It was interesting
that he was from the Foreign Affairs Ministry, but he gave no indication this
was a message he was carrying."
Interviewed by The
Independent in Kabul, the Afghan emissary said: "I told Mr. Katz they
should launch a new Desert Storm---like the campaign to drive Iraq out of
Kuwait---but this time they should call it Mountain Storm and they should drive
the foreigners out of Afghanistan. They also had to stop the Pakistanis
supporting the Taliban."
The Taliban emissary said
Mr. Katz replied that neither action was possible. Nor did Mr. Katz pass the
warning on to the State Department, according to senior US diplomatic sources.
When Mr. Muttawakil's
emissary returned to Kabul, the Foreign Minister told him to see UN officials.
He took the warning to the Kabul offices of UNSMA, the political wing of the UN.
These officials heard him out, but again did not report the secret Taliban
warning to UN headquarters. A UN official familiar with the warnings said:
"He appeared to be speaking in total desperation, asking for a Mountain
Storm, he wanted a sort of deus ex machina to solve his country's
problems. But before 9/11, there was just not much hope that Washington would
become that engaged in Afghanistan."
Officials in the State
Department and in UN headquarters in New York said they knew nothing about a
Taliban warning. But they said they would now be looking into the matter.
Mr. Muttawakil is now
unavailable for comment---he handed himself in to the Afghan authorities in the
former Taliban stronghold of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan last February. He
is reported to be in American custody there, one of the few senior members of
the Taliban regime the US has managed to arrest.
As America steadily broke the Taliban's military machine last autumn, there were no Taliban defections. Apart from Mr. Mutawakil's one vain attempt to warn the world, the Taliban remained absolutely loyal to their leader's vision. ##
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