Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October/November 1997, Pages 6, 53-54

Special Report

The Troubling Reticence Over U.S. "Terrorism" Cases

"There is certainly a legitimate public curiosity to the question of was there a great force behind this, and if there was, who was it?"—Federal prosecutor Henry J. DePippo, who tried the World Trade Center bombing case in 1993 and 1994, quoted in The New York Times, Aug. 4, 1997

Such peculiar things are happening in two entirely separate "Middle East terrorism" cases in New York that it's time for all involved to stop, take a deep breath, and ask—what's really going on here?

First the facts in the latest case: On the night of July 30 a newly arrived Egyptian, Abdul Rahman Mossabah, flagged down a New York transit police car and said that two young Palestinians with whom he was sharing a Brooklyn house were making bombs. After telling his story to metropolitan police, he went back to the house and went to sleep. Then, early the next morning, after evacuating nearby buildings, the police raided the house, shooting each of the Palestinians several times after one allegedly reached for a bomb, and the other allegedly reached for a policeman's gun.

Miraculously both Palestinians survived, but have been held incommunicado ever since while police exhibited one device apparently ready for use as a suicide bomb, and the makings of three other bombs. Police also said they found a rambling unsigned message that seemed to be threatening a series of bomb attacks. It also demanded the release of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric serving a life sentence in New York for a plot to blow up New York city landmarks; Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the Hamas leader jailed by Israel; Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who went on trial in New York Aug. 4 on charges he masterminded the World Trade Center bombing, and other militants.

"I think we were close to a disaster," said James Kallstrom, head of the FBI New York office. Later, however, as things got progressively murkier, another investigator said, "The more we look at these two guys, the less they look like suicide bombers." Then Kallstrom made another statement that "it is totally wrong to say that these individuals are connected to Hamas."

"They're not exactly living the religious life, looking to die for Allah," a federal investigator told staff writer John Kifner of The New York Times . In fact, Kifner wrote in the Aug. 5 issue, "The picture that is emerging of the two suspects, Ghazi Ibrahim Abu Maizar and Lafi Khalil, suggests a pair of drifters and street hustlers, living hand-to-mouth on short-term jobs and hanging out in neighborhood stores."

Abu Maizar had arrived in the U.S. from Canada, where he had been convicted of assault and for using a stolen credit card. Canadian authorities said he had used 10 different aliases there. U.S. authorities caught him three times trying to cross the border into Washington state. The third time, in January of this year, he claimed political asylum and was allowed to stay for a hearing. He said the Israelis had charged him with being a member of Hamas and twice had tried to turn him into an informer against his fellow Palestinians.

On June 23, Abu Maizer withdrew his request for asylum and was ordered to leave the U.S. by Aug. 23. Meanwhile he purportedly supported himself in New York and in North Carolina with grocery store jobs, none of which lasted for long, while he and Khalil looked for Americans wives who would make them eligible for the green cards granted to permanent residents.

In his home town of Hebron, members of his middle-class family laughed at his asylum request, saying he was apolitical and "exaggerates a lot." They said he had been arrested once and held between 5 and 10 days with other rock-throwers during the intifada—little more than a rite of passage for Hebron teenagers. A former Hebron neighbor described him as a petty thief who had broken into cars to steal stereos.

Twenty-two-year-old Lafi Khalil, who apparently met Abu Maizar for the first time in the U.S., had lived much of his life with an uncle in the village of Al Joul, near Ramallah, until his middle-class Palestinian parents returned from Kuwait as a result of the Gulf war and took up residence in a village near the Jordanian port of Aqaba. Khalil apparently entered the U.S. legally on a student visa, supported himself in New York doing minor building repair jobs, and joined Abu Maizer to work briefly in a North Carolina grocery. Managers of the Brooklyn stores where he and Abu Maizar spent their abundant spare time said that although Khalil complained constantly about lack of money, when he got some he spent it in two local strip-tease clubs.

From Al Joul, ABC reporter Bill Blakemore, one of the very few U.S. television correspondents who speaks some Arabic, reported Aug. 3 that "everybody we spoke with said the same thing—Lafi Khalil had been an informant for the Israeli secret police." This was also announced by Hamas in Jordan. Nor did Israeli officials deny it.

No one knew much about the Egyptian, who was said to speak several languages and be looking for work as a language teacher. One grocer speculated that the Egyptian turned in the two Palestinians "for the money," since rewards under the State Department's "Heroes" program for turning in terrorists go as high as $2 million, and $4 million if an aircraft bombing is prevented.

Then, one day after the arrests in Brooklyn, there arrived at the State Department a copy of the rambling letter found in the Brooklyn house, apparently mailed by one or both of the Palestinians a day or two before the "plot" was discovered. By the time the letter was received, both were in the hospital.

Clearly, none of these three were suicide bombers. But what were they, and was there a real bomb plot at all? Or was this to be a "foiled plot"? Were the two Palestinians to be the fall guys, or the whistle-blowers who would collect a handsome reward? And did the Egyptian play a role in the planned drama or did he blow the whistle to collect the money before the would-be heros could play that role themselves? Perhaps the most important question was, whose idea was it in the first place?

In the Arab world opinions are mixed about bombings and deadly violence. Polls taken by the Center for Palestine Reseach in Nablus showed Palestinian support in the West Bank and Gaza for violence there dropped to 20 percent after the series of four suicide bombings in February and March of 1996, which are credited by many with making possible the election victory of Binyamin Netanyahu as prime minister of Israel the following May. Since Netanyahu's subsequent freezing of the land-for-peace process, however, Palestinian support for violence in Israel/Palestine had climbed to 40 percent by this July.

But if support for violence against Israelis as a political weapon has doubled in a matter of months, there is no perceptible support among Muslims or Christian Arab American residents of North America for any kind of terrorism here. Citizens and green-card holders alike seem unanimous in believing that, in addition to the immorality of victimizing innocent people, any such action in North America would be extremely harmful to the Palestinians and to other Arab and Muslim causes.

Of the four men convicted of participating in the World Trade Center bombing, in which six Americans were killed, all were newly arrived from the Middle East, and seemingly without community ties except in mosques where exiled Egyptian Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman preached. There they allegedly were recruited by professional terrorist Ramzi Ahmad Yousef, whose trial, along with an alleged accomplice, Eyad Ismoil, on charges of masterminding that event opened Aug. 4 in New York and is expected to continue for three or four months

The narrow manner in which the U.S. government directed the first trial, which resulted in the conviction of the Muslims Yousef left behind to be captured, excited comment among Americans who have nothing to do with the Middle East. "It's as if the government basically used a zoom lens to focus on a very small part of the conspiracy," recalls Robert Precht, a defense lawer in that trial.

Since he left the U.S. on Feb. 26, 1993, the day of the World Trade Center explosion, Yousef has been convicted of planting a bomb aboard an aircraft flying from the Philippines to Japan which killed one Japanese passenger. Allegedly it was a trial run for an elaborate plot to blow up in a 48-hour period 12 U.S. commercial aircraft in flight in the Far East.

Yet, with all the questions that raises as to who financed his several years of extensive travel as an "international terrorist," the U.S. seems to be pursuing the same narrow strategy in prosecuting Yousef as it used with his followers. "Prosecutors are expected to focus not on the larger mysteries surrounding the defendant but on proving his guilt in the Trade Center blast," wrote reporter Benjamin Weiser in the Aug. 4 New York Times.

In fact, this hardly seems necessary. Yousef discussed the case with the FBI agents bringing him back from Pakistan where he was arrested in 1995, even drawing a picture of how the truck full of explosives was to be parked in the garage under the World Trade Center. Later, as he was being flown over Manhattan in a helicopter, FBI official William Gavin pointed at the Trade Center towers and said, "Look down there. They're still standing."

"They wouldn't be if I had had enough money and explosives," Yousef allegedly responded.

Deliberately avoiding the question of who was behind the explosion, as pointed out by former federal prosecutor DePippo, quoted at the beginning of this article, suggests that the current prosecutors fear they could stumble across something that could take the case out of their hands.

What this could be is suggested by the "who benefits" test with which all crime investigations must begin. The only obvious beneficiaries of the recent counterfeit plot in New York, and the earlier deadly serious actions by Ramzi Ahmad Yusuf in New York and in the Far East, in which a total of seven people were killed, are the enemies of all Muslims and Arabs.

But would the only party that fits the description resort to such tactics? One need only recall the infamous "Lavon Affair" in which an Israeli army intelligence agency sent an Israeli operative to Egypt to recruit young Egyptian Jews for training in Israel. On July 14, 1954, the same young men and women were caught firebombing theaters and railroad stations to make trouble between Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser and his Muslim Brotherhood opponents, create countrywide disturbances, and thereby disrupt negotiations between Egypt and Britain over a peaceful British withdrawal from the Suez Canal.

On the two weekends before they were caught, the same Israeli agents had firebombed U.S. Information Service libraries in Cairo and Alexandria, and the U.S. Consulate General in Alexandria, successfully disrupting warming U.S. relations with President Nasser, and helping to set off the chain of events that led to the 1956 tripartite Israeli-French-British invasion of Egypt.

Victor Ostrovsky, a former case worker for Mossad, Israel's external intelligence agency, points out that you don't even have to look beyond New York for Israeli precedents. When Israeli Prime Minster Golda Meir was scheduled to visit the United Nations in the late 1960s, he said, "a series of unexploded bombs were found in New York at an Israeli bank and other Israeli targets. None were really planned to explode. That is an option that investigators of the present incident should be thinking about.

"In fact there are elements in the Israeli Mossad who would be more than happy to do this sort of thing, and worse, and who have done it in Lebanon, to place the blame on contending factions and keep them fighting with each other," Ostrovsky continued. "They've also done it in Saudi Arabia. Nothing is beyond them. The assassins who killed Chilean opposition leader Letelier with a car bomb in Washington, DC were trained in Israel."

Is it just wishful thinking for Arabs to wonder if the particularly destructive actions of certain other "Arab terrorists" might also have been inspired by Israeli intelligence? Dr. George Habash, the Christian leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, seemed to go out of his way to inflame American public opinion against the Palestinian cause in the 1960s and 1970s. Since he was largely financed by the Soviet Union, many Arabs ascribed his deadly and self-defeating anti-Americanism to "the cost of doing business."

The actions of the infamous Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal seemed even more inexplicable. He assassinated moderate officials of Yasser Arafat's PLO and of various Arab governments in addition to bloody attacks on civilians in the Rome and Vienna airports. He was said to have been working at different times for the governments of Iraq, Syria and Libya, and his extensive cash assets, supposedly from blackmailing governments, companies and individuals all over the Middle East, were stashed in banks and businesses in Poland and other Soviet bloc countries. But who consistently benefited, and where is Abu Nidal now?

Ostrovsky's insight on this is that "usually Arabs who were carrying out Israeli plans had no idea where the plans really originated. Arabs carrying out operations against Syria often thought they were working for British intelligence. Arabs carrying out operations in some other countries thought they were working for the Syrians."

Ramzi Ahmad Yousef's operations all seemed directed against the United States, and this was long after the demise of the Cold War. Was he just a free-lance terrorist able to carry out remarkably intricate and extended plots on a shoestring budget? If so, was he working for Iraq or Libya in an effort to discredit Iran or "Islamists" by leaving simple-minded Muslims to get caught? Or was he working for a renegade Saudi "Islamist," Osama bin Laden, whose main target seems to be his own government? Three years before he arrived in the U.S. Yousef allegedly was living in a house paid for by Bin Laden in Pakistan.

Ostrovsky thinks it's unlikely that the complex actions by Yousef, or the crude bombs found in the possession of Abu Maizer and Khalil, were really designed to kill people. He even believes the truck bomb parked under the twin towers was supposed to be found before it exploded.

Significantly, Ostrovsky cited confirmed reports that in July the Israeli military was rehearsing a re-occupation of the seven West Bank towns it had turned over to the Palestinians in compliance with the Oslo accords even before the marketplace explosions in West Jerusalem and the discovery of unexploded bombs in New York.

Referring to the New York event, Ostrovsky said with a laugh, "The surprise is the stupidity in doing it so close to something that's happened in Israel, so that people could see the connection. The point of all these Israeli operations is to convince Americans that they're in the same boat as Israel. Fortunately, however, they're not."