...from The Guardian:

“Having lain low since 9/11, the individual who compiled the report contacted al-Qaida's leader in Pakistan, who cannot be named but is still at large. The report was transferred to the leader's laptop. The go-between who arranged the meeting was a footsoldier of the new al-Qaida breed called Naeem Noor Khan. Khan had made half a dozen visits to the UK and had risen through the ranks to become a key figure at the hub of the new al-Qaida's global communications network. As an IT consultant to several leading companies in Lahore, he had all the technical qualifications for the job. He downloaded a copy of the report on to his own laptop as well. Khan was arrested in July last year following a three-day stakeout at Lahore airport…”

Subsequently, Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan “flipped” and allowed British and Pakistani intelligence agents to fully observe ongoing al-Qaeda communications.

This continued until someone in the Bush White House ratted him out to the press and this very important anti-terrorist operation was aborted, much to the consternation of the British and Pakistanis who were trying to avert another terror attack.

Then “7/7” happened….

 http://gaelicstarover.blogspot.com/2005/08/treason-terror.html

The crucible

In the global war on terror, Pakistan has been identified as one of the key terrorist heartlands. But in a country where for many Osama bin Laden is a hero and the president a puppet of the US, can the battle be won? Peter Taylor went there to find out

Monday August 8, 2005
The Guardian

It was a sweltering six-hour drive from Islamabad to Kotsharif in the baking heat of the Punjab. This is the family village of the London bomber Shehzad Tanweer, whose ancestors were relocated there in the wake of partition when the British flooded their land to make a dam. His parents subsequently moved to England, where Tanweer was born.

It's a richer village than most, as shown by the brick houses largely built on remittances from relatives who left Pakistan to make a better life in Britain. I found the doors at the home of his uncle and aunt, with whom Tanweer stayed on a visit earlier this year, firmly closed. They weren't receiving visitors and they weren't doing interviews.

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Tanweer, the bomber of Aldgate East station on July 7, has brought unwelcome notoriety to the village. The only person who would talk was the head man, whose relatives are in Scotland. He said that Tanweer had seemed a normal lad, riding round the village on a motorbike and, he'd heard, fond of using the internet. He didn't believe Tanweer was a terrorist and thought that he, like so many others, had been an innocent victim of someone else's bomb. The small crowd that gathered seemed to agree, unable to accept that a young man who took part in mass murder in London was one of their own.

I visited the village's tiny mosque, where prayers had been said on his death, and watched a line of small boys nodding away as they learned the Qur'an by rote. It seemed highly unlikely that Tanweer had been radicalised here. As I left Kotsharif, the mystery of Tanweer's movements and contacts remained. It is now up to Pakistan's formidable intelligence agency, the Inter Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), to solve it.

The ISI is controversial as well as formidable. It was once a patron of the Taliban and a covert supporter of Osama bin Laden - but 9/11 changed all that, as President Musharraf turned policy on its head in the face of America's ultimatum. "It was in our national interest because I knew what would happen now in Afghanistan," he told me. "Our diplomatic association with the Taliban was going to become meaningless, as obviously they were going to be sorted out."

With a metaphorical gun to his head, Musharraf had little choice but to sign up to President Bush's "war on terror". I asked him if those officers who had helped set up and train the Taliban had now been purged. "Yes indeed, since the role is different, and since the officers are all from the military, they have all been changed, each one of them." (Nevertheless, there are suspicions that elements in the military still remain sympathetic, and several soldiers from the army's lower ranks were involved in one of the plots to assassinate the president.) Britain and America recognise that Pakistan's role in countering Islamist militancy is pivotal and are fully aware of the domestic tightrope that Musharraf is walking in appearing to do America's bidding and pursuing his policy of "enlightened moderation", through which he hopes to counter indigenous extremism.

Pakistan is a country of 150 million Muslims, in which Bin Laden is more popular than Bush. That's why Musharraf is scathingly branded "Busharraf" by his enemies. Domestically, their vitriol is most fiercely directed against his unprecedented decision to send 40,000 troops into the lawless tribal area of south Waziristan to hunt down al-Qaida's fugitives, and perhaps even Bin Laden himself. Revealingly, the protesters who picketed the president's visit to Manchester in December shouted that Musharraf was the real terrorist for killing Pakistanis on Pakistan's own soil.

The price for the army itself has been high. In the past year, more than 250 soldiers have been killed and 500 injured. Only a president who is also head of the army, the most powerful institution in Pakistan, could have got away with it. On the other side of the equation, more than 200 militants have been accounted for, many of them Uzbeks, Chechens, Tajiks and Turkmen. Inevitably, as the Manchester protesters noisily reminded Musharraf, innocent Pakistanis have been killed in the controversial Waziristan campaign. The militants had become so entrenched that, according to General Khattack, the commander of the operation, local shopkeepers stocked up on cornflakes, tinned food and beverages because they would not eat the local food. The general also tried to reassure his weary troops that "the enemy are not the jihadis. You are the true holy warriors." The look on their faces, however, suggested that not all were convinced.

Musharraf has become the hammer against al-Qaida - and there's no reason to doubt his sincerity. The results speak for themselves. Many of its most wanted have been arrested in Pakistan's teeming cities, among them Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11; Ramzi Bin al-Shibh, another of 9/11's key planners; and Abu Zubayida, screener of recruits to Bin Laden's training camps. All these arrests were in connection with attacks that had already taken place, but the ISI has also been dramatically proactive in preventing alleged attacks in the pipeline by passing on vital intelligence to its sister agencies in the US and the UK.

Last summer saw one spectacular success, whose origins predated 9/11 and whose consequences stretched well beyond. The attacks on New York and Washington were just one of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's plans. Others were simultaneously in preparation. According to the ISI, in the months leading up to 9/11, he instructed one of his operators, who was in Afghanistan at the time and whose name cannot be mentioned for legal reasons, to case high-profile financial targets in the New York and Washington areas.

At the beginning of 2001, this individual and his associates carried out detailed reconnaissance of financial targets that included the Prudential building in Newark, Citigroup in Manhattan and IMF headquarters in Washington. He stored the report on his laptop. It makes chilling reading. Referring to one target, it says, "This building is almost completely made to resemble a glass house. When shattered, each piece of glass becomes a potential flying piece of cutthroat shrapnel!" Apparently the attacks were placed on hold because at the time al-Qaida did not have the necessary explosive techniques.

Having lain low since 9/11, the individual who compiled the report contacted al-Qaida's leader in Pakistan, who cannot be named but is still at large. The report was transferred to the leader's laptop. The go-between who arranged the meeting was a footsoldier of the new al-Qaida breed called Naeem Noor Khan. Khan had made half a dozen visits to the UK and had risen through the ranks to become a key figure at the hub of the new al-Qaida's global communications network. As an IT consultant to several leading companies in Lahore, he had all the technical qualifications for the job. He downloaded a copy of the report on to his own laptop as well. Khan was arrested in July last year following a three-day stakeout at Lahore airport.

The Counter Terrorism Centre (CTC) is the repository of all the ISI's accumulated intelligence. It was set up after 9/11 with only seven officers, and now has more than 400 presiding over what the ISI regards as the biggest al-Qaida database in the world. It was in charge of interrogating Khan. I asked the CTC's head how long interrogations lasted. "They can continue for about 18 hours, 20 hours, sometimes 24 hours - sometimes 48 hours." Without sleep? "Yes, without sleep." He denied that any torture was used. The US recce plans were subsequently found on Khan's computer. Initially Khan was "a hard nut to crack" but then he talked, perhaps deciding that his future lay with the ISI rather than al-Qaida.

Khan also gave his interrogators details of an al-Qaida safe house in Gujarat, where, after a 14-hour gun battle, one of the FBI's most wanted fugitives emerged. His name was Khalfan Ghailani and he had a $10m price on his head, having long been sought by the Americans in connection with the bombings of their east African embassies in 1998. When the house was searched, the laptop belonging to al-Qaida's leader in Pakistan was found, which also contained the recce report.

But the ISI hadn't finished with Khan. They also instructed him to send emails from his laptop's address book to his contacts around the world - including the UK. This enabled the ISI to identify critical parts of al-Qaida's network. MI5 was informed and several suspects were detained in the UK. It is alleged that major attacks were prevented (again, legal constraints prevent more detail). I asked the CTC's head if there had been any intelligence at the time of Khan's arrest that pointed to the July 7 attacks. "Definitely they were talking about targeting the infrastructure in the UK, America and elsewhere, which we were able to frustrate and pre-empt. But following the arrests in the UK, there was no signature that there was a plan to target public facilities in the UK." He confirms that none of the July 7 bombers' names figured on the ISI's database.

British intelligence has now provided the ISI with telephone numbers that the London bombers called in Pakistan before they embarked on their suicide mission. The ISI is urgently tracking them down to see if there's a pattern and if "persons of interest" were called. The priority now is to uncover the network before another cell - assuming there is one - can strike again.

The bombers' possible connections with one or more of Pakistan's radical madrasas, the religious schools that Musharraf is committed to reforming, are now also coming under the spotlight. Pakistan has approximately 12,000 of these seats of Islamic learning, some of which are alleged to be the radicalising engine of Pakistan's religious extremists; they were, after all, the alma maters of the Taliban's leaders in Afghanistan. The CTC's head is adamant that to date no such connection has been found and British sources confirm it, despite reports in the press. It's unlikely, too, as the bombers were too old and were barely in Pakistan long enough to have been radicalised in a madrasa, although meetings with others in madrasas and radical mosques are not being ruled out.

But the investigation of the hinterland of the London bombers and the intelligence coups that flowed from the arrest of Naeem Noor Khan represent only one front in the war against Islamist extremists. Pakistan's counter-terrorist officers recognise, as do Britain's, that the war also has to be fought on the political front. I asked the CTC's head if his interrogators discussed motivation with their prisoners. "They always refer to Palestine. They always talk about the exploitation of Muslims in different parts of the world." And if these problems were addressed? "It would definitely make a visible and immediate difference," he said. Musharraf agrees, but believes Pakistan's own war on terror will be long term. "You can't solve these problems overnight," he told me. "I think were we to resolve the Palestinian and Kashmir disputes, we would really have achieved a lot." He recognises, too, that the failure to resolve these problems only increases the militant opposition at home. "My nightmare for Pakistan is exactly this, that the extremists are gaining strength."

 http://www.guardian.co.uk/pakistan/Story/0,2763,1544710,00.html