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| Europe |
| Bin Laden 'boasted of U.S. deaths' |
| 2002-11-27 |
| Osama bin Laden boasted of planning to kill thousands of people in the United States about half a year before the September 11 attacks, a German court has heard. Jordanian-born Shadi Abdalla, 25, told the court at the trial of Mounir El Motassadeq, a Moroccan accused of supporting the al Qaeda cell which allegedly led the attacks, that he briefly served as bin Laden's bodyguard while attending an al Qaeda training camp in Kandahar, Afghanistan. "He (bin Laden) said there would be thousands of deaths," Abdalla said. "His words were very strong — we must strike at America and destroy it." Motassadeq, 28, whose Hamburg trial is the first of a September 11 suspect, is charged with being an accessory to 3,116 murders in New York and Washington and with belonging to the Hamburg Islamist cell which allegedly led the September 11 attacks. Speaking in Arabic through a German interpreter, Abdalla said he learned to shoot pistols and assault rifles at the Afghan training camp and served the suspected terrorist mastermind as a bodyguard for two weeks while he was there. "All the people (in the camp) knew that bin Laden said that there would be something done against America, but what he had in mind we did not know," Abdalla said. "Within the radical Islamic camps in Afghanistan, America was clearly seen as the enemy. All people who were there said that the aggressors against Islamic countries should be killed. Everyone there agreed on this." The witness also said a suspected key member of the September 11 plot, Ramzi Bin Al-Shaibah, was in bin Laden's inner circle and in frequent contact with the al Qaeda leader. "He had a special position in the camp. He was very close to bin Laden and spoke very often with him and gave lessons in the mosque," Abdalla said of the man captured in Pakistan in September and handed over to the United States. Abdalla, a Palestinian born in Jordan who moved to Germany in 1997 and was granted asylum, testified Motassadeq was also at the Afghanistan camp and was present for a speech in which bin Laden preached jihad, or holy war. Abdalla said he often heard bin Laden talking about attacking the United States, though not specifically about the September 11 plot or the three suicide hijackers who lived undetected in Hamburg. El Motassadeq, who is married to a Russian Islamic convert, arrived in Germany in 1993 to study. He began his course at Hamburg's technical university's electrical engineering programme two years later. He has acknowledged he went to an al Qaeda camp to learn to shoot in mid-2000 and knew many of the alleged suicide hijackers as well as Bin Al-Shaibah, but denies being involved in the 9/11 attacks and says he never met bin Laden. Perhaps it's just that my mind boggles more easily than most, but I find it astounding that at this point in the war on terror there are so many goobers who say we should be doing nothing, or maybe surrendering, or I don't know what. We have an "antiwar" movement when we're involved in a conflict imposed by self-righteous zealots with whom there is neither negotiation nor coexistence. I could maybe understand if we had thoroughly whipped them, and the Kumbaya set was demanding we show mercy, even though it would be mercy to the merciless — but now? I'm afraid we're still in the early stages of the fight. Beyond belief. Utterly beyond belief. If the Berkeley City Council bunch thinks this is bad, just wait a few years. Before al-Qaeda is beaten we're going to have to become a lot more vicious than we are. The Islamist world is crawling with easy marks like these two, demanding jihad because manipulators like Binny and Zawahiri and the clerics behind them tell them to. As the actual belief system behind them becomes clearer it's amazing how akin it is to the evil that our fathers and grandfathers fought in the Second World War. That war took six years to fight and it cost millions dead. This one isn't going to be any easier. You heard it here first. |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |
| #1 It's the "judgement" issue. Our multicultural liberal society has embraced moral equivilancy and group opportunism over judgement. Saddam and Bin Ladin may be "very bad" but we cannot/must not judge...we can only rationalize and atone. Conversely everything GW Bush does is "worse than bad", because he had the teremity to judge Islamism as evil. He committed the unpardonable sin. The fact that his approach to terrorism may be correct is rendered irrelevant. |
| Posted by: John 2002-11-28 07:33:25 |