In this post I linked to this July 22 Guardian Unlimited report (via Flagrancy of Reason) on the status of Omar Sheikh, the British-born Islamist militant who is awaiting death by hanging in Pakistan for the murder of Daniel Pearl, despite evidence vindicating him:
Significantly, Sheikh is also the man who, on the instructions of General Mahmoud Ahmed, the then head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), wired $100,000 before the 9/11 attacks to Mohammed Atta, the lead hijacker. It is extraordinary that neither Ahmed nor Sheikh have been charged and brought to trial on this count. Why not?
Ahmed, the paymaster for the hijackers, was actually in Washington on 9/11, and had a series of pre-9/11 top-level meetings in the White House, the Pentagon, the national security council, and with George Tenet, then head of the CIA, and Marc Grossman, the under-secretary of state for political affairs. When Ahmed was exposed by the Wall Street Journal as having sent the money to the hijackers, he was forced to “retire” by President Pervez Musharraf. Why hasn’t the US demanded that he be questioned and tried in court?
I noted that Omar Sheik and Mahmoud Ahmed aren’t mentioned in the 9/11 final report.
Former Taliban foreign minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil is another name that doesn’t register even one hit when it’s put into the report’s search engine. He’s the Taliban official that Michael Sheehan, “the State Department’s point man on terrorism”, called and threatened in the middle of the night on Dec. 14, 1999 saying that the Taliban leadership would be held personally responsible if al Qaeda or its affiliated groups attacked U.S. interests. Sheehan was acting on the orders of Bill Clinton and his National Security Council who had been “pushed to the edge” by recent events.
His (Sheehan) unnerving day at the office had begun with news that Khalil Deek, a computer engineer and al-Qaida operative, had been arrested on suspicion of plotting to kill American tourists in the Holy Land. It had ended with news that a mysterious Arabic man had been arrested crossing the border into Washington state with a trunk full of bomb components.
Wakil felt the Clinton administration wasn’t appreciative of the working relationship the U.S. and the Taliban had developed over the years.
In July 2001 Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil tried to warn the Bush administration that a “huge attack” by al Qaeda on targets within the U.S. was imminent and would kill thousands. It’s unclear why he was ignored:
Late July 2001 Complete 911 Timeline
The Taliban Foreign Minister Wakil Ahmed Muttawakil learns that bin Laden is planning a “huge attack” on targets inside America. The attack is imminent, and will kill thousands. He learns this from Tahir Yildash, leader of the rebel Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), which is allied with al-Qaeda at the time. Muttawakil sends an emissary to pass this information on to the US consul general, and another US official, “possibly from the intelligence services,” also attends the meeting. The message is not taken very seriously; one source blames this on “warning fatigue” from too many warnings. Also, supposedly the emissary was from the Foreign Ministry, but didn’t say the message came from Muttawakil himself. The emissary then takes the message to the Kabul offices of UNSMA, the political wing of the UN. They also fail to take the warning seriously. [Independent, 9/7/02, Reuters, 9/7/02] See for more on this topic.
More officials than not respect Wakil’s intelligence and influence.
India wanted the United States to quiz him on the IC 814 hijack while he was in their custody.
Muttawakil played an important and ‘adverse’ role during the hijack leaving the then Foreign Minister Jaswant Singh red-faced by going back on several commitments made during the negotiations with the hijackers.
Wakil, who acted as an interlocutor at Kandahar after the IC 814 plane landed there, was also ‘hostile’ during the negotiations.
He had assured Jaswant Singh, who landed in Kandahar with the three terrorists (Maulana Masood Azhar, Omar Sheikh and Mushtaq Zargar), that the hijackers and the terrorists would be held in Afghan custody until all the Indians left Kandahar.
However, the hijackers were given a jeep in which they victoriously drove away.
The US gov’t agreed in principle to conduct this inquiry. However when the CBI was finally allowed to question Wakil in Afghanistan he clammed up saying he’d already told the FBI everything they wanted to know. On November 1, 2003 the CBI was complaining that the FBI had not been forthcoming in sharing this information with Indian officials and suspected a cover-up. As of April 18, 2004 the CBI was still searching for 7 suspects they believed were somewhere in Pakistan and remained frustrated by a 4-year old investigation that was “tied up in diplomatic sensitivities.” The CBI was also awaiting a decision on whether they could conduct a follow-up interview of Wakil.
And when forty-one Taliban prisoners, including high-ranking officials, managed a tunnel escape from a Kandahar jail an anonymous government official thought Wakil had played a role. According to this source, “Muttawakil was briefly released on September 27 and visited his home in Kandahar and on the following day met Taliban officials in the Tor Kotal area of Kandahar province on behalf of the Americans.” Hamid Karzai and the U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad denied this release ever took place according to this October 11, 2003 CNN report. CNN reported on October 25, 2003 that he’d been officially released from U.S. custody 10 days earlier and was living in Kandahar. Neither article mentions his July 2001 attempt to warn of the imminent attack but the latter reports that he will be eligible to participate in elections this October.
As of February ’04, in response to a “very nice letter” from Wakil, Karzai had still not decided whether to meet with him and accept his proposals.
On May 30 the Ottawa Citizen carried a report sourced from The Times of London with files from the associated press that included this:
Envoys of Hamid Karzai, Afghanistan’s western-backed president, have promised the former ministers posts in the government after September’s elections in return for persuading some of their colleagues to lay down their arms and support his candidacy.
“We want everyone to come back and learn from their mistakes,” explained Arif Noorzai, the minister for frontier and tribal affairs. “Excluding these people has only created problems. The idea is to have a broad-based government in which these forces can participate so they can’t be used by other countries or interests.”
[…]
According to one of Mr. Karzai’s closest advisers, Mr. Muttawakil has provided a list of 60 to 70 names of “good” Taliban and suggested an amnesty for them could split the movement.
If a real 9/11 investigation has been conducted behind closed doors who’s on the oversight committee? Osama?