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Decoding the threat ... here's why the war on terrorism may have just taken a big turn
ELF - Here's an interesting bit from the middle:Khan's cooperation with investigators, plus his extensive record of communications, led to yet another break. Ahmed the Tanzanian's real name is Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, and investigators say he was the man who purchased the truck that was used in the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, back in 1998. Twelve days after Khan's arrest, on July 25, Ghailani was seized in the Pakistani city of Gurjat, and investigators took possession of a laptop computer that contained on its hard drive maps and messages detailing surveillance information about several of the five sites in New York, Newark, and Washington that federal officials rushed to protect. The information, investigators say, all dated back to before the September 11 attacks. But the real bonanza was the information investigators could now cross-reference from Khan's and Ghailani's computers, and from cellphones evidently taken from the two men. Comparing these data against electronically intercepted information by the Pentagon's supersecret Echelon computer yielded an even bigger bonanza. Khan's arrest led to six phone numbers for locations in the United States, investigators said, declining to specify the locations. Many other numbers obtained from the two men had already been collected in Echelon's enormous database, and investigators are working now to re-examine several cryptic and coded conversations in light of the new information to identify new potential threats. The Echelon data, one intelligence official says, are so good, "it's as good as being there." Big fish. Sharing that kind of intelligence in real time with America's partners in the war on terrorism is also a relatively new development, and it's paying some handsome dividends. On August 3, British authorities arrested perhaps the most important al Qaeda member since Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. The Brits, evidently, had had Abu Issa al-Hindi under surveillance when the CIA, working with the information from Ghailani's computer, forwarded it to its British counterpart. Hindi, the officials said, had played a critical role in the gathering of surveillance information on the five financial sites in the United States, and may have authored some or all of the documents found on the seized computer. Today, there is no sign that the hemorrhaging of al Qaeda is about to end. Worth reading the whole article Posted by: Spot 2004-08-10 |
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