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| Terror Networks |
| Gitmo's 'Professor' linked to terrorism |
| 2007-08-14 |
| After more than five years, the Pentagon revealed why it is holding a Saudi nicknamed "the Professor" at Guantanamo Bay, saying he once lived with a Sept. 11 conspirator and received a stipend from Osama bin Laden. Shaker Aamer's lawyer denies the allegations, made after British Prime Minister Gordon Brown last week requested the release of the Saudi, who has been an unofficial leader among the detainees, and four other former residents of Britain. The Bush administration, which has been urging other nations to accept Guantanamo prisoners amid international pressure to close the military jail, warned that the five detainees — and particularly Aamer — are dangerous men. A senior U.S. official said Aamer shared an apartment in London in the late 1990s with Zacarias Moussaoui, a confessed al-Qaida conspirator and the only person in the United States charged in the attacks, and met with Richard Reid, imprisoned in the U.S. for trying to blow up an American passenger jet with explosives hidden in his shoes. Aamer also trained in the use of explosives and surface-to-air missiles and lived on stipends in Afghanistan paid by bin Laden, the official, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs Sandra Hodgkinson, told The Associated Press. "He has been involved in a lot of significant terrorist plots," Hodgkinson said Wednesday. ... But Hodgkinson said she was disclosing allegations against Aamer and the four other British residents — Jordanian Jamil el-Banna; Libyan-born Omar Deghayes, Ethiopian national Binyam Mohamed and Algerian Abdennour Sameur — to underscore "the risk these individuals pose," though the U.S. had no plans to try any of them. Deghayes, she said, has been associated with a militant group in Libya and has "direct connections" to al-Qaida operatives in Europe; Mohamed trained on use of explosives and proposed to al-Qaida leaders that uranium from hospitals be used in terror attacks. Sameur has attended al-Qaida training courses, while el-Banna is suspected of participating in a terrorist organization in Spain, she said. Stafford Smith, who represents all the men, denied the allegations and said he might pursue defamation charges against Hodgkinson in Britain to "stop this verbal torrent of falsehoods." |
| Posted by:ed |