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| Al Qaeda used Hotmail to plan attacks |
| 2009-05-02 |
| In the days following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, alleged al Qaeda operations mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed intended to use his free Hotmail account to direct a U.S.-based operative to carry out an attack, according to a guilty plea agreement filed by Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri in federal court. The document shows how al Qaeda, at least in 2001, embraced prosaic technologies like pre-paid calling cards, public phones, computer search engines and simplistic codes to communicate, plan and carry out its operations. Al-Marri also surfed the Internet to research cyanide gas, using software to cover his tracks, according to the document filed Thursday in federal court in Peoria, Ill. He marked the locations of dams, waterways and tunnels in the United States in an almanac. The government claims this reflects intelligence that al Qaeda was planning to use cyanide gas to attack those sites. In a stipulation of facts filed as part of the plea agreement, al-Marri admitted that he trained in al Qaeda camps and stayed in terrorist safe houses in Pakistan between 1998 and 2001. There, he learned how to handle weapons and how to communicate by phone and e-mail using a code. After arriving in the U.S. on Sept. 10, 2001 — a day before al Qaeda's long-plotted terror strikes in New York and Washington — Al-Marri stored phone numbers of al Qaeda associates in a personal electronic device. He used a "10-code" to protect the numbers — subtracting the actual digits in the phone numbers from 10 to arrive at a coded number, according to a person close to the investigation. In a 10-code, eight becomes a two, for example. Other al Qaeda members used the same code, according to the plea agreement. Al-Marri sent e-mails to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's Hotmail account — HOR70hotmail.com — addressed to "Muk" and signed "Abdo." The details of that code were included in an address book found in an al Qaeda safehouse in Pakistan. An attempt by The Associated Press to reach that address did not indicate the account had been closed, but it went unanswered. FBI investigators learned from their (pre-CIA torturing) interviews of Abu Zubaydah in 2002 that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was known to all as “Muktar,” and that he (Mohammed) had been the primary planner of 9/11, reports CBS News producer Phil Hirschkorn. Al-Marri initially tried to use a Yahoo e-mail account to contact Mohammed, but it failed to go through. So he switched to Hotmail as well. When al-Marri arrived in the United States, he created five new e-mail accounts to communicate with Mohammed, using the 10-code to send him his cell phone number in Peoria. From September to November, al-Marri tried and failed to contact members of al Qaeda in Pakistan using prepaid calling cards and public phones, sometimes traveling 160 miles to use a different phone. Also revealed in the plea agreemend is that al-Marri used the jihad nickname “Abdul-Rahman al-Qatari,” and provided al Qaeda with his family contact information in case he was killed or “martyred” during an al Qaeda mission. Al-Marri came to the U.S. with his wife and five children; they now live in Saudi Arabia, as do a number of his siblings, Hirschkorn reports. |
| Posted by:ryuge |
| #1 Interesting post, thanks. Randall Stross http://enhilex.com |
| Posted by: Randall Stross 2009-05-02 23:52 |