Torture this ******* NOWWW!!!

[BCS:BraveCaringSoul]

Extreme times call for extreme measures. We must do whatever it takes to "make" this Al Qaeda fruck talk.

As Lincoln understood, the great irony of democracy is that, from time to time, in order to preserve a free society history demands that our leaders have the will to do "extra constitutional acts" . Acts which in normal times would not, and should not, be tolerated.

WE must know everything of consequence that Binalshibh knows ASAP-- thousands of innocent lives may depend upon it. If a God, who is perfect and all knowing watches over us, may he have mercy on his soul because I, trapped in imperfection and darkness, can not afford to show him any.

"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one." The Wrath of Khan

From the Washington Post:

Suspected Planner of 9/11 Attacks Captured in Pakistan After Gunfight

Two Other Al Qaeda Members Killed, Several More Arrested

By Susan Schmidt and Dan Eggen

Washington Post Staff Writers

Saturday, September 14, 2002; Page A01

Ramzi Binalshibh, who allegedly helped plan and coordinate the Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, has been captured and is in U.S. custody after surviving a fierce firefight in Karachi with Pakistani police on the anniversary of the terror strikes, intelligence and law enforcement sources said yesterday.

The arrest marks the end of a yearlong manhunt for a suspect believed to be one of the few living conspirators in the Sept. 11 plot. It signifies an important victory in the difficult campaign to apprehend key operatives in Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network.

Even as Americans commemorated the anniversary of the attacks, Binalshibh was arrested by Pakistani police on Wednesday with as many as 10 other suspects, after a three-hour gun-and-grenade battle in which two gunmen were killed. He is being transferred to a U.S. air base in Afghanistan, sources said.

Details of the arrest were unclear last night, but one intelligence source said that CIA paramilitary units "were nearby" when the raid was carried out.

Charged in Germany with more than 3,000 counts of murder for his complicity in the attacks, Binalshibh had hoped to be the 20th hijacker in the plot but was repeatedly rebuffed in attempts to secure a U.S. visa, officials have said. His name has surfaced in investigations of several other terrorist attacks, including the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000 and a bombing earlier this year of a synagogue in Tunisia.

The Yemeni national roomed with hijacking ringleader Mohamed Atta in Hamburg, and provided crucial financial and logistical support to Atta and other members of the cell who carried out the operation, according to intelligence officials. The U.S. indictment against another alleged Sept. 11 conspirator, Zacarias Moussaoui, names Binalshibh as an "unindicted co-conspirator," and accused him of wiring money to Moussaoui and at least one of the hijackers, Marwan Al-Shehhi.

In a previously audiotaped interview with the Qatar-based al-Jazeera television station broadcast Thursday, Binalshibh boasted of his role in organizing the Sept. 11 plot and called the attacks "real acts of heroism" that succeeded in part because "the enemy is stupid." Al-Jazeera said it conducted the interview with Binalshibh and Khalid Sheik Mohammed, believed to be a top coordinator of the Sept. 11 attacks, in a secret location in Karachi.

"He is a very big fish to catch," said Vincent Cannistraro, a former CIA counterterrorism official. "He certainly was the coordinator with Khalid of the 9/11 operation itself, and he might know some of the people who may still be in the United States if we can get him to talk."

Pakistani officials were waiting to get final word from an American who, a Pakistani intelligence official said, suspected that one of the arrested persons resembles Mohammed.

U.S. sources said Mohammed, one of the FBI's "Most Wanted Terrorists," was not captured as part of the Karachi raid. Only one other suspected terrorist known to be in U.S. custody, al Qaeda lieutenant Abu Zubaida, surpasses Binalshibh in importance, several officials and observers said.

In a separate development, a federal official last night said authorities have issued arrest warrants in Buffalo, N.Y., for five men who are believed to have gone through al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. At least some of the men were in custody, the official said.

The men were described as naturalized American citizens, and some or all are of Yemeni descent. They have been living in Lackawanna, a suburb of Buffalo.

A federal official said information from a source who caused officials to raise America's terror alert index to "code orange" -- the second highest -- on the eve of the Sept. 11 anniversary also led to the group of Yemenis in Buffalo.

In Pakistan, several officials said specific information about the al Qaeda hideout in Karachi had come from "American law enforcement officials in Karachi."

"Frankly speaking, we didn't know that he was Ramzi until American officials identified him several hours after his capture," said a Karachi police official involved in the raid. Another added, "It is our sheer good luck that Ramzi was not killed in the encounter."

Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf told CNN in an interview that Pakistani intelligence officials learned that the suspects were living in a residential neighborhood. "The place was raided, and there was a shootout. Two of the al Qaeda members were killed and 10 arrested," he said. "We suffered about seven injuries on our side. It was a good operation. And there is one Egyptian, one Saudi, and eight Yemenis in this. And I'm told maybe there is an important person also involved."

In Wednesday's raid on a low-rise apartment building in Karachi, which began about 9 a.m. local time, two suspects were killed and one police officer was seriously wounded. Suspects hurled grenades and fired assault rifles at police for three hours.

Police seized a satellite phone, a laptop computer, firearms, grenades and other items from the building, according to local press reports.

As Musharraf has heightened efforts to crack down on militants, Pakistani security forces have engaged in more frequent gun battles with suspected terrorist operatives.

Harvey Kushner, a terrorism expert at Long Island University, said the case "shows that there is significant cooperation with intelligence agencies around the world." But he said he would not expect the arrest to affect the second-generation al Qaeda network, which has dispersed to a number of countries. Officials fear lower-level and largely independent operatives are planning attacks on their own.

The terror operatives are "much more spread out now," Kushner said.

In the al-Jazeera interview, Binalshibh and Mohammed said planning for the Sept. 11 attacks began in 1999.

Binalshibh has been identified by some Western intelligence and law enforcement officials as having attended a terrorist meeting in January 2000 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in which both the Cole attack and the Sept. 11 plot are believed to have been discussed. However, disagreement persists among intelligence analysts over whether a surveillance photograph identifies him as attendance.

Binalshibh grew up in the eastern Yemeni province of Hadramaut, considered a hotbed of Islamic radicalism. He first entered Hamburg in 1995 with a phony plea for asylum.

Binalshibh also appeared on a videotape containing "martyrdom messages" that were recovered by U.S. forces at the Afghan home of al Qaeda's slain military leader, Mohammed Atef.

German authorities believe Binalshibh met Atta and other members of the Hamburg cell through the Al Quds mosque in that city. The group was recruited into al Qaeda by a German of Syrian origin, Mohammed Haydar Zammar, and attended terror training camps in Afghanistan, German officials have said.

One member of the group, Moroccan citizen Mounir El Motassedeq, is the only person connected with the attacks in German custody. Arrested in Hamburg two months after the terror strike, he is charged with more than 3,000 counts of being an accessory to murder and membership in a terrorist organization.

According to the Moussaoui indictment, Binalshibh tried four times between May and October 2000 to secure a visa for entry into the United States. U.S. investigators have said that after these attempts failed, Moussaoui was designated as the 20th hijacker, but he was arrested on immigration charges in August 2001 after he raised suspicions at a Minnesota flight school.

Some investigators have theorized that Moussaoui, whose laptop computer contained information about cropdusting, may have been part of a second wave of terror attacks or a back-up plan instead.

Binalshibh fled Germany on Sept. 5, 2001, and was believed to have entered Afghanistan through Pakistan later that month.

In the clandestine interview with an al-Jazeera correspondent, Binalshibh praised the 19 hijackers as Islamic martyrs.

"You're entering a military battle, a nontraditional military battle, against the strongest power on earth and you are confronting them, with their forces and soldiers, with a group of only 19 men," Binalshibh said, according to an English-language transcript of the interview.

He added later, "The plane shook the World Trade Center so violently in an incredible way. We're seeing it live on the air and praying to God to make it happen. We treated those who kill our women and innocents with the same. We kill their women and innocent until they stop."

In the al-Jazeera interview, Binalshibh said Atta called him the morning of the attacks. "He said, 'Two sticks, a dash and a cake with a stick down.' As it turns out, two sticks is the number 11, and a dash is a dash and a cake with a stick down is the number 9. And that was September 11," Binalshibh said.

Special correspondent Kamran Khan in Karachi, and staff writers Walter Pincus and Dana Priest in Washington contributed to this report.

© 2002 The Washington Post Company

[BCS:BraveCaringSoul]

This article on Binalshibh was written exactly two months ago today:

Yemeni Fugitive Was Critical To Unfolding of Sept. 11 Plot

By Peter Finn

Washington Post Foreign Service

Sunday, July 14, 2002; Page A01

TARRAGONA, Spain -- On the morning of July 9, 2001, Mohamed Atta drove a silver Hyundai rental car east out of Madrid toward this Mediterranean beach area, a ribbon of resorts crowded with vacationers. The attacks on New York and the Pentagon were just weeks away and Atta was headed to a secret meeting to complete the planning, according to U.S. officials and a Spanish police investigation of the lead hijacker's movements.

As Atta drove 300 miles across the country, his old roommate in Germany, Ramzi Binalshibh, was boarding a budget flight from Hamburg to Reus, the small airport that serves this region. For Binalshibh, a Yemeni whose repeated failures to get a U.S. visa had ended his ambition to join Atta in death in the United States, the meeting in Tarragona would crown a mission that began for him at a similar summit 18 months earlier in the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur, U.S. law enforcement and Western intelligence officials said.

Investigators said they believe that planning for the Sept. 11 attacks was punctuated at either end of the plot's trajectory by the two critical meetings. Binalshibh, who is believed to be alive, is the only person known to have attended both meetings, making him a key potential source of answers to the enduring questions about the plot, Western intelligence officials said.

The Spanish summit is an important piece of the puzzle, but it too is riddled with gaps, despite nearly a year of work by Spanish investigators working with the FBI. For three days, Atta and Binalshibh vanished into the summer crowd here. Investigators still do not know whom the pair met with in the Tarragona area, where exactly they met or what support they may have received from Muslim radicals in the area to hold the meeting.

"The Spanish trip remains a mystery to us," said a U.S. counterterrorism official, who added that U.S. intelligence officials theorize that at least one senior, trusted al Qaeda courier flew to Spain for a meeting that lasted several days at a local safe house.

As the investigation continues, Binalshibh is now the most wanted figure from the tight circle of operatives believed to have planned and carried out the attacks.

"We want him bad," said one U.S. official, who described the 29-year-old fugitive as playing a critical support role in the methodical planning of the attacks until he fled Germany for Afghanistan on Sept. 5, 2001.

Investigators suspect that among members of a radical cell in Hamburg at the center of the Sept. 11 probe, Binalshibh maintained the most contact with other terrorists in Europe; his phone number, for instance, surfaced during German raids on a group in Duisburg linked to a bombing attack on a synagogue in Tunisia in April, in which 14 German tourists were killed.

Officials suspect Binalshibh also may have played a role in the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, where he grew up in the eastern province of Hadramaut, considered a hotbed of Islamic radicalism.

German authorities have issued an international arrest warrant for Binalshibh. He is also named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the French Moroccan who investigators believe took Binalshibh's place among the hijackers after Binalshibh failed to get a visa. Moussaoui allegedly received $14,000 from Binalshibh shortly after the Spanish meeting.

The importance of Binalshibh's role has been sharpened by the belief that he was at the Malaysia meeting that investigators say was critical to the Sept. 11 plot. The sighting, based on photographs, had been the subject of some debate within the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement communities, U.S. officials said. The meeting was photographed by Malaysian intelligence at the request of the CIA.

"I've seen the photographs and I don't think there's any doubt that it's him," said a Western intelligence official. "Everybody that has seen it in the intelligence and law enforcement community says, without question, it's him."

The official noted, however, "We have shown [the photos] to his supposed friends, or people that know him, and they've said they don't think it's him."

Rethinking Attacks

In 1999, before the Malaysian summit, al Qaeda was focused on a series of planned bombing attacks in Los Angeles and Jordan, timed for the turning of the millennium. The plots all failed, and in January 2000, al Qaeda members met in Kuala Lumpur to assess their failure and plan new attacks -- both the strike against the USS Cole and the attacks on New York and the Pentagon, U.S. intelligence officials said.

Among those attending the summit were Tawfiq bin Atash, a senior aide to Osama bin Laden, as well as two Sept. 11 hijackers, Saudi nationals Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi. The presence of Binalshibh is the earliest clear evidence of a link between the German-based hijackers and the larger group of Saudis.

"When Binalshibh went to the meeting in Malaysia in 2000, that's when they got the plans to go ahead with this thing," said the Western intelligence official.

The unassuming Binalshibh had come a long way since he stepped off a ship in Hamburg in 1995 and asked for political asylum, claiming to be a refugee from Sudan who had been jailed following a student demonstration in Khartoum. His story wasn't believed, but by the time he was ordered deported, in December 1997, he had obtained a visa, in circumstances that remain unclear.

He quickly slipped into the radical Islamic milieu in Hamburg, a world marked by the al-Quds mosque and a nearby bookstore with a backroom where violent tracts and videos on jihad, or holy war, were sold.

Investigators believe that members of the Hamburg cell that would carry out the hijackings were recruited by Mohammed Haydar Zammar, a 41-year-old German citizen of Syrian origin. Binalshibh, slight of build and 5 feet 7 inches tall, was not Zammar's ideal candidate, but he was close to Atta and increasingly committed to jihad, investigators said. Binalshibh was videotaped at the wedding of another Hamburg recruit, Said Bahaji, in October 1999, where he was recorded speaking of the "danger" posed by Jews before reciting a paean to holy war, said German officials, who found the video in raids after the Sept. 11 attacks.

In November 1998, after dropping out of preparatory German classes for a college degree, Binalshibh moved into an apartment with Atta and Bahaji. Zammar became a frequent visitor to their apartment on Marien Street near the university where Atta studied, neighbors said.

"What they did was say, 'We want to be fighters for Allah,' " said a Western intelligence official. "And then Zammar said, 'If you want to do that, here's where you need to go, and here's who you need to see.' "

In early 1999, Atta, Binalshibh and others in the Hamburg group made their way separately to al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan where they each spent about two months undergoing training, Western officials said.

"Once they got to Afghanistan and got trained, they got assessed by the people there as trustworthy," the intelligence official said.

'Only by Luck'

After the meeting in Malaysia, Binalshibh planned to participate directly in the attacks as a pilot. Between May and October 2000, however, he failed four times in Germany and Yemen to obtain a U.S. visa.

"It was only by luck, really, he wasn't given a visa," said one official. "Otherwise, he'd have been on one of those planes that went down."

Binalshibh's presence in Yemen in August and September 2000 has raised suspicions that he may have been involved in the October attack on the USS Cole, a suicide mission that was planned at the Malaysian summit, U.S. officials said.

Shortly after Binalshibh's last visa rejection, the plotters allegedly turned to another possibility for the 20th hijacker -- Moussaoui, who had trained in Afghanistan in 1998, U.S. officials said.

In May and June 2001, the plot was accelerating and the last of the Saudis -- believed to be the "muscle" on the planes -- began to arrive in the United States. With everyone in the country, Atta flew to Spain.

That first night in Madrid, Atta placed two calls to a cell phone in Germany that has proved untraceable to any individual, investigators said.

The next day, Binalshibh was on the move.

The flight from Hamburg landed at 7 p.m. on July 9 and three hours later, Binalshibh, accompanied by another man, pulled up in a car outside the Hotel Monica in the coastal town of Cambrils, a few miles south of the Reus airport. Atta's and Binalshibh's movements in the area were first detailed by the Spanish newspaper El Pais.

No Vacancies

According to Pere Gomez, the hotel manager, the receptionist on duty declined to rent them a room, despite vacancies, because she didn't like the look of Binalshibh; the other man stayed in the car and the receptionist did not get a clear view of him, the hotel manager said. The two drove off to the nearby Hotel Tropicana, which was full but whose receptionist offered to call other hotels to find the pair a room. She located a double room -- back at the Hotel Monica.

The two men returned and this time the receptionist gave them the room, explaining that there had been a cancellation. Binalshibh registered for the two men, Gomez said. They spent the night and checked out the next morning.

The identity of Binalshibh's companion remains unknown to investigators, but his description matches that of Bahaji, a German citizen of Moroccan origin, who is also wanted on an international arrest warrant issued by Germany. But a U.S. official, confirming what the hotel manager said in an interview, noted that investigators had no clear description of Binalshibh's companion, and it could also have been Atta.

Atta had left Madrid in his rental car early that morning and did not check into a hotel in the area until July 13. No traces have been discovered of Atta and Binalshibh in the Tarragona area between July 10 and July 13, officials said.

On July 13, Atta surfaced at a travel agency in Tarragona where he purchased a ticket to Florida for July 19. Over the coming days, he stayed in three different hotels, moving because he couldn't find a booking for consecutive nights during the crowded tourist season.

On the 16th, Binalshibh flew back to Hamburg, investigators said.

With preparations for the attack complete after the Spanish summit and the final cash transfers to Moussaoui complete, Binalshibh fled Germany on Sept. 5, investigators said. Apparently taking a circuitous route through Spain en route to Pakistan, officials believe he disappeared into Taliban-controlled Afghanistan just before Sept. 11.

In December 2001, Binalshibh resurfaced in an al Qaeda video that was seized by U.S. forces from the bombed-out home of Muhammad Atef, the al Qaeda military operations chief.

Wide-eyed and wearing a red kaffiyeh, Binalshibh looked at the camera and promised holy war.

[Sarge]

A good skinning and some alcohol should make him talk