No evidence blaming bin Laden By Robert Lusetich Los Angeles Correspondent September 24, 2001 http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,2919071%255E2703,00.html THE evidence linking Osama bin Laden to his alleged crimes is, like the man, at once everywhere and nowhere. Beyond George W. Bush's conviction supported outside the US most prominently by British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who said "it's fairly clear where the evidence is tending" hard facts have been hard to come by. Investigators have been pursuing two separate lines: tracing the hijackers back to bin Laden and his al-Qa'ida organisation, and trying to show the money to fund the operation came from that source. About a dozen people have been detained as "material witnesses", but no one has been charged in connection with the September 11 attacks. Many others held by US authorities face nothing more serious than immigration charges. Firm leads may come from Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen whose mother said he was "brainwashed" by fundamentalist Muslims in London in the 1990s. He was arrested in Minnesota on immigration violations before the attacks. He went to a flight-training school, as did some of the hijackers, asking to learn, not about landings and take-offs, but how to steer. Moussaoui was in a detention centre during the attacks. When they were reported on television, he stood up and cheered before going back to his cell. His name appears on a French list of known terrorist associates and he is not co-operating with investigators, who believe he was "a player". No one yet has been able to directly trace the hijackers to bin Laden. Certainly, some have indirect links to him the strongest being Khalid al-Midhar, who was on American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon. Al-Midhar attended a meeting in Malaysia last year of al-Qa'ida's inner sanctum. He reportedly made travel arrangements through a Yemeni organisation with strong links as a "logistical centre" for al-Qa'ida. He was photographed by a foreign intelligence service in Kuala Lumpur with Tawfiq Bin Atash, a man who allegedly served as bin Laden's "personal intermediary" with the terrorists who carried out the suicide bombing in Yemen last year of USS Cole, in which 17 US sailors were killed. Other evidence comes from communications intercepted in the US and Germany after the attacks. German officials say there was a cry of "We did it, we did it". On the money front, investigators have found virtually no link to bin Laden, whose personal wealth they think is hugely overestimated. However, they are giving credence to reports that companies that would have been financially devastated because of the attacks were being short-sold in the days before September 11, indicating prior knowledge. US intelligence insiders are open to the possibility that the hijackers concocted the plan alone. "He is not a leader in a practical sense," a CIA source told London's The Guardian of bin Laden. "He didn't pick up the blue phone and discuss the attack on Flight 93, then pick up the green one and go into targeting the White House. It is quite possible he may not have known about the attacks before they happened." |