History on Khaled Al-Masri

Khaled Al-Masri claims that he was seized in Macedonia, flown to a secret jail in Afghanistan and tortured. Now he is suing, wants an apology from the United States and of course money. I did an extensive article on him earlier this month, Khaled Al-Masri, a Democrat's Dream but a reader has forwarded some very interesting facts to me about al-Masri's past. I would like to share some of this history with you, then you can decide for yourself if he is an innocent victim or a terrorist, as the United States believes.

World Politics Watch has an excellent article by John Rosenthal, which you can go read here. I will give you some highlights below, all emphasis is mine. If you don't read all of this, please read the final paragraph.

"Munich to US: 'Don't Send Your CIA Thugs out into Europe's Streets'". Thus ran the triumphant headline on the Spiegel Online's English-language site a day after it became know that the Munich Public Prosecutor's Office had issued arrest warrants for 13 suspected CIA employees presumed to have participated in the abduction of German citizen Khaled Al-Masri in early 2004. Just one day later, however, the headline had acquired a certain unintended irony as reports emerged that Masri himself had beaten up a social worker in his hometown of Neu-Ulm, leaving the man hospitalized for three days. The assault occurred on Monday, Jan. 29. According to a Feb. 2 report in the Südwest Presse newspaper, citing the local Neu-Ulm prosecutor's office: "Masri is supposed to have pulled the man by the hair and thrown him against a wall. Then he threw a table at him, punched him in the face and stomped on him."

The victim of the assault is the project manager of a worker retraining program in which Masri, who has long been unemployed, was ordered to take part by the local employment agency.

Mr. Rosenthal continues by informing readers that al-Masri was in other fights, one a few years earlier at a welfare office. Al-Masri cleared a desk, pushed the employee against the wall and threw a chair at him. Welfare???

Masri's situation of chronic unemployment is, incidentally, a detail that has received little attention in the English-language media or has even been spun into yet another consequence of his "trauma." Masri was, however, unemployed already before he went missing in Macedonia in late 2003, early 2004: a fact that has led some in Germany -- though apparently not the Munich Public Prosecutor's Office -- to question the veracity of his story. According to his well-known account, Masri, following a quarrel with his wife, is supposed, on the spur of the moment, to have decided to spend New Years in the strife-ridden Balkan country. Just how an unemployed person -- and one with a wife and four children no less -- was able to afford acting on such a whim is not obvious. Adding to the mystery, Masri is reported to have been carrying several thousand euros in cash when he was picked up by Macedonian authorities at the Serbian-Macedonian border. (For further anomalies in Masri's account of his trip to Macedonia, see my earlier WPW report "The CIA Rendition Controversy: Is Khaled Al-Masri Lying?".) [snip]

... Masri had been "known as an adherent of a fundamentalist line in Islam and a proponent of military jihad" since "at the latest October 2003." October 2003 was three months before Masri was seized by the Macedonian border police and allegedly turned over to American agents.

The Stern article reported that Masri had been under "intensive" police surveillance at least since 2002. The surveillance, moreover, resumed upon his return to Germany in mid-2004. Thus, the Financial Times Deutschland cites the BKA-memorandum to the effect that Masri "maintains numerous contacts to persons considered dangerous [Gefährdern] and accused suspects [Beschuldigten] in the domain of Islamist terrorism." Among these "persons considered dangerous and accused suspects," the BKA undoubtedly had in mind Reda Seyam: a self-avowed friend of Masri and suspected al-Qaida operative who has been connected both to the 2002 Bali bombings and to atrocities committed by foreign Mujahideen during the Bosnian Civil War in the early 1990s. (For extensive details on Seyam, see my compendium of publicly-available evidence linking Masri to extremist milieus here.) Note that that Hamburg Public Prosecutor's announcement tacitly confirms the accuracy of the Financial Times Deutschland and Stern reports.

The final paragraph of Mr. Rosenthal's article says it all:

In light of the content of the leaked BKA memorandum, the question obviously arises: Is Khaled Al-Masri the same man as the Khaled Al-Masri named in the 9/11 Commission Report, after all? Yet another piece of apparently leaked BKA data suggests that the answer is "yes." An Oct. 28, 2006, report in the Spiegel -- which, however, the Spiegel did not translate for its English-language site -- cites the testimony of a German police informant who already on Sept. 26, 2001, described Masri as a "follower of Bin Laden." According to the Spiegel, the informant's report is contained in the BKA files on the 9/11 plot. The informant, moreover, is supposed to have suggested that Masri had foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks, quoting him as having said before 9/11 that one would "be hearing something soon" and that one "must inflict as much pain on the Americans as they would inflict on people of the Islamic faith." The Khaled Al-Masri named in the 9/11 Commission Report is supposed to have put Bin Al-Shibh and Al-Shehhi in contact with Bin Laden lieutenant Mamdouh Mahmud Salim. Salim would in turn organize the trips of Bin Al-Shibh, Al-Shehhi, and their co-conspirators Ziad Jarrah and Mohammed Atta, to an al-Qaida training camp in Afghanistan.

Khaled Al-Masri has the nerve to want an apology from the United States. I think not.

UPDATE: I would like to direct you to The American Israeli Patriot's article, "The FBI's New Most Wanted" where Jay Tuch reports on two terrorists that are walking free. Why? That's my question.

The FBI has added two new Arabs to their "Most Wanted List". In a press release yesterday, the FBI announced a $5 million dollar reward for information on the whereabouts of Mohammed Ali Hamadei and Ramadan Abdullah Mohammad Shallah.

Hamadei is wanted for hijacking TWA Flight 847 overseas in 1985. Hamadei and his accomplices tied passengers up and beat them…then summarily executed U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem and dumped his body on the tarmac. An alleged member of the terrorist organization Hezbollah, Hamadei is believed to be living in Lebanon.

Shallah is a founding member and leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or PIJ, a terrorist organization headquartered in Damascus, Syria. He is wanted for a series of bombings, murders, extortions, and racketeering crimes. (go read it all here)

Other reading:
In UK Channel 4 documentary- Dispatches: Undercover Mosque, A Deeper Look

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Biga's Rants, Abbas is done

Comments

[Night Rider]

Hi Debbie,

Yes Khaled Al-Masri is most definitely a terrorist and democrats best friend.

Liberals who needs them.