UQ Wire: Tunnel Bomb Ringleader's 9/11 Knowledge

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Revelations in the case of the Lebanese man accused of being the ringleader of a plot to bomb the PATH Tunnels in New York City to deluge lower Manhattan and Wall Street in a torrent of water have begun to shed light on other terrorism investigations in the U.S., perhaps even on the very nature of the terrorist threat.

As many as a dozen relatives of Assem Hammoud have already been accused or convicted in the U.S. of terrorist-related crime, The MadCowMorningNews has learned, members of what has been called the Hezbollah-Hammoud Syndicate in Detroit. Their number includes a self-admitted member of Hezbollah in Sarasota questioned by law enforcement authorities in late September of 2001 about his suspected foreknowledge of the 9.11 attack.

Dubbed the “Playboy Plotter” in New York’s tabloid press, which printed pictures showing him cradling adult beverages amidst a bevy of blonde girls, Hammoud's wide-open lifestyle does not at all fit the portrait of the Islamic fundamentalist terror threat put forth by the FBI, as well as in books about Mohamed Atta like “Perfect Soldiers,” which the mainstream media has touted as the “last word” on the terrorist hijackers.

Instead, the emerging portrait of the “jet-set jihadist” confirms the portrayal of Mohamed Atta in “Welcome to TERRORLAND” as a free-spending hard-drinking cocaine user and frequenter of strip clubs… exactly the portrait the FBI has gone to great lengths to dispel.

The FBI also appears to be deliberately ignoring Hammoud’s frequent jaunts around the world, which echo those of Mohamed Atta, in favor of an explanation indicating that Hammoud and his crew appear to be yet-another free-lance terrorist cell which coalesced and made plans in isolation, joining other groups that have been broken up in Miami, London, Toronto, Melbourne and Sydney.

As evidence of Hammoud’s international connections begins to mount, it is becoming increasingly clear that nothing could be further from the truth.

Hammoud-ed up

Authorities have already confirmed that one so-far unnamed relative of Assam Hammoud is a member of Al Qaeda being feverishly hunted by intelligence agencies which suspect he helped mastermind the PATH Tunnel plot.

(Ridiculed as fantastic by some, the plot’s chances of succeeding by blowing up the slurry wall rimming the WTC site which holds back the Hudson River were actually quite good, according to counterterrorism officials interviewed in NEWSWEEK. )

Other Assem Hammoud relatives reportedly include nine members of the Lebanese Hammoud clan living in Dearborn Michigan accused or convicted in a global smuggling scheme in support of Hezbollah involving bootlegged cigarettes, phony Viagra and counterfeit tax stamps.

Members of the $20-million per year smuggling ring, which eventually stretched through Lebanon, China, Brazil and Paraguay, included Makki and Mohamad Hammoud, Fadi Mohamad-Musbah Hammoud, Majid Mohamad Hammoud; Jihad Hammoud, Imad Mohamad-Musbah Hammoud, and Ali Ahmad Hammoud.

More than love of criminal riches held the group together; their shared Lebanese heritage, blood relations and allegiance to Hezbollah bound them as well, federal authorities stated in their indictment.

Initially the FBI denied that Hammoud was ever in the U.S. They now admit he was in this country at least twice, but that neither trip "had anything to do with this plot.”

The Hammoud who knew beforehand about the 9.11 attack

But Assem Hammoud's most intriguing relative in the U.S. is the Dearborn clan member who moved to Sarasota Florida, where he was quite a busy boy...

Wissam Hammoud owned a cell phone store in Sarasota which supplied mobile phones to Mohamed Atta... bragged of helping Hezbollah buy assault weapons and night-vision goggles (the group needed them so they “ could kill Jews at night”)... was convicted in February in a Federal Court in Tampa of soliciting the murder and beheading of a Federal Agent...and suspected of having foreknowledge of the 9.11 attack.

“In September 2001, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement interviewed Hammoud because someone had anonymously called saying Hammoud had made a comment that the Oklahoma City bombing was small compared with what was coming,” reported the Tampa Tribune on Jan 6 2004, in a story headlined “Man Bragged Of Ties To Terror, Records Say.”

Given his criminal history, and the threats and warnings made in Sarasota on the night before the 9.11 attack against the U.S. in general and George W. Bush in particular (reported only in the local media and in a chapter in Welcome to TERRORLAND), we see no reason to doubt that Wissam Hammoud knew whereof he spoke.

The first casualty of war is the truth

The little-known fact is that at 6 a.m. on the morning of September 11th four Arab men posing as journalists attempted to gain access to President George W. Bush at the Colony Beach Resort on Longboat Key in Sarasota, where he had spent the night, for the purpose of ending his life.

The evidence is in two separate local news reports which lead to only one conclusion: terrorists were looking to kill George W. Bush.

Secret Service agents guarding the President in Sarasota received a dramatic predawn warning of an imminent threat to the President. The plot was very likely coordinated by terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta himself, at that moment preparing to board a commuter flight from Portland, Maine to Boston, but who had been seen three days earlier in Longboat Key by numerous credible witnesses.

“The warning of imminent danger was delivered in the middle of the night to Secret Service agents in Sarasota guarding the President,” reported Monica Yadov of ABC’s Sarasota affiliate, “and it came exactly four hours and thirty-eight minutes before Mohamed Atta flew an airliner into the World Trade Center.”

"He was honest. He was local. He was a fireman. He talked."

The second account was in the Longboat Observer, a community newspaper which literally covers the waterfront in the upscale resort where President Bush spent the night before the 9.11 attack. It contained an eyewitness account of the assassination attempt which Monica Yadov on ABC reported the Secret Service had been warned about.

“At about 6 a.m. September 11, Longboat Key Fire Marshall Carroll Mooneyhan was at the front desk of the Colony Beach & Tennis Resort as Bush prepared for his morning jog," reported the paper in a story on Sept. 21. "From that vantage point, Mooneyhan overheard a strange exchange between a Colony receptionist and security guard.”

Mooneyhan was among a group milling in the lobby waiting to accompany Bush on his morning run... “A van occupied by men of Middle Eastern descent had pulled up to the Colony stating they had a ‘poolside’ interview with the president,” Mooneyhan told the Longboat Observer.

The men in the van identified themselves as a television news crew with an appointment with the President, he stated, claiming they had a ‘poolside’ interview scheduled with Bush after his morning run. They even asked for a Secret Service agent by name.

FBI: "How very strange."

Secret Service agents at the guard station told the men to contact the President’s public relations office in Washington D.C. to schedule an interview. They turned the four Arab men away, but they let them go.

When reporter Shay Sullivan of the Longboat Observer interviewed him about what he’d seen, Mooneyhan, endearingly, didn’t know enough to dummy up...

He was local. He was honest. He was a fireman. He talked.

“In light of the attacks, Mooneyhan wonders if what he witnessed is related to the events of September 11,” reported the paper.

So did the FBI. Sort of. The FBI’s blasé reaction: “That’s very strange,” an unnamed agent with the Sarasota field office of the FBI said, when informed what happened. Sullivan wrote, “He said he would direct agents to look into the matter.”

Savvy reporter Sullivan knew nothing about Yadov’s corroborating account of a dramatic predawn warning. Still, he immediately recognized that Mooneyhan had witnessed an assassination attempt, because the ploy used in the attempt to gain access to Bush had been successful two days earlier...

On September 9th, two Arab men pretending to be journalists arrived to conduct an interview with charismatic Northern Alliance leader Shah Massoud, the Taliban and bin Laden’s biggest foe. One of the two ‘journalists’ detonated a bomb hidden inside their television camera, killing both their intended target and themselves.

The media silence about these events during the pre-dawn hours before the 9.11 attack clearly illustrates both how seriously U.S. officials took the attempt, and how far they have been willing to go to keep it secret.

Since both Assem Hammoud and Wissam Hammoud boasted of belonging to Hezbollah, the obvious question is:

Did Hezbollah play any role in the events of that morning?

Real Americans won't be silenced

We learned of the Sarasota Hammoud’s connection to the alleged Lebanese mastermind of the PATH Tunnel plot from Bill Warner, a dogged private investigator who has been tracking the criminal activities in Sarasota and Tampa of a number of individuals with connections to terror networks since the 9.11 attack.

“Wissam Hammoud first crossed my radar when he began visiting a used car dealer suspected of shipping vehicles to the Middle East which later were used as car bombs in Baghdad,” he told us.

Information turned up by Warner’s investigation prompted the FBI to action on more than one occasion, most recently in the arrest and subsequent deportation—news of which was unaccountably suppressed—of four Moroccan nationals suspected of being part of a large auto theft ring sending cars and cash to the Middle East.

“The auto theft rings are centered here, between Sarasota and Tampa,” Warner said. . “They’ve been shipping cars, both legally and illegally, to Dubai and Jeddah in the Middle East. It’s a terrorist cash cow.”

Terrorism expert Steve Emerson, testifying before a Congressional committee investigating terrorist financing, confirmed Warner’s assertions. He stated several large auto theft rings in the U.S. have supplied considerable revenues into the coffers of Hezbollah and other terrorist organizations.

Paging Sami Al-Arian, pick up your cell phone please

Wissam Taysir Hammoud’s extraordinary criminal curriculum vitae began with an even-earlier incident with terror overtones.

In 1999 Hammoud and two pals, Mohamed Saad and Saad Saad, were stopped while attempting to board a flight in Tampa. Mohamed Saad owned a market which was raided in 2003 as part of a nationwide stolen baby formula scam. The owner of the property, Sami Al-Arian, was convicted of terrorism-related charges in Tampa last year.

The three men were heading to Detroit. In their luggage was an assault weapon and more than eleven pounds of ammunition, as well as what newspapers delicately called “other gun-related equipment.”

Even before 9/11, bringing a personal arsenal fit for paramilitary bank robbers in Los Angeles onboard a commercial flight was considered something of a faux pas.

Yet… nothing happened.

“It was not clear if the men faced any charges stemming from that incident,” reported the Sarasota Herald Tribune in a puzzled tone.

Wait till you run out of limbs to cut off... then behead him."

Wissam Hammoud’s next criminal foray occurred just three months before the 9/11 attack, when he sold a machine gun and short barrel shotgun to an undercover Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) agent, after he boasted of being an international arms dealer who shipped machine guns to Hezbollah to the agent.

Out of Katherine Harris’ backyard, Wissam Hammoud had been selling machine guns to Hezbollah, even as squadrons of terrorists trained in what would become, in 2004, Ms. Harris’ very own Congressional District.

Wissam Hammoud seemed to be leading a charmed life... his sentence for the machine gun mishap was one year… Of home detention.

Hammoud now felt emboldened enough by his seeming immunity— as who wouldn’t?—to go shopping for a hit man to have the men he saw as responsible for his continuing legal entanglements— a federal informant and an agent with the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives—murdered.

Perhaps he felt his draconian sentence was motivated by “racial profiling.”

It wasn’t just talk… When Hammoud made his alleged solicitation to commit murder, he already had a firearm, a silencer, and a particularly grisly plan.

According to the federal complaint, Hammoud told the hit man he wanted the informant tied to a tree, ordering him to then ‘slowly cut pieces of his (the informants) body off."

When he ran out of limbs to cut off, the hit man was told, the informant was to be beheaded. And this is where federal authorities finally drew the line.

Welcome to TERRORLAND

When people think of Central Florida, they think vacations & beaches, sunshine & fun, Tomorrowland & Universal Tours. But nestled in with the more traditional Florida attractions described as being “fun for the whole family” was an ominous new theme park which had risen unbidden from the murky swamp…

Some wag—it might have been us—called it “ TERRORLAND.”

The big question is why—- after 9.11—-this dark carnival should still be right in our midst, open for business?

After being stung in an argument with his one-time American girlfriend about which of their cultures was the most barbaric, Mohamed Atta boasted, “There are many rich people who fund what we do.”

“He said there was someone in Florida—some rich Arab—who had a lot of money,” Amada Keller recalled. “He asked me, ‘Are you aware that when we come over here, your people pay to have us set up businesses?’”

“Eventually, he told me, his people were going to try to take over this country,” Keller continued. “He said: ‘I’ve been in this country many times before. I can come in and go as I please.”

It's a small world after all

Like Mohamed Atta, who spent seven years in Hamburg in a program which most complete in two, Assem Hammoud spent seven years at Concordia University in Montreal.

And just as Mohamed Atta’s father lied that he had heard from his son on September 12th, the family of Lebanese PATH Tunnel bomb suspect Assem Hammoud produced photographs showing him cavorting with pretty women and drinking alcohol, as if to prove his innocence.

Hammoud's family apparently was not aware that he had received small-arms training at Ain al-Hilweh, a Palestinian refugee camp near Sidon.

His mother, Nabila Qotob, said Hammoud drinks alcohol, had girlfriends, traveled widely and showed no similarities to Islamic militants. To prove her son was no jihadi, she showed very un-Islamic pictures of Hammoud with three smiling women - none of them wearing veils - on his arm during an undated stay in Canada, and photos of Hammoud lounging shirtless on a speeding motorboat in Germany.

She described her son as "someone who loves life ... drinks alcohol ... and has several girlfriends," arguing that he was anything but a religious fanatic. Hammoud's mother told the media that her son "drinks alcohol, had girlfriends and showed no similarities to Islamic militants";

So had the family of Ziad Jarrah, the Lebanese hijacker-pilot of the United Airlines flight which crashed in Pennsylvania. They too sought to prove their son’s innocence by saying he was just a fun-loving young man with a Turkish girlfriend.

Like Scarface, but in Arabic

Private investigator Warner sees the terrorist network as being motivated by factors having little to do with Islamic fundamentalist zeal, an assessment that fits well with what is known about Assem Hammoud.

“They’re criminals,” he stated flatly. “Gangsters. There’s a lot of money involved.”

The criminal nature of the terrorist conspiracy and the worldwide dog-fight they have engaged in with U.S. forces is reminiscent of the gangs in the U.S. during Prohibition that murdered their rivals until their eventual merger into what is today known as “organized crime.”

The son of a wealthy Sunni Muslim family from Beirut, Hammoud taught economics and management at a private college, is fluent in Arabic, English, French and German, had many girlfriends, drank alcohol, and, according to a delicate quote in the Beirut newspaper Al-Safir, "pursued a very complex social lifestyle."

Assem Hammoud’s life in both Canada and Lebanon, where he taught at a private University, was filled with "a lot of booze, a lot of parties, a lot of sex." He was “a party animal.”

Some of his students even thought he was a drug addict.

Does this sound like an “Islamic fundamentalist?” Or is it, rather, a description of a lieutenant in an Islamic drug cartel?

But no... All this, investigators said, was part of a systematic effort to mislead those around him, according to FBI Assistant Director Mark Mershon.

This is the same thing the FBI said about “party animal” Mohamed Atta, who spent several months living with a pink-haired stripper in Venice.

But why would Assem Hammoud need to “pretend” to be living a gangsta lifestyle while living in Lebanon?

The answer would appear to lie in what no one in power in America wishes to acknowledge: this is, at least in part, a drug war, with the world’s first Islamic drug cartel.

“The first casualty of war is the truth,” goes a famous quote.

Maybe that’s even true in a drug war. Maybe that’s especially true in a WORLDWIDE drug war.

The whole world has become Chicago during Prohibition...

And every day is St. Valentine’s Day.

- Daniel Hopsicker is the author of Barry & 'the boys: The CIA, the Mob and America's Secret History. About the author. - Email the author.

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