Monday, October 02, 2006

Omar Saeed Sheikh

Xymphora has directed our attention to this story, in which Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf reveals (or should I say "claims"?) that Omar Saeed Sheikh is or was an agent of British intelligence.

Are you asking yourself "Omar who?" I should hope not -- he's one of the most important and fascinating characters in the 9/11 mystery, a figure intimately connected with the former head of Pakistani intelligence, Mehmood Ahmad Mehmood, and with Khaled Sheik Muhammed, the accused mastermind of the World Trade Center attack. Omar Saeed Sheikh is said to have helped train the hijackers. He's in prison now, convicted of murdering Daniel Pearl.

From Wikipedia:
On October 6, 2001, a senior-level U.S. government official told CNN that U.S. investigators had discovered Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh (Sheik Syed), using the alias "Mustafa Muhammad Ahmad" had sent about $100,000 from the United Arab Emirates to Mohammed Atta. "Investigators said Atta then distributed the funds to conspirators in Florida in the weeks before the deadliest acts of terrorism on U.S. soil that destroyed the World Trade Center, heavily damaged the Pentagon and left thousands dead. In addition, sources have said Atta sent thousands of dollars -- believed to be excess funds from the operation -- back to Saeed in the United Arab Emirates in the days before September 11. CNN later confirmed this.
If this guy worked for the Brits...well. I wonder what arch-Anglophobe Lyndon LaRouche will have to say about that.

The more you look into the Saeed Sheikh affair, the stranger it gets. The best place to start is this bio derived from the timeline prepared by the Center for Cooperative Research. He studied in London, and was, by all accounts, quite brilliant -- just the sort of person an intelligence agency would try to recruit.

But were the Brits the only ones to approach him? In the late 1990s, Saeed Sheikh was doing time in an Indian prison for terrorism.
By his own admission, he “lived practically like a Mafia don.” [London Times, 8/21/02] It has been claimed that in 1999, British intelligence secretly offered Saeed an amnesty and the ability to “live in London a free man” if he would reveal his links to al-Qaeda. He apparently refused. [Daily Mail, 7/16/02, London Times, 7/16/02] Even more curiously, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review suggested in March 2002, “There are many in Musharraf’s government who believe that Saeed Sheikh’s power comes not from the ISI, but from his connections with our own CIA. The theory is that ... Saeed Sheikh was bought and paid for.” [Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, 3/3/02]
Even more telling:
In his roughly two years of freedom before 9/11, Saeed was a very busy terrorist. According to Newsweek, once in Pakistan, Saeed “lived openly—and opulently—in a wealthy Lahore neighborhood. US sources say he did little to hide his connections to terrorist organizations, and even attended swanky parties attended by senior Pakistani government officials.” The US government inferred that he was a “protected asset” of the ISI. [Newsweek, 3/13/02] In fact, his house was given to him by the ISI. [Vanity Fair, 8/02] Even more remarkably, the media reported that Saeed was freely able to return to Britain [Press Trust of India, 1/3/00], just as if he had accepted Britain’s secret amnesty offer. He visited his parents in Britain in 2000 and again in early 2001.
Obviously, this guy's spookier than Caspar, and evidence links him to Atta. If you want to formulate a real 9/11 conspiracy theory, start here.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Omar Saeed Sheikh is said to have helped train the hijackers.


I like the use of the passive voice here. Said by whom? And how exactly did help train the hijackers - did he pay for their lessons on Cessnas? Cheap bastard wouldn't pay for them to learn on real jets I guess.

At least this stuff is good for a laugh.

Joseph Cannon said...

You didn't read the timeline, did you? OSS is key. What's "good for a laugh" is the pseudoscientific BS put out by the controlled demoliton crowd -- and, I repeat, that BS is funded by Adnan Khashogghi.

Do NOT attempt to promote that crap here. I'll delete your words as soon as I see them and I will ban you from commenting on any subject again. If you consider that censorship -- well, I really don't give a crap. You are free to open up your own damn blog.

Anonymous said...
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Joseph Cannon said...

Banned forever, 911 Curious. I TOLD you.

Anonymous said...

You said not to post anything about CD and my post contained nothing CD. I simply asked why there's no evidence for bin Laden and the 19 having been involved with the 9/11 attacks. You might want to ask yourself why your response to this question is so hostile.

Anonymous said...

Joe, the 9/11Curious comment was a bit snarky, but it was within the limits you imposed. I don't want to get banned either, but please, take a deep breath. I'd rather see 9/11Curious stick around unless he gets egregious about it.

I think I understand your anger, as I have quite a temper myself. But in a sense it is more than just "your blog." Cannonfire is something you have created in a spirit of sharing with others. It's a good thing you have made, and continue to make, but it's not a toy you can take away in petulance when someone doesn't play right.

Please, this new phenomenon of public blogs has kinks to get worked out. But it definitely is a new version of the old country store where locals sat around the potbellied stove and gabbed about politics. If the owner of the store had a customer whose point of view he didn't agree with--one that he thought served someone else nefarious purposes, even--he didn't ban the guy from the store. He couldn't do it, because the guy was part of the community that made the store possible. But it is also true that the guy should exercise some restraint himself, to honor his own obligations as a member of the community.

(Actually, my little rural town of 300 population is still a lot like this.)

Beyond that point, I have to say that when blogs ban subjects it is a bit too much like banning books you don't agree with. Everybody thinks they have the right to do it, but the end result is a loss for free speech and inevitably free thinking. That Kos and Atrios and other so-called progressive blogs ban the subject of vote-theft is appalling. But I'm sure they think they are right to do so, and after all, it is "their blog."

And even if I get banned for saying what I have, I want to thank you for maintaining such a brilliant blog. Don't lose sight of what you're doing here.

Joseph Cannon said...

Let me explain something. All my life, I never wanted to be an artist; I wanted to be an illustrator. You want a dog? I paint a dog. You want the web page to have a chartreuse background? Chartreuse it is. You're the boss. You want a sans-serif typeface? You get it. Even when I've been paid for my writing, I've always been paid for writing something that someone else told me to write.

For nearly thirty years, I have not been the boss of...well, anything.

But here, there's no paycheck involved. And for once in my life, in this one small area of my life, things are going to go my way.

I will not tolerate the controlled demolition freaks. I think they are just plain fucking evil, and I do not recognise those bastards as fit partners for debate.

In social situations, whenever I try to explain that there was more to 911 than we've been told, the other party automatically presumes that I am talking about "bombs in the building." That nonsense has received all the publicity.

Of COURSE the situation was planned to fall out in this way.

The administration wants us to be arguing over "Loose Change" and not over "Press for Truth." The CD theory is a key part of the coverup.

As I've said before, the first time I saw footage of the towers falling ( I got up late that day), two thoughts hit me: 1. This is about Israel, and 2. The conspiracy buffs will say explosives were planted in the building, as they did in the case of Oklahoma City.

When the time comes, once the CD theory has played its role, it can be eliminated easily -- in less than a week. A major broadcast need merely compare video footage of a the towers falling to footage of a REAL CD. The differences are glaringly obvious, even to a child. That's why no expert in controlled demolitions -- NOT ONE IN THE ENTIRE WORLD -- believes in the CD theory of the towers' fall.

It makes me sick to my stomach that "Loose Change" is so well known when so few people know who (say) Khaled Sheikh Mohammed or Wally Hilliard are.

Yes, I'm frustrated. And I am angry. I'm so angry that the CD freaks have even started to give me bad dreams.

And so my rules are these: When I write a post (what you are reading now is a comment, not a post) directly attacking one aspect or another of the pseudoscientific theories, I will allow the nuts to spew whatever they please in response, as long as they stick to the specific topic at hand instead of wandering all over the place. At all other times, the CD creeps are allowed NO voice on this blog.

That is final.

For once in my life, I am the boss of something. THAT IS FINAL.

I might take a different attitude if the CD freaks had a shortage of other forums in which to express their views. But they have plenty of opportunites to make their case. And anyone who does not like my rules is free to start his own blog.

I'd rather go back to the days when this blog received no more than a hundred readers a day than have to live with the knowledge that my blog has become a forum for a supremely irritating lie.

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