9/11 Hijacker Received $100,000

From the nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Mohammed is the longtime confessed mastermind of 9/11. The nephew, Ammar al Baluchi, is a Kuwaiti captive and claims he didn't know Marwan al Shehhi was associated with al Qaeda and had no advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks.

Reuters:

The nephew of confessed September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed acknowledged sending more than $100,000 to one of the hijackers who crashed a plane into the World Trade Center, according to a Pentagon transcript released on Thursday.

But the nephew, Kuwaiti captive Ammar al Baluchi, told a military panel at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay that he did not know Marwan al Shehhi was associated with al Qaeda and had no advance knowledge of the September 11 attacks.

"When Marwan al Shehhi approached me, he never declared himself as 'hijacker Marwan al Shehhi,'" al Baluchi told the military panel, according to a censored transcript.

The US is not buying the ignorance argument, and with good reason.

He said his uncle introduced him to al Shehhi, and he deposited the hijacker's money into bank accounts in the United Arab Emirates and then sent it to him in five transactions totaling $114,500 in 2000 and 2001. Al Shehhi was in the United States at the time, taking flying lessons.

So your uncle introduces you to a guy, you give said guy $114,500 over several months, you put the money into several bank accounts, and you use several transactions ... yet you didn't find this suspicious?

Like I said ... the government isn't buying it.

The U.S. military said al Baluchi was a lieutenant for his uncle and handled al Qaeda money transfers and travel arrangements for associates fleeing Afghanistan after the collapse of the Taliban government.

Al Baluchi, 29, was captured in Pakistan in 2003 and was one of 14 "high-value" prisoners moved to the Guantanamo base in Cuba from secret CIA prisons in September.

The fact that he was captured in Pakistan is significant.

Mohammed, al Qaeda's military operations chief, is also at Guantanamo and submitted a letter to the review board saying his nephew had no association with al Qaeda or the Taliban.

"I used him for business dealings. He had no knowledge of any al Qaeda links. Ammar is being linked to al Qaeda because of me," Mohammed wrote.

Al Baluchi told the panel that he left Dubai suddenly a day or two before the September 11 attacks because he lost his work visa when his employer closed its office there. He said the small amount of cyanide he had when arrested was to be used to bleach fabric.

"It is not associated with threatening United States national security at all," the transcript quoted him as saying.

This is all plausible, but still suspicious.

The U.S. military said al Baluchi was waiting in Pakistan for a shipment of explosives to be used to blow up the U.S. Consulate in Karachi, and had in his possession a compact disk containing a letter to Osama bin Laden and photos of the World Trade Center attacks.

Al Baluchi denied all that and said he never met bin Laden and must have downloaded the photos from the Internet. He said he had provided helpful information to U.S. interrogators for four years, far longer than he provided services to his uncle's friends.

Al Baluchi also said that if he could be classified as an enemy combatant for handling al Shehhi's banking transactions, then so should the U.S. banks, flight schools, car rental agencies and property managers who did business with the hijackers, "since without the support of all those people, 9/11 would not have been possible."

He must have downloaded the pictures from the internet eh ... why? As for the last paragraph in which he says he can't be held as an accessory to the attack unless US banks and other businesses are held as accessories to 9/11 also ... please. This guy was engaging in activity that was completely suspicious, and if it turns out he was assisting an enemy of the US to attack the US he should be held accountable. His statement is like saying a getaway driver in a bank heist is not an accessory because he never went into the bank.