the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
Nov 19, 2001
On October 18, four men, convicted in the 1998 bombings at the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, received sentences of life in prison in New York federal court. The four–Fazul Abdullah Mohamed, Mohamed Sadiq Odeh, Mohamed Rashid Daoud al-Owhali, and Wadih El Hage–were convicted of planning the attacks as members of Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network. The bombs killed 224 people, mostly Kenyans, as well as 12 U.S. citizens; some 4,000 people were injured.
The four were convicted in part on the testimony of Ali Mohamed, whose case had been heard separately and whose sentence was never prounounced in open court.
Egyptian born Mohamed was a sergeant in the U.S. army for most of the 1980s. He received one medal for “patriotism, valor, fidelity and professional excellence” while he served. But what was really interesting about Mohamed’s training is that he went through training for Special Forces officers at Fort Bragg–although later on, the newspapers refer to him only as a “supply sergeant” at Fort Bragg. In other words, the U.S. army trained Mohamed as a specialist in terrorism.
In 1984, according to information given in his trial, Mohamed approached the CIA to offer his services as a spy. Supposedly, the CIA declined. In any case, in1989, he entered bin Laden’s network. He provided military training to bin Laden’s personal security guards. He was supposed to have turned over training manuals he received in his Special Forces training. Some of the subjects are particularly interesting: how to plan terrorist operations; how to plant explosives in buildings; how to carry out assassinations using different techniques.
It seems Mohamed was at least a double agent. He certainly is like people recruited by the CIA to use in other countries to carry out all the dirty tricks which we find out about later on–like blowing up buildings, killing hundreds of people. And, no matter who it turned out he owed his “loyalty” to, he learned all this at Fort Bragg, courtesy of the U.S. military.