Jarrah in Dubai, the CIA and the 9/11 Commission

[KJF]

On 30-31 January 2000 alleged hijacker pilot Ziad Jarrah returned from training in Afghanistan to Germany via Dubai, when he was stopped at the airport. The main text of the 9/11 Commission Report describes it like this.

“In early 2000, Atta, Jarrah, and Binalshibh returned to Hamburg. Jarrah arrived first on January 31, 2000.97 According to Binalshibh, he and Atta left Kandahar together and proceeded first to Karachi, where they met KSM...” (p. 167)

Endnote 97 reads:

“97. Jarrah encountered a minor problem during his return trip to Hamburg. On January 30, 2000, while transiting Dubai on his way from Karachi to Germany, Jarrah drew questioning from UAE authorities about an overlay of the Qu'ran that appeared on one page of his passport. The officials also noticed the religious tapes and books Jarrah had in his possession, but released him after he pointed out that he had lived in Hamburg for a number of years and was studying aircraft construction there. FBI report,"Summary of Penttbom Investigation," Feb. 29, 2004, p. 13.”

So, a friendly intelligence agency had identified one of the 9/11 hijackers an Islamist radical worthy of attention from the security services 20 months before the attacks. This is pretty important information, why has the 9/11 Commission relegated it to an endnote? And why didn't UAE intelligence tell the US? If they had, then that would have stopped 9/11, right?

Jane Corbin of the BBC went to the UAE, interviewed security officials there and they told her they did tell the Americans of Jarrah, while he was still being held at the airport, but the US said let him go, so they did. (The Base, p. 180-1)

CNN did its own digging and claims Jarrah “was stopped and questioned in the United Arab Emirates ... at the request of the CIA ... sources in the government of the UAE, and other Middle Eastern and European sources told CNN. The CIA suspected Ziad Jarrah had been in Afghanistan and wanted him questioned because of "his suspected involvement in terrorist activities," UAE sources said.”
http://edition.cnn.com/2002/US/08/01/cia.hijacker/index.html

Terry McDermott of the LA Times went to the UAE and checked the story again. He writes:
“What happened was we called the Americans,” said a UAE official. “We said, 'We have this guy. What should we do with him?' ... He's there, we called the Americans, their answer was, 'Let him go, we'll track him.' We were going to make him stay. We weren't feeling very happy in letting him go.” (Perfect Soldiers, p. 187)

The CIA and the 9/11 Commission have denied and omitted to mention the US was notified of Jarrah's stop, but the UAE has insisted on it on several occasions. Is there any way to work out who's telling the truth and who isn't?

(1) McDermott writes: “It is worth noting, however, that when the initial reports of the Jarrah interview were made by Jane Corbin for the BBC in 2001 ..., citing UAE sources, the Americans publicly denied they had ever been informed of it. As it happened, Corbin had the wrong date for the event, so the American services might have been technically correct in denying knowledge of it. They later repeated that denial several times when other reports repeated the inaccurate date.” (Perfect Soldiers, p. 295) So the denial was one of those non-denial denials with which we have become so familiar in recent years and perhaps we shouldn't place too much weight on it.

(2) McDermott saw publicly unavailable documentation about 9/11 in both the US and Germany. He writes, “The United States, however, has acknowledged in internal documents and in communications with German investigators that the Emiratis did contact them about Jarrah.” and “... the FBI has acknowledged to its German counterpart the stop did occur and they were informed.” (Perfect Soldiers, p. 294-5).

There is room to argue about some aspects of the stop, for example the date (some sources claim it was in 2001, not 2000) and whether Jarrah was stopped because he was on a watchlist or because of an indicator of Islamic extremism in his passport, but that's not my focus here and I'm going to leave it be.

My conclusion is that the US (probably the CIA station at the embassy in Abu Dhabi) was told about Jarrah at the time and that the 9/11 Commission is covering up this very important story by only giving half of it and burying that in an endnote. I would have expected them to have investigated the story and trotted out the same tired excuses about a lack of interagency co-operation. I certainly wouldn't describe this as a “minor problem”; Jarrah allegedly intended to murder hundreds of people in the US and was flagged to US intelligence as an Islamist radical worthy of the security services' attention – that's not a minor problem, that's something that should derail the entire operation. I wonder why the Commission didn't try to deal with it at all.

[reprehensor]

1. Because it is rife with inconsistencies.

In The Hidden History of 9-11-2001, independent researcher Jay Kolar suggests that the Jarrah who was interrogated in Dubai could not have been the real Ziad Jarrah;

On January 30, 2001, a four-hour interrogation of Ziad Jarrah transpired in the Dubai, Emirates airport, known CIA intercept point, which Jarrah simply walked into. During the interrogation Ziad Jarrah said that he did spend ‘‘the previous two months and five days’’ in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where bin Laden was known to have his al-Qaeda terrorist training base, and that he was returning to Florida (Chicago Tribune, December 13, 2001). But he did not. After his release, according to CNN’s MacVicar and Faraj (2002), ‘‘Jarrah boarded a KLM flight in the early hours of January 31 and flew to Europe.’’ Someone must have inputted ‘‘national security override’’ into US government computers next to his name for, in the next seven months before 9-11, at least one of the two Jarrahs would travel to the US, Lebanon, Germany, and back to the US, without so much as metaphorically raising an intelligence agency eyebrow.

After 9-11, investigators confirmed that ‘‘Jarrah had spent at least three weeks in January 2001 at an al-Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan’’ (MacVicar & Faraj, 2002). However, this itinerary must belong to Ziad Jarrah of Lebanon’s double because, according to Arne Kruithof’s Florida Flight Training Center, Jarrah of Lebanon had been a student there continuously for the previous six months and because the flight school later confirmed he was there in Venice, Florida, until January 15, 2001 (Thompson, 2004, p. 192). With the flight school’s confirmation, we already know that Jarrah of Lebanon could not have been the Jarrah at the al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan. But the testimony of Ziad’s family that he arrived in Lebanon on January 26th to be with his father who had just undergone open-heart surgery, and that he visited him in the hospital every day until after January 30th (Longman, 2002, pp. 101–102), corroborates Ziad’s whereabouts and eliminates the possibility of his presence in Dubai en route from Afghanistan.

So it had to be Ziad Jarrah of Lebanon’s double, a covert intelligence operative, who just waltzed into the known CIA intercept, as if the whole episode had been scripted in advance. Emirates and European intelligence sources confirmed the following to CNN:

...the questioning of Jarrah fits a pattern of a CIA operation begun in 1999 to track suspected al-Qaeda operatives who were traveling through the United Arab Emirates. These sources told CNN that UAE officials were often told in advance by US officials which persons were coming through the country and whom they wanted questioned.

One source provided CNN a drawing of the Dubai airport and described how people wanted for questioning were intercepted, most often at a transit desk. US officials declined to comment on whether the CIA operated this way at the Dubai airport. (MacVicar and Faraj, 2002)

Keeping in mind the purpose and historical role of the double in covert intelligence agency operations, the use of this particularly well-prepared double – who not only supplied documentation but also somewhat resembled Jarrah of Lebanon – smacks of a well-orchestrated setup geared to call attention to this incident as one that would later incriminate not only the real Ziad Jarrah, an unwitting patsy, but through him all of the 19 ‘‘hijackers,’’ as terrorist agents of al-Qaeda. Through the double, covert operative Jarrah’s sojourn and three-month stay in al-Qaeda stronghold Afghanistan, he became the desired link that moles inside the US government need to pin the 9-11 rap on al-Qaeda. Another piece of evidence that should have cast suspicion on this Jarrah double is that he carried a valid US multiple-entry visa in his passport, a fragment of which, according to MacVicar and Faraj (2002), turned up in the Flight 93 debris field. This fragment of evidence, its identification by UAE officials in Dubai as belonging to the multiple-entry visa they inspected there, combined with the fact that the person carrying this visa and passport could not have been the real Ziad Jarrah from Lebanon because he was in Florida and Lebanon while his double was showing up in Afghanistan and Dubai, UAE, effectively clears the accused Ziad Jarrah of Lebanon of involvement in the 9-11 attacks and the US government’s charges against him. - Kolar, pp. 23-24, The Hidden History of 9-11-2001.

[seatnineb]

2. Excellent find Reprehensor! n/t

[KJF]

3. Depends

If the stop was really on 30 January 2001 then it is proof of a double, because another Jarrah was elsewhere on this date. However, if it was on 30 January 2000 it isn't, as the real Jarrah was passing through Dubai on that date. Both dates have been reported by the media and there's no way to say for definite which one is right (or whether both of them are right) without getting Corbin to answer a few questions - because she is the source of the 2001 date. Where did she get it from? Is it just a typo?

The time period mentioned (for his alleged stay in Afghanistan in 2000/2001) "two months and five days" probably really relates to his stay in Afghanistan/Pakistan in 1999/2000 - he went there on 25 November 1999 and left on 30 January 2000. In my opinion, it's pretty unlikely that he would travel to Dubai on the same date on consecutive years after spending exactly the same period of time in Afghanistan, so I'm not buying the 2001 stop.

Obviously, this doesn't make his two visa photos look like each other, or even much like him.

[BuddyYoung]

4. Sorta like the fact there was LHOswald and a Harvey Lee Oswald.

It's all so predictable but since the public is so ignorant and gullible, intlelligence agencies everywhere "get away with it" every time.