- A new book alleges years of attempts to arrest Osama
bin Laden being blocked by the US.
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- The fate of John O'Neill, the Irish-American FBI agent
who for years led US investigations into Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network,
is the most chilling revelation in the book Bin Laden: The Hidden Truth,
published in Paris this week.
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- O'Neill investigated the bombings of the World Trade
Centre in 1993, a US base in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the US embassies in
Nairobi and Dar-Es-Salaam in 1998, and the USS Cole last year.
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- Jean-Charles Brisard, who wrote a report on bin Laden's
finances for the French intelligence agency DST and is co-author of Hidden
Truth, met O'Neill several times last summer. He complained bitterly that
the US State Department - and behind it the oil lobby who make up President
Bush's entourage - blocked attempts to prove bin Laden's guilt.
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- The US ambassador to Yemen, Ms Barbara Bodine, forbade
O'Neill and his team from entering Yemen. In August 2001, O'Neill resigned
in frustration and took up a new job as head of security at the World Trade
Centre. He died in the September 11th attack.
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- Brisard and his co-author Guillaume Dasquié, the
editor of Intelligence Online, ...The FBI agent..."All the answers,
everything needed to dismantle Osama bin Laden's organisation, can be found
in Saudi Arabia."
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- The US shrank from offending the Saudi royal family.
O'Neill went to Saudi Arabia after bombing of the US military installation...Saudis
interrogated the suspects, declared them guilty, and executed them - without
letting the FBI talk to them.
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- O'Neill:...clear evidence in Yemen of bin Laden's guilt
in the bombing of the USS Cole...State Department prevented him from getting
it."
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- The first country to issue an international arrest warrant
against bin Laden was not the US, but Moamar Gadafy's Libya, in March,1998.
The confidential notice, published for the first time in their book, was
sent by the Libyan interior ministry to Interpol on March 16th, 1998, and
accuses bin Laden of murdering two German intelligence agents, Silvan Becker
and his wife, in Libya in 1994.
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- Bin Laden supported...fundamentalist...al-Muqatila...wanted
to assassinate Gadafy...considered an infidel.
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- ...British collaboration with al-Muqatila...Interpol
warrant was ignored...since sept 11..al-Muqatila...placed...list of "terrorist
groups".
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- ...document negotiations between...Bush adm...and the
Taliban between February and August of this year.
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- Less convincingly, they conjecture that the September
11th suicide attacks were the result of the failure of those negotiations.
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- ...motivation...US attempts...peace...Taliban..oil../..Russia...refused...allow
the US to extract it through Russian pipelines and Iran is considered a
dangerous route. That left Afghanistan.
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- The US oil company Chevron - where Mr Bush's National
Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice was a director throughout the 1990s -
is deeply involved in Kazakhstan. In 1995, another US company, Unocal (formerly
Union Oil Company of California) signed a contract to export $8 billion
worth of natural gas through a $3 billion pipeline which would go from
Turkmenistan through Afghanistan to Pakistan.
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- ...State Dept applauded...Taliban takeover in September
1996, five months after a US assistant secretary of state warned "economic
opportunities will be missed" if political stability was not restored
in Afghanistan.
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- Laila Helms, the part Afghan niece of the former CIA
director and former US ambassador to Tehran Richard Helms, is described
as the Mata-Hari of US-Taliban negotiations.
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- Ms Helms brought Sayed Rahmatullah Hashimi, an adviser
to Mullah Omar, to Washington for five days in March 2001 - after the Taliban
had destroyed the ancient Buddhas of Bamiyan. Hashimi met the directorate
of Central Intelligence at the CIA and the Bureau of Intelligence and Research
at the State Department.
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- In negotiations which continued until July, the US then
took a more discreet position, letting the UN envoy Francesc Vendrell do
most of the work and appointing a former US ambassador to Pakistan, Thomas
Simons, to represent the US at informal meetings in Berlin.
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- The last direct US contact with the Taliban was on August
2nd, 2001, when Christina Rocca, the director of Asian affairs at the State
Department, met the Taliban ambassador in Islamabad. Ms Rocca was previously
in charge of contacts with Islamist guerrilla groups at the CIA, where
in the 1980s, she oversaw the delivery of Stinger missiles to Afghan mujaheddin.
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- Last February, the Taliban had indicated it might be
willing to hand over bin Laden, but by June, according to Brisard and Dasquié,
the US began considering military action...
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- ...dispatching Francesc Vendrell to see the exiled King
Zaher Shah in Rome and raising the threat of military action, Washington
"backed the Taliban into a corner", the authors say. For the
Taliban - assuming its leadership had advance knowledge of the suicide
attacks - September 11th was a sort of pre-emptive strike.
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- ...significant part of the Saudi royal family supports
bin Laden. "Saudi Arabia has always protected bin Laden - or protected
itself from him,"...attacks inside the kingdom targeted US interests,
never the Saudis.
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- Khalid bin Mahfouz is the former chairman of the kingdom's
biggest bank, the National Commercial Bank, who, with 10 family members
received Irish citizenship in December 1990. Brisard and Dasquié
call him "the banker of terror".
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- The 73-year-old Mahfouz is now under house arrest in
the Saudi resort of Taif, accused by the FBI and CIA of having diverted
$2 billion to Islamic charities that helped bin Laden.
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- http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/world/2001/1119/wor8.htm
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