Word: binalshibh
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...this time, however, intelligence agencies were looking closely at al-Awlaki's connections to the hijackers. At the home in Hamburg of Ramzi Binalshibh, a Yemeni who was a leading figure in the 9/11 plot, German authorities found al-Awlaki's phone number. The FBI questioned the cleric but didn't have enough information to arrest him. In March 2002, he left the U.S. for Yemen. He made one final trip to the U.S. in October of that year and was briefly detained at New York City's JFK airport, but the FBI's attempt to arrest...
...occasion Brinkema backed Moussaoui's call to cite testimony from Guantanamo prisoners and 9/11 masterminds Khaled Sheikh Mohammed and Ramzi Binalshibh for his defense. Prosecutors resisted that demand, claiming the information was classified. (Moussaoui would win the right to use parts of statements by the 9/11 puppet masters, who described the Frenchman as too erratic and unreliable to be let in on the plot...
...against him didn't make Moussaoui look any better: he was arrested in August, 2001 while attending a Minnesota flight school. When investigators took a closer look at him after 9/11, they discovered jihadist literature and plane flying information on his computer. Further inquiry led to the discovery that Binalshibh had wired him $14,000 from Germany; a check with French officials showed that he'd long been under watch as a suspected jihadist who'd made the de rigeur trip to al-Qaeda's Afghan haven...
...Moussaoui had been in jail nearly a month when the attack occurred, meaning he couldn't have been directly responsible for it. Moussaoui was also a lousy student who flunked out of several flight schools. And, most importantly, the statements by Sheikh Mohammed and Binalshibh confirmed what anyone watching his trial already knew: Moussaoui was too big a loud-mouth and hot-head to let anywhere near a plot like 9/11. In the end, Moussaoui's conviction relied almost entirely on his own guilty plea and inconsistent admissions to having wanted to carry out terror attacks...
...declassified Justice Department memos, former CIA director Michael Hayden asserts that it was only after the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah that authorities learned about Ramzi Binalshibh, a midlevel al-Qaeda member who helped coordinate the Sept. 11 attacks. The memos also say it was because of the waterboarding of Mohammed that U.S. intelligence learned about a "second wave" of attacks planned for after Sept. 11. Was there truly another 9/11 in the works? Maybe. Or maybe Mohammed made it up to stop the waterboarding...