By Gareth Porter
(This is the second of a five-part series, " Khobar Towers Investigated: How a Saudi Deception Protected Osama bin Laden".)
"WASHINGTON, Jun 23 (IPS) - In the last week of October 1996, the Saudi secret police, the Mabahith, gave David Williams, the FBI's assistant special agent in charge of counter-terrorism issues, what they said were summaries of the confessions obtained from some 40 Shi’a detainees.
The alleged confessions portrayed the bombing as the work of a cell of Saudi Hezbollah that had had carried out surveillance of U.S. targets under the direction of an Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officer before hatching a plot to blow up the Khobar Towers facility.
But the documents were curiously short of the kind of details that would have allowed U.S. investigators to verify key elements of the accounts. In fact, Saudi officials refused even to reveal the names of the detainees who were alleged to have made the confessions, identifying the suspects only by numbers one through six or seven, according to a former FBI official involved in the investigation.
Justice Department lawyers argued that the confessions were completely unreliable, and unusable in court, because they had probably been extracted by torture.....
The question of how the alleged plotters got their hands on roughly 5,000 pounds of explosives – the estimated amount in the truck bomb - was one of the central questions in the investigation of the bombing. But interviews with six former FBI officials who worked on the Khobar Towers investigation revealed that the investigation had not turned up any evidence of how well over two tonnes of explosives had entered the country.
Not one of the six could recall any specific evidence about how the alleged plotters got their hands on that much explosives.....
If the Saudi Hezbollah group had actually been plotting to bring the explosives into the country by hiding them in cars, they would have had to get more than 50 explosives-laden cars past Saudi border guards who were already on alert. There is no indication, however, that any additional cars with explosives came across the border in the weeks prior to the bombing."
(This is the second of a five-part series, " Khobar Towers Investigated: How a Saudi Deception Protected Osama bin Laden".)
"WASHINGTON, Jun 23 (IPS) - In the last week of October 1996, the Saudi secret police, the Mabahith, gave David Williams, the FBI's assistant special agent in charge of counter-terrorism issues, what they said were summaries of the confessions obtained from some 40 Shi’a detainees.
The alleged confessions portrayed the bombing as the work of a cell of Saudi Hezbollah that had had carried out surveillance of U.S. targets under the direction of an Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps officer before hatching a plot to blow up the Khobar Towers facility.
But the documents were curiously short of the kind of details that would have allowed U.S. investigators to verify key elements of the accounts. In fact, Saudi officials refused even to reveal the names of the detainees who were alleged to have made the confessions, identifying the suspects only by numbers one through six or seven, according to a former FBI official involved in the investigation.
Justice Department lawyers argued that the confessions were completely unreliable, and unusable in court, because they had probably been extracted by torture.....
The question of how the alleged plotters got their hands on roughly 5,000 pounds of explosives – the estimated amount in the truck bomb - was one of the central questions in the investigation of the bombing. But interviews with six former FBI officials who worked on the Khobar Towers investigation revealed that the investigation had not turned up any evidence of how well over two tonnes of explosives had entered the country.
Not one of the six could recall any specific evidence about how the alleged plotters got their hands on that much explosives.....
If the Saudi Hezbollah group had actually been plotting to bring the explosives into the country by hiding them in cars, they would have had to get more than 50 explosives-laden cars past Saudi border guards who were already on alert. There is no indication, however, that any additional cars with explosives came across the border in the weeks prior to the bombing."
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