In response to message posted by Steven_Russell:

Steven - thanks for the report on Abdul Rahman Said Yasin - gosh it's hard to keep track of all these terrorists. From your article...

But Abdul Rahman Yasin's older Iraqi brother, Musab Yasin, lived in the same Jersey City building as Mohammad Salameh, the Palestinian who had first called his uncle in Iraq just days before Abdul Rahman sought his own passport to America. After September 1, 1992, the1993 WTC bombing mastermind, Abdul Basit Karim, travelling under the name of Ramzi Yousef, came to stay at the apartment of Musab Yasin in Jersey City. So too did Abdul Rahman Yasin, Musab's younger brother, who arrived in America from Iraq in September 1992, soon after Ramzi Yousef. Many young Arab men used the two Yasin and Salameh apartments, praying and eating together; relations were so close that the apartments were connected by an intercom.

Had forgotten about the Abdul Basit Karim alias for Ramzi Yousef. But this intelligence report says that both names are false...that Iraqi officials set him up with false IDs....

An interview with Laurie Mylroie

Author of Study of Revenge:
Saddam Hussein’s Unfinished War Against America

(excerpt)

The key evidence revolves around the identity of the bomb’s mastermind, Ramzi Yousef. He entered the United States as Ramzi Yousef, Iraqi citizen, but left as Abdul Basit Karim, Pakistani national. In fact, both names are aliases.

We know that Abdul Basit Karim is a real person. We know that he was born and raised in Kuwait, studied in Britain, and then returned to Kuwait. He was in Kuwait when Iraq invaded, and he probably died then. As a permanent resident of Kuwait, his records were on file at the Ministry of the Interior in Kuwait City. We also know that his file was tampered with.

* What was done to the file, and why is that significant?

There are things that should be in the file but aren’t. For example, copies of the front pages of Abdul Basit Karim’s passport, with his picture and signature, should be there. But they were removed.

There are also things in the file that shouldn’t be there. For example, a notation that Abdul Basit Karim and his family left Kuwait on August 26, 1990, traveled from Kuwait to Iraq, and crossed into Iran on their way to Pakistani Baluchistan, where they live now—that information shouldn’t be in a Kuwaiti file. There wasn’t a Kuwaiti government in August 1990. Iraq was occupying the country. Moreover, that’s not the kind of information you give authorities when you travel. You tell them where you came from and where you’re going. You don’t give them your whole itinerary.

But the clincher is that the fingerprint cards in Abdul Basit Karim’s file have Ramzi Yousef’s fingerprints. Yet Yousef is definitely not the same person as Karim. Yousef is tall, and Karim was of medium height. That can only mean that someone took Abdul Basit Karim’s fingerprint card out of the file and substituted a card with Yousef’s prints on it. The only reason for doing that and making other changes was to create a false identity for Yousef. And the only party that reasonably could have done so is Iraq, while it occupied Kuwait.

* What have other people said about this?

I discussed this with Jim Fox, who by then had retired from the FBI. He agreed that Abdul Basit Karim’s file had been tampered with and that that was the "smoking gun." He had passed the information on to the New York FBI, but he cautioned me that he wasn’t sure what they would do with it.

more on Yousef from terrorismfiles.org...

Ramzi Yousef aka Abdul Basit Karim

Who is Ramzi Yousef?

Ramzi Yousef is the convicted mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. He also plotted to bomb U.S. airliners in January 1995.

In 1993, before the bombing, Yousef lived in Jersey City, New Jersey, with fellow bomber Mohamed Salameh, one of the first four men convicted in the WTC attack and sentenced to life in prison.

According to the presiding judge in his 1998 trial, the bombing of New York's World Trade Center on February 26, 1993 was meant to topple the city's tallest tower onto its twin, amid a cloud of cyanide gas. Had the attack gone as planned, tens of thousands of Americans would have died. Instead, as we know, one tower did not fall on the other, and, rather than vaporizing, the cyanide gas burnt up in the heat of the explosion. "Only" six people died.

In January 1995, Yousef and his associates plotted to blow up eleven U.S. commercial aircraft in one spectacular day of terrorist rage. The bombs were to be made of a liquid explosive designed to pass through airport metal detectors. But while mixing his chemical brew in a Manila apartment, Yousef started a fire. He was forced to flee, leaving behind a computer that contained the information that led to his arrest a month later in Pakistan. Among the items found in his possession was a letter threatening Filipino interests if a comrade held in custody were not released. It claimed the "ability to make and use chemicals and poisonous gas... for use against vital institutions and residential populations and the sources of drinking water."

Quick Facts

- Yousef lived for a time in a Pakistani boarding house run by Saudi exile Osama bin Laden. Although in an interview in 1997 bin Laden said he did not know Yousef personally.

- Yousef fled the country the night of the attack and made it onto the FBI's Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list, with a $2 million reward for information leading to his arrest. Law enforcement authorities apprehended him after receiving a tip from an informant.

- Ramzi Yousef's plots were the most ambitious terrorist conspiracies ever attempted against the United States.

Arrest and conviction

Pakistani police arrested Yousef a month later, on February 7, 1995, in an Islamabad hotel room. Authorities also arrested Shah in Malaysia, based on his photo agents found scanned into Yousef's laptop. He later admitted providing money and fake passports to Yousef and Murad but denied knowing about bomb plots.

Yousef and Murad were high school friends who grew up in a village in Kuwait, and later lived together in Pakistan and the Philippines.

Prosecutors depicted Yousef as the leader of the cell that carried out the February 26, 1993, World Trade Center truck bombing that killed six people and injured more than 1,000 -- at the time, the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil.

Yousef's fingerprints turned up on bomb-making manuals and storage lockers used by the trade center bombers. He was believed to have bought the chemicals used to construct the 1,500-pound bomb placed inside a rented Ryder truck and detonated after the vehicle was driven into one tower's parking garage.

U.S. District Court Judge Kevin Duffy sentenced Yousef to life in prison on January 8, 1998, for the trade center bombings; Murad was sentenced to life on May 16, 1998.

Yousef is incarcerated at the federal "supermax" prison in Florence, Colorado, where Yousef has been cooperating with the government and has yet to be sentenced. He recently was housed close to prosecutors at a facility in lower Manhattan, New York.

....Jen