Ex-al-Qaida spokesman recalls 9/11 with bin Laden

“We are the ones who did it.”

The testimony came as Abu Ghaith’s trial on charges he conspired to kill Americans and aid al-Qaida as a spokesman for the terrorist group took a dramatic turn. His decision to take the witness stand was announced by his lawyer, Stanley Cohen, who surprised a nearly empty courtroom that quickly filled with spectators as word spread.

Abu Ghaith testified that bin Laden seemed worried that night and asked what he thought would happen next. Abu Ghaith said he predicted America “will not settle until it accomplishes two things: to kill you and topple the state of the Taliban.”

Bin Laden responded: “’You’re being too pessimistic,’” Abu Ghaith recalled.

Bin Laden then offered the onetime imam a job that would gain him infamy as well as a place in the inner circle of the world’s most wanted terrorist. “I want to deliver a message to the world,” Abu Ghaith said bin Laden told him. “... I want you to deliver that message.”

The testimony was a rare gambit by the defense, a last-ditch effort to counter a mountain of evidence against Abu Ghaith, including an alleged confession and videos showing him sitting beside Bin Laden on Sept. 12, 2001, and another in which he warned Americans that “the storm of airplanes will not abate.” The defense has never disputed that Abu Ghaith associated with bin Laden after 9/11, but it contends he was recruited as a religious teacher and orator, and had no role in plotting more attacks.

On cross examination, though, Abu Ghaith admitted that he sent his pregnant wife, six daughters and a son to Kuwait while he went to Afghanistan on Sept. 7, 2001, after hearing inside and outside al-Qaida training camps that something big was going to happen soon.

“I had heard something would happen but I didn’t know what,” he said in response to Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Ferrara’s questions.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/binladen/who/alqaeda.html

Bin Laden kin agreed to speak for Al Qaeda while N.Y. burned, prosecutor says

Opening statements were delivered Wednesday in the trial of Osama bin Laden's son-in-law, Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, the most senior alleged member of Al Qaeda to be tried in a civilian US court.

On March 11, 2005, Al-Quds Al-Arabi published extracts from Saif al-Adel's document "Al Qaeda's Strategy to the Year 2020".^[71][72] Abdel Bari Atwan summarizes this strategy as comprising five stages to rid the Ummah from all forms of oppression:

1. Provoke the United States and the West into invading a Muslim country by staging a massive attack or string of attacks on U.S. soil that results in massive civilian casualties.
2. Incite local resistance to occupying forces.
3. Expand the conflict to neighboring countries, and engage the U.S. and its allies in a long war of attrition.
4. Convert al-Qaeda into an ideology and set of operating principles that can be loosely franchised in other countries without requiring direct command and control, and via these franchises incite attacks against the U.S. and countries allied with the U.S. until they withdraw from the conflict, as happened with the 2004 Madrid train bombings, but which did not have the same effect with the July 7, 2005 London bombings.
5. The U.S. economy will finally collapse by the year 2020 under the strain of multiple engagements in numerous places, making the worldwide economic system which is dependent on the U.S. also collapse leading to global political instability, which in turn leads to a global jihad led by al-Qaeda and a Wahhabi Caliphate will then be installed across the world following the collapse of the U.S. and the rest of the Western world countries.

Atwan also noted, regarding the collapse of the U.S., "If this sounds far-fetched, it is sobering to consider that this virtually describes the downfall of the Soviet Union."^[71]

 ^{a b} Abdel Bari Atwan. "The Secret History of Al Qaeda", p. 221. University of California Press, 2006. ISBN 0-520-24974-7. Google Books. March 11, 2005. Archived from the original on May 12, 2011. Retrieved May 8, 2011.

Wait a minute.....Either Al Quaeda exists, or it doesn't exist?   Which is it?