[quote]Detainee Admits to Helping Orchestrate Embassy, USS Cole Attacks
American Forces Press Service,Donna Miles, March 19, 2007
WASHINGTON, March 19, 2007 – A detainee at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has admitted to helping orchestrate the bombings of the U.S. embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, in 1998 and the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000.
The Defense Department today released the transcript of Walid Muhammad Salih bin Attash’s combat status review tribunal hearing, held March 12 at the detention facility. The tribunal was an administrative hearing to determine only if Attash could be designated an enemy combatant.
After hearing allegations against him, including his involvement in the Aug. 7, 1998, embassy bombing and the Oct. 12, 2000, attack on the USS Cole, Attash said he carried out “many roles” in the attacks.
Speaking through an interpreter, Attash said he met in Karachi, Pakistan, with the operator who carried out the embassy attack just hours beforehand.
“I was the link between Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Sheikh Abu Hafs al Masi, and the cell chief in Nairobi,” Attash said. “I was the link that was available in Pakistan.”
In that capacity, Attash said he supplied the terror cell “with whatever documents they need(ed), from fake stamps to visas, whatever, sending them from Afghanistan to Pakistan and individuals, cell members.”
[color=red]The attack, conducted almost simultaneously with an attack on the U.S. embassy in Tanzania, left 213 people in Nairobi dead, including 12 Americans, and more than 4,500 wounded.[/color]
Attash heard evidence against him charging that he facilitated and participated in close-combat training in the Lowgar training camp in Afghanistan in late 1999. Graduates of the class reportedly met with bin Laden, who lectured about the operational details of the East Africa bombings.
The following year, Attash is alleged to have helped plan and carry out the attack on the USS Cole during a refueling stop in the Yemeni port of Aden. Seventeen U.S. sailors were killed and 39 others wounded.
Attash said he helped plan the attack, purchased the boat and explosives used, and recruited the people who conducted it. He said he was in Kandahar with bin Laden during the actual attack.
defenselink.mil/news/newsart … x?id=32503[/quote]
It appears that this actor was trained and determined to proceed with death and destruction.
Gitmo works.