U.S. Senate committee reveals Canadian link to Brooklyn Bridge terrorist
OTTAWA — Canada’s “millennium bomber” was communicating with a U.S. alQaida operative who later plotted to topple the Brooklyn Bridge and other targets as part of a suspected wave of post-9/11 attacks, according to a report on the CIA’s torture of detainees.
News of a connection between Ahmed Ressam and Iyman Faris was revealed amid-details of al- Qaida’s North American jihadist cells in the years and mon ths leading to the September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington.
The disclosure is contained in a damning report Tuesday by a Senate committee that accuses the Central Intelligence Agency of running a “deeply flawed” detention and interrogation program that tortured terror suspects in bleak, dungeonlike prisons a decade ago. The spy agency misled Congress and the White House about the extent and effectiveness of its “enhanced interrogation techniques”
Ressam, a failed refugee claimant living in Montreal, was arrested Dec. 14, 1999, at the Canada-U.S. border at Port Angeles, Wash., en route to Los Angeles International Airport with explosives in the trunk of his car. He belonged to a terror cell that included veterans from the Armed Islamic Group — which was fighting to replace the government in Algeria — and veteran jihadist fighters from Bosnia. He is now serving a 37-year prison term for planning to bomb U.S. targets around New Year’s Eve 1999.
Faris, who immigrated to the U.S. from Kashmir in 1994 and was an associate of 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, is serving a 20-year sentence for aiding and abetting terrorism. In late 2002, he investigated the possibility of cutting the cables supporting the Brooklyn Bridge, for what he and Mohammed suggested might have been a second wave planned for New York and Washington to follow the attacks of 2001.
CIA records indicate the Federal Bureau of Investigation opened an international terrorism investigation in March 2001 targeting Faris, then a long-haul truck driver living in Ohio, says the Senate report.
“According to CIA records, the ‘predication of the (FBI’s) Faris investigation was information provided by (foreign) authorities that (revealed) Faris’s telephone number had been called by Islamic extremists operating in France, Belgium, Turkey and Canada, including ‘millennium bomber’ Ahmad (sic) Ressam,’” it says.