Long before the world heard the name Osama bin Laden there was another name which was often associated with terrorist activity around the world – Abu Nidal.
Nidal was born in 1937 in what was then still Palestinian Jaffa. Like bin Laden, his father was a wealthy businessman. Nidal was the child of one of his father’s 13 wives but one who the family shunned after the father died because she was a 16 year-old household servant at the time of her marriage.
Nidal’s father died in 1945 and the family property was lost in 1948 when Israel came into existence. Nidal, (whose real name was Sabri Khalil al-Banna) became politically active in the 1960’s. But his as yet, non-violent activism, caused him to leave Saudi Arabia and eventually settle in the West Bank town of Nablus. When Israel captured the West Bank during the 1967 War, Nidal again fled and his political activism and his personality became darker and violent.
Nadal would eventually rise to prominence in the Palestine Liberation Organization’s “Fatah” branch. Throughout the 70’s and 80’s he was directly or indirectly linked to numerous attacks from the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre to eventually, the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103, but Nidal’s rage was not exclusively focused on western or Israeli interests. His Fatah cell would eventually breakaway from the PLO and even claim credit for killing a PLO representative. The cell would ultimately become so radically independent that it was referred to simply as ANO (Abu Nidal Organization). By the mid 1980’s Nidal was forced into exile in Libya, hiding from not only Israeli and American agents but from Jordanian efforts to extradite him to face a death sentence in Jordan.
In the wake of western attacks and sanctions arising from the Pam AM 103 bombing, Libyan leader Gaddafi felt Nidal’s presence in his country was too great a liability. Already deemed persona non-grata throughout the Arab middle east, Nidal finally found refuge under the protection of Saddam Hussein and would spend the remainder of his life in a Baghdad apartment until his death on or around August 16, 2002.
The events surrounding Nidal’s death are a confusing and contradictory weave encompassing everything from suicide to assassination to a pitched gun battle with Iraq security forces motivated by a belief that Nidal may have been conspiring to assist the United States in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. Some reports state that documents found in Nidal’s apartment after his death indicate he was engaged in finding links between Hussein and bin Laden. These various accounts of how Nidal died are summarized on several Internet sites.
On May 6, 2011, in the wake of the U.S. killing of Osama bin Laden, CNN's Anderson Cooper interviewed former National Security Advisory and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for her reaction to the Bin Laden story. As his last question, Cooper inquired, “Was there ever a moment over the years -- you know, there were a time -- I remember an article in "The Washington Post" I think in 2003 and 2004, saying that the trail had gone stone cold -- was there ever a time where you felt we may not get this guy?"
Rice replied, "Oh, no, I always felt we would get him. I didn't know when. And I rememberwhen we killed a terrorist, Abu Nidal, and you know what, that was some 20 years after. And so, I thought, we'll stay after this." (Emphasis Added) (Video)
To date, Rice’s comment has gone totally ignored by both CNN and other news media who were alerted to the apparent revelation that the National Security Advisor to President George W. Bush at the time of Nidal’s death had stated flatly, “when we killed a terrorist, Abu Nidal, and you know what, that was some 20 years after.”
First, the perspective offered of “some 20 years later” seems to preclude a simple misstatement by Rice and appears to be a clear recall of an event that occurred “some 20 years,” (23 to be exact) after the bombing of Pan Am 103. But why, if as stated in various news reports and by some mainstream publications including Jane’s Defense Weekly, would we kill Nidal if he was assisting the US in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, and in particular with finding justifications for that invasion? Why would Saddam’s security forces allow suspicion to fall on them when if, as Rice seems to indicate, Nidal was killed by a secret American hit team? The abiding question of whose side Nidal was on at the time of his death opens the door to whose side was he loyal to in previous years. Were Nidal and his group, like Bin Laden and Al Qaeda - at some time in the past in collaboration with western intelligence? According to a number of published reports in Great Britain, mostly ignored in the US, the answer would seem to be yes.
The link between Nidal, the CIA and Britain’s MI5 is woven into the much larger scandal involving BCCI, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International. BCCI was shuttered in 1991 but not before establishing a documented legacy of corruption, money laundering and fraud on a massive scale. Its list of documented clients ranged from Columbian drug cartels to Col. Oliver North who maintained accounts there in order to funnel money for arms purchases by the Nicaraguan Contras.
Although officially barred from operating in the United States, BCCI investors were able to purchase Washington based Financial General Bankshares which was morphed into First American Bankshares and was shown for all purposes to function as a US based branch for BCCI.
A lengthy investigation conducted in Great Britain following the collapse of BCCI indicated that Nidal was actively engaged in money and arms trafficking deals, some which may have been directly or indirectly involving the CIA or MI5. One of the most intriguing elements of the BCCI story involves another mysterious suicide death – the case of American author Danny Casolaroin Martinsburg, West Virginia in August of 1991. Casolaro reportedly was on the verge of releasing a political nuclear bomb squarely in the lap of President George H. Bush. Casolaro had developed and reportedly nearly completed documentation of a conspiracy linking the scandals of Inslaw, October Surprise, BCCI and Iran/Contra. He had dubbed the expose ‘The Spider’ and had traveled to Martinsburg to reportedly met a source who had promised to provide the keystone needed to complete the puzzle.
Rice’s apparent revelation would appear to offer some added validity to statements which have been made at various times by critics of George H Bush’s invasion in 2003 and the illusive “weapons of mass destruction” justification. Those critics have proposed that Bush’s father chose not to finish off Saddam Hussein following the successful retaking of Kuwait from the Iraqi Army in 1991 because Hussein had information showing American involvement with and occasional collaboration with terrorists and despots, including Saddam himself. It has been offered that the younger President Bush launched the war in retaliation for a failed assassination attempt against his father by Hussein during a visit to Kuwait in April of 1993 shortly after Bush had left office. President Clinton subsequently authorized a Tomahawk cruise missile attack against the Iraqi Security Force’s headquarters in Baghdad in retaliation for that attempt.. Some have offered that W Bush felt that as long as Hussein was alive and in power, he posed a lethal threat to the legacy of Bush’s father because of information he could reveal about American involvement in the same scandals which formed the backbone of Casolaro’s investigation.
But what threat did Nidal pose? By 2002 he was a terrorist has-been living in constant fear of the Jordanians and under the protection of a regime that had little history of truly helping the Palestinian cause.
Why, at a time when nearly every available resource was supposedly hunting for 911 mastermind Osama bin Laden, would we risk a ‘hit’ team’ on Nidal? If, as Rice’s comment implies, we had the ability to assassinate protected persons within Iraq months prior to our invasion, then why not go after someone critical in the Hussein Regime?
The answer keeps coming back to what Nidal knew and was doing not in 2002, but in 1990-91 when George H Bush was President.
Today’s generation of investigative reporters are either too young to appreciate the implications of Casolaro’s ‘Spider’ or perhaps are old enough and cautious enough to remember it and chose not to revisit it for obvious reasons.
We offer these words in the sincere hope that someday the American news media will again be smart enough and brave enough to ask the truly hard questions…and not relent until they have the truthful answers.
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