MOSUL, Iraq, Sept. 4 (UPI) -- A man captured in August north of al-Qaim, Iraq, had a computer "thumb drive" that contained planning information about the July 7 London suicide bombings, a U.S. military officer has revealed.
Col. Robert Brown, commander of the 1st Brigade 25th Infantry Division in Mosul told United Press International the man was connected to the al-Qaida terrorist network.
He declined to discuss the specific nature of the information on the small computer drive, variants of which store between 8 and 256 megabytes of data, but said it indicated al-Qaida involvement in the attacks on London's bus and subway system.
The drive is the latest piece of information linking the al-Qaida leadership to the bombings, in which four British Moslems killed themselves and 52 others
The Arabic language satellite channel Al-Jazeera last week aired parts of a videotape in which al-Qaida's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, claimed responsibility for the near-simultaneous blasts, believed to have used a potent but easily manufactured home-made explosive called TATP.
The video -- which was sent to al-Jazeera by al-Qaida's al-Sahab media production arm -- also contains the now-traditional martyrdom message from one of the bombers.
Mohammed Sidique Khan, a 30 years old teaching assistant from Dewsbury, needs Leeds in Yorkshire, was one of the three bombers who were British-born Moslems from Pakistani families. The fourth was a West Indian-born immigrant to Britain, and a convert to Islam.
Dressed in a traditional Arab headdress or Khafiyah, Khan calmly tells viewers that Moslems "are at war and I am a soldier."
"Your democratically elected governments continuously perpetuate atrocities against my people all over the world, he says, accusing Western governments of "the bombing, gassing, imprisonment and torture" of Moslems. "Your support of them makes you directly responsible," he says, in an apparent effort to explain the choice of civilian targets.
Although Khan does not directly mention Iraq, Zawahiri calls the attacks "a sip from the cup that Moslems have been drinking from," in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The tape will add to the ongoing debates both about the degree of involvement and control over the attacks by al-Qaida's senior leadership and about the extent to which the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq has made the world more or less safe from terrorism.
Richard Clarke, a career counter-terrorism official who held senior posts in both the Clinton and Bush White House told a luncheon briefing for reporters recently that it was difficult to accurately assess the exact impact of the war in Iraq on the strength of al-Qaida.
But he said "it is difficult to quantify but undeniably true that... there are more people participating [in al-Qaida-linked groups] outside Iraq because of the U.S. presence" there.
U.S. President George W. Bush said prior to the invasion that links between al-Qaida and Iraq's dictator Saddam Hussein created the risk that the regime would pass weapons of mass destruction to terrorists.
Since the invasion, no stockpiles of such weapons have been found and almost nothing has emerged from the voluminous files of Iraqi state security organizations to substantiate pre-war allegations of an alliance between the secular Baathist regime and the Islamic extremist terror network.
Senior U.S. military officers in Iraq, however, say that -- whatever might have been true before the invasion -- the country is now the main battlefield between the United States and al-Qaida.
"I don't think anyone's done a good enough job explaining" the nexus between Iraq and al-Qaida, Brown said.
U.S. Central Command estimates about 100 to 150 "foreign fighters" cross Iraq's porous borders each month. These men by and large man the suicide bombs, "martyring" themselves in the most devastating weapon the insurgents and terrorists have in their arsenal.
Lt. Col. Mike Gibler, commander of the 3rd battalion of the 21st Infantry Regiment, said the suicide bombers are comprised of two kinds of people. Some are jihadists who think they are coming to Iraq to fight Americans with guns or bombs and don't know they have been recruited for suicide missions. They are isolated, forced to watch videotapes of propaganda to brainwash them, and finally told if they refuse their mission their families will be killed.
He said a number of would-be bombers have been captured during raids and interrogated.
The second group, says Gibler, "is blind with rage, blind with anger for just what America stands for. It's the 'haves' and the 'have-nots,' and a lot of the 'have nots' believe it's our fault.
"They are usually college kids who have a degree and want to make a million dollars. They know it can be done but they are not gonna be offered the opportunity because 'America is preventing it.'"
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With additional reporting from UPI Homeland and National Security Editor Shaun Waterman in Washington.
