QUES: Zakariya Essabar, a Moroccan citizen, moved to Germany in February 1997 and to Hamburg in 1998, where he studied medical technology. Soon after moving to Hamburg, Essabar met Binalshibh and the others through a Turkish mosque. Essabar turned extremist fairly suddenly, probably in 1999, and reportedly pressured one acquaintance with physical force to become more religious, grow a beard, and compel his wife to convert to Islam. Essabar's parents were said to have made repeated but unsuccessful efforts to sway him from this lifestyle. Shortly before the 9/11 attacks, he would travel to Afghanistan to communicate the date for the attacks to the al Qaeda leadership. Mounir el Motassadeq, another Moroccan, came to Germany in 1993, moving to Hamburg two years later to study electrical engineering at theTechnical University. A witness has recalled Motassadeq saying that he would kill his entire family if his religious beliefs demanded it. One of Motassadeq's roommates recalls him referring to Hitler as a "good man" and organizing film sessions that included speeches by Bin Laden. Motassadeq would help conceal the Hamburg group's trip to Afghanistan in late 1999. Abdelghani Mzoudi, also a Moroccan, arrived in Germany in the summer of 1993, after completing university courses in physics and chemistry. Mzoudi studied in Dortmund, Bochum, and Muenster before moving to Hamburg in 1995. Mzoudi described himself as a weak Muslim when he was home in Morocco, but much more devout when he was back in Hamburg. In April 1996, Mzoudi and Motassadeq witnessed the execution of Atta's will. During the course of 1999, Atta and his group became ever more extreme and secretive, speaking only in Arabic to conceal the content of their conversations. 87 When the four core members of the Hamburg cell left Germany to journey to Afghanistan late that year, it seems unlikely that they already knew about the planes operation; no evidence connects them to al Qaeda before that time. Witnesses have attested, however, that their pronouncements reflected ample predisposition toward taking some action against the United States. In short, they fit the bill for Bin Laden, Atef, and KSM. Going to Afghanistan The available evidence indicates that in 1999, Atta, Binalshibh, Shehhi, and Jarrah decided to fight in Chechnya against the Russians.
Do you have any questions?
MY QUESTION: Who were the members of the Hamburg cell?

QUES: The after-action review had treated the CIA as the lead agency for any offensive against al Qaeda, and the principals, at their March 10 meeting, had endorsed strengthening the CIA's capability for that role. To the CTC, that meant proceeding with "The Plan," which it had put forward half a year earlier-hiring and training more case officers and building up the capabilities of foreign security services that provided intelligence via liaison. On occasion, as in Jordan in December 1999, these liaison services took direct action against al Qaeda cells. In the CTC and higher up, the CIA's managers believed that they desperately needed funds just to continue their current counterterrorism effort, for they reckoned that the millennium alert had already used up all of the Center's funds for the current fiscal year; the Bin Laden unit had spent 140 percent of its allocation. Tenet told us he met with Berger to discuss funding for counterterrorism just two days after the principals' meeting. While Clarke strongly favored giving the CIA more money for counterterrorism, he differed sharply with the CIA's managers about where it should come from. They insisted that the CIA had been shortchanged ever since the end of the Cold War. Their ability to perform any mission, counterterrorism included, they argued, depended on preserving what they had, restoring what they had lost since the beginning of the 1990s, and building from there-with across-the-board recruitment and training of new case officers, and the reopening of closed stations. To finance the counterterrorism effort, Tenet had gone to congressional leaders after the 1998 embassy bombings and persuaded them to give the CIA a special supplemental appropriation. Now, in the aftermath of the millennium alert, Tenet wanted a boost in overall funds for the CIA and another supplemental appropriation specifically for counterterrorism. To Clarke, this seemed evidence that the CIA's leadership did not give sufficient priority to the battle against Bin Laden and al Qaeda. He told us that James Pavitt, the head of the CIA's Directorate of Operations, "said if there's going to be money spent on going after Bin Laden, it should be given to him. My view was that he had had a lot of money to do it and a long time to do it, and I didn't want to put more good money after bad." The CIA had a very different attitude: Pavitt told us that while the CIA's Bin Laden unit did"extraordinary and commendable work," his chief of station in London "was just as much part of the al Qaeda struggle as an officer sitting in [the Bin Laden unit]." The dispute had large managerial implications, for Clarke had found Ailies in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).
Do you have any questions?
MY QUESTION: Who insisted that the CIA had been shortchanged ever since the end of the Cold War?

QUES: Washington The Iraqi government has agreed to let U.S. Rep. Tony Hall visit the country next week to assess a humanitarian crisis that has festered since the Gulf War of 1990, Hall's office said Monday. The Dayton Democrat, who has traveled to other crisis points including Sierra Leone and North Korea, will spend three days visiting hospitals and other facilities to seek understanding why aid has been ineffective in stemming malnourishment and other medical problems. Iraq has been under economic sanctions since the war ended, which some say have thwarted the country's ability to recover from the devastation of the bombing campaign. The Persian Gulf War destroyed much of the country's medical infrastructure, according to a report by the World Health Organization. In 1996 the WHO found that much of the population existed in a state of ''semi-starvation.'' Hall will be only the second member of Congress to travel in Iraq since the war, according to Hall's office. The last visitor was then-U.S. Rep. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, who went to help a pair of U.S. oilmen in diplomatic trouble. Hall flies to Amman, Jordan, on Friday, where he'll spend the night before driving to Iraq. Flights are not permitted into Iraq. Hall is to return to Washington on April 22. Story Filed By Cox Newspapers
Do you have any questions?
MY QUESTION:
How many U.S members of Congress visited Iraq before Hall?