Most of the details of these plots did not make it into the president's 37-minute speech at the White House, but they were eye-opening just the same.
The detainees also provided details about Al Qaeda's specially trained travel facilitators and forgers, whose role was to crank out falsified documents to aid operatives on their terrorist missions around the world.
Some of them spent most of their time -- and a lot of Al Qaeda's money -- trying to help get operatives into the United States for attacks under the direct supervision of Mohammed.
One of them was a relative of Mohammed known as Ammar al-Baluchi, who has been accused of delivering funds to the Sept. 11 hijackers. What hadn't been disclosed was that Al-Baluchi went so far as to marry an Al Qaeda operative named Aafia Siddiqui and send her to the United States to help one of Al Qaeda's soldiers slip into the country.
Siddiqui, a U.S.-educated neuroscientist, remains on the loose and is one of the FBI's most wanted suspected terrorists. But her connections to Al Qaeda, and especially to Mohammed and the terror network's inner circle, had never been disclosed.
The administration also released details about the man that Siddiqui allegedly helped infiltrate the United States in preparation for attack, Majid Khan. Khan had links to top Al Qaeda operatives, including Mohammed, who assigned him to conduct research on poisoning U.S. water reservoirs. The Pakistani national, also known as Yusif, attended high school in Baltimore in the late 1990s.
Additional information about the 14 CIA detainees was released Wednesday, including:
* Abu Faraj Libbi, a Libyan, was the former No. 3 leader of Al Qaeda and the most wanted man in Pakistan. He allegedly masterminded two attempts to assassinate Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf. But as Al Qaeda's "general manager" he also was heavily involved in financially supporting not only Al Qaeda operatives but their families as well.
* Abu Zubeida, a Palestinian raised in Saudi Arabia, was believed to be a link between Osama bin Laden and many Al Qaeda cells around the world. But he also was believed to be organizing an attack on Israel at the time of his capture in 2002, using at least $50,000 from donors in Saudi Arabia. And in November 2001, Zubeida helped smuggle Abu Musab Zarqawi, the now-deceased leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, and some 70 other Arab fighters out of Afghanistan and into Iran.
