JERUSALEM — Pleasing Israel in the process, President Bush issued a new “Most Wanted” list Wednesday, stepping up the worldwide pressure on 22 suspected terrorists, some of whom have been at large for years.
“Terrorism has a face and today we expose it for the world to see,” Bush said in Washington on Wednesday at FBI headquarters, which has been at the epicenter of the massive investigation into the Sept. 11 suicide hijackings. “We list their names, we publicize their pictures, we rob them of their secrecy.”
On the list are Osama bin Laden, his two top deputies, and several members of his Al Qaida network implicated in earlier bombings against U.S. interests overseas.
Also included on the list are three terrorists connected to Hezbollah, including Imad Mugniyah, a founder of the group and a suspect in the bombings of the Israel Embassy and the AMIA Jewish community center in Buenos Aires that left 119 dead in the early 1990s.
Before Sept. 11, U.S. officials considered Mugniyah responsible for the deaths of more Americans around the world than anyone else, CNN reported Wednesday.
A senior official in the Prime Minister’s Office said Wednesday night that the inclusion of three Hezbollah names on the 22 most-wanted terrorist list is significant, because it signals all parties that the United States is “widening its net.”
“Placing these three on the list shows that terrorism is indivisible, and that any attempt to make a distinction between terrorism against occupation and terrorism against the twin towers is not possible. The Palestinians are trying to draw distinctions, but it doesn’t work. You can’t exonerate one organization, because then the whole war on terror will crumble,” he said.
The official said that as the U.S. investigation of bin Laden’s terror network widens, links will be found among bin Laden and groups like Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
He said Secretary of State Colin Powell has let Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat know that he has to arrest terrorists, and that if he doesn’t and there is a major attack in Israel, the U.S. will not hold Israel back from retaliating.
“The U.S. is in no moral position to rebuke Israel for taking self-defense action, when it is invoking its own moral and legal right of self defense for what it is doing in Afghanistan, and even received a U.N. Security Council resolution confirming that right. What is good for the U.S., is good for us as well,” he said.
Commenting on the 22 names on the list, Powell said, “They have blood on their hands from Sept. 11 and from other acts against America in Kenya, Tanzania and Yemen.”
Powell also announced a State Department reward program offering large bounties for assistance that leads to the terrorists’ arrest.
The 22 are the most dangerous terrorists, Bush said, “the leaders, key supporters, planners and strategists. They must be found, they will be stopped.”
The White House was also working with the television show “America’s Most Wanted” to put together a special broadcast on the list, officials said. And Attorney General John Ashcroft created a “9/11 Task Force” within the Justice Department that will handle terrorism case prosecutions and focus on preventing further attacks.
The task force will comprise prosecutors from U.S. attorney’s offices in New York and northern Virginia and from the department’s terrorism and violent crimes unit.
The aim is to centralize information on terrorism and formulate indictments for cases, said Justice Department spokeswoman Susan Dryden.
Ashcroft said the new list will boost global publicity for the U.S. manhunt and leave terrorists “no place to hide.”
The list identifies only earlier-indicted defendants and not suspects in the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
Listed just below bin Laden’s name among those indicted for the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania are two Egyptians, Ayman al-Zawahri and Muhammad Atef, who long have been identified as bin Laden’s most trusted lieutenants.
Officials have said evidence gathered since Sept. 11 has connected both men to the suicide-hijacking plot.
Interpol, the international police organization, also issued an arrest warrant for Zawahri since the hijackings that alleges he “masterminded several terrorist operations in Egypt” and is “accused of criminal complicity and management for the purpose of committing premeditated murders.”
Zawahri, a doctor by training, is the former head of the Egyptian al-Jihad terrorist group that merged in 1998 with bin Laden’s Al Qaida network. Al-Jihad had been linked to terrorist activities dating to the assassination of Anwar Sadat 10 years ago this month.
Atef, a former police official, has been identified by U.S. authorities as a key military strategist and training director for bin Laden.
Others who made the most-wanted list were several people identified last week by British Prime Minister Tony Blair during a speech laying out evidence against bin Laden’s network.