Chairman McCaul’s 2011 baby doll claim

Austin U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, a Republican poised to chair the House Committee on Homeland Security, once made a claim about terrorist plotting, baby dolls and Texas.

In March 2011, we rated the claim as True.

Shortly after a Saudi man who attended college in Lubbock was accused of attempting “to use a weapon of mass destruction,” McCaul issued a statement about his “likely” connection to an international terrorist network.
   
Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari’s “intent to use baby dolls to conceal chemical explosives is a rare, little-known method used by Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Ramzi Yousef in the 1995 Bojinka plot in which they planned to blow up 12 jumbo jets over the Pacific Ocean,” McCaul, already a member of the Homeland Security committee, said.
   
Aldawsari was later convicted and sentenced to life in prison, the Associated Press reported.

At the time, we wondered about McCaul’s statement that baby dolls figured into both his case, and the 1995 plot linked to Mohammed, who has described himself as the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and Yousef, convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Upshot: An FBI investigation suggests that Aldawsari could have been considering using a doll to conceal explosives in attacks on U.S. targets, including President George W. Bush’s Dallas home. Other reports also indicate that Mohammed and Yousef planned to use baby dolls to conceal explosives in a 1995 plot.

See our full look, freshly reposted above and to the right.