by Peter Dale Scott
						Pacific News 
						Service, Commentary, Posted: Jun 24, 2004
						
						
						Editor's Note: The name "Ali Mohamed" came up briefly in 
						9/11 Commission hearings. Had commission members done 
						their homework, writes PNS contributor Peter Dale Scott, 
						they could have probed the links between Mohamed and the 
						FBI, which likely released the terrorist years ago in a 
						bungle that may have contributed to the loss of hundreds 
						of lives.
						
						It is clear that important new evidence about al Qaeda 
						has been gathered and released by the 9/11 Commission. 
						But it is also clear that the commission did nothing 
						when a Justice Department official, in commission 
						testimony last week, brazenly covered up the 
						embarrassing relationship of the FBI to a senior al 
						Qaeda operative, Ali Mohamed. By telling the Royal 
						Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) to release Mohamed in 
						1993, the FBI may have contributed to the bombing of the 
						U.S. Embassy in Kenya five years later.
						
						The official testifying was Patrick J. Fitzgerald, U.S. 
						Attorney for Northern Illinois, who prosecuted two 
						terrorism cases involving Mohamed. As Fitzgerald told 
						the commission, Ali Mohamed was an important al Qaeda 
						agent who "trained most of al Qaeda's top leadership," 
						including "persons who would later carry out the 1993 
						World Trade Center bombing."
						
						As for Ali Mohamed's long-known relationship to the FBI, 
						Fitzgerald said only that, "From 1994 until his arrest 
						in 1998, he lived as an American citizen in California, 
						applying for jobs as an FBI translator and working as a 
						security guard for a defense contractor."
						
						Whatever the exact relationship of Mohamed to the FBI, 
						it is clear from the public record that it was much more 
						intimate than simply sending in job applications. Three 
						years ago, Larry C. Johnson, a former State Department 
						and CIA official, faulted the FBI publicly for using 
						Mohamed as an informant, when it should have recognized 
						that the man was a high-ranking terrorist plotting 
						against the United States. In Johnson's words, ""It's 
						possible that the FBI thought they had control of him 
						and were trying to use him, but what's clear is that 
						they did not have control." (San Francisco Chronicle, 
						11/04/01)
						
						Ali Mohamed faced trial in New York in 2000 for his role 
						in the 1998 Nairobi Embassy bombing. He pleaded guilty 
						to a reduced charge of conspiracy and avoided a jury 
						trial. While pleading guilty, Mohamed admitted he had 
						trained some of the persons in New York who had been 
						responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
						
						In Mohamed's plea-bargain testimony, as summarized on a 
						U.S. State Department Web site, he revealed that in late 
						1994 the FBI ordered him to fly from Kenya to New York, 
						and he obeyed. "I received a call from an FBI agent who 
						wanted to speak to me about the upcoming trial of United 
						States v. Abdel Rahman (in connection with the 1993 WTC 
						bombing). I flew back to the United States, spoke to the 
						FBI, but didn't disclose everything that I knew."
						
						One year earlier, according to the Toronto Globe and 
						Mail, Ali Mohamed had been picked up by the RCMP in 
						Canada in the company of an al Qaeda terrorist. Mohamed 
						immediately told the RCMP to make a phone call to his 
						FBI handler. The call quickly secured his release.
						
						The Globe and Mail later concluded that Mohamed "was 
						working with U.S. counter-terrorist agents, playing a 
						double or triple game, when he was questioned in 1993." 
						His companion, Essam Marzouk, is now serving 15 years of 
						hard labor in Egypt after having been arrested in 
						Azerbaijan, according to Canada's National Post 
						newspaper. As of November 2001, Mohamed had still not 
						been sentenced, and was still believed to be supplying 
						information from his prison cell.
						
						The RCMP's release of Mohamed may have affected history. 
						The encounter apparently took place before Mohamed flew 
						to Nairobi, photographed the U.S. Embassy, and took the 
						photo or photos to bin Laden. (According to Mohamed's 
						confession, "Bin Laden looked at the picture of the 
						American Embassy and pointed to where a truck could go 
						as a suicide bomber.")
						The 9/11 
						Commission should have had a serious discussion of the 
						U.S. intelligence agencies' relationship to Mohamed. It 
						has been widely reported, and never denied, that after 
						he first came to the United States from Egypt he worked 
						first for the CIA and then the U.S. Army Special Forces.
						
						Mohamed trained the WTC bombers at an Islamist center in 
						Brooklyn, N.Y, where earlier he had been recruiting and 
						training Arabs for the U.S.-supported Afghan War. A 
						British newspaper, the London Independent, has charged 
						that he was on the U.S. payroll at the time he was 
						training the Arab Afghans, and that the CIA, reviewing 
						the case five years after the 1993 WTC bombing, 
						concluded in an internal document that it was "partly 
						culpable" for the World Trade Center bomb.
						
						The commission may have failed to explore these matters 
						for the same reason it suppressed testimony from a 
						former FBI translator, Sibel Edmonds. She said a foreign 
						organization had penetrated the FBI's translator 
						program. Attorney General John Ashcroft has since 
						ordered Edmonds not to speak further about the matter, 
						asserting "state secrets" privilege.
						
						Sadly, the only public commission discussion of Mohamed 
						came from commission member Timothy Roemer, who naively 
						repeated Fitzgerald's statement and went no further: "He 
						comes to the United States and applies for jobs as an 
						FBI translator and as a defense contractor," Roemer 
						said.
						
						PNS contributor Peter Dale 
						Scott ([email protected]) is a former 
						Canadian diplomat and professor of English at U.C. 
						Berkeley. His most recent book is "Drugs, Oil and War: 
						The United States in Afghanistan, Colombia, and 
						Indochina" (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). Ali Mohamed 
						is treated in Scott's forthcoming book, an examination 
						of off-the-books U.S. forces from 1950 to Iraq. His Web 
						site is here.