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.