Reply #16: Important info! [View All]

[paulthompson]

Peter Lance has just posted something at the Huffington Post explaining how the documentary turned into a whitewash:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-lance/triple-cross-nat-geo-cha_b_28270.html

He explains in some detail about Patrick Fitzgerald's complicity there. Note how Lance reveals that Fitzgerald actually HAD DINNER with Ali Mohamed twice in 1997, and during those meetings Mohamed confessed point blank to all kinds of amazing criminal things. Ali Mohamed talked about being connected to hudreds of al-Qaeda agents and even gave strong hints about the upcoming embassy bombings in Africa. He said he loved bin Laden and was at war with the US. After the meeting, Fitzgerald called Ali Mohamed "the most dangerous man" he'd "ever met" and announced that "we cannot let this man out on the street." But Mohamed continued to live and plot undisturbed in Santa Clara, California for another year, until after the embassy bombings!

Then on October 21, 2003, Fitzgerald said the following under oath before the Senate Judiciary Committee. He's talking about the "wall" - the gap between intelligence agents and prosecutors - but he totally lies about his own past with Ali Mohamed. There's no mention of his meetings with Ali Mohamed or that he'd been very familiar with what Ali Mohamed had been up to going back to at least 1995. He blatantly lies under oath:


Let me review some examples of how the wall played out. On August 1998, al Qaeda struck at the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, nearly simultaneously killing 224 people. The team of FBI agents and prosecutors, which had obtained a sealed indictment of Bin Laden two months earlier, deployed to East Africa and almost immediately learned of al Qaeda's involvement and arrested two bombers in Nairobi. One month later, in September 1998, a man named Ali Mohamed was questioned before a federal grand jury in Manhattan. Ali Mohamed, a California resident, had become a United States citizen in 1989 after serving in the United States Army from 1986. Ali Mohamed lied in that grand jury proceeding and left the courthouse to go to his hotel, followed by FBI agents, but not under arrest. He had imminent plans to fly to Egypt. It was believed at the time that Mohamed lied and that he was involved with the al Qaeda network but Mohamed had not by then been tied to the bombings.

The decision had to be made at that moment whether to charge Mohamed with false statements. If not, Mohamed would leave the country. That difficult decision had to be made without knowing or reviewing the intelligence information on the other side of the "wall." It was ultimately decided to arrest Mohamed that night in his hotel room. As described below, the team got lucky but we never should have had to rely on luck. The prosecution team later obtained access to the intelligence information, including documents obtained from an earlier search of Mohamed's home by the intelligence team on the other side of "the wall." Those documents included direct written communications with al Qaeda members and a library of al Qaeda training materials that would have made the decision far less difficult. (We could only obtain that access after the arrest with the specific permission of the Attorney General of the United States, based upon the fact that we had obligations to provide the defendant with discovery materials and because the intelligence investigation of Mohamed had effectively ended.) The criminal case gathered additional evidence through further investigation.

Mohamed later pleaded guilty in federal court admitting that he was a top trainer to the leadership of al Qaeda and Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and that he had participated in the surveillance of a number of overseas American targets, including the American embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, and had later shown the sketches of that embassy to Bin Laden himself. Mohamed admitted he had trained some of the persons in New York who had been responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Mohamed stated that had he not been arrested on that day in September 1998, he had intended to travel to Afghanistan to rejoin Usama Bin Laden. Thus, while the right decision to arrest was made partly in the dark, the "wall" could easily have caused a different decision that September evening that would have allowed a key player in the al Qaeda network to escape justice for the embassy bombing in Kenya and rejoin Usama Bin Laden in a cave in Afghanistan, instead of going to federal prison.

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So Fitzgerald is finally exposed as a cover up artist and an extremely dishonest prosecutor. A lot more damning information about how Fitzgerald mishandled al-Qaeda investigations will come out in Lance's new book. No wonder Karl Rove and others were never charged in the Valerie Plame case!