Interview with Osama bin Laden. Denies his Involvement in 9/11Full text of Pakistani paper’s Sept 2001 “exclusive” interview
By Global Research
Global Research, May 09, 2011
Daily Ummat in Urdu (Translation into English by BBC Worldwide Monitoring September 29, 2001 28 September 2001Theme: 9/11 & ‘War on Terrorism’
854 79 103 7276
Global Research Editor’s Note
We bring to the attention of our readers the following text of Osama bin Laden’s interview with Ummat, a Pakistani daily, published in Karachi on September 28, 2001. It was translated into English by the BBC World Monitoring Service and made public on September 29, 2001.
FBI HAS NO HARD EVIDENCE OF BIN LADEN INVOVEMENT IN 9-11
U.S. GOVT DROPS CHARGES AGAINST BIN LADEN: NEVER INDICTED FOR 9-11
9-11 EXPOSED
The authenticity of this interview, which is available in recognized electronic news archives, is confirmed.
Osama bin Laden categorically denies his involvement in the 9/11 attacks.
Bin Laden’s statements in this interview are markedly different from those made in the alleged Osama video tapes.
In this interview, Osama bin Laden exhibits an understanding of US foreign policy. He expresses his views regarding the loss of life on 9/11. He also makes statements as to who, in his opinion, might be the likely perpetrator of the September 11 attacks.
This is an important text which has not been brought to the attention of Western public opinion.
We have highlighted key sections of this interview. It is our hope that the text of this interview, published barely a week before the onset of the war on Afghanistan, will contribute to a better understanding of the history of Al Qaeda, the role of Osama bin Laden and the tragic events of September 11, 2001.
Michel Chossudovsky, May 9, 2011
Originally aired days after 9-11
Full text of September 2001 Pakistani paper’s “exclusive” interview with Usamah Bin-Ladin
Ummat (in Urdu), Karachi, 28 September 2001, pp. 1 and 7.
Ummat’s introduction
Kabul: Prominent Arab mojahed holy warrior Usamah Bin-Ladin has said that he or his al-Qa’idah group has nothing to do with the 11 September suicidal attacks in Washington and New York. He said the US government should find the attackers within the country. In an exclusive interview with daily “Ummat”, he said these attacks could be the act of those who are part of the American system and are rebelling against it and working for some other system. Or, Usamah said, this could be the act of those who want to make the current century a century of conflict between Islam and Christianity. Or, the American Jews, who are opposed to President Bush ever since the Florida elections, might be the masterminds of this act. There is also a great possibility of the involvement of US intelligence agencies, which need billions of dollars worth of funds every year. He said there is a government within the government in the United States.
The secret agencies, he said, should be asked as to who are behind the attacks. Usamah said support for attack on Afghanistan was a matter of need for some Muslim countries and compulsion for others. However, he said, he was thankful to the courageous people of Pakistan who erected a bulwark before the wrong forces. He added that the Islamic world was attaching great expectations with Pakistan and, in time of need, “we will protect this bulwark by sacrificing of lives”.
Following is the interview in full detail:
Ummat: You have been accused of involvement in the attacks in New York and Washington. What do you want to say about this? If you are not involved, who might be?
Usamah [Osama bin Laden]: In the name of Allah, the most beneficent, the most merciful. Praise be to Allah, Who is the creator of the whole universe and Who made the earth as an abode for peace, for the whole mankind. Allah is the Sustainer, who sent Prophet Muhammad for our guidance. I am thankful to the Ummat Group of Publications, which gave me the opportunity to convey my viewpoint to the people, particularly the valiant and Momin true Muslim people of Pakistan who refused to believe in lie of the demon.
I have already said that I am not involved in the 11 September attacks in the United States. As a Muslim, I try my best to avoid telling a lie. I had no knowledge of these attacks, nor do I consider the killing of innocent women, children, and other humans as an appreciable act. Islam strictly forbids causing harm to innocent women, children, and other people.
Such a practice is forbidden ever in the course of a battle. It is the United States, which is perpetrating every maltreatment on women, children, and common people of other faiths, particularly the followers of Islam. All that is going on in Palestine for the last 11 months is sufficient to call the wrath of God upon the United States and Israel.
There is also a warning for those Muslim countries, which witnessed all these as a silent spectator. What had earlier been done to the innocent people of Iraq, Chechnya, and Bosnia?
Only one conclusion could be derived from the indifference of the United States and the West to these acts of terror and the patronage of the tyrants by these powers that America is an anti-Islamic power and it is patronizing the anti-Islamic forces. Its friendship with the Muslim countries is just a show, rather deceit. By enticing or intimidating these countries, the United States is forcing them to play a role of its choice. Put a glance all around and you will see that the slaves of the United States are either rulers or enemies of Muslims .
The US has no friends, nor does it want to keep any because the prerequisite of friendship is to come to the level of the friend or consider him at par with you. America does not want to see anyone equal to it. It expects slavery from others. Therefore, other countries are either its slaves or subordinates.
However, our case is different. We have pledged slavery to God Almighty alone and after this pledge there is no possibility to become the slave of someone else. If we do that, it will be disregardful to both our Sustainer and his fellow beings. Most of the world nations upholding their freedom are the religious ones, which are the enemies of United States, or the latter itself considers them as its enemies. Or the countries, which do not agree to become its slaves, such as China, Iran, Libya, Cuba, Syria, and the former Russia as received .
Whoever committed the act of 11 September are not the friends of the American people. I have already said that we are against the American system, not against its people, whereas in these attacks, the common American people have been killed.
According to my information, the death toll is much higher than what the US government has stated. But the Bush administration does not want the panic to spread. The United States should try to trace the perpetrators of these attacks within itself; the people who are a part of the US system, but are dissenting against it. Or those who are working for some other system; persons who want to make the present century as a century of conflict between Islam and Christianity so that their own civilization, nation, country, or ideology could survive. They can be any one, from Russia to Israel and from India to Serbia. In the US itself, there are dozens of well-organized and well-equipped groups, which are capable of causing a large-scale destruction. Then you cannot forget the American Jews, who are annoyed with President Bush ever since the elections in Florida and want to avenge him.
Then there are intelligence agencies in the US, which require billions of dollars worth of funds from the Congress and the government every year. This funding issue was not a big problem till the existence of the former Soviet Union but after that the budget of these agencies has been in danger.
They needed an enemy. So, they first started propaganda against Usamah and Taleban and then this incident happened. You see, the Bush administration approved a budget of 40bn dollars. Where will this huge amount go? It will be provided to the same agencies, which need huge funds and want to exert their importance.
Now they will spend the money for their expansion and for increasing their importance. I will give you an example. Drug smugglers from all over the world are in contact with the US secret agencies. These agencies do not want to eradicate narcotics cultivation and trafficking because their importance will be diminished. The people in the US Drug Enforcement Department are encouraging drug trade so that they could show performance and get millions of dollars worth of budget. General Noriega was made a drug baron by the CIA and, in need, he was made a scapegoat. In the same way, whether it is President Bush or any other US president, they cannot bring Israel to justice for its human rights abuses or to hold it accountable for such crimes. What is this? Is it not that there exists a government within the government in the United Sates? That secret government must be asked as to who made the attacks.
Ummat: A number of world countries have joined the call of the United States for launching an attack on Afghanistan. These also include a number of Muslim countries. Will Al-Qa’idah declare a jihad against these countries as well?
Usamah: I must say that my duty is just to awaken the Muslims; to tell them as to what is good for them and what is not. What does Islam says and what the enemies of Islam want?
Al-Qa’idah was set up to wage a jihad against infidelity, particularly to encounter the onslaught of the infidel countries against the Islamic states. Jihad is the sixth undeclared element of Islam. The first five being the basic holy words of Islam, prayers, fast, pilgrimage to Mecca, and giving alms Every anti-Islamic person is afraid of it. Al-Qa’idah wants to keep this element alive and active and make it part of the daily life of the Muslims. It wants to give it the status of worship. We are not against any Islamic country nor we consider a war against an Islamic country as jihad.
We are in favour of armed jihad only against those infidel countries, which are killing innocent Muslim men, women, and children just because they are Muslims. Supporting the US act is the need of some Muslim countries and the compulsion of others. However, they should think as to what will remain of their religious and moral position if they support the attack of the Christians and the Jews on a Muslim country like Afghanistan. The orders of Islamic shari’ah jurisprudence for such individuals, organizations, and countries are clear and all the scholars of the Muslim brotherhood are unanimous on them. We will do the same, which is being ordered by the Amir ol-Momenin the commander of the faithful Mola Omar and the Islamic scholars. The hearts of the people of Muslim countries are beating with the call of jihad. We are grateful to them.
Ummat: The losses caused in the attacks in New York and Washington have proved that giving an economic blow to the US is not too difficult. US experts admit that a few more such attacks can bring down the American economy. Why is al-Qa’idah not targeting their economic pillars?
Usamah: I have already said that we are not hostile to the United States. We are against the system, which makes other nations slaves of the United States, or forces them to mortgage their political and economic freedom. This system is totally in control of the American Jews, whose first priority is Israel, not the United States. It is simply that the American people are themselves the slaves of the Jews and are forced to live according to the principles and laws laid by them. So, the punishment should reach Israel. In fact, it is Israel, which is giving a blood bath to innocent Muslims and the US is not uttering a single word.
Ummat: Why is harm not caused to the enemies of Islam through other means, apart from the armed struggle? For instance, inciting the Muslims to boycott Western products, banks, shipping lines, and TV channels.
Usamah: The first thing is that Western products could only be boycotted when the Muslim fraternity is fully awakened and organized. Secondly, the Muslim companies should become self-sufficient in producing goods equal to the products of Western companies. Economic boycott of the West is not possible unless economic self-sufficiency is attained and substitute products are brought out. You see that wealth is scattered all across the Muslim world but not a single TV channel has been acquired which can preach Islamic injunctions according to modern requirements and attain an international influence. Muslim traders and philanthropists should make it a point that if the weapon of public opinion is to be used, it is to be kept in the hand. Today’s world is of public opinion and the fates of nations are determined through its pressure. Once the tools for building public opinion are obtained, everything that you asked for can be done.
Ummat: The entire propaganda about your struggle has so far been made by the Western media. But no information is being received from your sources about the network of Al-Qa’idah and its jihadi successes. Would you comment?
Usamah: In fact, the Western media is left with nothing else. It has no other theme to survive for a long time. Then we have many other things to do. The struggle for jihad and the successes are for the sake of Allah and not to annoy His bondsmen. Our silence is our real propaganda. Rejections, explanations, or corrigendum only waste your time and through them, the enemy wants you to engage in things which are not of use to you. These things are pulling you away from your cause.
The Western media is unleashing such a baseless propaganda, which make us surprise but it reflects on what is in their hearts and gradually they themselves become captive of this propaganda. They become afraid of it and begin to cause harm to themselves. Terror is the most dreaded weapon in modern age and the Western media is mercilessly using it against its own people. It can add fear and helplessness in the psyche of the people of Europe and the United States. It means that what the enemies of the United States cannot do, its media is doing that. You can understand as to what will be the performance of the nation in a war, which suffers from fear and helplessness.
Ummat: What will the impact of the freeze of al-Qa’idah accounts by the US?
Usamah: God opens up ways for those who work for Him. Freezing of accounts will not make any difference for Al-Qa’idah or other jihad groups. With the grace of Allah, al-Qa’idah has more than three such alternative financial systems, which are all separate and totally independent from each other. This system is operating under the patronage of those who love jihad. What to say of the United States, even the combined world cannot budge these people from their path.
These people are not in hundreds but in thousands and millions. Al-Qa’idah comprises of such modern educated youths who are aware of the cracks inside the Western financial system as they are aware of the lines in their hands. These are the very flaws of the Western fiscal system, which are becoming a noose for it and this system could not recuperate in spite of the passage of so many days.
Ummat: Are there other safe areas other than Afghanistan, where you can continue jihad?
Usamah: There are areas in all parts of the world where strong jihadi forces are present, from Indonesia to Algeria, from Kabul to Chechnya, from Bosnia to Sudan, and from Burma to Kashmir. Then it is not the problem of my person. I am helpless fellowman of God, constantly in the fear of my accountability before God. It is not the question of Usamah but of Islam and, in Islam too, of jihad. Thanks to God, those waging a jihad can walk today with their heads raised. Jihad was still present when there was no Usamah and it will remain as such even when Usamah is no longer there. Allah opens up ways and creates loves in the hearts of people for those who walk on the path of Allah with their lives, property, and children. Believe it, through jihad, a man gets everything he desires. And the biggest desire of a Muslim is the after life. Martyrdom is the shortest way of attaining an eternal life.
Ummat: What do you say about the Pakistan government policy on Afghanistan attack?
Usamah: We are thankful to the Momin and valiant people of Pakistan who erected a blockade in front of the wrong forces and stood in the first file of battle. Pakistan is a great hope for the Islamic brotherhood. Its people are awakened, organized, and rich in the spirit of faith. They backed Afghanistan in its war against the Soviet Union and extended every help to the mojahedin and the Afghan people. Then these are very Pakistanis who are standing shoulder by shoulder with the Taleban. If such people emerge in just two countries, the domination of the West will diminish in a matter of days. Our hearts beat with Pakistan and, God forbid, if a difficult time comes we will protect it with our blood. Pakistan is sacred for us like a place of worship. We are the people of jihad and fighting for the defence of Pakistan is the best of all jihads to us. It does not matter for us as to who rules Pakistan. The important thing is that the spirit of jihad is alive and stronger in the hearts of the Pakistani people.
Copyright Ummat in Urdu, BBC translation in English, 2001
Read about Osama Bin Laden in Michel Chossudovsky’s international best-seller
According to Chossudovsky, the “war on terrorism” is a complete fabrication based on the illusion that one man, Osama bin Laden, outwitted the $40 billion-a-year American intelligence apparatus. The “war on terrorism” is a war of conquest. Globalisation is the final march to the “New World Order”, dominated by Wall Street and the U.S. military-industrial complex.
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Ali Mohammed Triple Infiltration Spy
Peter Lance
TRIPLE CROSS: Nat Geo Channel’s Whitewash of the Ali Mohamed Story
In the fall of 2005 I was approached by Jonathan Towers, producer of Inside 9/11, a four-hour documentary on the road to 9/11 in which I was one of 60 journalists and government officials interviewed. I told Towers that I was working on a new investigative book exposing FBI negligence in its nine year failure to stop Ali A. Mohamed, al Qaeda’s chief spy who infiltrated the Bureau, the CIA and the Green Berets at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
Towers immediately optioned my research and flew me to Washington where I presentedTRIPLE CROSS, my new book to John Ford, programming president of the Nat Geo Channel. He bought the project in the room, declaring, “I don’t know how we can’t do a documentary.”
Over Christmas I wrote a 12 page ten-act treatment outlining the two key parts of the Ali Mohammed story: First, how he’d come to the U.S. in 1985, seduced a California woman into marriage, enlisted in the U.S. Army and got himself assigned to the JFK Special Warfare School at Bragg. From there, as he stole top secret documents for his chief sponsor, al Qaeda’s No. 2 Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mohamed commuted to New York City on weekends where he trained key members of the first WTC bombing cell and the notorious “Day of Terror” cell responsible for a plot to blow up the U.N. and the bridges and tunnels into Manhattan.
In 1991 Mohamed moved bin Laden and 100’s of al Qaeda terrorists from Afghanistan to Sudan, set up al Qaeda’s training camps in Khartoum and literally wrote al Qaeda’s manual of terror. In 1993 he trained members of the al Qaeda contingent that downed two U.S. Blackhawk helicopters in Somalia, brokered a meeting between bin Laden and the head ofHezbollah and personally took the pictures of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi that Osama bin Laden himself used to target the suicide truck bombs that killed 224 in Kenya in 1998.
That part of my research was presented in the Nat Geo documentary that aired on Monday.
But that was only half of my story. The other half was the astonishing saga of how the two bin Laden “offices of origin” — the FBI’s New York Office (NYO) and the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the SDNY, allowed Mohamed to operate with impunity for years. How key special agents in the bin Laden Squad (I-49) like Jack Cloonan desperately played catch-up as Mohamed planned the Embassy bombings. How John Zent, Ali’s west coast control agent was totally outgunned by him, getting caught up as a material witness in a grisly triple homicide in Fresno in 1992 when he should have been riding herd over the al Qaeda sleeper. How it was Zent who vouched for Ali and got him released from Canadian custody in 1993 – allowing him the freedom to help plan the Blackhawk Down operation and theEmbassy bombing plot.
My most astonishing, findings involved Patrick Fitzgerald, the former head of Organized Crime and Terrorism in the SDNY, who had allowed Ali to remain free as early as 1994 even though he named him as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Day of Terror case. Another of my key findings was that Fitzgerald buried probative evidence of an al Qaeda New York cell in 1996.
Beginning in January 1996 Fitzgerald effectively ran Squad I-49, but I learned that despite wiretaps on the key cell members and hard evidence in 1997 that Ali Mohamed (an FBI informant) was a major player in the Embassy bombing plot – he allowed him to remain free.
Most shocking were two face to face meetings Fitzgerald had with Mohamed in 1997. After the first meeting in April “Fitzie,” as Cloonan called him, declared Ali “the most dangerous man” he’d “ever met” and announced that “we cannot let this man out on the street.”
But Fitzgerald did, even though in October of 1997 Ali told him that he loved bin Laden and didn’t need a fatwa to declare war against the U.S. where he’d become a naturalized citizen. Fitzgerald had convicted blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and 9 others for seditious conspiracy two years earlier, yet he permitted Mohamed to operate in the open and didn’t arrest him until after the simultaneous truck bombings in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7th, 1998 which followed Ali Mohamed’s 1993 surveillance with surgical precision.
Fitzgerald and Cloonan then took more than 18 months to get a plea bargain out of Mohamed, who never truly betrayed al Qaeda. They kept him in Manhattan Federal jail for 9 months on a John Doe warrant for fear the media would get wind of their negligence and actually prevented him from testifying in the Embassy bombing trial in 2001 because of the embarrassment that cross-examination of Mohamed would cause the Bureau and the Justice Department which had allowed bin Laden’s top spy to work as an FBI informant.
Worse, while they had Ali in custody for three years, Fitzgerald and Cloonan failed to extract the 9/11 plot from him, even though they knew that the plot had commenced in 1994 in Manila, almost four years before Ali’s capture. As the man who had lived with bin Laden and personally trained his security detail, Mohamed knew every twist and turn of it.
Within days of 9/11 Cloonan rushed backed from Yemen and interviewed Ali, whom the Feds had allowed to slip into witness protection, and demanded to know the details of the plot. At that point Ali wrote it all out – including details of how he’d counseled would-be hijackers on how to smuggle box cutters on board aircraft and where to sit, to effect the airline seizures.
In effect, my telling of the Ali Mohamed story holds Cloonan, Fitzgerald and a host of other key Feds responsible for not stopping the 1998 Embassy bombings or the 9/11 plot.
And yet not a word of that story showed up in the two-hour documentary entitled “Triple Cross: Bin Laden’s spy in America” which aired Monday night on the Nat Geo Channel. Why? Because Nat Geo allowed Jack Cloonan to become the effective “narrator” of the film. He never once suggested that Fitzgerald was in any way at fault. He never mentioned how Fitzie had failed to keep Ali off the street. Nor did Cloonan name John Zent, Ali’s hapless California “control” agent, who was snookered by him for years.
How did this happen? In June, in the midst of script writing the doc of which I was to be the principal narrator, executive producer and editorial voice, the Nat Geo Channel and Towers Productions knuckled under to Cloonan and two other key Feds: former U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White and former NYO Joint Terrorism Task Force investigator Det. Tommy Corrigan.
My contract with Towers stipulated that I was to get all interview transcripts immediately after on-camera shoots in order to incorporate the details in the book’s manuscript – Yet these three ex Feds demanded that Nat Geo keep the research from me and they simplyacquiesced.
I couldn’t go on camera to narrate the doc without these key interviews, so NGC cut me out of the production and post production process – even refusing to send me a rough cut of the doc for fact-checking unless I signed a non-disparagement agreement.
All of this is documented in a series of letters between me and Nat Geo Channel executives contained (along with the January 2006 treatment) in a press release on my website.
In effect, NGC ended up replacing me with Jack Cloonan, one of the very Feds that my research had found grossly negligent. Cloonan had two and a half years from January 1996 to August 1998 to build a file on Ali and interdict the Embassy plot and yet, despite evidence from I-49’s own files of Ali’s direct links to senior Embassy plotters, Cloonan, Fitzgerald and other top Feds failed to detect the plot.
In February of 2001, Fitzgerald went on to prosecute three relatively peripheral players in the plot and cemented his reputation by convicting them of an act of terror that his own “bin Laden squad” had failed to prevent. The fourth operative, Wadih El-Hage had been on the FBI’s radar since 1991. Ali Mohamed had stayed in his Kenyan home in the mid 90’s as they plotted the bombings. Another agent in Fitzie’s squad Dan Coleman, had searched El-Hage’s home a year before the bombings and found direct links to Ali Mohamed and yet Fitzgerald failed to connect the dots.
But the viewers of TRIPLE CROSS – the Nat Geo documentary on Monday night never saw any of this evidence critical of the Feds because Nat Geo Channel, allowed the story of FBI failures in the Ali Mohamed case to be told from the Bureau’s point of view.
It was like doing Schindler’s List from Hitler’s perspective.
The casualty of all of this was the truth – and under the guise of a documentary which Nat Geo Channel claimed was “based in part” on my book, they perpetrated a factual distortion unknown in the recent history of broadcast journalism.
Why does any of it matter and why is this not simply a case of a disgruntled writer, unhappy at a television adaptation of his work? Because going in, the Nat Geo Channel bought a documentary from a five-time Emmy winning reporter that, once and for all, would expose the negligence of the Dept. of Justice on the road to 9/11. See the treatment that they green lit. It’s at the end of the August 27th, 2006 press release.
This matters because key Feds who covered-up probative al Qaeda intelligence in 1996 remain in senior positions at Justice. Fitzgerald is U.S. Attorney for Chicago and Special Prosecutor in the CIA leak case. Valerie Caproni, who supported Fitzgerald’s 1996 burial of evidence of an active al Qaeda cell in New York, is now the FBI’s general counsel.
Most importantly, as I discovered after five years of research, the FBI has failed to reform post 9/11. After more than $600 million spent on an updated computer system to track bin Laden, they have scrapped the “virtual case file” system and FBI Director Robert Muellertold Congress in 2005 that it will be 2009 before they have the same ability to connect the dots that most Americans have using Google and other search engines.
Just months ago it was reported that many agents in the FBI’s flagship “bin Laden” New York office didn’t even have access to e-mail – while al Qaeda remains a tightly organized threat.
Further, as I report in TRIPLE CROSS (the book) Dietrich Snell, a key SDNY prosecutor who served with Fitzgerald, covered up crucial evidence of FBI negligence before the 9/11 Commission and flushed key links between al Qaeda and the New York cell of blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman that were turned-up in the year 2000 by the Army’s Operation Able Danger.
Monday night’s documentary gave lip service to the tragic Ali Mohamed story but failed to provide a single word of critical analysis to help viewers understand what a disservice Feds like Cloonan and Fitzgerald did to this country in causing citizens to rely on the Justice Department to protect them, while they were continually outgunned by bin Laden’s #1 spy.
When my book comes out I’ll connect those dots and set the record straight. But for those viewers who thought that they got the truth on Ali Mohamed from the Nat Geo Channel, I can assure them, as the principal investigative reporter to uncover his story, what they got was a whitewash.
http://www.democracynow.org/2006/11/29/triple_cross_journalist_peter_lance_on
Contact: Peter Lance: http://www.peterlance.com
Triple Cross: Journalist Peter Lance on How Bin Laden’s Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets and the FBI–And Why Patrick Fitzgerald Failed to Stop Him
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TOPICS
New details have emerged about how an al Qaeda spy named Ali Mohamed penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets and the FBIbefore the 9/11 attacks. We speak with investigative journalist Peter Lance about his new book, “Triple Cross.” [includes rush transcript]
Ali Mohamed was a member of Osama bin Laden’s inner circle who operated freely within the United States for years before 9/11. Despite being a top al Qaeda operative, he managed to become a naturalized US citizen, join the US Army, get posted to the military base where Green Berets and Delta Force train and infiltrate both the CIA and FBI. And while he was an FBI informant he smuggled bin Laden in and out of Afghanistan and helped plan the attacks on US embassies in Africa. He ended up playing a pivotal role in 9/11.
Journalist Peter Lance joins me here in our firehouse studio. He is a five-time Emmy Award-winning investigative reporter and a former ABC News correspondent. His new book is called “Triple Cross: How Bin Laden’s Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets and the FBI–And Why Patrick Fitzgerald Failed to Stop Him.”
- Peter Lance, five-time Emmy Award-winning investigative reporter and a former ABC News correspondent. His latest book is “Triple Cross.” His previous books include “1000 Years For Revenge” and “Cover Up.”
Website: Peterlance.com
TRANSCRIPT
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This all according to journalist Peter Lance, who joins us here in New York, a five-time Emmy Award-winning investigative reporter, former ABC News correspondent. His new book is quite a tome. It’s called Triple Cross: How Bin Laden’s Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets and the FBI–And Why Patrick Fitzgerald Failed to Stop Him. Welcome to Democracy Now!
PETER LANCE: Good to be back, Amy.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, lay out this story.
PETER LANCE: Okay. Well, Ali Mohamed was — the story actually begins 20 years before 9/11 with the murder of Anwar Sadat. Ali Mohamed was actually a member of the radical Egyptian army unit that murdered Sadat. Only, at the time, he escaped investigation because he happened to be at Fort Bragg even then on an officer exchange program. And when Mubarak took over in Egypt, he purged the military of some radical elements, and Ali was discharged.
But Dr. Imam al-Zawahiri, who was then emerging as the leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, recognized Ali Mohamed’s potential. Amy, he was an army commando. He spoke four languages, including Hebrew. He had two degrees in psychology. So Dr. al-Zawahiri pretty much adopted him and sponsored him and first vectored him toward Egypt Air. He spent a year at Egypt Air, the state airline, where he studied all the air piracy counterterrorism measures.
He then — you know, there was the Marine barracks bombing in Lebanon in ’83, October. And the previous April, there was the embassy bombing, the kidnapping of the CIA station chief. So the CIAwas desperate at that point in early ’84 to get anyone who, you know, could speak Arabic or had any sense of the Islamic world. So Ali walked into the CIA station in Cairo and presented himself, and they vetted him to some degree, but they sent him to Hamburg, where the primary CIA station looking into Hezbollah was operated. And he went to work briefly as a CIA operative in Hamburg and infiltrated a mosque, only, according to legend, blown his cover.
But, Amy, mysteriously he was able to get past the US watch list. And one of his former CO at Fort Bragg told me he believed that he had had help from the CIA getting into America. On the plane on the way in, a TWA flight, he met a woman from California who was coming back from Greece on vacation, about ten years older than him. And six weeks later, they were married at a drive-through wedding chapel in Reno, Nevada. He is now living in Santa Clara in her condo in the middle of, you know, the high-tech heartland, and eventually enlists in the US Army, as you said, goes in as an enlisted man, because I believe that, you know, OCS, Officer Candidate School, would have subjected him to greater scrutiny.
But in any event, he ends up at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, which is the heart of the advanced training for Delta Force and the Greet Berets. And his CO, Colonel Anderson, told us, he said it would be easier to win the power ball lottery than to be in the unit that murdered Anwar Sadat and get past the watch list and end up at the SWC, they call it.
AMY GOODMAN: How do you know all this?
PETER LANCE: Well, I know it because, you know, I have been working for five years now, Amy, focusing primarily on the two bin Laden offices of origin, the New York office of the FBI and the Southern District Prosecutor’s Office. Up until 9/11, the war on terror, as you know, was fought as a series of legal cases, a stones throw from where we are here in the Southern District.
And so, what I did when I went — right after 9/11, when I began, really “How did this happen?” and “Could it happen again?” were my two questions. So, what I did was, I read all 40,000 pages of the Southern District cases. I read every book on the subject, 10,000 articles. You know, Paul Thompson has — I’ve worked closely with Paul Thompson of cooperativeresearch.org and basically, you know, began developing sources inside and outside of the bureau.
And one day, I woke up — after the first book, I showed tremendous negligence by the bureau, and then gross negligence, in my second book, to the point of suppression of some evidence. And I still couldn’t connect the dots. And one day, I woke up, and I went, “Ali Mohamed is the key.” I mentioned him briefly in my first two books. And there had been about a dozen articles on him, which I cite in the beginning of the book. New York Times had done pieces on him. But no one had ever looked at him in depth.
And when I began to, you know, peel back the layers on Ali Mohamed’s career, I realized that the principal fed, the principal prosecutor who was running Squad I-49 effectively in the New York office of the bureau, the bin Laden squad, was Patrick Fitzgerald. Patrick Fitzgerald, from January 1996, was charged by the Justice Department with pretty much getting bin Laden. President Clinton had issued —
AMY GOODMAN: Explain his position at the time.
PETER LANCE: At the time, he was a prosecutor in the Southern District. He was soon to become, ironically, head of Organized Crime and Terrorism in the Southern District. And this is the office, by the way, that produced Rudy Giuliani, Louis Freeh. It’s the primary — it’s the stellar US federal prosecutor’s office.
AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, Patrick Fitzgerald is the man who eventually went on to investigate the Valerie Plame case.
PETER LANCE: Absolutely, and became US Attorney in Chicago. In fact, he made — I would speak metaphorically and say he made his bones, he became famous, on the African embassy bombing case, which was called US v. Bin Laden in February of ’01. But he ended up convicting one primary player, Wadi al-Hajj, but the other people convicted were fairly minor players.
Ali Mohamed, Amy, on the other hand, was the principal —- not only did he do the surveillance for the bombing in 1993, but bin Laden himself, according to Ali’s testimony, pointed to the pictures and said, “This is where I want the suicide truck bomb to go.” Five years later, that’s exactly where the bomb in Nairobi went off. Ali sustained the cell. He interacted regularly with Wadi al-Hajj, and yet he’s also an FBI informant on the West Coast from 1992. Amy, this man trained the original World Trade Center bombing cell. He trained the -—
AMY GOODMAN: You mean in 1993.
PETER LANCE: In 1993. The cell that worked with Ramzi Yousef to do the first World Trade Center bombing. He trained El Sayyid Nosair, the Egyptian who murdered Rabbi Meir Kahane in 1990. In fact, he stayed at his house. He used to come up weekends from Fort Bragg, and he would bring top-secret — I have like 30 pages of heretofore classified documents in the book. And he would bring these top-secret memos from Fort Bragg, and he’d give them to Nosair. They found them the night after the rabbi’s murder in Nosair’s apartment. And they also found two operatives, Abu Halima and Salameh, that night. They arrested them. And these men were photographed, along with Nosair, in Calverton, Long Island in 1989. Now, this was when Bush 41 is in the White House.
The New York office of the FBI, their elite unit that got John Gotti, over four weekends in July of ’89, they followed a group of men — MEs, they called them, for Middle Eastern men — and they followed them, Amy, from the Al Farooq Mosque on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn out to the shooting range, where they’re firing automatic weapons in the middle of the summer. And of the men photographed by the FBI when Bush 41 was in the White House, three were later convicted in the Trade Center bombing. One, Nosair, was convicted both initially for the gun charges and the rabbi’s death, and eventually Patrick Fitzgerald and Andrew McCarthy convicted him in what was called the “Day of Terror” plot, the bridge and tunnel plot.
So the FBI had Ali Mohamed’s cell on the radar in ’89. They had Ali himself working as an informant from 1992. And he is literally, as you pointed out — he moved the entire al-Qaeda leadership from Afghanistan to Sudan. He set up the al-Qaeda training camps. He trained bin Laden’s personal body guard, lived in bin Laden’s house and, as I said, was the primary player behind the African embassy bombings.
I prove in this book — and I challenge Patrick Fitzgerald who refused to talk to me, but I challenge him to show me where they could not have prevented the African embassy bombings. Squad I-49, this elite squad of FBI units, which he was effectively directing, had a wiretap on the home in Kenya of Wadi al-Hajj. They searched Wadi al-Hajj’s house, Amy, in August of ’97 in Kenya. They found Ali Mohamed’s phone number and contact information in Sacramento.
Patrick Fitzgerald himself had a meeting with Ali Mohamed, face to face, in Sacramento in October, at which point Ali said to him — and by the way, at this point Ali Mohamed is a naturalized US citizen, an Army veteran getting a pension, you know, from the US Army —- he said to Patrick Fitzgerald across the table, “I love bin Laden. I do not need a fatwa to attack America. I have a number of sleepers who I can make operational like that. And I could just” -—
AMY GOODMAN: And this, you have from what, this information?
PETER LANCE: From Jack Cloonan, the principal agent who was at the meeting. He was the principal agent — one of the two or three principal agents in Squad I-49, was at the meeting. So it’s, you know, from the mouth of the agent who was there. And after the meeting, Patrick Fitzgerald turned to Cloonan and said, “That is the most dangerous man I have ever met. We cannot leave him on the street.” And yet, they did, Amy, for ten more months, only to have the bombs go off. They waited a month to arrest him. And even when they arrested him, they kept him on a John Doe warrant for nine months in the Southern District, because they didn’t want the media to know effectively they had been snookered by this guy.
AMY GOODMAN: A John Doe warrant means they didn’t name him.
PETER LANCE: Didn’t name him. And they negotiated with him for almost two years to cut a deal. But Ali had all the cards, if you will, in the poker game. Why? Because he knew that the feds would never want the record that is now contained in this book to come out, how they had been bamboozled and snookered for many years by this principal spy.
AMY GOODMAN: I’m looking at some criticism by Larry Johnson, the former CIA analyst, who says, “Here’s the truth: there’s not one document, piece of court evidence or retired FBI agent that supports the claim that in the year prior to the bombing of the US embassies in East Africa Ali Mohamed was recorded stating his intent to attack those embassies. Not one.”
PETER LANCE: Larry Johnson is a joke, okay? Larry Johnson was a former CIA officer who happened to be in the same class as Valerie Plame. If you google “Larry C. Johnson” and google “the declining terrorist threat,” he wrote an Op-Ed page piece on July 10th of 2001, the day the Phoenix memo was issued, that basically said the declining terrorist threat — he was quoted in theNew York Times as saying, bin Laden is highly overestimated, he’s being treated like a Fortune 500 leader when in fact al-Qaeda is fragmented.
Larry Johnson has had an animus against me personally for years. Amy, last week, on his website he actually said that I had not won five Emmy Awards. He came right out and said it, and I called the National Academy. They furnished him with proof. It was all on my website. My five Emmys were listed. And he literally maliciously, without even talking to me to confirm, withdrew that, you know, false malicious statement. Larry Johnson’s upset because I’ve named him in my book as an example of how the feds failed on the road to 9/11. He’s a regular talking head, because he has supported, you know —- and by the way, I support the investigation -—
AMY GOODMAN: And what about the point that there is not one document, not one former FBIagent who supports this idea that he said that he was going to take out the embassies before they were bombed?
PETER LANCE: He never said — I never ever said in my book that he did. I never ever said in my book that Ali Mohamed said he was going to take out the embassies before they were bombed. What was true, what Jack Cloonan told me, was that Harlan Bell, one of the agents in Squad I-49, after the embassy bombing, he went back and he looked at — he had recorded some conversations with Ali, and Ali said, “We have an operation going on in Africa.” He never mentioned the bombings. I never even said that in the book. What Larry Johnson is trying to do is, because he’s upset that I’ve impeached his credibility, he’s trying to attack my book. And by the way, he made that statement before the book had even come out. He hadn’t even read the book.
AMY GOODMAN: Where is Ali Mohamed today?
PETER LANCE: Ali Mohamed is in some kind of custodial witness protection. As I said, he cut a deal. He escaped the death penalty. He is — I believe he’s in the New York area somewhere, because Cloonan said his wife Linda Sanchez remains loyal to him, visits him regularly, and Cloonan lives in the New York area, and he says, “I see Linda when she comes in to visit Ali.” But they may have moved him by now.
AMY GOODMAN: Why would the US be protecting him?
PETER LANCE: Because he is a one-man 9/11 commission. Ali Mohamed, if he ever told the full truth under oath, would expose all the years of negligence by the Southern District. Amy, look, Patrick Fitzgerald and the Southern District prosecutors have had an almost unblemished reputation for years as being the primary, you know, terror-busters. You know, Vanity Fair did this glowing article on him, in which they described him as the bin Laden brain, scary smart intelligence.
No one has ever, ever gone back and audited Patrick Fitzgerald in the Southern District. The 9/11 Commission didn’t, because Dietrich Snell was a co-prosecutor with Fitzgerald, is the one who wrote Staff Statement 16 on the origin of the plot. And he literally pushed the plot, the 9/11 plot forward from Manila, the Philippines, with Yousef and Khalid Shaikh. He moved it to 1996, claiming that Khalid Shaikh wasn’t even a member of al-Qaeda at the time.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you think needs to happen now?
PETER LANCE: What I think needs to happen is there needs to be a real investigation of 9/11, not staffed by alumni of the very agencies that, you know, were asleep at the switch in the years leading up to 9/11. It should be staffed by American citizens, journalists, scholars, widows, the Jersey girls should be on it. It should be fully funded, and it should have subpoena power, because anyone that thinks that in reading the 9/11 Commission Report you’ve gotten the full story is wrong. No accountability. They never named a single name in the 9/11 Commission Report.
Ali Mohamed’s entire career is mentioned in one tiny little paragraph of the 9/11 report. Jamie Gorelick was deputy attorney general. She literally — they had Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, bin Laden’s brother-in-law, was captured in December of 1994 with a Newton PDA, a treasure trove of evidence linking him to the Blind Sheikh in New York and Yousef’s cell in Manila. And Jamie Gorelick effectively pushed him out of country to Jordan, even though her own State Department, the State Department said he’s a terrorist, we should investigate him. Not a word of that is in the 9/11 report.
Nor in The Looming Tower. I mean, Lawrence Wright, in this book — and he’s an excellent writer for the New Yorker — Lawrence Wright mentions Mohammed Jamal Khalifa twenty times and never even mentions the fact that he was captured by the bureau, because he interviewed many of these agents and just took their word at face value. What I’ve done is I’ve gone back and I’ve audited them. So anyone who’s read this book — and I recommend that everyone read The Looming Tower, by the way, it’s an excellent book — but that’s half of the story. We need to audit the Justice Department. We need to go back. And this transcends administrations. Fitzgerald is still working for Bush 43. Valerie Caproni, who was party to a cover-up of evidence in 1996 in the Eastern District and with Ramzi Yousef, she is the general counsel to the FBI. So many of these same people are working under Bush 43.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to have to leave it there. A very complex story. Peter Lance’s latest book is called Triple Cross: How Bin Laden’s Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets and the FBI–And Why Patrick Fitzgerald Failed to Stop Him. His earlier book, One Thousand Years for Revenge. Also wrote Cover Up. Thank you, Peter, for being with us.