A week after the September 11th attacks, FBI Special Agent Jack Cloonan flew back from Yemen to New York where convicted al Qaeda spy Ali Mohamed had been brought up from custodial witness protection in Florida to the M.C.C. (federal jail) in Lower Manhattan. 

Rushing from the airport and desperate to learn what Ali might have known about the attacks that killed 2,976, Cloonan got to the prison around 11:00 p.m.

“I walked in and I had him pulled out,” Cloonan said in an interview for my Ali Mohamed biography Triple Cross. “I said, ‘How’d they do it?’ and he wrote the whole thing out—the attack, as if he knew every detail of it. He [had] conducted training for Al Qaeda on how to hijack a plane.

“’This is how you get a box cutter on board. You take the knife, you remove the blade and you wrap it in [redacted] and put it in your carry-on luggage.’ They’d read the FAA regulations. They knew four inches wouldn’t go through. ‘This is how you position yourself,’ he said. ‘I taught people how to sit in first class. You sit here and some sit here.’ He wrote the whole thing out.”

On 9/11 the hijackers who flew AA Flight 77 into the Pentagon were reported to have used box cutters. Three of the muscle hijackers who stormed the cockpit and took that plane were Khalid al-Midhar and the al-Hazmi brothers, Nawaf and Salim. Later it was revealed that Khalid and Salim had obtained their fake ID’s (used to board the plane) at Sphinx Trading, the same tiny Jersey City Mailbox store that had been on Patrick Fitzgerald’s radar since the 1995 “Day of Terror” trial. (see Part I)- (Highlight ‘Part I’: link to part I)

As bin Laden’s trusted security advisor Ali Mohamed almost certainly knew of the planes-as-missiles operation that KSM was executing by 1998. Khalid Sheikh’s nephew, Ramzi Yousef, had conceived the plot in Manila in 1994; the year Ali stayed in bin Laden’s own house in Khartoum as he trained his bodyguards.  By 1997 Mohamed was living part time in Kenya with Wadih El-Hage, bin Laden’s personal secretary.

So why couldn’t Patrick Fitzgerald and the elite agents of the FBI’s Bin Laden squad have squeezed the plot out of him in the year 2000 when Ali copped a plea that spared his life? That’s one of the most important questions that could be answered if the trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed goes forward in New York. And if the Feds don’t have the inclination to ask that question, the defense attorneys surely will.

The baseless fears of the KSM trial critics

A media storm erupted from the moment the Justice Department announced that the 9/11 “mastermind” would face a jury in the Southern District of New York. The critics have ranged from Rudi Guiliani to N.Y. Gov. David Paterson and now, even 9/11 Commission chairman Gov. Tom Kean has chimed in.

KSM at Guantanamo

Many predict that the trial will be a “circus,” and a threat to U.S. security. But they seem to forget that the SDNY Feds have locked up two of the most lethal al Qaeda terrorists in the world: Ramzi Yousef and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman after separate New York trials that were models of civility.

So far in five SDNY trials, not a single al Qaeda terrorist has escaped justice. The 1994 WTC bombing trial, the 1995 Day of Terror Trial, the 1996 Bojinka trial, the second WTC bombing trial in 1997 and the Embassy bombing trial in 2001 all proceeded to convictions without incident. Except for a few raucous protests outside the New York Supreme Court trial of El Sayyid Nosair, the killer of Rabbi Meier Kahane, none of the trials turned into the “circus” the critics are predicting.

What about the threat to the U.S. homeland some critics say will increase if KSM is allowed to venture out of the confines of Gitmo? Hogwash. Ramzi Yousef and most of the principal al Qaeda convicts are serving life sentences at the Supermax in Florence, Colorado, the most hardened Federal prison in the system. The blind Sheikh, reported near death in 2007, is locked down at the Butner Federal Medical Facility in North Carolina.

As to critics like John Yoo (architect of the DOJ’s water-boarding rationale) who warned in the Wall Street Journal that KSM’s trial would represent a “bonanza” of intelligence for al Qaeda, I refer him to Ali Mohamed’s stunning track record uncovering the inner secrets of the FBI and Green Berets during his 11 year run as al Qaeda’s spy.

Thanks to Ali Amiriki, (aka “Ali the American”) the FBI informant and U.S. Army sergeant embedded at Fort Bragg, there is little or nothing about the Government’s “sensitive sources and methods,” that might come out at this trial that bin Laden and al-Zawahiri don’t already know.

Mohamed in Fort Bragg video

The likelihood KSM will walk? Zero to none
There’s little doubt that KSM will be convicted. Even if all of the “testimony” he vomited out during his months of water boarding is suppressed, he openly admitted to his role as “the executive director of 9/11” last December in the Gitmo military trial at of Salim Hamdan, bin Laden’s driver.

“Due to my work as…a military official in al Qaeda,” KSM boasted, “my job is to oversee all of the al Qaeda cells aboard.”  And he coughed up even more culpable details in March of 2007 at another Guantanamo hearing. Back then he actually boasted that he “was responsible for the 9/11 operation, from A to Z.”

KSM then went on to list 29 al Qaeda terror operations that he either ran or was a co-conspirator in planning; including both attacks on the WTC: the 1993 bombing and 9/11, the separate 1994 plots to assassinate President Bill Clinton and Pope John Paul II in the Philippines, the notorious “Bojinka” plot (hatched by his nephew Ramzi Yousef) to smuggle improvised explosive devices aboard a dozen U.S. bound airliners exiting Asia in 1995, the 2002 murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl and the Bali nightclub bombing that same year which left 202 dead.

So when he goes on trial in New York, while any statements made under “enhanced” interrogations will no doubt get suppressed, those admissions made freely in open court in Guantanamo will sink him for sure.

What are the unanswered questions about the FBI’s failure to stop 9/11 that the trial of KSM in New York could reveal? And how could Ali Mohamed impact the possible prosecution of  alleged Fort Hood killer Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan?

The most important reason for bringing KSM before a civilian jury in New York is the potential his trial has for connecting the dots on the negligence of U.S. intelligence agencies prior to 9/11. The responsibility for that job was squandered by the 9/11 Commission, half the staff of which were alumni of the very agencies they were charged with auditing.

That’s why nobody in the counter-intel community was held accountable for failing to miss the “planes as missiles plot,” hatched by Ramzi Yousef and his uncle in Manila in 1994 – a plot that the Philippines National Police had warned the N.Y. Feds about as early as 1995. No wonder ex-New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean, the 9/11 Commission Chairman, doesn’t want to go back down that road.

However, in this upcoming legal showdown with KSM in New York, his ego suggests that he’ll take the stand. After all, his nephew Ramzi represented himself during his 1996 Bojinka trial (for which he was convicted). Once he starts talking, Khalid Shaikh could trigger the answers to a number of questions that were side-stepped or ignored by the 9/11 Commission and the Congressional Joint Inquiry:

1) Isn’t it true that Osama bin Laden and al-Zawahiri had established what amounted to an al Qaeda headquarters at the al Farooq mosque in Brooklyn as far back as 1989 and directly bankrolled the first WTC bombing by Yousef?

The 9/11 Commission claimed that the 1993 WTC bombing was the work of “loosely based group of Sunni Islamists.”  Even Patrick Fitzgerald, the man Vanity Fair called “the bin Laden brain” told a documentary crew in 2005 that he wasn’t sure whether al Qaeda was involved in the bombing that killed six and injured 1000 a month into Clinton’s presidency.

But if the trail of culpability for the FBI leads all the way back to their 1989 surveillance of Ali Mohamed’s trained cell at a Long Island shooting range (see Part I) ( Highlight ‘Part I’: link it to Part I) that will make three separate presidential administrations (both Bushes and Clinton’s) responsible for failing to stop the al Qaeda juggernaut.

2) After secretly indicting KSM in January, 1996, why did the Feds wait until January 2008 to unseal the indictment?

In 1995 they’d brought KSM’s nephew Ramzi to ground the old fashioned way: with a $2 million reward plastered on want posters and matchbook covers from Bangkok to Islamabad where he was finally busted after a young South African accomplice ratted him out.

KSM want posters distributed in early 1998

But the Feds didn’t go public with their worldwide hunt for KSM until early 1998 and by then he was in Hamburg, well on his way to executing the “planes operation” he and Ramzi  had set in motion back in Manila in 1994. Why did SDNY prosecutors wait so long to seek the public’s help in capturing Khalid Shaikh?

3) How much assistance did KSM get from Khalid bin Abdullah al-Thani, a member of the ruling family of Qatar who reportedly got Khalid Sheikh a new I.D. and smuggled him off to the Czech republic in 1996 after an FBI sting of Yousef revealed his uncle’s presence in Doha.

According to Paul Thompson who runs a remarkable website, KSM even returned to Qatar two weeks after 9/11 and stayed there “with the knowledge of some Qatari royals.”

Why is the possible participation of the Qataris in the 9/11 plot a crucial question? Because since 2002 the forward headquarters for CENTCOM, the United States Central Command has been located at Camp As Sayliyah in Doha. The entire invasion of Baghdad and the Iraqi campaign was coordinated out of this facility.

KSM could be the one man with insight into just how cozy the al-Thanis are with al Qaeda’s leadership. Talk about an irony, the U.S. invades Iraq on the false pretext that Saddam Hussein was linked to the 9/11 attacks and our principal strategic ally in the region may have been responsible for helping the “mastermind,” KSM slip through the FBI’s fingers five years before the attacks.
 
The importance of Ali Mohamed to the Hasan case

Bringing this story full circle; apart from the lessons the U.S. Army should have learned about sheltering Islamic radicals during Ali Mohamed’s service at Fort Bragg, it’s quite possible that if he’s convinced to talk, al Qaeda’s master spy could be helpful to the prosecution of Maj. Hasan.

Why? Because of the disturbing evidence that seems to grow each day of Hasan’s relationship with radical imam Anwar al Aulaqi. Months ago the FBI learned that Hasan and al Aulaqi communicated “10 to 20 times,” but no formal investigation was every launched by the Bureau.

Terrorism analyst Thompson has done ground-breaking investigative work on al Aulaqi; proving that he interacted directly with 9/11 hijackers al-Midhar and al Hazmi in San Diego, then helped them along after the imam moved to the Dar al Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, Virginia in 2000.

 We now know that Maj. Hasan held his mother’s funeral at that mosque in May of 2001. In one of the emails, monitored by the FBI six months before the Fort Hood massacre, Maj. Hasan told al Aulaqi “I can’t wait to join you” in the afterlife.

Two degrees of separation between Maj. Hasan and KSM

In 2004 U.S. News reported that post 9/11, German authorities found the phone number of al Aulaqi’s Dar al Hijrah mosque in the apartment of Ramzi Binalshibh, Khalid Shaikh’s Number Two, who will also go on trial in New York.

While no evidence has surfaced that al Aulaqi ever met KSM, the link between the Fairfax mosque and Ramzi Binalshibh makes for two degrees of separation between the 9/11 “executive director,” Khalid Shaikh and the fanatical U.S. Army psychiatrist who allegedly left 13 dead and 30 wounded at Fort Hood.

There’s also a disturbing parallel between the FBI’s failure to detect Ali Mohamed as a threat to U.S. security and the Bureau’s lapses in monitoring Maj. Hasan.

The Weekly Standard quoted the FBI as admitting that Hasan came to their attention “in December 2008” and that the Joint Terrorism Task Force “reviewed … communications between…Hasan and (al Aulaqi) and deemed them “consistent with research being conducted by Maj. Hasan…” Contrast that with the London Telegraph’s report: in one outburst at Walter Reed Army Hospital, Hasan declared that non-believers should be beheaded and “have boiling oil poured down their throats;” hardly the view of a serious medical researcher.

As documented in Part I, Ali Mohamed not only exhibited openly hostile jihadist views while serving as an E5 sergeant at the JFK Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, the Army even used him to make a training video in which he articulated his radical Islamic beliefs. 20 years ago an actual agent of al Qaeda had burrowed into a highly secure Army facility and after he was discovered and arrested a decade later, the Army didn’t seem to learn its lesson.

A revelation or another cover up?

The continuing Hasan investigation will shed new light on whether the Bureau has sufficiently reformed in the years since the 9/11. The question is, will federal prosecutors have the courage to come clean on years of negligence by the two “Bin Laden offices of origin” and put the man who snookered them on the stand as the chief witness against KSM?

Ali Mohamed remains the greatest enigma in the war on terror. Locked away somewhere in custodial witness protection there are seals upon seals on his case. Having skirted the fate that awaits KSM, can the convicted spy now be persuaded to testify about what he knows of the 9/11 plot and Khalid Shaikh’s role in it?

If he does, he could be to terrorism what Sammy “the bull” Gravano was to organized crime – the most lethal witness ever against the 9/11 “executive director.” A full, unexpurgated vetting of FBI/DOJ blunders at that trial could be the kind of kick in the ass the Bureau needs to finally begin its reform.

There’s little time to lose. The FBI’s failure to identify Ali Mohamed as a threat two decades ago at Fort Bragg and their recent lapses in stopping the wide-eyed shooter at Ford Hood are proof positive that the Bureau has miles to go before Americans can feel protected from the metastasizing threat of radical Islam.
 

Peter Lance is a five-time Emmy Award-winning investigative reporter and former correspondent for ABC News. He has covered hundreds of stories worldwide for 20/20, Nightline, and World News Tonight. Peter is the author of 1000 Years for Revenge, Cover Up, and the novel First Degree Burn. For more details visit Peter’s website.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

In its firestorm of coverage, the mainstream media has overlooked a potential link between the two biggest domestic terrorism stories of the day: the shootings at Ford Hood and the decision by the Justice Dept. to try accused 9/11 “mastermind” Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in New York City.

Five time Emmy-winning former ABC News correspondent and HarperCollins author Peter Lance shines a light on the man who may well be the greatest enigma in the “war on terror.”

His name is Ali Abdel Saoud Mohamed, aka Ali Amirki or “Ali the American,” the ex-Egyptian Army officer who penetrated the CIA (briefly) in 1984, the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg from 1987 to 1989 and the FBI where he served as an informant from the early 1990’s, interacting with top federal prosecutors and Special Agents as he trained the cell responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and “Day of Terror” plots. Earlier he moved Osama bin Laden’s entourage from Afghanistan to Khartoum, set up the al Qaeda training camps in the Sudan, trained the Saudi billionaire’s own personal bodyguard and later served as the principal plotter in al Qaeda’s five year mission to blow up the U.S. Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Ali Mohamed was the ticking time bomb at Fort Bragg who should have redefined the Army’s rules for uncovering traitorous Islamic radicals in the ranks 20 years before Maj. Nidal Malik Hassan went on his alleged rampage at Fort Hood.

But more importantly, for all the critics who think trying KSM in the Southern District of New York is a bad idea, Ali Mohamed could represent the Feds’ best witness at trial; insuring once and for all that Khalid Shaikh will finally be brought to justice.

The spy who hid in plain site

In the years leading up to the 9/11 attacks, no single agent of al Qaeda was more successful in compromising the U.S. intelligence community than Ali Mohamed. A member of the radical Egyptian Army unit that murdered President Anwar Sadat in 1981, Mohammed escaped prosecution, but he was later purged from the Egyptian military due to his radical Islamic views.

In 1983 he caught the attention of Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, five years before the doctor with the spectacles and go-tee joined bin Laden to form al Qaeda. Al Zawahiri saw Ali as the espionage agent he needed to penetrate the U.S.

After the 1983 bombings of the U.S. embassy and the Marine barracks in Beirut, the CIA was hungry to recruit assets who understood the radical Islamic mindset. So with very little vetting, the Agency sent Ali to Hamburg where he went into a Hezbollah mosque only to blow his cover and get his name on a Watch List.

Undaunted, Mohamed got onto a TWA flight from Athens to JFK in 1985. On the brief trip across the Atlantic, he managed to seduce an older American woman named Linda Sanchez who was returning from vacation in Greece.  They were married six weeks later at a drive-through wedding chapel in Reno. After that, Ali moved into Linda’s home in Santa Clara, California and set up an al Qaeda “switchboard” and sleeper cell with an ex-Egyptian medical student named Khalid Dahab.

In 1986 he drove to Oakland and enlisted in the U.S. Army, careful to stay under the radar and avoid the scrutiny of Officer Candidate School. Astonishingly, though still a resident alien, he was posted to Fort Bragg where he managed to work his way up to the rank of E5 (sergeant) and, without any security clearance, get posted to the highly secure JFK SWC where elite Green Beret and Delta Force officers train.

A chilling precursor

So far, in its official reaction to the Fort Hood massacre the U.S. Army has been taking a page from the Claude Raines school of crisis management; imitating the reaction of the duplicitous Capt. Renault in the film Casablanca who professed, “shock, shock” that there was gambling going on at Rick’s club only to be handed his winnings.

But two decades before Maj. Hasan allegedly dropped thirteen people in cold blood, key officials at Bragg were aware of Ali Mohamed’s openly jihadist views. They even used him in a training video, in which Ali declared (with chilling confidence) that it was the duty of all Muslims to change countries with secular governments into Islamic regimes.

“It’s an obligation,” said Ali on the training tape, “it’s not a choice.”
 
And how much was known at Bragg among the officer elite of Ali’s subversive agenda? Ask his own commanding officer, Col. Robert Anderson:

“I think you or I would have a better chance of winning the Powerball lottery, than an Egyptian major in the unit that assassinated Sadat would have getting a visa, getting to California, getting into the Army and getting assigned to a Special Forces unit. That just doesn’t happen.”

But it did and Ali was so audacious at Bragg that he announced to Anderson that he was going to use his leave to visit Afghanistan and hunt Soviets. It was an act that could have had global implications akin to the Soviet shoot down of Francis Gary Powers’ U-2 flight, if Mohamed had been captured or killed in the midst of the covert U.S. war to help the Mujahideen.

In an interview for my HarperCollins biography of Mohamed, Triple Cross, Anderson said that he tried to get Ali court martialed after he returned from Kabul and brazenly dropped two belts from Soviet Spetsnaz commandos on his desk. Bragging that he’d killed them, Ali wasn’t worried in the slightest that he’d be reprimanded and Anderson said he was told by a JAG officer that there was insufficient evidence “to convict anyone of anything.”

Does this resonate with the kind of audacious behavior Maj. Hasan exhibited at Walter Reed Army Hospital only to be given a pass? As the French say, “plus c’est change, plus c’est la meme chose.”

Al Qaeda’s secret spy in New York

But the Afghan theater of ops wasn’t where Ali Mohamed did his most damage. On weekends, in 1989 he began commuting up to New York from Fort Bragg where he trained Mahmoud Abouhalima, a six foot two-inch red headed Egyptian cab driver, Mohammed Salameh, a Palestinian illegal alien, and Nidal Ayad, a Kuwait émigré and Rutgers grad – all later convicted by Southern District prosecutors in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

Working out of what the Feds called “the Jersey jihad office,” the Kennedy Boulevard based Al-Salaam mosque in Jersey City, Ali even played his Fort Bragg training video for the “brothers” as he schooled them in and weapons training and other covert operations.

Should the Army have known about Ali’s clandestine trips back then? Maybe not initially, but the alarm bells should have gone off at the JFK SWC in November, 1990 when El Sayyid Nosair, another Ali trainee, gunned down Rabbi Meier Kahane, founder of The Jewish Defense League as he gave a speech at the Marriot Hotel on Lexington Avenue.

That night as multiple law enforcement units descended on Nosair’s house in New Jersey they found a treasure trove of intelligence suggesting that Ali Mohamed (who stayed with Nosair on his New York visits) had betrayed not only the U.S. Army, but his adopted country.

They filled forty-seven boxes with evidence seized, including Green Beret manuals marked “Top Secret for Training” and communiqués classified as Secret from the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Another memo, entitled “Location of Selected Units on 05 December 1988,” listed the precise positions of Special Operations Forces (SOF) worldwide—including the army’s Green Berets and Navy SEAL teams—along with details of their missions. That single communiqué could have easily gotten Mohamed indicted on charges of espionage and treason, defying the legal judgment of the JAG officer at Bragg who had spurned Lt. Col. Anderson’s request for a court martial.

A warning of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing

The cache also contained hints of al Qaeda’s most famous New York target: the World Trade Center. One passage inside Nosair’s notebook called for the “destruction of the enemies of Allah…by… exploding…their civilized pillars…and high world buildings.”

Considering the “stove piping” that existed back then, you might ask how would the FBI have known about Ali’s presence at Fort Bragg or his links to El Sayyid Nosair?

Fair question, until you realize that 16 months before the Kahane assassination, the FBI Special Operations Group followed Nosair and a group of other “ME’s” (middle eastern men) from a Brooklyn mosque to the Calverton shooting range on Long Island.

Over four weekends in July, the Bureau agents took dozens of surveillance photos of Nosair, Abouhalima, Salameh, Nosair and Ayad (all trained by Ali Mohamed) firing handguns, AK-47’s and other semi-automatic weapons. They even had shots of the chrome-plated .357 Magnum, Nosair would use to rub out the rabbi.

The “lone gunman”

Even more shocking, when you ponder why the dots weren’t connected, was the presence of Abouhalima and Salameh, Nosair’s intended getaway driver’s, at his New Jersey home the night of the assassination.

They were taken into custody; only to be released by the NYPD the next day. Later, despite the involvement of three co-conspirators, Chief of Detectives Joe Borelli labeled the assassination a “lone gunman shooting.”

Nosair, a Prozac popping janitor who worked in the basement of Manhattan’s civil court was tried locally by the Manhattan D.A. and to the surprise of Bill Greenbaum, the ADA who prosecuted the case, the Army kept their distance.

“We had people from Fort Bragg who came up,” he told me. “But then they went home and we never heard a word.”

Nosair lawyered up with William Kuntsler who succeeded in getting him convicted on mere weapons charges vs. the actual Kahane murder. Years after the 9/11 attacks Eleanor Hill, chief investigator for the House-Senate Joint Inquiry, revealed that Osama bin Laden himself helped pay for Nosair’s defense.

The first U.S. blood spilled by al Qaeda

The legal fee from the Saudi billionaire suggested that the rabbi’s death at the hands of an Ali Mohamed-trainee was the first in a series of al Qaeda missions directed against U.S. citizens; the next being the murder of six people in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1998 Embassy bombings, the loss of 17 sailors in the bombing of the U.S. Cole in 2000 and the mass murder of 2,976 on 9/11.

Ali Mohamed was personally connected to three of those five acts of terror. In the Embassy plot, he actually took the surveillance pictures that bin Laden used to pinpoint the location of the suicide truck bombs.

And what about the culpability of the two “Bin Laden offices of origin;” The FBI’s New York Office (NYO) and the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) in failing to sniff out Mohamed as an al Qaeda spy?

In retrospect their record is shameless. But the seeming inability of the Southern District Feds to connect the dots continued up through the mid 1990’s.

In prepping for the 1995 “Day of Terror” plot, an al Qaeda scheme to blow up the bridges and tunnels into Manhattan, assistant U.S. attorneys Patrick Fitzgerald and Andrew C. McCarthy put together a list of 172 un-indicted co-conspirators.
Ali Mohamed was on the list along with Osama bin Laden and a little known individual named Waleed al Noor – co-owner with Egyptian Mohammed El-Attris of a small check cashing and mailbox story in Jersey City called Sphinx Trading.

If the Feds had any doubts about how “mobbed up” with al Qaeda Sphinx was, all they had to do was visit the building that housed the “Jersey Jihad” office  and the al Salaam mosque where blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, al Qaeda’s spiritual leader, held court. Sphinx Trading was on the ground floor.

The 9/11 dots that never got connected

One of the most shocking discoveries I made in researching Triple Cross was that, six and a half years after McCarthy and Fitzgerald put Waleed al-Noor on that list with bin Laden and Ali Mohamed, Khalid al-Midhar and Salim al-Hazmi, two of the muscle hijackers who flew AA Flight #77 into the Pentagon on 9/11, got their fake ID’s at Sphinx from Mohammed El-Attriss, al-Noor’s partner.

Meeting Mohamed face to face

In 1996, Assistant U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald (now the top Federal prosecutor in Chicago) was charged by DOJ brass with getting an indictment of bin Laden. He turned to Squad I-49 in the FBI’s NYO where he began working with Special Agents Jack Cloonan and Dan Coleman.

By the summer of 1997, suspecting that something very bad was developing in Africa, Fitzgerald sent Coleman to Nairobi where he searched the home of Wadih El Hage, a bin Laden confident who was one of the principal bombing plotters.

Coleman was shocked to discover links between El Hage and Ali Mohamed, who had been cooperating with the Feds since 1992. That prompted Fitzgerald himself to fly across country to Sacramento where Ali was then living. In a face to face meeting, the federal prosecutor naively hoped he could turn Mohamed.

But Ali was not about to betray his “sheikh,” Osama. He actually admitted to Fitzgerald that he “loved” bin Laden and “believe[d] in him.” Then, he uttered words that amounted to treason; boasting that he didn’t need a fatwa to make war on the U.S., since America was “the enemy.” There was no way he was going to betray the jihad to these hapless Feds. Finally, he got up and left.

Moments later, Fitzgerald turned to Cloonan and said, “That is the most dangerous man I have ever met. We cannot let this man out on the street.” But that’s just what he did; allowing Ali to remain free for another 10 months; waiting to arrest him until a month after the bombs went off in Africa killing 224 and injuring thousands. It was a plot that Ali had been perfecting since 1993.

Cutting a deal with the devil’s “aide”

Back at Fort Bragg, Col. Anderson, Ali’s C.O. had described him to me as a “fanatic.” He wasn’t the devil, the Colonel said, “ he was more like the aide to the devil. He had an air about him; a stare, a very coldness that was pathological.”

Does that not echo the growing testimony we’ve heard from Army colleagues who interacted for years with Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan?

It took Fitzgerald more than a year to get any real cooperation out of Mohamed. It wasn’t until the year 2000 that Ali finally pled guilty to the Embassy bombings in return for being spared the death penalty.

The problem was, as the months counted down to the 9/11 attacks, why didn’t he give up the “planes as missiles plot?” From what Cloonan told me, Mohamed knew every detail. How could a top Fed like Pat Fitzgerald cut a deal with al Qaeda’s chief spy and not squeeze the truth out of him about bin Laden’s ultimate goal?

In PART TWO we’ll look at how much Ali may have known about the 9/11 plot and why, if the Feds were smart, he could become the secret weapon against KSM.

Peter Lance is a five-time Emmy Award-winning investigative reporter and former correspondent for ABC News. He has covered hundreds of stories worldwide for 20/20, Nightline, and World News Tonight. Peter is the author of 1000 Years for Revenge, Cover Up, and the novel First Degree Burn. For more details visit Peter’s website.

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

Hard to believe it’s already been a month since I finally got down to it, joined the blogosphere, and started this blog. Originally I thought the blog would be limited to a few posts per month, mainly short commentaries on issues and topics of interest to me, and maybe an op-ed piece or two. Well, that changed, and did so quickly!

The lengthy series on ‘Dissecting the MSM’ ended up becoming a project of its own. I have 3 parts done, and one last post, part 4, Corporate Ownership & Public Demand, to go. I think I should be able to wrap that one up before the end of this month. I already have an idea and notes on my next series, and I think you will find it interesting and controversial; at least I hope you will. I won’t give out more but please stay tuned.

I have two reports on Project Expose MSM and am reviewing two other cases to see whether they are ‘solid’ and supported sufficiently to be published. It is quite difficult, but interesting and fun nonetheless. Exposing these cases is only step one. What we need to do is decide how to translate the knowledge of these cases into action. More on this later…

We have also had a few fun TGIF posts. For these I am running out of ‘fun’ but relevant ideas, and welcome your suggestions on our future TGIF topics. The criteria: Fun, humorous, and relevant to our general discussion areas. Please bring in your ideas. You can post them under the ‘comments’ section of our last TGIF on June 5.

We have had over 25,000 visitors here in one month. This really exceeded my expectations for the first month. Most importantly I have been truly amazed by the depth of the comments you’ve posted: articulate, thought provoking, independent, and all that expressed and communicated respectfully and civilly. I have to admit, my biggest fear was to end up with lots of ‘one-liner’ shallow, ultra partisan, and or propagandist comments; the ultimate turn off and at times nauseating trend I’ve observed on many sites/blogs throughout the years. I am delighted to have you and your voice. I am learning a lot from you. Please don’t stop. For those of you among the 25,000 who have not added your voice yet: please join us. Let us hear and learn from you. Whether you are conservative, liberal, libertarian, realist, neocon…doesn’t matter, join the discussion and add your voice; enrich the discussion we are having here.

I have a few ideas and projects for the future of this blog. Some of them may be considered ambitious, but so what? I’ll do my best to implement them. One of these ideas will involve participation of a few solid investigative journalists I know and consider friends. Another one has to do with weekly Podcast interviews…However, before I start pitching and implementing them I need to get this blog, the number of visitors, and the number of posted comments to the next benchmark. I am hoping to establish a monthly average of 50,000 unique ID visitors by this fall. Ambitious? Yes. Doable? Surely. This also will largely depend on you and your support to get us there. Again please bring your ideas and suggestions. Those of you who happen to be savvy (I am certainly not savvy) in blogging and website promotion (cross-posting, RSS Feed, Digg, Reddit, etc.): I appreciate any help you can provide in this area…E-mail me if you are interested and can spare a little time to pitch in and help implement these ideas.

This is it for my brief monthly round up on this blog’s monthiversary. Now, it is your turn. Let me know what you think.

P.S.

Peter Lance’s ‘Triple Cross’ & Patrick Fitzgerald

This coming week the paperback edition of Peter Lance’s latest HarperCollins investigative book TRIPLE CROSS is being released. The book is highly critical of Fitzgerald, particularly with respect to his interaction with al Qaeda master spy Ali Mohamed, and is already creating lots of controversy. I just received my signed copy from Peter, but I haven’t had a chance to read it yet.

So far Patrick Fitzgerald has sent four threat letters to HarperCollins, Lance’s publisher, threatening to sue if the book is published. He claims the book has defamed him and put him in a “false light.”

Here is an article covering the latest on Lance’s book and Fitzgerald:

Ann Sparanese, the New Jersey Librarian who has waged anti-censorship campaigns in the past, sent an email to thousands of librarians nationwide chastising Fitzgerald for his attempt to pulp the book and calling it “A Book to Watch.” Here is the link: http://libraryjuicepress.com/blog/?p=1454#comments

Lance’s Press Conference will be held this Tuesday, June 16, at 9:30 a.m., in the John Zenger Room of the National Press Club, 529 14th Street NW, Washington, DC 20045. I am invited to attend, and hopefully will make it there and report on it further here.

Okay, this was supposed to be a brief monthly round up! I’ll wrap it up here before it turns into a novella, and leave you with the latest from

Paul Jamiol: