Bin Laden's phone

There's been a lot of press this month about the U.S. missing a chance to catch Osama bin Laden because he stopped using a satellite phone in August 1998. While some Clintonites and President Bush blamed the press for writing that he used such a phone, we thought there was another plausible reason: August 1998 was when the U.S. tried to kill bin Laden in an air strike. Such events would likely make the terrorist leader change his methods.

Anyway, we came across a speech, delivered in April 2002, that reveals the U.S. continued to gain valuable information by eavesdropping on al Qaeda members after August 1998.

The speech was delivered by U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth. Judge Lamberth presided over the special court that administers the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The FISA court approves warrants for searches and intercepts of foreign agents in this country. It was the first speech on FISA ever delivered by a judge who sat on the special panel.

Of that time in August 1998, Judge Lamberth said, "On the night of the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Africa, I started the first emergency hearings in my living room at 3 a.m. From the outset, the FBI suspected bin Laden and the surveillance I approved that night and in the ensuing days and weeks all ended up being critical evidence at the trial in New York last year in which several of bin Laden's associates were convicted on numerous charges relating to those bombings."

PATRICK J. FITZGERALDUNITED STATES ATTORNEY NORTHERN DISTRICT OFILLINOISPREPARED REMARKS FORTHE SUBCOMMITTEE ON CRIME, TERRORISM, AND HOMELAND SECURITY COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY U.S. HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES APRIL 28, 2005

Excerpt:

"Let me review some other examples of how the wall
played out. On August 7, 1998, alQaeda 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 obtaineda sealed indictment of Bin Laden two months earlier, deployed to East Africa and almost immediately learned ofal 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 beginning in 1986.

It was believed at the time that Mohamed lied in the grand jury proceeding and that he was involved with the alQaeda network,but Mohamed had not by then been tied to the bombings. Ali Mohamed left the courthouse to goto his hotel, followed by FBI agents, but not under arrest. He had imminent plans to fly to Egypt. 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 was 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’shome by the intelligence team on the other side of “the wall.” (The search had been a FISA search under authority that preexisted the Patriot Act.) 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. 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 inthe 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 further 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 UsamaBin 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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