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Postal Worker's Letter Tied To Slaying of Afghan Leader

By Steve Fainaru and Brooke A. Masters
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, May 13, 2002; Page A01

NEW YORK -- Authorities believe a U.S. postal employee in custody here helped draft a letter of introduction that may have been used by two men who posed as journalists to assassinate a leading opposition figure in Afghanistan last fall, according to a U.S. official familiar with the case.

A summer 2001 conversation about the letter allegedly surfaced in hundreds of hours of wiretaps involving Ahmed Abdel Sattar, 42, the official said. Authorities charged last month that Sattar had served as the New York-based "communications center" for an Egyptian terrorist group directed by a blind Muslim cleric from his U.S. prison cell.

Sattar has not been charged with involvement in the Sept. 9 slaying of Gen. Ahmed Shah Massoud, leader of the Northern Alliance, which long fought the Taliban in Afghanistan. But the Egyptian national who allegedly drafted the letter with Sattar, Yassir Sirri, has been charged in London with conspiring to murder Massoud. Sirri has denied involvement.

The U.S. official said authorities remain uncertain whether Sattar knew the letter would be used in the attack on Massoud, which took place in Northern Afghanistan two days before the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes on Washington and New York.

"It's clear that this was a letter for these two guys," said the official, who asked not to be identified. "But how much Sattar knew about the mission isn't clear."

Sattar's lawyer, Kenneth A. Paul, declined to comment, citing a court order that prohibits him from discussing specific evidence. Sattar, he said, is being held in a maximum security unit at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, and has been permitted neither a family visit nor a phone call since his arrest.

The conversation about the letter, first reported in the New York Post, adds another dimension to the case against Sattar, who was described in last month's indictment as "a surrogate" for the imprisoned cleric, Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman. Abdel-Rahman was convicted in 1995 of plotting to blow up several New York landmarks, including the World Trade Center.

Sattar's arrest was overshadowed by charges filed the same day against Abdel-Rahman's lawyer, Lynne F. Stewart, but authorities regard Sattar as potentially more important to the ongoing federal terrorism probe. (A translator, Mohammed Yousry, also was arrested in the alleged conspiracyto provide material support to a terrorist organization. Sirri was indicted but was already in custody.)

Authorities believe the case of Sattar, a naturalized U.S. citizen who came here from Egypt in 1982, provides a window on the domestic activity of global terror networks and a way to understand the relationships between Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization and other extremist groups such as Abdel-Rahman's Gama'a al-Islamiyya, or the Islamic Group. Sattar has pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Sattar arranged contacts with global terrorists, disseminated propaganda and helped prepare at least one fatwa, or religious edict, that offered a moral rationale for committing violent acts, the indictment alleged. "He was the IG's [Islamic Group's] point man in North America," said the federal official. "He served as a communications facility for their worldwide network. He's very important."

Friends and family of Sattar said they are anxious to hear what the tapes reveal. Up to now, they said, the charges make little sense given the U.S. government's approach to Sattar over the past decade. On more than one occasion, the FBI tried unsuccessfully to recruit Sattar as an informant, his wife, Lisa, says.

Until 1997, Sattar had government clearance as a paralegal to visit Abdel-Rahman in federal prisons. Even as the government was tapping his phone, Sattar, a 13-year veteran of the U.S. Postal Service, was drawing a $40,000 salary for a job with the main post office on Staten Island that included picking up priority mail from secure areas of John F. Kennedy International Airport. That job ended when he was abruptly transferred to a desk job at a remote branch on Staten Island after the Sept. 11 attacks.

"This is what I don't understand: If he was a suspect for this long, why did they let him go here and here and here and here?" asked Mohamed Nabeel Elmasry, a close friend of Sattar's who worked with him as a paralegal on Abdel-Rahman's defense team. "Why did they let him have access to all these sensitive areas?"

Authorities said they waited to arrest Sattar because of the vast amounts of information they were gathering -- not just about him, but also about high-level members of the Islamic Group.

"It wasn't just Sattar we were listening to," the federal official said. "We were listening to everybody. It was a gold mine."

Sattar, often described as soft-spoken and unfailingly polite, was in many ways quintessentially American. He lived in a three-bedroom apartment on Staten Island with his Chicago-born wife and their four children. He supplemented his income by selling baby formula at night.

In a used Plymouth Voyager, he took his family on post office picnics to Six Flags in New Jersey and to historic sites in Washington and Philadelphia. He went to ballgames at Yankee Stadium and pounded stainless steel pots with his wife when the Chicago Bulls won the NBA championship.

A registered independent, he voted for Ralph Nader for president, his wife said.

Paul Phillips, president of Staten Island Branch 83 of the American Postal Workers Union, said Sattar recently told him, "I've got to be innocent, because the FBI has been following me for 10 years and they've got nothing."

But even after Abdel-Rahman's conviction, Sattar never hid his devotion to the cleric, or his views on U.S. policy. A frequent spokesman for the Islamic movement, he told "Frontline" in 1999 that he viewed the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania as "part of a war" against Islam that had been "declared by the American government." He called bin Laden "an inspiration" and said he had "sympathy for people who hate, or, let's say . . . understanding of why people show their hate toward the United States."

Phillips said copies of the "Frontline" interview circulated among employees of the Staten Island post office. Even before Sept. 11, he said, some colleagues shunned Sattar while others tried to engage him. "People who worked the closest with him had the least concern," Phillips said. "He came across as a family guy who went to his mosque and did his job. If somebody needed a door opened or there was a woman on the other side of the counter who needed help with a package, he was always, 'Oh, let me help you with that.' You wanted to like him, but you always knew there was this other side."

Authorities opened a wiretap on Sattar's home phone under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows the government to monitor suspected spies and agents of foreign terrorist organizations. Paul, Sattar's lawyer, said evidence recently turned over to the defense suggests the wiretaps may go back as far as seven years.

According to Sattar's indictment, an Islamic Group leader requested Sattar's assistance in expanding the organization's presence in the United States in early 1999. The group had taken responsibility in 1997 for a massacre in Luxor, Egypt, in which 58 tourists and four Egyptian security officers were shot and hacked to death. Before fleeing, the assailants scattered leaflets demanding Abdel-Rahman's release; one was inserted into the slashed corpse of a victim, according to Sattar's indictment.

The indictment alleged several contacts between Sattar and the Islamic Group: In 1999, it said, Sattar held telephone conversations with a group leader, Rifa'i Taha Musa, debating the effectiveness of a cease-fire the organization had declared.

On Oct. 3, 2000, the indictment said, Musa called Sattar and discussed a fatwa that Musa had written in Abdel-Rahman's name.

The next day, Sattar allegedly called Sirri -- the Egyptian charged in London with conspiracy to murder Massoud -- and read him the edict, entitled "Fatwa Mandating the Bloodshed of Israelis Everywhere." It appeared the next day on a Web site run by Sirri, according to the indictment.

The edict called on "brother scholars everywhere in the Muslim world to do their part and issue a unanimous fatwa that urges the Muslim nation to fight the Jews and to kill them wherever they are."

In January, the Wall Street Journal reported that it had purchased a looted IBM desktop computer in Kabul that had apparently been used by leaders of al Qaeda. Among the documents on the computer's hard drive was a letter written last May requesting an interview with Massoud.

The request, the Journal reported, carried the name of Yassir Sirri of the Islamic Observation Center in London. But the computer indicated it had been written by a user named Mohammed Zawahiri, a possible reference to bin Laden's top lieutenant, Ayman Zawahiri, according to the paper.

The U.S. official familiar with the recorded conversations between Sirri and Sattar said "at least one" was clearly about the contents of an interview request to be sent to Massoud. On the tape, the official said, the two men "can be heard discussing in some detail how to write such a letter and how it should read," with Sattar commenting on certain passages.

Massoud was mortally wounded by a bomb hidden inside a television camera that was detonated during an interview. Many authorities believe the Sept. 9 assassination was a preemptive strike on the primary opposition leader in advance of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The U.S. official said there is no clear evidence linking Massoud's slaying to Sept. 11, nor is there evidence suggesting that Sattar or Sirri had advance notice of those attacks. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, announcing the indictments of Sattar and the others on April 9, noted that the indictment did not include information related to Sept. 11 and said, "I think it's safe to assume that there is not any that would be likely to be forthcoming."

In an interview last week, Lisa Sattar said her husband was home sleeping on his day off when the first plane struck the World Trade Center. After she woke him up, they both sat transfixed. At first, she said, Sattar screamed for the safety of his children, who were already at school, and then he merely stared.

"It was like someone turned him off," she said. "It was like there was no more Ahmed. He was like a zombie. He wasn't anything."

After it became known that the suspected hijackers were Muslim, she said, Sattar told her: "Oh my God, that's it. Do you know what's going to happen? We're going to live a life of hell."

"He was right," she said.

Sattar called work and said he was taking the rest of the week off for his safety. He told his family to stay in the apartment. When he returned to work the next week, according to Phillips, the union president, Sattar was asked by the postmaster to transfer to a remote location on Staten Island. He agreed.

"Two of the people that worked in his facility lost a brother or a son, and they felt that the emotions were very high," Phillips said. Before the transfer, Phillips said, Sattar had picked up priority mail for Staten Island at a secure location at JFK airport twice a week, but Phillips said he did not believe Sattar was allowed out on the tarmac. A spokeswoman for the U.S. postal inspector did not return phone calls.

Lisa Sattar said the FBI had followed her husband for years. But after the Sept. 11 attack, agents became a constant presence, following him even as he drove the children on their paper route.

Asked whether she believed in her husband's innocence, Lisa Sattar said: "They make it sound like he was running some kind of major operation out of my home. It's very unlikely, really unlikely." Among other things, she said, that would be illogical, because she and her husband believed for years that their phones were tapped.

On the morning of April 9, Sattar was summoned to the main Staten Island post office. He confidently told colleagues the meeting was to give him his old job back. Instead, he was arrested.

"Something doesn't click here," Lisa Sattar said. "All the clearances he had, and the way they waited. If there are conversations from 1999 and 2000, why wait so long? I don't understand it."

Amazing how everything always 'circles back'.

>>>>In just under two hours of questioning by Mr. Tigar, Ms. Stewart spoke of how her career had grown from the days when she commuted by motorcycle to Rutgers University law school in New Jersey. She said she built a low-budget community law practice in Lower Manhattan, defending "any case that came through the door."<<<

NY Times: On Stand, Terrorist's Lawyer Denies Aiding Violent Cause
On Stand, Terrorist's Lawyer Denies Aiding Violent Cause

By JULIA PRESTON, The New York Times

October 26, 2004

After sitting silently for four months while federal prosecutors portrayed her as an eager accomplice of her terrorist clients, Lynne F. Stewart spoke at her trial yesterday for the first time, saying she was a "very, very adversarial" lawyer but had never crossed the line to aid violence.

Ms. Stewart, a tenacious, unorthodox lawyer who has represented a long list of unpopular clients over her 30-year career, sought from the first words of her testimony in Federal District Court in Manhattan to show that everything she had done to help one particular terrorist client, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, had been part of a full-tilt defense inspired by her "anti-authoritarian view of the world."

But she insisted that she had never abetted or even endorsed the Islamic holy war preached by Mr. Abdel Rahman, an Egyptian cleric convicted of conspiring to blow up New York City landmarks.

"I'm not in the habit of fundamentalism," Ms. Stewart said.

Ms. Stewart's testimony had been long awaited in a case that accuses her of aiding terrorism by relaying the sheik's messages of war to his followers. The government says she violated a fundamental oath to obey the law and crossed over to become a terrorist conspirator herself. She and her lawyers say the case against her is a clear example of overreaching by prosecutors in a post-9/11 world, and violates the sacrosanct relationship between lawyer and client.

Her testimony, on the first day of the defense presentation of its case, brought new electricity to a long trial that is examining the limits of what lawyers can do to represent terrorists, in one of the most ambitious terror cases brought by the Justice Department of Attorney General John Ashcroft.

On the stand, Ms. Stewart, 65, looked much like the public school librarian she once was, wearing her gray hair in a proper bowl cut and dressed in a conservative black and brown dress and orthopedic lace-up shoes. But, in a presentation full of contrasts, she described an approach to the law that had led her to the no-holds-barred defense of unpopular, unsavory and dangerously violent clients.

"We are bound to accept the cases of even those people who are hated by the public," Ms. Stewart said. "We are adjured by the ethical system to fight as hard and as vigorously and as zealously as we possibly can for our clients."

Ms. Stewart was clearly unaccustomed to sitting in the courtroom dock. She had to be reminded by the court clerk to swear an oath to tell the truth at the start of her testimony, and at first her face looked flushed and she struggled to steady her hands. When her lawyer, Michael E. Tigar, asked her to describe her defense strategy for one client, she instinctively bridled, hesitating to reveal trade secrets.

"I'm still a tenderfoot here," she said.

The first day of her testimony was intended to humanize her for the jury, which has been listening since June 22 to a case consisting mainly of thousands of pages of transcripts of secretly recorded phone calls and of meetings between Ms. Stewart and Mr. Abdel Rahman in federal prison.

In just under two hours of questioning by Mr. Tigar, Ms. Stewart spoke of how her career had grown from the days when she commuted by motorcycle to Rutgers University law school in New Jersey. She said she built a low-budget community law practice in Lower Manhattan, defending "any case that came through the door."

She said she agreed to represent Mr. Abdel Rahman in his 1995 terror trial, against the advice of many colleagues and friends, because she thought "it was the right thing for me to do."

Ms. Stewart's presence on the witness stand radically changed the atmosphere of the trial. She and her two co-defendants have been heard until now only on scratchy recordings made by the F.B.I. over several years up to 2001, when Ms. Stewart continued to represent Mr. Abdel Rahman, who is blind, after he was sentenced to life in prison for the thwarted bombing plot. The federal authorities imposed severe restrictions on the sheik to silence him in prison, restrictions she had agreed to in writing.

Ms. Stewart said she had agreed to represent the sheik despite his furious sermons calling for violence against the United States and Egypt because she saw that he was "a blind man, he came from a very different culture." She said she viewed him as a major Islamic scholar and believed that he had been railroaded by prosecutors with little evidence that he had actively participated in the bomb plot.

"I believe government is best when government is little," said Ms. Stewart, touching on a rare point of agreement between her leftist outlook and the Republican administration that is prosecuting her. "A government can overreach. A government is very, very powerful."

But Ms. Stewart insisted that she had always kept her distance from the sheik's politics. "I'm my own person, I have my own beliefs," she said. She said she had grown skeptical of religious fanaticism when she attended an evangelical Christian college.

"You have to take a step to the side," she said of her strategy with politically controversial clients. "You can't be too close to the client or too close to the cause, whatever that may be."

Ms. Stewart said she had never made much money in her practice, and her defense of the sheik was no exception. She received a total of $47,000 in federal payments during the sheik's 10-month trial.

Ms. Stewart is facing five counts of lying to the government and conspiring with Mr. Abdel Rahman to convey a call for terrorist war in Egypt to his militant followers. Her lawyers said she faces up to 35 years in jail if convicted on all charges.

Her two co-defendants are Mohamed Yousry, an Arabic translator who worked with Ms. Stewart, and Ahmed Abdel Sattar, a postal worker and paralegal aide in the sheik's trial who is facing the most serious terror charges. Mr. Tigar has said Ms. Stewart's defense will last about seven days.

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company