The Times promoted the “Quiet but Aggressive Staff” on the 9-11 Commission. The story’s lead character, Dietrich Snell, tells the Times that he heard a terror suspect promise revenge as he was led away. The New York Daily News had a slightly different story in 2001.
Reporters Jennifer 8. Lee and Eric Lichtblau began: “When Dietrich Snell first felt his office shake on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 — the reverberations from the first jetliner crashing into the World Trade Center down the street — he ran into the office of his boss, the attorney general of New York, Eliot L. Spitzer. Mr. Snell, who was a federal prosecutor in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing case, had a feeling that this was no accident. Gazing through the windows at the burning tower, Mr. Snell told his co-workers, Mr. Spitzer said, that one of the defendants convicted in a terrorism case had warned as he was being led away: ‘We're going to get them. We're going to get them.’”
But the New York Daily News had a slightly different and more detailed Snell story on September 25, 2001. From the viewpoint of the 9-11 commission and the widows that promote it, Snell was part of the problem. Greg B. Smith reported: “Two years ago, federal prosecutors turned down a cooperation offer from a terrorist who claimed he was part of a well-financed 1995 plot to crash an airplane into the CIA headquarters.”
"It was not something that we focused on. It was something that he said," recalled Dietrich Snell, the ex-prosecutor who convicted Murad. "We took seriously what he was telling us, but what we were focused on was the plot to blow up the 12 airliners."
“Snell, who left office in 1998, did not recall Murad coming forward to offer information in return for leniency in sentencing. But court papers and two sources familiar with the situation confirm that Murad did try to cooperate with Manhattan U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White's office. He was turned down, the sources said.”
At whose instigation was Snell put on the Commission?