Posted on 06/08/2002 1:38:38 PM PDT by sarcasm
Left this country wide opem!!!!!
Instead we got Dave Frasca. Oh, the FBI did get rid of the one guy who knew all about Al Queda. Brilliant of them.
This really isn't a new philosophy. America usually waits until the enemy knocks us down before we get up and do something about it. Remember Dec. 7, 1941? I do.
I'm for it. The weasel did know, but it didn't look like a winner for him
so he sloughed off the responsiblity, made a few ineffectual gestures,
and got a pass from the press and the "intellectual (liberal) elite".
"I tried" is just more form over substance, as I learned early in life
it don't mean shit and isn't even as good as, "No excuse SIR!"
Freedom Is Worth Fighting For !!
Molon Labe !!
By the way one of the planners of the '93 WTC bombing trained in '92 at the same camp near Khost in Afghanistan that Ressam later trained at. He then met Ramzi Yusef in Pakistan, I take it in the bin Laden-financed safe house that this article says Yusef was staying at. Then they flew together to the U.S., with bombing plans.
Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion.
The tapes offer a rare glimpse into the sensitive relationship between the confidential informer and the law-enforcement officals with whom he worked. They also reveal for the first time how Federal and police agents instructed him to "pump up" a suspect for information and negotiate a $1 million fee from the Government for his services. Scattered through the hundreds of pages of transcripts are many instances in which the Government agents appear to encourage Mr. Salem to lead the suspects to incriminate themselves. Defense lawyers have long contended that the Government crossed a legal line, instructing Mr. Salem in a fishing expedition that became entrapment. Although the bulk of the transcripts does not appear to show the agents steering Mr. Salem toward improper or illegal conduct, whether they did so finally will be resolved in court. Many New Details Among the details included in the transcripts are the following: *A reference by Mr. Salem to 12 possible bombs and hitherto unmentioned targets, including Grand Central Terminal, the Empire State Building and Times Square. *A New York City police detective working with the F.B.I. told Mr. Salem, who was getting $500 a week from the Government, that if he wanted a $1 million informer's fee, he should press for $1.5 million and then negotiate. *An unusual suggestion that some of the money sought by Mr. Salem was going to be put up by private individuals. *A reference from Mr. Salem, in a conversation with an F.B.I. agent, to an argument between F.B.I. officials over whether Mr. Salem should remain an unidentified informer or surface as a witness to testify at trial. *A major defendant in the World Trade Center trial was tipped off by a neighbor to an elaborate F.B.I. ruse to search the Brooklyn apartment of another suspect, Mahmud Abouhalima, and replace explosives in his apartment with false explosives supplied by the F.B.I. *Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a defendant in the second bombing case, was using a fax machine to command anti-Communist Muslim rebels, moving forces from Pakistan to Afghanistan and dealing with a code-named agent from Hamas, the militant Palestinian group, Mr. Salem told the F.B.I. The transcripts cover Mr. Salem's dealings with the suspects and his work for the Government over a period of at least two years, going back to the trial in the killing of Rabbi Meir Kahane. Mr. Salem recorded the conversations with Government agents on his own, without the knowledge or consent of his contacts in the F.B.I., apparently to use as an insurance policy to hold the Government to its promises of money and protection. Some of the most striking passages in the transcripts show Mr. Salem agonizing over what he suggests was the failure of the F.B.I., despite his information, to halt the Feb. 26 bombing of the trade center, in which six people were killed. Although Mr. Salem is not a witness in that case, he was working with the Government at that time. "They told me that 'we want to set this,' " Mr. Salem said, referring to the bomb in a conversation on April 1 with John Anticev, one of the F.B.I. agents he reported to, and sometimes complained to others about. " 'What's the right place to put this?' " Then he added, still speaking to the agent: "You were informed. Everything is ready. The day and the time. Boom. Lock them up and that's that. That's why I feel so bad." Federal officials have acknowledged in the past that they dropped Mr. Salem as an informer sometime before the trade center bombing over what they said was his reluctance to wear a body recorder, as well as other disagreements. They said he never provided detailed information of the attack in advance but that they began using his services again after the bombing and credited him with foiling the related but separate plot to bomb the United Nations, Holland and Lincoln tunnels and the Federal building housing the F.B.I. in Manhattan. The case is expected to come to trial next year, perhaps shortly after the end of the related trial of four men charged with bombing the World Trade Center. As the most important witness, Mr. Salem is expected to be called upon to verify tapes he made of conversations with suspects and testify on his dealings with them. |
In several instances, the transcripts show Mr. Salem lecturing Federal agents on how to do their jobs, criticizing their surveillance and interview techniques. In one instance, he suggests that they tell a possible source that his phone was tapped, when in fact it was not, and that they confront the man and push him hard for information. "Don't give him a chance to think," Mr. Salem is quoted as saying. "If he will think it's, 'I want my lawyer.' Then bingo, you are gone." Aid for Defense? By creating the so-called bootleg tapes, Mr. Salem has given ammunition to defense lawyers who argue that he entrapped the 15 defendants charged with conspiring to bomb New York City landmarks. In one instance that shows how Mr. Salem was prompted by Federal agents, Mr. Anticev is quoted as saying, "You know, pump, maybe kind of pump him up a little bit." The agent tells Mr. Salem to stress "the loyalty to his cousin." The target in that instance, Ibrahim A. Elgabrowny, is a cousin of the man who was charged with shooting Mr. Kahane and now a defendant in a plot to bomb New York City targets. In another instance, Mr. Anticev is quoted as instructing Mr. Salem to press to learn whether Mr. Elgabrowny or his associates were hiding explosives. He is quoted as telling Mr. Salem not to worry about being exposed as the source of the information. "We'll just know where stuff exists and where it is," Mr. Anticev is quoted as saying. "And then we'll make our move." "There's no danger, you know," he says later. "We can be sneaky and take our time." Mr. Salem has dropped from sight since the June arrests, and an effort to get in touch with him through the witness protection program of the Federal Marshals Service was rejected. But a member of the defense team said he was spotted within the last month in Manhattan. Mr. Salem, a 43-year-old former Egyptian Army officer and confidant of the radical Egyptian cleric, Mr. Abdel Rahman, surfaced as the Government's mole after a June 24 F.B.I. raid on a Queens garage that the Government said smashed an extremist Muslim plot to blow up the United Nations, Lincoln and Holland tunnels and the Manhattan Federal building housing the F.B.I., and to assassinate Senator Alfonse M. D'Amato and State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, among other targets. The unauthorized tapes came to light immediately after the raid as Mr. Salem hurriedly evacuated his West Side Manhattan apartment and was quickly identified by associates of the sheik and by law-enforcement authorities as the "confidential informant" who had secretly gathered evidence, including many tape-recorded conversations, against those later charged as conspirators in the case. Tapes Left Behind In the belongings Mr. Salem left behind either carelessly or by design were cassettes of the tapes he had secretly recorded with the F.B.I. Because these could shed light on the prosecution's evidence-gathering methods to the point of possible entrapment, defense lawyers convinced Judge Mukasey that they should gain access to this material as well as to Mr. Salem's authorized recordings, turned over earlier. Even before he came in from the cold of his undercover role in June, the burly, bearded Mr. Salem was an enigmatic figure, a private investigator who supported himself as a jewelry designer, a security guard for the sheik who freely gave interviews to news reporters. Officials in Cairo say he entered the Egyptian Army as a private and during an 18-year career fought in the 1973 war with Israel and was "pensioned out" as a senior officer while continuing a relationship with Egyptian military intelligence. His American wife, from whom he was divorced this year but to whom he is still close, told New York Newsday last week that he had recently sent a set of the bootleg tapes home to Egyptian authorities with a visiting relative. In the United States for about six years, he lived most recently in a fifth-floor suite at the Bretton Hall residence hotel at 2350 Broadway. A news reporter invited to interview him there shortly after the World Trade Center bombing found herself on camera as Mr. Salem insisted videotaping the encounter. He showed her photographs of what he said was his sandbagged bunker in the 1973 war, the reviewing stand where former President Anwar el-Sadat was assassinated in 1981 and his grave site. He also showed pictures of people who had apparently been tortured: a woman with cigarette burns and a man confined in a cage. He said that he prayed at the Abu Bakr mosque in Brooklyn and the al-Salaam mosque in Jersey City, where Sheik Omar often preached, and that he had known the cleric from Egypt. He said he was attracted by Mr. Rahman's aura of power and fearlessness. Remembered as Benefactor Associates in Jersey City said they remembered Mr. Salem as a generous benefactor of the mosques and of the sheik himself. He also collected money for the defense of El Sayyid A. Nosair, an Egyptian contractor charged in the 1990 assassination of the militant Jewish leader, Rabbi Meir Kahane. Mr. Nosair was acquitted of that killing but convicted of related assault and weapons charges. He is also one of the 15 defendants in the bombing conspiracy case. Mr. Salem also had dealings with Mr.. Elgabrowny, a relative of Mr. Nosair for whom Mr. Salem said he helped obtain a pistol permit from the New York City Police Department. Associates and lawyers of some of the defendants said that Mr. Salem appeared rather abruptly on the scene around the time of the Kahane killing and that they now suspect he was sent to infiltrate the circle around Mr. Nosair. |
Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion.
The account, which is given in the transcript of hundreds of hours of tape recordings Mr. Salem secretly made of his talks with law-enforcement agents, portrays the authorities as in a far better position than previously known to foil the Feb. 26 bombing of New York City's tallest towers. The explosion left six people dead, more than 1,000 injured and damages in excess of half a billion dollars. Four men are now on trial in Manhattan Federal Court in that attack. Mr. Salem, a 43-year-old former Egyptian army officer, was used by the Government to penetrate a circle of Muslim extremists now charged in two bombing cases: the World Trade Center attack and a foiled plot to destroy the United Nations, the Hudson River tunnels and other New York City landmarks. He is the crucial witness in the second bombing case, but his work for the Government was erratic, and for months before the trade center blast, he was feuding with the F.B.I. Supervisor 'Messed It Up' After the bombing, he resumed his undercover work. In an undated transcript of a conversation from that period, Mr. Salem recounts a talk he had had earlier with an agent about an unnamed F.B.I. supervisor who, he said, "came and messed it up." "He requested to meet me in the hotel," Mr. Salem says of the supervisor. "He requested to make me to testify and if he didn't push for that, we'll be going building the bomb with a phony powder and grabbing the people who was involved in it. But since you, we didn't do that." The transcript quotes Mr. Salem as saying that he wanted to complain to F.B.I. headquarters in Washington about the bureau's failure to stop the bombing, but was dissuaded by an agent identified as John Anticev. "He said, I don't think that the New York people would like the things out of the New York office to go to Washington, D.C.," Mr. Salem said Mr. Anticev had told him. Another agent, identified as Nancy Floyd, does not dispute Mr. Salem's account, but rather, appears to agree with it, saying of the New York people: "Well, of course not, because they don't want to get their butts chewed." Mary Jo White, who, as the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York is prosecuting defendants in two related bombing cases, declined yesterday to comment on the Salem allegations or any other aspect of the cases. An investigator close to the case who refused to be identified further said, "We wish he would have saved the world," but called Mr. Salem's claims "figments of his imagination." The transcripts, which are stamped "draft" and compiled from 70 tapes recorded secretly during the last two years by Mr. Salem, were turned over to defense lawyers in the second bombing case by the Government on Tuesday under a judge's order barring lawyers from disseminating them. A large portion of the material was made available to The New York Times. In a letter to Federal Judge Michael B. Mukasey, Andrew C. McCarthy, an assistant United States attorney, said that he had learned of the tapes while debriefing Mr. Salem and that the informer had then voluntarily turned them over. Other Salem tapes and transcripts were being withheld pending Government review, of "security and other issues," Mr. McCarthy said. William M. Kunstler, a defense lawyer in the case, accused the Government this week of improper delay in handing over all the material. The transcripts he had seen, he said, "were filled with all sorts of Government misconduct." But citing the judge's order, he said he could not provide any details. |
The transcripts do not make clear the extent to which Federal authorities knew that there was a plan to bomb the World Trade Center, merely that they knew that a bombing of some sort was being discussed. But Mr. Salem's evident anguish at not being able to thwart the trade center blast is a recurrent theme in the transcripts. In one of the first numbered tapes, Mr. Salem is quoted as telling agent Floyd: "Since the bomb went off I feel terrible. I feel bad. I feel here is people who don't listen." Ms. Floyd seems to commiserate, saying, "hey, I mean it wasn't like you didn't try and I didn't try." In an apparent reference to Mr. Salem's complaints about the supervisor, Agent Floyd adds, "You can't force people to do the right thing." The investigator involved in the case who would not be quoted by name said that Mr. Salem may have been led to believe by the agents that they were blameless for any mistakes. It was a classic agent's tactic, he said, to "blame the boss for all that's bad and take credit for all the good things." In another point in the transcripts, Mr. Salem recounts a conversation he said he had with Mr. Anticev, saying, "I said, 'Guys, now you saw this bomb went off and you both know that we could avoid that.' " At another point, Mr. Salem says, "You get paid, guys, to prevent problems like this from happening." Mr. Salem talks of the plan to substitute harmless powder for explosives during another conversation with agent Floyd. In that conversation, he recalls a previous discussion with Mr. Anticev. "Do you deny," Mr. Salem says he told the other agent, "your supervisor is the main reason of bombing the World Trade Center?" Mr. Salem said Mr. Anticev did not deny it. "We was handling the case perfectly well until the supervisor came and messed it up, upside down." The transcripts reflect an effort to keep Mr. Salem as an intelligence asset who would not have to go public or testify. A police detective working with the F.B.I., Louis Napoli, assures Mr. Salem in one conversation, "We can give you total immunity towards prosecution, towards, ah, ah, testifying." But he adds: "I still have to tell you that if you're the only game in town in regards to the information," then, he says, "you'll have to testify." Studied for Signs of Illegality The transcripts are being closely studied by lawyers looking for signs that Mr. Salem and the law enforcement officials, in their zeal to gather evidence, may have crossed the legal line into entrapment, a charge that defense counsel have already raised. But the transcripts show that the officials were concerned that by associating with bombing defendants awaiting trial in the Metropolitan Correctional Center, Mr. Salem might have been accused of spying on the defense. In an undated conversation, Mr. Anticev tries to explain the perils. "We're not allowed to have any information regarding that," he tells Mr. Salem. "That could jeopardize, you know, if you go see a lawyer, ah, you know, with the defendant's friend or whatever like that, and you're talking about things we're not suppose to, ah, condone that. We're not supposed to make people do that for us. That's like sacred ground. You can't be privileged, ah, you can't know what's being talked about at all." Mr. Salem seems to bridle. "I, I, I don't think that's right," he says. The agent insists: "Yeah, but that's just a guideline. If that ever happened, ah, you can back and reported on the meeting between, ah, you know, Kunstler and Mohammad A. Elgabrown. Forget about it. I mean a lot of people ah the case can get thrown out. You understand?" The references were to the defense lawyer, Mr. Kunstler, and his client in the second bomb case, Ibrahim A. Elgabrowny. Mr. Salem seems to reluctantly agree. "They want you to have a hand in it," Mr. Anticev goes on, "but they're afraid that when you get that kind of, ah, too deep, like me, it's almost like, especially with all this legal stuff going on right now." If it were just intelligence gathering, the agent says, "You can do anything you want. You could go crazy over there and have a good time. Do you know what I mean?" The agent goes on: "But now that everything is going to court and there is legal stuff and it's just, it's just too hard. It's just too tricky, if, this, you know. And then there's the fact if you come by with the big information, he did this, ah, let me talk about this with the other people again." "O.K.," Mr. Salem says. "All right. O.K." CORRECTION-DATE: October 29, 1993, Friday CORRECTION: An article yesterday about accounts of a plot to build a bomb that was eventually exploded at the World Trade Center referred imprecisely in some copies to what Federal officials knew about the plan before the blast. Transcripts of tapes made secretly by an informant, Emad A. Salem, quote him as saying he warned the Government that a bomb was being built. But the transcripts do not make clear the extent to which the Federal authorities knew that the target was the World Trade Center. |
Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion.
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By GREG B. SMITH DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER Daily News (New York) NEWS; Pg. 6 April 23, 2002, Tuesday SPORTS FINAL EDITION
Even though federal investigators became suspicious of Sattar as early as 1993, he had the authority as a mailman to deliver and pick up express mail from Kennedy Airport, giving him access to restricted areas barred to the public. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Sattar was reassigned to a post office in a remote section of Staten Island with no access to the airport. The FBI arrested Sattar two weeks ago along with the sheik's lawyer Lynne Stewart and two others on charges of providing support to a terrorist group. The charges contrast sharply with Sattar's image as a mild-mannered 15-year veteran of the Postal Service quietly raising four children with an American wife on Staten Island. But a review of documents and interviews with federal officials reveal that for years, Sattar has been under suspicion for his activities on behalf of al-Gama'at al-Islamiyya, a particularly vicious terror group that slaughtered 58 tourists in 1997 at Luxor, Egypt.
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Sattar's affiliation with terrorism surfaced in 1993, as the FBI zeroed in on the sheik's involvement in an al-Gama'at conspiracy to blow up New York landmarks such as the Holland Tunnel and the United Nations. The English-speaking Sattar became the spokesman for the blind cleric. The FBI knew in early 1993, shortly after the World Trade Center bombing, that an FBI informant named Emad Salem told the bureau that Sattar said he obtained the unpublished home address of a lead agent in the sheik's investigation. Salem told the agent, John Anticev, who then recalled seeing Sattar in a postal uniform near his home. Fearing for his children's safety, Anticev moved, court records state. Sattar also was investigated for obtaining the home address of other agents and prosecutors looking into the origins of Al Qaeda, a federal source told the Daily News.
Postal Inspector spokeswoman Pat Bossert confirmed that Sattar had access to Kennedy in picking up express mail, but insisted he did not have "special access" to other restricted areas. She declined to discuss the FBI's investigation of Sattar's efforts to obtain addresses of agents and prosecutors. 'Cleaned up everything' Investigators also discovered that Sattar was involved deeply with Trade Center bomber Mohammed Salameh. The informant Salem said Satter became agitated when he learned Salameh had been arrested. "As soon as he had heard about Salameh's arrest, he had run home right away and 'cleaned up everything,' " Salem told the FBI. Later, Sattar asked Salem "if there was a way to clean chemicals off the body so that no residue was left behind," according to court documents. Sattar's wife, Lisa, doesn't believe the charges. She describes him as a quiet man, a devoted father who works two jobs to pay for their small rented apartment. "Supposedly all this stuff went on from the home. It's highly unlikely," she said. "Our apartment is very small. I can hear him talking on the phone." |
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BY MICHAEL DALY Daily News (New York) NEWS; Pg. 5 May 29, 2002, Wednesday SPORTS FINAL EDITION
"Column 1001 B," said Lt. John Ryan, commander of the PA police recovery task force. Ryan pointed out the evenly spaced rectangles where the exterior columns had been. The rectangles marked off an acre in ghostly gray dirt where the tower once stood. "There's one," Ryan said. He pointed to a twin pattern of rectangles over by the final raking. "There's the other," Ryan said.
The meeting was just across town, in a 13th-floor conference room at 1 Police Plaza. The matter at hand that November day in 1990 was the assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane. "Can you tell me this guy acted alone?" the then-chief of detectives is said to have asked. By "this guy," the chief meant El Sayed A Nosair, who had been arrested after fleeing the Manhattan hotel ballroom where Kahane was shot. "Absolutely not," Norris would recall saying. "We have two other people we think were involved." The two had been in Nosair's New Jersey apartment when Norris' squad arrived to search it. Both were cab drivers and admitted being outside the hotel. Witnesses had seen Nosair jump into a cab immediately after the shooting and then hop out as if he had boarded the wrong one.
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"Shut up," the chief now said, by Norris' account. "You handle the murder. They handle the conspiracy." By "they," the chief meant the FBI.
Norris departed as upset as any good cop would be, but nowhere near as upset as he was after the FBI arrived at his squad room with authorization from the chief of detectives to cart away two filing cabinets of papers his squad had found in Nosair's apartment. Aside from numerous documents in Arabic, the cabinets contained a bomb manual, military training guides and an assassination list. There were also photos of New York landmarks, reportedly including the World Trade Center. What followed was termed "a joint investigation," the true nature of which became apparent when Norris' detectives located a shooting range in Connecticut where Nosair and his buddies had trained. "What do you want? The FBI was here two weeks ago," a man there is said to have told the detectives. That meant the FBI had been there shortly after the shooting. Norris deduced that the agents knew much more about Nosair and his buddies than they were letting on. This reportedly included a 1990 phone intercept of Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman speaking to Nosair of "attacking big buildings, attack skyscrapers." On Feb, 26, 1993, a bomb went off in the World Trade Center garage. The bombers included one of the cab drivers who had been at Nosair's apartment. Norris now asked a senior police official if the FBI had followed the bombers right up to the World Trade Center. "I can't tell you, but you're not far off," the official said. Three years after seizing Nosair's file cabinets, the FBI had not finished translating the Arabic documents. One proved to be a handwritten sermon by Rahman calling on his followers to attack America and "blow up their edifices." Another document reportedly bore the name of the organization that Osama Bin Laden had founded in 1988. "Al Qaeda." A tape subsequently surfaced of the agents being chided by their chief informant in the case for not preventing the bombing. "Put two and two together," Emad Salem told them. 'We want to help' Eight years later, the whole country is wondering whether putting two and two together could have prevented the death of 3,047 people. Norris had since become police commissioner of Baltimore, and as was reported here, he went before Congress to ask why the FBI continued to largely shut out the country's police from the fight against terrorism. "The FBI has a total of 11,533 agents," Norris noted. "There are nearly 650,000 local law enforcement officers in the country. We want to help, and I think the nation needs us to help." In recent days, Norris has become alarmed by the FBI's suggestion that more attacks are "inevitable." He is reminded of what people in New York once said about crime being unstoppable. He proposes that we use the same Compstat program against terror that worked so well against street crime. "All it is is connecting the dots," Norris says. "You could attack this the way you attack robbers or rapists or anything else. Whatever comes, nuclear, anthrax, it has to be delivered by people. They live next door to other people, they use ATMs, they go eat somewhere, they rent cars, they get tickets. They're findable."
Meanwhile, the other lieutenant, John Ryan of the Port Authority recovery task force, was down at The Pit yesterday, watching them remove that final Column 1001 B from twin acres of dust. |
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