Posted on 09/11/2002 11:53:28 AM PDT by xsysmgr
Among the more than 3,000 men, women, and children who died in the al Qaeda attack on America last September 11, Joe Trombino was the only one twice victimized by terrorists. Trombino's doubly tragic fate offers crucial lessons as the nation seeks ways to prevent future outrages.
On October 20, 1981, Trombino was loading bags of money from the Nanuet National Bank aboard his Brinks armored truck, while fellow guard Peter Paige stood back to the wall, automatic rifle ready, at a huge mall near Nyack, N.Y., 20 miles north of the World Trade Center. Suddenly a red van wheeled up and three masked men jumped out. The first fired an M-16, killing Paige almost instantly. Another bandit methodically aimed a sawed-off shotgun and fired specialized ammunition at the truck's driver three times, wounding him despite the bullet-resistant windows. A fourth robber, seated on a nearby bus-stop bench, whipped out a pistol and joined the fusillade. Trombino got off only one shot before bullets ripped into his shoulder, leaving his left arm hanging by a thread. "I've got no arm!" he screamed before he lost consciousness. In less than two minutes, the four robbers grabbed six moneybags containing $1.6 million and sped off.
A half-mile away, a 20-year-old college student, Sandra Torgerson, paused at her living-room window at a startling sight on an adjacent parking lot. A red van followed by a beige Honda whipped in behind a U-haul truck, and men bearing rifles and green bags left the van for the other two vehicles and roared away. Sandra Torgersen phoned police. But for her alert action, the Brinks robbers would have made a clean getaway, and the nation would soon have experienced a terrorist epidemic.
Minutes later, four Nyack policemen stopped the U-haul truck at a freeway onramp. "Please, what's wrong?" asked the woman in the cab's passenger seat. "Can't you put your guns away?"
As the officers dropped their guard, the van's roll-up door flew open and six bandits charged out firing automatic weapons. They killed two policemen, wounded a third, and scattered into two trailing "switch" cars and automobiles commandeered from terrified motorists. In ensuing chases, four were captured and seven to nine more escaped. Three of those captured — Kathy Boudin, Dave Gilbert, and Judy Clark — were among the fanatical founders of the terrorist Weather Underground organization that emerged from the radical 1960s group, Students for a Democratic Society.
Joe Trombino, 47 years old at the time, underwent three operations and painful therapy to save, strengthen, and regain some use of his left arm. After two years he returned to work as a Brink's armed guard. "He'd done that for so long," said his wife, Jean, "it was like he didn't know what else to do."
Meantime the FBI and police departments nationwide assembled a shocking picture of a deadly terror network behind the Nyack attack. At first nobody had intelligence to draw on. "It was like Pearl Harbor all over again," the FBI's chief antiterrorist investigator, Ken Walton, told me. The Weather Underground fugitives had assembled a broad coalition of terrorist organizations: the Black Liberation Army, the Puerto Rican FALN, the Republic of New Africa, and the communist May 19 organization. They had pulled off at least 18 "armed expropriations" of banks and armored cars, with more than a million dollars in loot; had freed notorious terrorists from prison; and had operated for over five years without either police or FBI intelligence catching a hint of the conspiracy. And they were poised to launch widespread urban guerrilla warfare when their Nyack robbery miscarried.
Hearing the gunfire, 17-year-old Rusty O'Keefe, son of a Nyack fireman, had written down the license number of a fleeing auto that led lawmen to an intelligence bonanza: an East Orange, N.J., terrorist lair. They found an arsenal of automatic weapons, bomb-making materials, lists of prominent politicians and businessmen for assassination and kidnapping, maps and plans for bombing police and power stations, and equipment for counterfeiting fake identification.
How had a terrorist network gained such headway in America without attracting law enforcement's attention? Congress will be asking the same critical question this month [September] when it holds hearings on the intelligence failures that preceded the 9/11 al Qaeda attack. In both cases the answer is traceable to the 1970s hysteria over "FBI spying."
Joe Trombino's government blew a golden opportunity to discover and prevent the al Qaeda attack that killed him because Congress was stampeded in 1978 into imposing on the executive-branch restrictions that 23 years later intimidated top FBI executives and stymied field agents who sniffed and begged permission to pursue a terrorist skyjack plot.
On August 13, 2001, Zacarias Moussaoui, a Muslim and French citizen of Moroccan descent, showed up at the Pan Am International Flight Academy in Minneapolis and paid $6,800 in cash for 12 hours of flight-simulator training on a Boeing 747-400 jumbo jet. To Joe Rosengren, the operations director, "It was very obvious he did not know how to fly an airplane, especially something as big as that." A flight instructor, a former U.S. military pilot who spoke French and had experience in the Middle East, interviewed Moussaoui and decided he was a potentially dangerous skyjacker who could turn a fuel-laden jumbo jet into a guided missile. The academy staff discussed Moussaoui, suspected a skyjacking plan, talked about the huge fuel load of a 747 and its potential to become a guided missile, and decided to call the FBI.
Two days later, on August 15, FBI Special Agent Dave Rapp, a former military fighter pilot himself, confronted Moussaoui at the Residence Inn as he started out for his first simulator flight. Moussaoui attempted a bluff, claiming he had a renewed visa and invited Rapp and an Immigration and Naturalization Service agent to his room to show them, but the visa had expired. Truculently Moussaoui refused consent to search his luggage or laptop computer. Certain they had a terrorist, the agents conferred with the Minneapolis FBI's top lawyer, and that night the INS arrested Moussaoui for the visa violation.
The FBI's Minnesota field office asked Bureau executives in Washington to ask a judge for a search warrant under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Headquarters declined, even after French intelligence's confirmation of Moussaoui's ties to radical Islamic groups and activities connected to Osama bin Laden. The FBI's Washington lawyers contended they lacked sufficient evidence to satisfy the 1978 law.
It was a decision with tragic consequences. In Moussaoui's notebook the FBI would have found the telephone number of the Hamburg apartment of the main al Qaeda attack cell, where Moussaoui's paymaster and the plot's ringleader, Ramzi Binalshiabh, stayed. They also would have discovered Moussaoui's links to an al Qaeda cell in Malaysia already known to the CIA as a terrorist hatching ground. With these leads the FBI and German police might quickly have unwound and stopped the 9/11 plot.
But who was really at fault? The FBI? Or Congress? The lawmakers themselves bear substantial blame. In 1970, the American Civil Liberties Union made "dissolution of the nation's vast surveillance network" a top priority, and put an old-line Communist-party member, Frank Donner, in charge of the project. On March 8, 1971, clandestine radicals calling themselves "the Committee to Investigate the FBI" burglarized an FBI office in suburban Philadelphia and began leaking secret documents to liberal journalists eager for "scoops." In October Princeton University held a conference entitled "Investigating the FBI," and documents leaked to the media fueled participants' eagerness to "expose" FBI "abuses." Says intelligence historian Richard E. Morgan, "It was as if dammed-up resentment of American liberals against the FBI had suddenly broken loose; the news media widely publicized the Princeton meeting and the criticisms developed there."
On May 2, 1972, longtime FBI director J. Edgar Hoover died suddenly. Six weeks later, five men under direction of a former FBI agent and a former CIA employee working for the White House were caught burglarizing the Democratic National Committee headquarters, and the Watergate scandal began to unravel. In 1973 Acting FBI Director William Ruckleshaus revealed that in 1969-70, during the Vietnam War, President Nixon had ordered the FBI to tap 17 telephones of White House staffers, other government officials, and journalists to find out who was leaking classified documents.
Meantime, Leonard Boudin, a longtime secret Communist-party member and father of Weather Underground terrorist Kathy Boudin, sued the FBI on behalf of the Trotskyite communist Socialist Workers Party for planting informants in its meetings. In 1976, with President Ford fighting for political survival in his Watergate-weakened presidency, the FBI admitted burglarizing homes of eight relatives and associates of fugitive Weather Underground terrorists who were conducting a bombing campaign whose targets included the U.S. Capitol, State Department, Pentagon, and New York Police Department headquarters. One of the eight was Judy Clark, who later drove one of the getaway cars for the armed terrorists who shot Joe Trombino. She and four other WUO associates sued the FBI for violating their constitutional rights, and President Jimmy Carter's Justice Department agreed to a $90,000 settlement. Meantime, the Justice Department stopped the FBI hunt for the fugitive terrorists, and Carter's Attorney General Griffin Bell began a grand-jury investigation of the FBI instead.
Incredibly, the decade in which terrorists set off more than 400 bombs in America ended with more than two-dozen Carter Justice Department civil-rights lawyers investigating 132 FBI agents, and no one looking for the Weather Underground terrorists. Ultimately, prosecutors convicted two top FBI executives of conspiring to violate the constitutional rights of the terrorists' eight relatives and associates. The jury verdict came in just as the electorate turned out the Carter crowd, and to save the two G-men the expense of appealing the new President Reagan promptly pardoned them.
By this time, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D., Mass.) had led Congress in stripping the Executive Branch of vital intelligence authority. In Canada and Britain, "black bag jobs," surreptitious entries and electronic surveillance operations are done on the signature of a senior cabinet officer, and under every president from Franklin D. Roosevelt on, the attorney general signed warrants. The 1978 law required the Justice Department to get a judge's permission before the FBI could search, bug, or wiretap in national security cases. By a 178-176 vote Rep. Robert McClory (R., Ill.), ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, won approval of an amendment to restrict the judicial warrant requirement to U.S. citizens. But two days of heavy lobbying by President Carter and Attorney General Bell reversed the vote. requiring judicial permission to act against foreign agents or visitors, too.
Sen. Kennedy, the prime crusader, praised Carter as "the first president in history willing to waive the implied rights of inherent powers that other presidents have demanded." Carter signed the "Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act" on October 15, 1978. That was the law that shielded Zacarias Moussaoui from the warrant sought by the suspicious Minnesota FBI agents. Rep. John M. Ashbrook (R., Ohio) called the law "a disaster we will live to regret" and the way was clear for al Qaeda's invasion of America.
Shortly after 9 A.M. Joe Trombino, now 68, waited in his Brinks armored truck in the World Trade Center basement for three fellow guards who were making a delivery on the eleventh floor. In 1993 he had made a delivery just hours before terrorists bombed the WTC. This time Trombino tried to imagine what was happening upstairs as the building began to shake and water cascaded down. A policeman ordered him to move his truck, and Trombino was calling into Brink's operations center from a payphone when the line went dead.
Joe Trombino was crippled in one terrorist surprise attack and died in another because his government, created to "insure domestic Tranquility, . . . and secure the Blessings of Liberty," failed him and more than 3,000 others.
— Eugene H. Methvin, a Washington-based journalist, has reported on American courts and law enforcement since 1952. He served on the 1983-86 president's Commission on Organized Crime.
That is an excellent read. I have said that if there is to be any Congressional investigation they should start hauling up democrat polticians from the last 3 decades because they are responsible for the dismantling of our intelligence services.
Again, your and my least favorite president, Jimmy Carter was instrumental in setting up 9/11/2001.
Sen. Kennedy, the prime crusader, praised Carter as "the first president in history willing to waive the implied rights of inherent powers that other presidents have demanded." Carter signed the "Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act" on October 15, 1978. That was the law that shielded Zacarias Moussaoui from the warrant sought by the suspicious Minnesota FBI agents. Rep. John M. Ashbrook (R., Ohio) called the law "a disaster we will live to regret" and the way was clear for al Qaeda's invasion of America.
When the Opecker Princes bought out Jimmy Carter, that was a great investment for them.
Thanks for the ping re more evidence of the damage Carter did to our country.
Let's not forget Bill Clinton's pardon of these murderous bastards, all in Hillary's quest for the US Senate.
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