“TESTIFYING” BEFORE THE 9/11 COMMISSION

After reading 1000 Years for Revenge, the chairman of the 9/11 Commission, former New Jersey governor Thomas Kean, suggested that I share my findings with his staff. As it turned out, however, the commission elected to take my “testimony” in secret, in a windowless conference room at 26 Federal Plaza on March 15, 2004. In fact, the man who interviewed me, Dietrich Snell, was the former prosecutor of Ramzi Yousef, whose very office had failed to act on the evidence from the Philippines National Police that Yousef was tied to the planes operation.

As I saw it, Dietrich Snell should have been a witness before the 9/11 Commission, subpoenaed to testify under oath in open session. Instead he was hired as its senior counsel, and given the job of determining “the origin of the plot”—the most important question facing the 9/11 Commission. After all, f they couldn’t tell when the plot commenced, they couldn’t rightfully hold U.S. intelligence agencies responsible for not stopping it. But it soon became clear that the commissioners, and investigators like Snell, had little interest in assessing blame. Almost half of the commission’s staff was made up of alumni from the very agencies that failed to stop the attacks. In short, the foxes had been hired to guard the chicken coop.

In the end, Snell relegated the evidence I submitted from the Philippines National Police to a footnote in the 9/11 Commission’s final report. Worse, he flushed remarkable documentary evidence that al Qaeda may have been involved in the crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996. A cache of memos from the Bureau’s own files strongly suggested a bomb had been planted aboard the Paris-bound flight in order to secure a mistrial for Yousef in the first of two federal prosecutions. The forensic investigator who had shared the documents with me had also presented them to the Commission, but there wasn’t a word about that 1996 al Qaeda-related evidence from Ramzi Yousef in their final report.

OPERATION ABLE DANGER

What I didn’t know at the time was that, in late 1999 and early 2000, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the head of the U.S. Army’s Special Operations Command (SOCOM) had authorized a data mining operation called Able Danger, in which vast amounts of classified and open-source intelligence on al Qaeda was being processed using powerful “search bots” that surfed the Web around the clock. Within months, the Able Danger analysts had amassed 2.5 terabytes of data, equal to 12 percent of  all the printed pages in the Library of Congress.

By early 2000, working out of Fort Belvoir, Virginia, and the Defense Intelligence Analysis Center -- the very center where Ronnie Bucca had served -- the Able Danger investigators had found key links to four of the 9/11 hijackers. They also found direct ties between bin Laden and the New York cell of Ramzi Yousef and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman. This dovetailed with my findings that the two attacks on the World Trade Center were perpetrated by the same core group of al Qaeda operatives. The Abel Danger data miners later found a major al Qaeda presence in the port city of Aden, Yemen.

The active pursuit of that intelligence in the early fall of 2000 could have prevented the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in October, and tipped Bureau agents to the 9/11 plot more than a year before the attacks. For reasons as yet undetermined, though, the vast cache of data-mined intelligence was ordered destroyed in April 2000. Worse, when two decorated Able Danger operatives, an army lieutenant colonel and a navy captain, sought to share this scandal with the 911 Commission, they were effectively spurned.
The senior counsel on the 9/11 Commission staff who rejected the Able Danger intel, and kept it out of the final report, was Dietrich Snell—the same ex-prosecutor who had buried my evidence that the two attacks on the Twin Towers were directly funded and controlled by bin Laden and al Qaeda.

A DIFFERENT FINDING

The 9/11 Commission Report, published in July 2004 and later nominated for a National Book Award, concluded that the original World Trade Center bombing cell was made up of a “loosely based group of Sunni Islamists”; further, that the 9/11 plot had originated not with Ramzi Yousef in Manila in 1994, as I had demonstrated, but with Yousef’s uncle Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who—according to Snell’s account—merely pitched the planes-as-missiles operation to Osama bin Laden in 1996. The evidence I’d obtained from the Philippines National Police demonstrated that the Yousef-KSM Manila cell was funded directly by bin Laden via his brother-in-law, but the Commission, with the backing of Snell and other ex-Feds, concluded that KSM wasn’t even a member of al Qaeda in 1996.
By mid-2004 I was getting closer to the truth. The 1996 FBI 302 memos I’d tried to share with the commission showed that the Bureau, and prosecutors from the Justice Department, had affirmatively covered up evidence of an active al Qaeda cell in New York City. The same intelligence revealed the existence of a bin Laden-sponsored plot to hijack U.S. airliners, designed to pressure the U.S. to free the blind Sheikh and Ramzi Yousef, who was locked up in the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Lower Manhattan. Similar threat reporting would show up in Presidential Daily Briefings in 1998 and 2001—a fact that later made headlines—but my findings revealed that the FBI had buried  identical intelligence years before.
Why would America’s most elite law enforcement and investigative agencies suppress such critical intel?

Their motive could be traced to a most surprising quarter: organized crime. As a phone book-sized file of documentary evidence from prosecutors in the Eastern District of New York reveals FBI investigators and federal prosecutors were desperate to avoid a scandal over an alleged corrupt relationship between R. Lindley DeVecchio, a senior supervisory special agent in the Bureau’s New York Office, (NYO) and a notorious hit man named Gregory Scarpa Sr., whose two-year war of succession in the Colombo crime family had left twelve people dead, including two innocent bystanders.

               Through a bizarre turn of events, the Yousef evidence came from the killer’s son, Greg Scarpa Jr., a junior wiseguy who happened to inhabit a jail cell adjacent to Yousef’s at the MCC. But rather than risk losing a series of sixty Mafia cases in the Eastern District built on tainted evidence from Scarpa Sr., the Feds decided to bury the intel.

One of the lead prosecutors who disconnected those dots, I learned, was Patrick Fitzgerald, then the head of Organized Crime and Terrorism in New York’s Southern District. Considered the Justice Department’s leading authority on bin Laden, Fitzgerald would go on to become U.S. Attorney in Chicago, and special prosecutor in he ongoing investigation of media leaks regarding former CIA operative Valerie Plame, which ultimately cleared White House aide Karl Rove, while indicting Lewis “Scooter” Libby, top aide to Vice President Cheney.