Bureau and that he had frequently visited the Blind Sheikh’s crew in Jersey City. “I had him at Fort Bragg, I had him in New Jersey with the guys from the mosque, and I had him in Afghanistan,” Stavis said. “I called it completing the triangle.”
Stavis now saw Mohamed as the key to his client’s defense. When he moved to subpoena him as a defense witness, he had no idea that Mohamed was busy training a terror cell in Nairobi, Kenya. Nor did he know that the FBI had hired Mohamed as an informant. But it had become abundantly clear to him that the government had a lot to hide.
The prosecution team was led by Patrick Fitzgerald, an assistant US attorney appointed by Reagan who was considered one of the government’s strongest prosecutors. He was joined by Andrew McCarthy, an unabashed right-wing ideologue who exhibited what Jabara described somewhat charitably as “a linear and un-nuanced understanding of Islam.” The federal judge presiding over the case, Michael Mukasey, shared McCarthy’s hard-line views and formed a working relationship with him after the trial. (McCarthy, for instance, used his column at the right-wing National Review to tout Mukasey’s antiterror cred—“Bravo, Attorney General McCarthy,” read one blog—after the latter was appointed US attorney general under George W. Bush.)
In late 1994, the FBI located Mohamed in Nairobi and summoned him back to California for an urgent discussion. Determined to maintain his standing with the bureau, Mohamed obliged, tapping Al Qaeda financiers to cover his flight. McCarthy, as assistant US attorney, rushed over from New York to meet Mohamed in Santa Clara. According to a letter submitted by Nosair’s cousin, Ibrahim El-Gabrowny, a defendant in the “Day of Terror” verdict, “McCarthy advised Ali Mohamed to ignore the subpoena’s order and not to go to testify on Nosair’s behalf and that Mr. McCarthy will cover up for him regarding that.”
The government knew that Mohamed had been involved with the Blind Sheikh while he’d had access to sensitive material at Fort Bragg. And it also apparently knew—a year before the first mention of his name in American media and three years before his first major attack—the identity of Al Qaeda’s top figure. Stavis recalled how Fitzgerald asked one of his defense witnesses seemingly out of the blue if he had ever met Osama bin Laden at the Services Bureau office in Pakistan. The witness answered that he had. As Stavis later recalled, “I said to myself, I don’t know who this bin Laden guy is, but he’s really in Fitzgerald’s crosshairs.”
Oddly, the government took no action against Mohamed after meeting him in California. Whether El-Gabrowny’s startling account of McCarthy’s scheming was accurate or not, Mohamed never testified. Instead, he was listed by the prosecution as an “unindicted co-conspirator,” a legally empty designation. When Stavis attempted to bring Mohamed’s commanding officer, De Atkine, to the stand in his place, the government blocked him too, this time on the suspect grounds that the military academician was not a competent witness.
Finally, when Stavis attempted to introduce Mohamed’s army records as evidence, McCarthy vehemently objected, arguing they were irrelevant to the case. At every turn, the prosecution fought to cover up the US government’s past collaboration with the defendants and its ongoing relationship with Mohamed.
Despite the stonewalling, Stavis managed to extract a stipulation from the government. It read: “From shortly after the start of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 through September 1991, the United States, through one of its intelligence agencies, provided economic and military support to the Afghan Mujahideen through a third country intermediary.” The document represented the first official acknowledgement by the government of one of its worst-kept secrets.
Stavis’s relentless focus on Ali Mohamed also generated the first mention of the shadowy operative’s name in American media. It came in the form of a February 3, 1995, article in the Boston Globe that detailed Mohamed’s relationship with the CIA, his presence at the Al-Kifah Center in Brooklyn, and the fact that he had trained most, if not all, of the defendants in weapons use.
“His presence in the country is the result of an action initiated by Langley,” a senior CIA official told the Boston Globe, referring to Mohamed and to the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
The “Day of Terror” trial was the largest and most complex terror conspiracy prosecution of its day. Despite its contrived foundations, or perhaps because of this, it served as a blueprint for future terror prosecutions. The trial ended with a verdict that surprised no one: a local jury found all the defendants guilty of conspiracy to commit sedition. They delivered their verdict almost immediately, with minimal deliberation. Mukasey proceeded to sentence Abdel-Rahman and Nosair to life and slapped the others with lengthy sentences that amounted to life in jail. Despite the fact that the plot was conceived by an FBI informant in a controlled environment, Mukasey claimed it “would have resulted in the murder of hundreds if not thousands of people.”
Among those found guilty was Mohammed Saleh, a Palestinian refugee and gas station owner who was accused of selling the diesel fuel the would-be bombers planned to use. Despite his insistence that he had no idea whom he was selling gas to or what they intended to do with it, Saleh was sent away for thirty-five years. “I think my client was set up by the FBI,” Saleh’s lawyer, John Jacobs, declared after his conviction. “They bought their conviction with a million dollars they gave the informant. They bought it with the misconduct of the agents.”
Mukasey concluded the trial by launching into a tirade that put his right-wing political outlook on full display: “This country has experienced militant fascism that failed and militant communism that failed,” he railed at the defendants, suggesting that the militant Islam they embraced would be the next ideological movement in America’s crosshairs.
Earlier that day, the Blind Sheikh had belted out a 100-minute jeremiad before Mukasey and the packed courtroom that gained legendary status among his followers. He ticked off a litany of transgressions the United States had committed against Muslims (at least, in his view), from its support for the secular Turkish revolution of Kamal Atatürk in 1923 to its full-scale backing of Israel to the Gulf War. At the crescendo of his address, Abdel-Rahman predicted that the United States would substitute the hammer and sickle with the Islamic crescent as its new national enemy. With America’s Cold War against communism over, he foresaw a hot war in and against the Islamic world. Unlike Mukasey, who appeared to wish for the same scenario, the Sheikh warned that the coming clash of civilizations would end in catastrophe for America. “God will make (America) disappear from the surface of the Earth, as it has made the Soviet Union disappear,” he said, invoking the triumph of the mujahedin over the Red Army. The sheikh appeared to see no irony in the fact that the United States was the guarantor of that victory, or in his own role as a CIA asset.
There were no warnings of any terror plots after the trial and no sign of danger as a result of the verdict. Yet the Clinton administration decided to place airports and government buildings under a sweeping security clampdown, amplifying and extending the atmosphere of fear the trial had inspired. “We’re preparing for the worst,” declared FBI deputy director Weldon Kennedy. Attempts to provide a confused public with a historical framework for understanding the new threat, meanwhile, were harshly punished. When Robert Fox, the FBI’s New York City director, mentioned in a nationally televised 1993 broadcast that the CIA had trained many of the perpetrators of the World Trade Center attack, he was swiftly transferred to a faraway post. The subject was considered taboo thereafter.
While inconvenient truths about CIA collusion with international jihadists were swept away, a coterie of militarists hyped the Al Qaeda threat to weave crank conspiracy theories that advanced an ulterior, interventionist agenda, attracting interest and promotion from influential quarters. Laurie Mylroie, a disgruntled, obscure former foreign policy advisor to President Bill Clinton, had published a dubious 1997 article claiming that Yousef had actually been an Iraqi intelligence agent. Former CIA director James Woolsey and an ex-Reagan administration official named Frank Gaffney seized on Mylroie’s crackpot theory as proof that Saddam Hussein posed an existential threat to the United States. Her research, which linked minuscule islands of truth with bridges of bunkum, became the linchpin for Woolsey and a close-knit band of neoconservative zealots to initiate a multiyear project to build the case for a full-scale military confrontation with Iraq.