Patrick Fitzgerald, who testified to the 9/11 Commission about Ali Mohamed, knew him well. In 1994 he had named him as an unindicted co-conspirator in the New York landmarks case, yet allowed him to remain free. This was because, as Fitzgerald knew, Ali Mohamed was an FBI informant, from at least 1993 and maybe 1989.(3) Thus, from 1994 "until his arrest in 1998 [by which time the 9/11 plot was well under way], Mohamed shuttled between California, Afghanistan, Kenya, Somalia and at least a dozen other countries."(4)

What I first wrote in 2004, and again in 9/11 and American Empire, has to my knowledge has not yet been in the US press: it is that in 1993 Ali Mohamed had been detained by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Canada, (when he inquired at an airport after an incoming al Qaeda terrorist who turned out to be carrying two forged Saudi passports). Mohamed immediately told the RCMP to make a phone call to the FBI in the United States, and the call secured his release.(5) This release enabled Ali to go on to Kenya, take pictures of the U.S.. Embassy, and deliver them to bin Laden for the Embassy bombing plot.

In August 2006 there was a National Geographic Special on Ali Mohamed. We can take this as the new official fallback position on Ali Mohamed, because John Cloonan, the FBI agent who worked with Fitzgerald on Mohamed, helped narrate it. I didn't see the show, but here's what TV critics said about its contents:

Ali Mohamed manipulated the FBI, CIA and U.S. Army on behalf of Osama bin Laden. Mohamed trained terrorists how to hijack airliners, bomb buildings and assassinate rivals. [D]uring much of this time Mohamed was ... , an operative for the CIA and FBI, and a member of the U.S. Army.(6) ... Mohamed turned up in FBI surveillance photos as early as 1989, training radical Muslims who would go on to assassinate Jewish militant Meir Kahane and detonate a truck bomb at the World Trade Center. He not only avoided arrest, but managed to become an FBI informant while writing most of the al Qaeda terrorist manual and helping plan attacks on American troops in Somalia and U.S. embassies in Africa.(7)

That Mohamed trained al Qaeda in hijacking planes and wrote most of the al Qaeda terrorist manual is confirmed in a new book, The Looming Tower, by Lawrence Wright, who has seen US Government records.(8) Let me say this again: one of al-Qaeda's top trainers in terrorism and how to hijack airplanes was an operative for FBI, CIA, and the Army.

But what we have heard so far is a fall-back cover-up of even worse truths. Peter Lance, who first wrote the script for the National Geographic special, told about Mohamed's detention and release in Toronto. This important detail, along with others, was cut from the program. Lance withdrew from the project and complained on his website about these and other cuts, such as this one:

"Within days of 9/11 Cloonan ... interviewed Ali, whom the Feds had allowed to slip into witness protection, and demanded to know the details of the plot. At that point Ali wrote it all out - including details of how he'd counseled would-be hijackers on how to smuggle box cutters on board aircraft and where to sit, to effect the airline seizures."(9)

So let us sum up what we know so far about Ali Mohamed:

A key planner of the 9/11 plot, and trainer in hijacking, was simultaneously an informant for the FBI. This operative trained the members for all of the chief Islamist attacks inside the United States -- the first WTC bombing, the New York landmarks plot, and finally 9/11, as well as the attacks against Americans in Somalia and Kenya. And yet for four years Mohamed was allowed to move in and out of the country as an unindicted conspirator. Then, unlike his trainees, he was allowed to plea-bargain. To this day he may still not have been sentenced for any crime, and may even be in witness protection.(10)

Peter Lance has charged that Fitzgerald had evidence before 1998 to implicate Mohamed in the Kenya Embassy bombing, yet did nothing and let the bombing happen.(11) In fact, the FBI was aware back in 1990 that Mohamed had engaged in terrorist training on Long Island; yet it acted to protect Mohamed from arrest, even after one of his trainees had moved beyond training to an actual assassination.(12)

Mohamed's trainees were all members of the Al-Kifah Center in Brooklyn, which served as the main American recruiting center for the Makhtab-al-Khidimat, the "Services Center" network that after the Afghan war became known as al Qaeda.(13) The Al-Kifah Center was headed in 1990 by the blind Egyptian Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who like Ali Mohamed had been admitted to the United States, despite being on a State Department Watch List. (14) As he had done earlier in Egypt, the sheikh "issued a fatwa in America that permitted his followers to rob banks and kill Jews."(15)

In November 1990, three of Mohamed's trainees conspired together to kill Meir Kahane, the racist founder of the Jewish Defense League. The actual killer, El Sayyid Nosair, was caught by accident almost immediately; and by luck the police soon found his two co-conspirators, Mahmoud Abouhalima and Mohammed Salameh, waiting at Nosair's house. They found much more: There were formulas for bomb making, 1,440 rounds of ammunition, and manuals [supplied by Ali Mohamed] from the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg marked "Top Secret for Training," along with classified documents belonging to the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff. The police found maps and drawings of New York City landmarks like the Statue of Liberty, Times Square -- and the World Trade Center. The forty-seven boxes of evidence they collected also included the collected sermons of blind Sheikh Omar, in which he exhorted his followers to "destroy the edifices of capitalism."(16)

All three had been trained by Ali Mohamed back in the late 1980s at a rifle range, where the FBI had photographed them, before terminating this surveillance in the fall of 1989.(17)

The U.S. Government was thus in an excellent position to arrest, indict, and convict all of the terrorists involved, including Mohamed.

Yet only hours after the killing, Joseph Borelli, Chief of NYPD detectives, struck a familiar American note and pronounced Nosair a "lone deranged gunman.."(18) Some time later, he actually told the press that "There was nothing [at Nosair's house] that would stir your imagination ... ..Nothing has transpired that changes our opinion that he acted alone."[19]

Borelli was not acting alone in this matter. His position was also that of the FBI, who said they too believed "that Mr. Nosair had acted alone in shooting Rabbi Kahane." "The bottom line is that we can't connect anyone else to the Kahane shooting," an F.B.I. agent said."(20)

In thus limiting the case, the police and FBI were in effect protecting Nosair's two Arab co-conspirators in the murder of a U.S. citizen. Both of them were ultimately convicted in connection with the first WTC bombing, along with another Mohamed trainee, Nidal Ayyad. The 9/11 Report, summarizing the convictions of Salameh, Ayyad, Abouhalima, and the blind Sheikh for the WTC bombing and New York landmarks plots, calls it "this superb investigative and prosecutorial effort" (i.e. by Cloonan and Fitzgerald).(21) It says nothing about the suppressed evidence found in Nosair's house, including "maps and drawings of New York City landmarks," which if pursued should have prevented both plots from developing.

Almost certainly, the 9/11 Commission knew more about this scandalous situation than they let on. It cannot be just a coincidence that they selected to write the staff reports about al Qaeda and the 9/11 plot, and conduct the relevant interviews, Dietrich Snell, who had been Fitzgerald's colleague in the Southern District of New York U.S. Attorney's office. (Thus Snell presumably drafted the praise for the superb effort by his former colleague Patrick Fitzgerald and the FBI). Of the nine people on Snell's team, all but one had worked for the U.S. Government, and all but two for either the Justice Department or the FBI.(22)

If you go to my website, www.peterdalescott.net, you will know that: Shortly after 9/11, in October 2001, U.S. and British newspapers briefly alleged that the paymaster for the 9/11 attacks was a possible agent of the Pakistani intelligence service ISI, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh. There was even a brief period in which it was alleged that the money had been paid at the direction of the then ISI Chief, Lieutenant-General Mahmoud Ahmad.(23)

Others have since argued that Saeed Sheikh worked for both America and Britain, since "both American and British governments have studiously avoided taking any action against Sheikh despite the fact that he is a known terrorist who has targeted U.S. and UK citizens."(24) The claim what Saeed Sheikh was recruited by MI-6 in Great Britain has been made by myself, by John Newman, and by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed; recently it has been pointed to in the new book by Pervez Musharraf, the President of Pakistan.(25)

And there may have been other double agents. Last month Robert Baer, a former CIA officer, told an Australian newspaper that ''In 1996, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed [the al-Qaeda mastermind of the 9/11 plot] was in Doha [the capital of Qatar], the CIA found out about it, and wanted to arrest him and people in Washington stopped them. That has never been answered in the 9/11 commission report, why that arrest was stopped."(26)

One week after 9/11, in a story for Pacific News Service, I wrote the following (which is still on my website):

It is important to learn from the serious mistakes made by the United States and CIA in the past. The usual CIA mode of undermining foreign governments it does not like -- from Russia to Cuba to Iran -- has been to organize and train their opponents in criminal activities, including sabotage and smuggling. But time and again this strategy backfires. The problem is that as soon as the United States loses interest in its agents' cause, the sabotage techniques it has taught will more than likely be turned back against it.(27)

This is what happened with al Qaeda.

When I wrote this I did not yet know about the scandal of Ali Mohamed's tolerated terrorism. In 2004, when I did know, I reported a story in the London Independent (but not this country) that Mohamed was on the U.S. payroll at the time he was training the Arab Afghans, and that the CIA, reviewing the case five years after the first WTC bombing, concluded in an internal document that the CIA itself was "partly culpable" in the World Trade Center attack.(28)

I cannot tell you whether (as I would like to think) Mohamed and Saeed were examples of rogue agents out of control (in which case we have a CIA problem), or whether they were agents not out of control (in which case we have of course a much worse CIA problem). One way or the other, we have a fundamental and on-going problem, for which we need a more serious remedy than just putting a Democrat in the White House. As has happened after past intelligence fiascoes, our intelligence agencies were strengthened as a result of the 9/11 Commission, not brought under control, and their budgets were increased.

It's time to confront the reality that these agencies themselves, and their own sponsorship and protection of terrorist activities, have aggravated the greatest threats to our national security. Scott Ritter and others have written that, at this very moment, CIA-backed bombings are being undertaken in Iran by the Mujahideen e-Khalq (MEK or MKO), an opposition group listed by the United States State Department as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.(29) It appears that, as if having learned nothing, the CIA is still sponsoring terrorists.

I want to admit, in all fairness, that certain notable victories have been achieved in the narrow pursuit of al Qaeda. At the same time, after five years of the new broadened war on terrorism, we can say with confidence that the net result to date is a far more dangerous world than we had before.

Peter Dale Scott's latest book (co-edited with David Ray Griffin) is 9/11 & American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out (Olive Branch Press, 2006). His website is http://www.peterdalescott.net.

Notes