[Newspoetry] NYTimes.com Article: A Witness Against Al Qaeda Says the U.S. Let Him Down

[gillespi at uiuc.edu]

This article from NYTimes.com 
has been sent to you by gillespi at uiuc.edu.


Dear Newspoets. This guy tried to do the right thing.

gillespi at uiuc.edu

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A Witness Against Al Qaeda Says the U.S. Let Him Down

June 3, 2002
By JUDITH MILLER 




 

Essam Al Ridi, an Egyptian-American pilot, has seen Osama
bin Laden and his world of militant Islam up close, and he
is one of the few people who helped prosecutors penetrate
it long before Sept. 11. 

Early last year, his testimony was crucial in convicting
Mr. bin Laden's former personal secretary for conspiring in
the 1998 plot by Al Qaeda to bomb two American embassies in
Africa, in which more than 200 people died. 

But Mr. Al Ridi says that since he described his dealings
with Mr. bin Laden, his life has taken a harsh turn. 
Even though the Justice Department offered to protect him
from reprisals by Egypt, he said, he was detained, kicked
and held incommunicado for 24 hours during a trip to Cairo
last May to see his parents. When the Federal Bureau of
Investigation sought his help again after the Sept. 11
attacks, he was fired by a Middle Eastern airline that
suddenly viewed him as a security risk. 

Mr. Al Ridi, 43, sees his treatment as a sign of the
potential perils facing Arabs and Muslims who help the
F.B.I. in its war on terror. Justice Department officials
acknowledge that he has suffered from the fallout. But they
say that while they have tried to help him, there are
limits to what they can do, especially with other
countries. 

"I said, `Help us, and we'll help you,' and it didn't work
out," said Robert Miranda, an F.B.I. agent in Dallas
dealing with Mr. Al Ridi. "It's been a whole ugly mess." 

Law enforcement officials now worry that Mr. Al Ridi's
complaints could create more problems when the F.B.I. is
eager to recruit Arab and Muslim informants and remake
itself with a much greater domestic intelligence
capability. 

"Things like this make recruitment 100 times harder," said
Robert M. Blitzer, a former senior F.B.I. counterterrorism
official. 

At the trial, Mr. Al Ridi, who was born in Cairo and became
an American citizen in 1994, helped convict Wadih El-Hage,
who was once Mr. bin Laden's personal secretary. Mr. Al
Ridi testified that he had bought a surplus United States
military jet for Mr. bin Laden in 1992 and then flew the
plane to Sudan, where Mr. bin Laden ran businesses while
quietly building his Qaeda network. 

Mr. Al Ridi testified that Mr. El-Hage had told him the
plane might be used to move American-made Stinger missiles
left from the Afghan-Soviet war. 

Mr. Al Ridi, who was never part of Al Qaeda and was not
charged with a crime, said recently that some of Mr. bin
Laden's activities were suspicious. But he said that he
viewed his involvement with Mr. bin Laden as a business
deal, and that he never saw any sign of the terror to come.


Now, unable to find work in aviation, Mr. Al Ridi is living
off his nearly exhausted savings with his wife and five
children in a rented house near Dallas. 

"I am at the end of my rope," he said in one of several
interviews, the first by a major witness in the embassy
bombings trial. "The government and I had a gentleman's
agreement: Help us, they told me, and we won't forget you.
But they have forgotten me, except when they need
information." 

Mr. Miranda, the F.B.I. agent, said he had twice
recommended that officials at bureau headquarters give Mr.
Al Ridi $50,000 for his help. He said they were considering
the request. 

Patrick J. Fitzgerald, who was the prosecutor in the
embassy bombing case and is now the United States attorney
in Chicago, confirmed that the government had tried to
protect Mr. Al Ridi from reprisals in Egypt, which has long
clamped down on Islamic militants. 

But law enforcement officials said they could not guarantee
that nothing bad would happen to him there. "We can control
only what we can control," one federal official said. 

Still, the officials say, Mr. Al Ridi's complaints provide
a glimpse of how delicate and taxing it can be to maintain
the confidence of vulnerable witnesses. 

Like many other witnesses, in cases of organized crime or
terror, Mr. Al Ridi says he now sees how hard it is to
shake free of the shadows caused by old associations. 

Mr. Al Ridi said he was living in the Dallas area in 1983
when he heeded a call from a Muslim scholar, Abdullah
Azzam, to support the Afghan jihad against the Soviet
Union. He went to Pakistan, where he later met Mr. bin
Laden, who became a leader in that fight. He met Mr.
El-Hage, a student also in thrall to the jihad, during a
return visit to the United States. 

Mr. Al Ridi said he had once helped the Central
Intelligence Agency obtain photographs of a downed Russian
helicopter. He also arranged a shipment of 25 heavy-duty
sniper guns to the Afghan resistance in 1987. 

Though C.I.A. officials say they never supplied weapons to
Mr. bin Laden, Mr. Al Ridi said the agency knew that Mr.
bin Laden ended up with some of the guns. Still, he said,
he later saw many of the guns "rusting away in their
boxes." 

After the Afghans expelled the Soviets in 1989, the jihad
attracted a different kind of believer, Mr. Al Ridi said -
"young Muslim kids, without passports, running away from
who knows what." 

Depressed by this, he said, he returned to Texas. When
Sheik Abdullah was assassinated shortly after that, he
said, "the Afghan chapter and jihad were closed for me." 

But not entirely, as it turned out. In 1992, Mr. Al Ridi
said, Mr. El-Hage called, asking him to buy the plane. Mr.
Al Ridi agreed - purely, he said, because he needed cash. 

Mr. Al Ridi said he paid $210,000 to a dealer in Arizona
for a T-39 passenger jet that had been retired by the
United States military, earning a $25,000 fee. He flew it
to Sudan and handed the keys to Mr. bin Laden. 

The next day, Mr. Al Ridi testified last year, he told Mr.
bin Laden that he objected to "the fact that you are a rich
man and trying to be a military leader." He told Mr. bin
Laden that his spurring of young Arabs into battle had
amounted to their own "flat killing, not jihad." 

He said Mr. bin Laden took the scolding in stride. He then
offered him a job as a pilot, Mr. Al Ridi said, but he
declined. 

The two men also discussed starting a crop-dusting business
in Sudan, Mr. Al Ridi said. He said he told the F.B.I.
about this in 1999, but the bureau never asked him for a
report he had written for Mr. bin Laden until after Sept.
11, when agents realized that one of the hijackers had
inquired about crop-dusting planes. 

Mr. Al Ridi said that as far as he knew, Mr. bin Laden
never used the surplus jet to move the shoulder-mounted
Stinger missiles from Pakistan to Sudan. Mr. Al Ridi also
flew the plane to Nairobi from Sudan in 1993, taking five
men who he thought were working on a business project. 

Mr. Al Ridi later learned, he said, that one of the men was
Muhammad Atef, Al Qaeda's senior military commander, who is
believed to have died last fall in Afghanistan. He said he
heard the men had gone to Somalia to stir tribal leaders
against American peacekeeping forces. 

Mr. Al Ridi said he flew the plane one last time in 1995,
but the brakes failed and it crashed into a sand dune. The
authorities said his co-pilot was Ihab Mohammed Ali, a
member of Al Qaeda known as Nawawi who had attended flight
school in Oklahoma and is in federal custody. 

Given these connections, investigators say, Mr. Al Ridi's
name came up once they started looking into the embassy
bombings in 1998. Mr. Al Ridi was living in Bahrain, and he
agreed to return to Dallas for an interview in late 1999. 

He said he did not ask for money, and he told Mr.
Fitzgerald, the prosecutor, that he did not want to be
placed in the witness protection program. Records show that
the government spent $1 million to provide two former
members of Al Qaeda, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy
charges and also testified at the trial, with new
identities. 

But on the stand in February 2001, Mr. Al Ridi did ask for
one favor: protection from Egypt, which, having been
victimized by Muslim-inspired terror, has dealt harshly
with veterans of the Afghan campaign. 

Mr. Fitzgerald responded by asking Mr. Al Ridi, "What is it
that the United States government promised to do for you to
aid in your situation?" Mr. Al Ridi replied that the
Justice Department had pledged to tell Egyptian officials
that "I'm not involved directly with Osama in any of his
acts." 

Before going to Egypt last May, Mr. Al Ridi said, he
alerted F.B.I. officials in Cairo. 

Nevertheless, he was detained. He said he managed to leave
a message for Mr. Miranda, the agent in Dallas, before he
was kicked while handcuffed near a urinal and deprived of
sleep, food and water. After nearly a day, he said, the
F.B.I. got him out of jail. 

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Mr. Al Ridi, who was a pilot
trainer for Qatar Airways in Qatar, said F.B.I. agents went
there to interview him again about Mr. bin Laden. 

Mr. Al Ridi expressed concern that the airline might
misconstrue why they were there. The agents assured him, he
said, that Qatari security knew he was helping them. But
shortly after their visit, he said, he was fired. 

Egyptian officials and Qatar Airways executives did not
respond to requests for comment. Justice Department
officials said the F.B.I. tried unsuccessfully to allay the
airline's concerns. Worried about further problems, Mr.
Miranda and Mr. Fitzgerald also arranged for Mr. Al Ridi's
brother to move from Cairo to the United States, officials
said. 

For weeks, though, Mr. Al Ridi said he also tried to call
Mr. Fitzgerald, who was swamped with post-Sept. 11
investigative work. 

Mr. Al Ridi said he wanted Mr. Fitzgerald to write a letter
to counter fears among potential employers that it would be
risky to hire him. 

Mr. Fitzgerald said he would write a letter commending Mr.
Al Ridi's service as a government witness. But he said no
federal prosecutor would write what Mr. Al Ridi really
wants - a letter that would give him a "clean bill of
health." 

New information about his past dealings could still emerge,
Mr. Fitzgerald said. He said he also could understand why
any airline would be wary of a pilot who had worked for
Osama bin Laden. 

Mr. Al Ridi countered that the prosecutors "tell me I did
the right thing" in cooperating. But, he asked, "Would
others do what I did if they knew the price I have paid?"

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/03/national/03WITN.html?ex=1024128548&ei=1&en=f38395a2ea11ad9e



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