But in a Sacramento restaurant, in the presence of FBI agents, Mohamed professed that he "loved" bin Laden and didn't need a fatwa to attack the US (his adopted country). Further, he admitted to having a network of sleepers who he could make operational at any moment.
For a naturalized citizen and Army vet who had sworn oaths to protect and defend America, Ali's threat to attack the United States was sedition on its face. But the handcuffs never came out.
Fitzgerald left the meeting shaken and told FBI agent Cloonan, "Ali Mohamed is the most dangerous man I have ever met. We cannot let this man out on the street."
And yet Fitzgerald and the Feds left him on the street for another ten months, even though they'd linked him directly to the Kenyan Embassy bombing cell. Only after the bombs went off in Nairobi and Dar Es Salaam, killing hundreds, was Mohamed finally arrested.
We can only wonder if that carnage might have been prevented if the President's nominee for Attorney General had pushed for Ali Mohamed's testimony in 1995. Clearly Mohamed would have been outed, terminating his ability to slip in and out of Africa unheeded.
Keeping Ali off the stand again
In 2001, when Patrick Fitzgerald convicted the Embassy bombing co-conspirators, paving the way for his appointment as U.S. Attorney in Chicago and the CIA leak czar, Ali Mohamed was, once again, strangely absent from the stand.
The former Egyptian army officer-turned-spy was the one man in custody who could personally identify bin Laden as the person who had fingered the position of the suicide truck bomb in Nairobi.
Under an exception to the hearsay rule for co-conspirator testimony, Ali's eyewitness testimony would have been both admissible and highly probative. Yet in the trial against Osama bin Laden, the man who was arguably the most important single adversary to the United States since Adolf Hitler, Fitzgerald risked losing the case rather than using Mohamed, his best witness.
His motivation in hiding Ali from public view may have been similar to that of Andrew McCarthy, who'd sought to keep Ali off the stand before Judge Mukasey.
"Mohamed would have been opened up by defense lawyers and told the whole sad tale of how he'd used the Bureau and the CIA and the DIA for years," says retired says retired special agent Joseph F. O'Brien. "The Bureau couldn't risk that kind of embarrassment."
The Ali Mohamed Enigma
Ultimately, the Feds cut a deal with Mohamed. In return for his silence, he would be spared the death penalty and end up in custodial witness protection. Today, his case file remains one of the most tightly sealed in the history of the "war on terror."
As commentator Rory O'Connor later described the Feds' handling of Mohamed, "it was a conspiracy to cover up incompetence."
As the new attorney general, Judge Michael B. Mukasey could change all of that. He could push to get Mohamed's file unsealed so that the public could finally get a full vetting of the Justice Department's track record when it came to stopping al Qaeda in the 12 years from when the FBI began tracking its New York cell up through the attacks of 9/11.
But how likely is that, given Judge Mukasey's pedigree as an SDNY veteran who joked about Ali's significance as far back as 1995?
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