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Issue 9 - Fall 2004 / Winter 2005page. 53 |
Who Bombed the US World Trade Center in 1993?Growing evidence points to Role of FBI Operative. |
Simultaneous with the detonation of an explosive bomb at the World Trade Center in New York on February 26 of this year (1993), FBI investigators were en route to New York.
"Even as office workers were trying to pry their way out of stalled elevators or stagger down smoky stairwells in the wake of a devastating explosion last Friday," wrote Ronald J. Ostrow and Robin Wright, under the headline US Tackling Blast Probe on Unprecedented Scale, "a special team of men and women were leaving FBI headquarters here for the next flight to New York."
Not only the FBI was so prompt. "Thousands of people and dozens of agencies here and abroad sprang into action. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything bigger, except maybe the Kennedy Assassination,’ said one counter terrorism official."
Officials declared that the vast scale of their ‘investigation’ notwithstanding, "it will take several months (emphasis added) before the forensic aspects are completed," if only because the bombing ‘could’, according to CIA analyst Graham Fuller, "be an operational decision dating back a year that doesn’t have any relationship with immediate events".
The ink wasn’t dry on the press release before the discovery of the alleged culprit in the bombing was announced by these same agencies within hours of their prior declaration, evincing investigative skills that eclipsed any heretofore in evidence. How was this accomplished?
A Refund and a Car Fragment
"He wanted his money back," begins a story by Ralph Blumenthal under the subheading, Insistence on a Refund for a Van Led to the Arrest of Blast Suspect. Mohammed A. Salameh had returned three times to a Ryder Truck Rental dealer in Jersey City requesting a refund of the $400 cash deposit he had placed on a yellow Ford Econoline van that, he stated, had been stolen the night preceding the explosion.
How then had the authorities linked Salameh’s request to the World Trade Center? It seemed unlikely, "(b)ecause the huge bomb had cored the garage with a crater spanning several parking levels. Much of the vital evidence," reported The New York Times in the very story implicating Salameh, "including what remained of the vehicle suspected of delivering the bomb, was … buried under tons of rubble at the bottom."
There appeared to be no possibility of recovering anything of use for a very long time, given the force of the blast. "Top officials, including James M. Fox, Assistant Director in charge of the FBI’s New York office, and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, despaired of being able to reach evidence because of the unstable and unsafe conditions underground.
Nonetheless, agents of the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF) suddenly came forward with "yellow pieces of a vehicle that appeared to [have] been blown apart with particular ferocity. One of the fragments carried a part identification number."
This discovery supposedly occurred on the Sunday morning following the Friday blast. By the same afternoon, the FBI had identified the presumptive source of the explosion, describing the vehicle as "a model 350 Ford Econoline van, color yellow," tracing it to Ryder Truck Rental (one of the largest lease chains in the United States) and then to a specific Ryder dealership on the property of Rockview Auto Sales, a used-car lot in a section of Jersey City not far from the apartment of Salameh and from the walk-up mosque of a blind Egyptian cleric named Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman. To date, the fragment bearing the serial number has not been produced.
Salameh’s biography was distributed instantly to the media, replete with claimed political sympathies and associations going back years. Suspect Tied to Islamic Fundamentalist Sect was the subheading of The New York Times story whose account of the ‘evidence’ and Salameh’s arraignment without bail before Judge Richard Owen of Federal District Court in Manhattan was breathless, "concluding a tumultuous day in a case that has drawn national attention and … statements by President Clinton, the Governors of New York and New Jersey and other officials."
White House spokesperson, George Stephanopoulos, confirmed the arrest. Acting Attorney General Stuart M. Gerson followed Stephanopoulos, declaiming, "It’s a remarkable day in the history of the FBI."
Disarray and Contradictory Signals
Federal and city field operatives seemed less than pleased by the Washington announcements. "The unusual statements virtually pre-empted announcements by the federal and local investigators in New York working on the case and touched off a flap of angry recriminations. The arrest’s timing brought on another bitter dispute. City law-enforcement officials, bristling for days over what they called news leaks by federal officials, said a New York Newsday report, tracing the van to a rental agency in Jersey City, had forced a premature arrest." Nonetheless, "there was no indication that the newspaper was asked to withhold the article."
The disarray amongst high ranking officials and the contradictory signals regarding the release of politically charged declarations was a tell-tale sign that there were central features of the events about which government officials were seriously concerned and that the authorities wished to conceal.
The New York Times noted that at the Stephanopoulos press conference, Acting Attorney General Gerson became disturbed when asked about the motivations for the bombing. "I don’t know the answer to that," he replied, adding, "and I wouldn’t tell you if I did", a cryptic reply echoed by FBI Director William Sessions.
The New York Times article was less reticent. Salameh was linked to Sheikh Rahman, to "several radical groups that make up the Egyptian branch of Islamic Jihad," through the Sheikh, to "the 1982 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar El-Sadat", to a Brooklyn mosque, to Farouq Majid, "noted by investigators in the 1990 assassination of Rabbi Mier Kahane," and to El Sayyid A. Nosair, who had been charged with, and acquitted of, the 1990 Kahane slaying.
Salameh, days after the bombing, was thus connected in the press to "a wide array of contacts and associations with terrorist organizations." By March 9, The New York Times published a photo of Salameh alongside Nosair at the time of his acquittal of the earlier assassination of Kahane, founder of the Jewish Defense League and a virulently anti-Arab legislator in Israel.
The authorities "pursued a dizzying array of clues and lessons on fronts ranging from Jersey City, N.J., to Brooklyn and to the Mideast." A new ‘major suspect’ was announced, Ibrahim El-Gabrowny, who was said to have ties to Salameh Nosair and was described as "a leading official of a Brooklyn mosque frequented by Sheik Omar Abdul Rahman."
Questions and Answers
A New Jersey storage locker was uncovered, containing "chemicals used for explosives," which the authorities "seized and detonated," a strange way to handle incriminating evidence. Two other apartments were discovered in which "other chemicals and electronic equipment were found … linked to Mr. Salameh and others through aliases as well as witness accounts, officials said."
The authorities were seeking to depict a group of conspirators who had attempted to blow up a skyscraper in Manhattan and then left their various apartments without removing the chemicals, wire or bomb paraphernalia employed in the enterprise. Indeed, it was difficult to understand why they would leave this evidence in so many disparate places.
The explanation was instructive in its scarcely concealed racism. "‘One search is leading to another,’ said one ranking investigator. ‘But these are nomadic people. While it may lie in the culture, they bounce from place to place. All different people sleep there and stop there, stay a short time, then leave.’"
Several reporters, however, raised the obvious problem with the official scenario. "After five days of frantic activity since Mr. Salameh’s arrest, investigators admit puzzlement over two key questions: the method and the motive. Why, they have asked, would anyone planning a car-bomb attack lease a vehicle in their own name – as the federal complaint contends Mr. Salameh to have done – even if he planned to claim later that the vehicle had been stolen from him and he had returned on three separate occasions to the rental office to demand a $400 refund?"
"And even if the van had been totally obliterated, officials reason, would not Mr. Salameh’s theft report have attracted attention, at some point leading investigators to him and his same group of associates they are now studying?"
The New York Times acknowledges that "such enigmas caused local investigators to ‘dismiss Mr. Salameh as perhaps a patsy for others, someone who may have been duped into carrying out the attack and taking the blame’."
It soon emerged that the very people who worked at the Ryder rental office which rented the van to Salameh were FBI operatives. "The trap was set for Salameh by FBI agents disguised as employees of the rental outlet. They dickered with Salameh over the deposit, giving him $200 in a partial refund. He was then arrested at a bus stop near the agency."
How then did they conclude that Salameh was directly engaged in the planning, fabrication of the explosives and implementation of the plan? James Fox, Assistant FBI Director in charge of the New York office, informed journalists that the critical piece of evidence was "a telephone number listed on the rental agreement. … Investigators traced the number to an apartment in Jersey City where they found a letter addressed to Salameh as well as the tools and electronic equipment that indicated the presence in this apartment of a bomb maker."
This then was the pivotal evidence leading to the implication of Salameh.
Long active in political life, Ralph Schoenman currently is co-producer of Taking Aim with Ralph Schoenman and Mya Shone, broadcast weekly on WBAI-NY (www.takingaim.info) He is Communications Chair of the Million Worker March. All rights reserved. Copyright belongs to the author.
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