Investigators consider new tactics

© St. Petersburg Times,
published October 22, 2001

FBI and Justice Department investigators are increasingly frustrated by the silence of jailed suspected associates of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network, and some are beginning to say that traditional civil liberties may have to be cast aside if they are to extract information about the Sept. 11 attacks and terrorist plans.

More than 150 people rounded up by law-enforcement officials in the aftermath of the attacks remain in custody, but attention has focused on four suspects held in New York who the FBI thinks are withholding valuable information.

FBI agents have offered the suspects the prospect of lighter sentences, money, jobs, and a new identity and life in the United States for them and their families, but they have not succeeded in getting information, according to law-enforcement sources.

Among the alternative strategies under discussion are using drugs or pressure tactics, such as those employed occasionally by Israeli interrogators. Another idea is extraditing the suspects to allied countries where security services sometimes employ threats to family members or resort to torture.

Under U.S. law, interrogators in criminal cases can lie to suspects, but information obtained by physical pressure, inhumane treatment or torture cannot be used in a trial. And government interrogators who used such tactics could be sued by the victim or charged with battery.

The four key suspects, held in New York's Metropolitan Correctional Center, are Zacarias Moussaoui, a French Moroccan detained in August initially in Minnesota after he sought lessons on how to fly commercial jetliners but not how to take off or land them; Mohammed Jaweed Azmath and Ayub Ali Khan, Indians traveling with false passports who were detained the day after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks with box-cutters, hair dye and $5,000 in cash; and Nabil Almarabh, a former Boston cabdriver with alleged links to al-Qaida.

Robert M. Blitzer, former chief of the FBI counterterrorism section, said offers of reduced sentences worked to get testimony in the cases of Ahmed Ressam, caught bringing explosives into the country for millennium attacks that never took place, and Ali Mohammed, the former U.S. Army Green Beret who pleaded guilty in the 1998 embassy bombings and provided valuable information about al-Qaida.

The two former al-Qaida members who testified publicly in the 1998 bombing trials were resettled with their families in the United States under the witness-protection program and given either money or loans.

Torture "goes against every grain in my body," Blitzer said. "Chances are you are going to get the wrong person and risk damage or killing them." In the end, he said, there has to be another way.

FBI investigating Atta visit to Florida flight station

MIAMI -- U.S. law officials are investigating a mysterious visit by Mohamed Atta, thought to be the ringleader in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, to a federal flight facility at Kendall-Tamiami Executive Airport in south Miami-Dade County in August, when the Egyptian pilot was renting planes ostensibly to hone his skills.

Kathleen Bergen, a Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman in Atlanta, would not comment on Atta's visit to the FAA's flight service station at Tamiami that provides flight and weather information to private plane pilots in South Florida.

But Bergen did not deny that the FBI was looking into Atta's visit. He was seeking weather and route information for a flight between Miami and Vero Beach, Knight Ridder reported.

Why Atta needed to make that flight is unclear, but the FAA facility he visited is one of three in Florida and 61 in the country. The other two in Florida are in St. Petersburg and Gainesville.

INS says Atta had applied for visa, allowing his entry

MIAMI -- Miami International Airport immigration inspectors did not deport suspected hijacker Mohamed Atta in January because they concluded that he could enter the United States even if he lacked a visa for foreign student pilots and had previously stayed in the country longer than authorized, according to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service.

The inspector then ordered Atta out of the regular immigration line and referred him to a second inspector for further questioning.

The second inspector cleared Atta into the country as a tourist, despite the fact that Atta did not possess the student visa and had stayed in the United States more than a month beyond the written authorized departure date on his previous trip.

In its first statement on the case late Friday, the INS said the inspectors who questioned Atta were unable to bar him from entering the country because he had complied with immigration law despite the absence of the pilot visa and the previous overstay.

That's because by the time Atta showed up at MIA, he had already applied for the pilot visa and his request entitled him to stay longer on his previous trip and to re-enter the country on a visitor's permit.

-- Information from Knight Ridder was used in this report.

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