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BY MICHAEL DALY Daily News (New York) NEWS; Pg. 5 May 29, 2002, Wednesday SPORTS FINAL EDITION
"Column 1001 B," said Lt. John Ryan, commander of the PA police recovery task force. Ryan pointed out the evenly spaced rectangles where the exterior columns had been. The rectangles marked off an acre in ghostly gray dirt where the tower once stood. "There's one," Ryan said. He pointed to a twin pattern of rectangles over by the final raking. "There's the other," Ryan said.
The meeting was just across town, in a 13th-floor conference room at 1 Police Plaza. The matter at hand that November day in 1990 was the assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane. "Can you tell me this guy acted alone?" the then-chief of detectives is said to have asked. By "this guy," the chief meant El Sayed A Nosair, who had been arrested after fleeing the Manhattan hotel ballroom where Kahane was shot. "Absolutely not," Norris would recall saying. "We have two other people we think were involved." The two had been in Nosair's New Jersey apartment when Norris' squad arrived to search it. Both were cab drivers and admitted being outside the hotel. Witnesses had seen Nosair jump into a cab immediately after the shooting and then hop out as if he had boarded the wrong one.
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"Shut up," the chief now said, by Norris' account. "You handle the murder. They handle the conspiracy." By "they," the chief meant the FBI.
Norris departed as upset as any good cop would be, but nowhere near as upset as he was after the FBI arrived at his squad room with authorization from the chief of detectives to cart away two filing cabinets of papers his squad had found in Nosair's apartment. Aside from numerous documents in Arabic, the cabinets contained a bomb manual, military training guides and an assassination list. There were also photos of New York landmarks, reportedly including the World Trade Center. What followed was termed "a joint investigation," the true nature of which became apparent when Norris' detectives located a shooting range in Connecticut where Nosair and his buddies had trained. "What do you want? The FBI was here two weeks ago," a man there is said to have told the detectives. That meant the FBI had been there shortly after the shooting. Norris deduced that the agents knew much more about Nosair and his buddies than they were letting on. This reportedly included a 1990 phone intercept of Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman speaking to Nosair of "attacking big buildings, attack skyscrapers." On Feb, 26, 1993, a bomb went off in the World Trade Center garage. The bombers included one of the cab drivers who had been at Nosair's apartment. Norris now asked a senior police official if the FBI had followed the bombers right up to the World Trade Center. "I can't tell you, but you're not far off," the official said. Three years after seizing Nosair's file cabinets, the FBI had not finished translating the Arabic documents. One proved to be a handwritten sermon by Rahman calling on his followers to attack America and "blow up their edifices." Another document reportedly bore the name of the organization that Osama Bin Laden had founded in 1988. "Al Qaeda." A tape subsequently surfaced of the agents being chided by their chief informant in the case for not preventing the bombing. "Put two and two together," Emad Salem told them. 'We want to help' Eight years later, the whole country is wondering whether putting two and two together could have prevented the death of 3,047 people. Norris had since become police commissioner of Baltimore, and as was reported here, he went before Congress to ask why the FBI continued to largely shut out the country's police from the fight against terrorism. "The FBI has a total of 11,533 agents," Norris noted. "There are nearly 650,000 local law enforcement officers in the country. We want to help, and I think the nation needs us to help." In recent days, Norris has become alarmed by the FBI's suggestion that more attacks are "inevitable." He is reminded of what people in New York once said about crime being unstoppable. He proposes that we use the same Compstat program against terror that worked so well against street crime. "All it is is connecting the dots," Norris says. "You could attack this the way you attack robbers or rapists or anything else. Whatever comes, nuclear, anthrax, it has to be delivered by people. They live next door to other people, they use ATMs, they go eat somewhere, they rent cars, they get tickets. They're findable."
Meanwhile, the other lieutenant, John Ryan of the Port Authority recovery task force, was down at The Pit yesterday, watching them remove that final Column 1001 B from twin acres of dust. |
Good point. I forget whether it was the trial for the '93 WTC bombing or the trial a couple of years after of the blind sheikh and his accomplices for some further bombing plots that never got carried into action, but some of the defendants at one of those trials were black and Hispanic converts to Islam. Who says al Qaeda can't be infiltrated?