1 May 2001
Source: Digital file from the Court Reporters Office, Southern District of
New York; (212) 805-0300.
This is the transcript of Day 37 of the trial, May 1, 2001.
See other transcripts: http://cryptome.org/usa-v-ubl-dt.htm
5212
1 UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
SOUTHERN DISTRICT OF NEW YORK
2 ------------------------------x
3 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
4 v. S(7) 98 Cr. 1023
5 USAMA BIN LADEN, et al.,
6 Defendants.
7 ------------------------------x
8
New York, N.Y.
9 May 1, 2001
9:45 a.m.
10
11
12 Before:
13 HON. LEONARD B. SAND,
14 District Judge
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
5213
1 APPEARANCES
2 MARY JO WHITE
United States Attorney for the
3 Southern District of New York
BY: PATRICK FITZGERALD
4 KENNETH KARAS
PAUL BUTLER
5 MICHAEL GARCIA
Assistant United States Attorneys
6
7 SAM A. SCHMIDT
JOSHUA DRATEL
8 KRISTIAN K. LARSEN
MARSHALL MINTZ
9 Attorneys for defendant Wadih El Hage
10 ANTHONY L. RICCO
EDWARD D. WILFORD
11 CARL J. HERMAN
SANDRA A. BABCOCK
12 Attorneys for defendant Mohamed Sadeek Odeh
13 FREDRICK H. COHN
DAVID P. BAUGH
14 Attorneys for defendant Mohamed Rashed Daoud Al-'Owhali
15 DAVID STERN
DAVID RUHNKE
16 Attorneys for defendant Khalfan Khamis Mohamed
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
5214
1 (In open court)
2 THE COURT: Certain consistency in punctuality.
3 Mr. Schmidt is not here nor is Mr. Dratel. You know where
4 they are?
5 MS. BESOBRASOW: They should be here any moment, your
6 Honor.
7 THE COURT: Are there any matters that require the
8 Court's attention?
9 MR. FITZGERALD: I believe not, your Honor. I could
10 tell your Honor all that's left of the government's rebuttal
11 case, we're just going to offer corrected stipulations, a
12 stipulation chart, and to read one stipulation between the
13 government and defense counsel for Odeh. That should take
14 literally two minutes and we'll be ready to do the summations.
15 MR. RICCO: Yes.
16 THE COURT: Anybody have a different view?
17 Very well. Then as soon as Mr. Schmidt arrives,
18 we'll bring in the jury.
19 MR. FITZGERALD: Thank you.
20 (Recess)
21 THE COURT: Let's bring in the jury.
22 MR. DRATEL: Your Honor, a couple of -- one scope of
23 items.
24 THE COURT: This was called for 9:45.
25 MR. DRATEL: I know, your Honor. I'm sorry.
5215
1 THE COURT: Yes.
2 MR. DRATEL: Mr. El Hage's Grand Jury testimony?
3 THE COURT: Yes.
4 MR. DRATEL: I guess it's the first one in September
5 '97.
6 THE COURT: Yes.
7 MR. DRATEL: Went in virtually in toto and at the
8 time we had moved to strike certain parts that were
9 prejudicial and on 403 grounds, and at the time certain -- a
10 couple of things stayed in, one in particular because it was
11 in the indictment as a part of a perjury charge which has
12 since been dismissed, which was the old Count 290, on the
13 identification of a person and it had to do with the imam in
14 Tucson and the murder of the imam in Tucson. Now there is
15 nothing in the indictment, there are no pending charges that
16 relate to that, and we would ask that that be stricken.
17 THE COURT: You are asking -- this is an overt act?
18 MR. DRATEL: Not an overt act.
19 THE COURT: There is a charge?
20 MR. DRATEL: It was part of a charge, a perjury
21 charge.
22 THE COURT: Which count is this?
23 MR. DRATEL: It's old Count 290. It has been
24 dismissed.
25 THE COURT: And the count has been dismissed. So you
5216
1 want dismissed from the Grand Jury testimony the questioning
2 that related to something which became the subject of
3 something that has been since dismissed?
4 MR. DRATEL: Yes. And that it be stricken also from
5 the, I guess the introductory part of the perjury part of the
6 indictment.
7 MR. FITZGERALD: Your Honor, if this is going to take
8 great length, I can tell you it's not coming up in the
9 summation at all so we can deal with it at the end of the day.
10 But we would oppose that because Mr. El Hage has put much
11 testimony in even as late as yesterday about goats regarding
12 counts not charged in the indictment, lies not charged, to
13 show the context of the Grand Jury appearance and I think --
14 THE COURT: We'll take it up at 4:30.
15 MR. DRATEL: Your Honor, there's one other, one
16 question and answer really in the Grand Jury --
17 THE COURT: It is also going to be -- say what the
18 subject matter is. We do intend to schedule things and to
19 have some timing.
20 MR. DRATEL: Yes, your Honor. I'm sorry.
21 THE COURT: Tell me what the matter is.
22 MR. DRATEL: There was questioning about a visa in
23 the first Grand Jury appearance, there was a question about a
24 visa for Ethiopia for Mr. El Hage, questioning about an
25 assassination attempt on the Egyptian president. There's been
5217
1 no other proof of that at all.
2 THE COURT: Same issue?
3 MR. DRATEL: Yes.
4 THE COURT: Same issue.
5 MR. DRATEL: Not same issue as far as the perjury
6 counts. This was never a perjury count. It was in there but
7 there has been no other proof. So right now it's prejudicial
8 without any other proof.
9 MR. FITZGERALD: We can take it up at 4:30, Judge.
10 It's not part of the government's summation.
11 THE COURT: Take it up at 4:30.
12 MR. DRATEL: Thank you, your Honor.
13 THE COURT: Bring in the jury.
14 MR. DRATEL: Your Honor, a clothing issue for Mr. El
15 Hage.
16 THE COURT: I sent that memo to the warden and as I
17 sent a previous letter and the warden advises that there is no
18 health risk involved in the concern raised by Mr. El Hage and
19 that with respect to tooth brushes, he will get the new
20 toothbrush when the existing supply is exhausted. And I know
21 of no reason and have no inclination to interfere with these
22 matters of the operation of the MCC.
23 MR. DRATEL: Your Honor, I'm also concerned about the
24 immediate clothing issue, that he was not given his other
25 shirt today and now he's --
5218
1 THE COURT: I understand. I have sent that to the
2 warden. What would you like me to do?
3 MR. DRATEL: I don't know, your Honor.
4 THE COURT: Neither do I. Please be seated.
5 Thank you.
6 (Jury present)
7 THE COURT: Good morning. Mr. Fitzgerald.
8 MR. FITZGERALD: Yes, Judge, good morning. The
9 government formally offers but does not read at this time
10 corrected pages to the Stipulation 1, Government Exhibit 162R,
11 163R, and a corrected stipulation 154R, and we also offer but
12 do not read at this time Government Exhibit 7, which is a
13 chart of all the stipulations offered by the government in
14 this case.
15 THE COURT: Received.
16 (Government Exhibits 7, 154R, 162R and 163R received
17 in evidence)
18 MR. FITZGERALD: And we also offer at this time
19 Government Exhibit 193, which is a stipulation between the
20 government and Odeh and his counsel, and I would like to read
21 that.
22 THE COURT: Yes.
23 MR. FITZGERALD: It is hereby stipulated and agreed
24 by and between the United States of America and defendant
25 Mohamed Sadeek Odeh, by and with the consent of his
5219
1 undersigned attorneys, as follows:
2 If recalled to testify as a witness, Kelly Mount
3 would testify that on or about March 17, 1999, she vacuumed
4 Government Exhibit 529, the Nike bag, and each of its contents
5 other than those items about which she testified previously,
6 namely, Government Exhibits 535A, through 535E and 535G
7 through 535I, obtaining a single filter sample. She then
8 analyzed that sample, which analysis proved negative for the
9 presence of explosives residue in that sample.
10 It is further stipulated and agreed that this
11 stipulation may be received in evidence as a government
12 exhibit at trial.
13 THE COURT: Received.
14 (Government Exhibit 193 received in evidence)
15 MR. FITZGERALD: With that your Honor, the government
16 rests its rebuttal case.
17 THE COURT: Government rests. So the record is
18 complete, ladies and gentlemen. All of the evidence is now
19 before you and we proceed to the closing arguments. One of my
20 functions with respect to closing arguments is I am the
21 timekeeper, and we'll proceed now with the government's
22 closing argument.
23 MR. KARAS: Your Honor, counsel, ladies and
24 gentlemen, good morning.
25 You may recall that my partner, Mr. Butler, began his
5220
1 opening statement by setting the scene for you in the
2 midmorning hours of August 7, 1998, just minutes before two
3 bombs ripped through our embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar
4 es Salaam, Tanzania. I would like to begin my closing
5 statements by showing you what the scene was like in the
6 immediate aftermath of those bombings to remind all of us
7 about why we are here.
8 (Video played)
9 MR. KARAS: Ladies and gentlemen, those portions of
10 those videos serve as a painful symbol, painful reminder of
11 why it is that we have spent the last two and a half months
12 together, spending the last two and a half months to review
13 evidence that was collected from all over the world.
14 And the reason that we have done this is because we
15 have been involved in a search for justice, a search to
16 determine who it is that committed these acts, these
17 unspeakable acts that ended the lives and the hopes and the
18 dreams of hundreds of people, these vicious acts that
19 shattered three friendly nations, these evil acts defined no
20 justification, these unjust acts that demand accountability.
21 Now this search for justice began by Mr. Butler
22 committing to you that the government would establish beyond a
23 reasonable doubt that the defendant Mohamed Odeh and the
24 defendant Mohamed Al-'Owhali participated in the bombing of
25 the American Embassy in Nairobi on August 7th and that Khalfan
5221
1 Khamis Mohamed participated in the bombing of the embassy in
2 Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. And I submit to you, ladies and
3 gentlemen, we have honored that commitment and we have
4 established the guilt of those defendants for those crimes in
5 this case.
6 But we committed to more. We committed to showing to
7 you that there was a conspiracy behind these embassy attacks,
8 a conspiracy to murder the people of the United States simply
9 because they were American, and we committed to showing to you
10 that all four of these defendants participated in that
11 conspiracy. And I submit to you that we have honored that
12 commitment, that we have established beyond a reasonable doubt
13 the guilt of all four of those defendants in connection with
14 the conspiracy.
15 Now, ladies and gentlemen, we have now come to the
16 close of the case and all of the evidence has been put before
17 you, and I understand that hundreds of exhibits went before
18 you very quickly and without explanation. And sometimes they
19 went in by way of stipulation and they went in even more
20 quickly, and I know, because I helped read some of these
21 stipulations.
22 But now is the time, now is the time where we can
23 discuss what the evidence tells you and how it is that the
24 pieces of the puzzle come together to show to you why it is
25 that we have proved these defendants guilty beyond a
5222
1 reasonable doubt. This is our opportunity to walk through the
2 evidence and explain the context of the conspiracies and the
3 events that preceded the bombings as well as the acts that
4 were carried out in furtherance of the bombings.
5 The way I'm going to do this, ladies and gentlemen,
6 is the first thing I'm going to do is offer a brief summary of
7 what the evidence shows these defendants did, and I do that
8 because I don't want people to be concerned about the number
9 of names that you have heard, about the number of places and
10 acts and companies and countries, because at its core, the
11 case against each and every single one of these defendants is
12 relatively straightforward.
13 Once we go through the summary of what the evidence
14 shows these defendants did, we will walk together through the
15 chronology of the events, the chronology that comprises the
16 conspiracy to murder, the conspiracy to commit war against the
17 United States. And when we have gone through that chronology,
18 we will talk about the counts in the indictment. We will talk
19 about every count in the indictment.
20 Now, the indictment has 300 counts, a little over 300
21 counts, and that is not so much a reflection of the complexity
22 of this case but of the sad fact that each and every victim is
23 represented in a separate count in this indictment, a separate
24 count of murder.
25 Now, I'll tell you up front, ladies and gentlemen,
5223
1 this is going to take some time. There has been a lot of
2 evidence presented before you and I want to take the time and
3 make sure that you understand what the evidence means, and I
4 think this is going to take the balance of today and tomorrow.
5 So let's roll up our sleeves, let's go through the evidence,
6 and let's continue this search for justice.
7 Now, let's begin with the summary. What does the
8 evidence show that the defendant Wadih El Hage did in
9 connection with this conspiracy? Now, in his opening
10 statement, counsel for El Hage, on behalf of El Hage, said to
11 you that Mr. El Hage was a mediator and that he was somebody
12 who shared in the tragedy of the embassy bombings.
13 Ladies and gentlemen, I submit to you that the
14 evidence shows that Wadih El Hage was a facilitator, somebody
15 who performed key logistical acts on behalf of the al Qaeda
16 conspiracy and somebody who obstructed the investigation into
17 al Qaeda within a year of the bombing and within weeks after
18 the bombing.
19 What the evidence shows, ladies and gentlemen, is
20 that, like many people in al Qaeda, Wadih El Hage has a family
21 and that Wadih El Hage conducts business transactions. But
22 like other people in al Qaeda, the evidence shows that Wadih
23 El Hage led a double life, a secret criminal life on behalf of
24 al Qaeda, and that he performed logistical services for al
25 Qaeda to make sure that others in al Qaeda could carry out
5224
1 their deadly acts.
2 The evidence shows that as far back as 1992 and 1993
3 Wadih El Hage was in charge of the al Qaeda payroll in
4 Khartoum, Sudan when al Qaeda was headquartered in that
5 country. It showed that Wadih El Hage made efforts to
6 transport Stinger Missiles from Pakistan to Sudan in 1993, the
7 same year that al Qaeda was targeting the American
8 peace-keeping mission in Somalia, and the evidence shows that
9 Wadih El Hage arranged for the transport of five al Qaeda
10 people from Khartoum down to Nairobi, also during the time
11 that al Qaeda was targeting the American presence in Somalia.
12 What else does the evidence show? The evidence shows
13 that Wadih El Hage served as Usama Bin Laden's personal
14 assistant, the gatekeeper to the man that was the head of this
15 secret conspiracy. The evidence also shows that in 1994 Wadih
16 El Hage moved from Khartoum, Sudan down to Nairobi, Kenya to
17 become a leader of the East African cell of al Qaeda.
18 And the evidence shows that when he got down to
19 Nairobi, he maintained a close operational working
20 relationship with the East African cell -- and, ladies and
21 gentlemen, this is the same cell that would carry out the
22 bombings of the embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam; that
23 Wadih El Hage arranged for the facilitation and delivery of
24 false travel documents of other al Qaeda members; that he
25 communicated in code and passed on messages to others in al
5225
1 Qaeda; that he maintained a close working relationship with
2 others in the East African cell, such as the defendant,
3 Mohamed Odeh.
4 And in 1997 you heard evidence that Wadih El Hage
5 went twice to visit Usama Bin Laden and his commander, Abu
6 Hafs, here in Afghanistan. And when he returned from that
7 first trip in February of 1997, Wadih El Hage brought back
8 with him a new policy, a policy to militarize, to militarize
9 the cell that in 16 or 18 months thereafter would carry out
10 the bombings in East Africa.
11 And then you heard that El Hage went back to see Bin
12 Laden in August of 1997, a year after Bin Laden had publicly
13 declared war against the United States, six months after he
14 gave the interview with CNN where he said he would send dead
15 Americans home. And when El Hage returned, he was met by
16 American officials and he testified in a Grand Jury in this
17 courthouse, when the American government was conducting an
18 investigation of al Qaeda to try to learn about what al Qaeda
19 was doing in its war against America, to try to stop al Qaeda
20 from carrying out its deadly mission.
21 And it was at that moment that Wadih El Hage was
22 faced with a choice: He could honor his oath, he could tell
23 the truth, he could help the United States against al Qaeda,
24 or he could side with al Qaeda and Bin Laden. And the
25 evidence overwhelmingly establishes that what Wadih El Hage
5226
1 did was he sided with Jihad, he sided with al Qaeda. The
2 American citizen chose Bin Laden over America.
3 And he would do it again, because the evidence shows
4 that in 1998, merely weeks after our embassies were bombed,
5 Wadih El Hage testified again in the Grand Jury and again he
6 took an oath and again he chose al Qaeda over the United
7 States. And he lied about key members of al Qaeda, and one of
8 the people that he lied about was the defendant, Mohamed Odeh,
9 which is where we turn next.
10 What does the evidence show about Mohamed Odeh? The
11 evidence shows, ladies and gentlemen, that Mohamed Odeh was a
12 sworn member of al Qaeda, that he was a sworn member of al
13 Qaeda since 1992; that he maintained his status as a sworn and
14 paid member of al Qaeda through the various fatwahs and
15 declarations of Jihad issued by Usama Bin Laden; that he
16 maintained his status as a sworn and paid member of al Qaeda
17 through August 7th, 1998. Mohamed Odeh received extensive
18 training in Afghanistan in firearms, in explosives such as
19 TNT, and he received advance explosive training at al Qaeda's
20 camps.
21 The evidence also shows, ladies and gentlemen, that
22 Mohamed Odeh trained ideologically similar groups in Somalia,
23 once again at the same time while al Qaeda was targeting the
24 American presence in Somalia.
25 The evidence also shows that Mohamed Sadeek Odeh was
5227
1 given a business, a fishing business, by the military
2 commander of al Qaeda, a man by the name of Abu Hafs, and that
3 Mohamed Odeh remained an active member of the East African
4 cell of al Qaeda, maintaining contact and working with Wadih
5 El Hage and others. And some of the others that he worked
6 with carried out the bombings and he carried them out with
7 them.
8 In particular, ladies and gentlemen, the evidence
9 shows that Mohamed Odeh attended several meetings in the
10 spring and the summer of 1998, with the very same people who
11 carried out the bombing, and what you will see and what the
12 evidence shows is that Mohamed Odeh's role was as the
13 technical advisor to those who carried out the bombing in
14 Nairobi.
15 The evidence also shows that Mohamed Odeh traveled to
16 Nairobi in the days before the bombing. He checked into a
17 hotel using a fake name, supported by a fake passport; that he
18 attended meetings where he knew that al Qaeda was expecting
19 American retaliation for something that al Qaeda was about to
20 do; and that he fled Nairobi the night before the bombing,
21 using that fake passport, on his way to Afghanistan, the
22 headquarters of al Qaeda and the home of Usama Bin Laden, and
23 that he was caught on the morning of August 7th in Pakistan.
24 Now, the evidence shows that Mohamed Al-'Owhali had a
25 very different role in this case. Mohamed Al-'Owhali was to
5228
1 carry out the attack. He was the person who was supposed to
2 execute the bombing in Nairobi, and you know from the evidence
3 that he was supposed to die in the bombing.
4 Now, what the evidence shows is that Mohamed
5 Al-'Owhali also received training at al Qaeda camps in
6 Afghanistan. He learned about explosives, he learned about
7 weapons, but he also learned about hijackings, he learned
8 about kidnappings, and he was proficient enough at this
9 training to earn an audience with Usama Bin Laden. And it was
10 during one of his meetings with Usama Bin Laden that Mohamed
11 Al-'Owhali asked for a mission, a mission that you know he got
12 and that you know he carried out, to the detriment of 213
13 people.
14 Now, Mohamed Al-'Owhali, he, too, gets a fake
15 passport and the evidence shows that he goes to Yemen in May
16 of 1998 and then he goes back to Afghanistan, where he gets
17 the details of where it is that the operation is supposed to
18 be carried out. He made a video that was supposed to take
19 credit for his martyrdom operation, a video that al Qaeda was
20 going to show to celebrate its attack against the embassy in
21 Nairobi. And then he got to Nairobi in the early days of
22 August and he met with the other people that he was going to
23 work with to carry out the bombing.
24 He did some last-minute surveillance of the embassy.
25 He reviewed some photos and some sketches of the embassy. He
5229
1 learned all about the plan in Dar es Salaam, and then he was
2 given his instructions. And what you know is he carried out
3 his instructions.
4 On the morning of the bombing, in that back parking
5 lot of the embassy, Mohamed Al-'Owhali got out of the truck,
6 he threw his flash grenades in an effort to get that truck as
7 close to the target as possible -- the American Embassy in
8 Nairobi, Kenya.
9 Only the plan called for him to die, and he ran. And
10 when he ran, and realizing he had no travel documents and that
11 he had no money, he reached out to al Qaeda. He called Yemen,
12 and Mohamed Al-'Owhali and al Qaeda worked together to rescue
13 Al-'Owhali before he was apprehended in Nairobi, Kenya.
14 What does the evidence show about Khalfan Khamis
15 Mohamed? The evidence shows that he, too, obtained the
16 requisite training in Afghanistan and that he, too, went to
17 Somalia to train others, but that in March of 1998 Khalfan
18 Khamis Mohamed was approached about doing a Jihad job, a job
19 he readily accepted, and that it was Khalfan Khamis Mohamed
20 that purchased the utility vehicle, that white Suzuki that was
21 used to transport the component of the bomb, the TNT, the gas
22 cylinders, the detonators.
23 And you learned that Khalfan Khamis Mohamed rented
24 that place, that house at 213 Ilala that functioned as the
25 bomb factory where Khalfan Khamis Mohamed and the others
5230
1 ground the TNT and put together the bomb and loaded the bomb
2 on the bomb truck so that it could be delivered to the
3 American Embassy in Dar es Salaam. And you know that Khalfan
4 Khamis Mohamed went with that bomb truck and he prayed that
5 the bomb would go off, and he was happy when it did. And
6 Khalfan Khamis Mohamed cleaned up the house in an effort to
7 erase the trail that would connect him and his cohorts in the
8 bombing and he fled to South Africa.
9 Now, ladies and gentlemen, that was just a brief
10 summary of what the evidence shows that these four defendants
11 did, what it is that they did that makes them guilty of the
12 charges that have been brought against them in this
13 indictment.
14 What I would like to do now is turn to the chronology
15 and to walk through the conspiracy from its beginning up
16 through the bombings, and you will learn, ladies and
17 gentlemen, that all of the parts connect, that the people
18 within al Qaeda worked very closely together, that they react
19 to situations and that they plan accordingly, and you will see
20 this as we go through this chronology.
21 Now, the beginning of this conspiracy is in
22 Afghanistan, and that's where we're going to begin. And we're
23 going to talk a little bit about how it is that al Qaeda was
24 set up, how it was structured, who the leaders were, and how
25 it is that al Qaeda transformed itself into an organization
5231
1 that sought more than anything else to kill Americans.
2 The conspiracy begins in the late 1980s in
3 Afghanistan, at a time when the mujahadeen are finishing their
4 fight against the Soviet Union, a fight that you know by way
5 of stipulation that the American government supported. But
6 what turned out as an effort to help Afghanis from the Soviet
7 Union transformed into something else, because you heard from
8 the third person to join this group, Jamal Al-Fadhl, the very
9 first witness who testified, and what he told you about was
10 that at the beginning there was this organization called the
11 Mektab al Khidemat, which just means the Services Office. And
12 in fact Jamal Al-Fadhl told you that he would attend and go to
13 meetings at The Services Office in Brooklyn and that's where
14 he found out about the fight in Afghanistan against the
15 Soviets.
16 And what Jamal Al-Fadhl told you was is that Bin
17 Laden and somebody by the name of Abdallah Azzam were sort of
18 in charge of this Mektab al Khidemat but that Bin Laden had a
19 different view as the hostilities were winding down against
20 the Soviets. He wanted to export Jihad, and he wanted to take
21 the group that had been collected in Afghanistan and he wanted
22 to form a group that would reach out and fulfill his dream,
23 his view of how he thought the world should work.
24 So Usama Bin Laden, who was pictured in Government
25 Exhibit 100, formed this organization with two other people --
5232
1 we can show Exhibit 105 -- among others, but the three people
2 that Jamal Al-Fadhl talked to you about who were part of this
3 were, on the left part of the screen, a man by the name of
4 Ayman al Zawahiri, and then you see Bin Laden there in the
5 middle, and on the right-hand part of the screen is Mohamed
6 Atef, known as Abu Hafs.
7 And Abu Hafs, ladies and gentlemen, he's going to
8 become the military commander of al Qaeda, the military
9 commander. And of course, as Mr. Butler mentioned in his
10 opening statements, when we're talking about military, we're
11 not talking about armies doing battle, armed opponents
12 battling one another, we are talking about terrorism, we're
13 talking about preying on civilians. And Abu Hafs is the
14 person who is going to run the military committee.
15 You are going to see later on that Abu Hafs is the
16 person who sets up Odeh with his fishing business. Abu Hafs
17 is the person who is going to meet with Wadih El Hage in
18 Kenya, and he's one of the many, many al Qaeda people that
19 Wadih El Hage is going to lie about in the Grand Jury in 1997
20 and 1998.
21 Now, Ayman al Zawahiri is the man on the left. He's
22 one of the founders of al Qaeda. You will see that he's one
23 of people that served on the committees. He's also the emir
24 or the leader of this group known as the Egyptian Islamic
25 Jihad, or EIJ. And EIJ is an organization that forms a joint
5233
1 venture with al Qaeda. You will see that Ayman al Zawahiri
2 joins in the February 1998 fatwa where Bin Laden says it is
3 the duty to kill all American civilians.
4 So Jamal Al-Fadhl told you about those three people
5 and he told you that there was another person by the name of
6 Abu Ubaidah. Now, Abu Ubaidah was the person who was also one
7 of the military commanders of al Qaeda. Abu Ubaidah is the
8 person who drowns in that ferry accident in Lake Victoria in
9 the spring of 1996 and he is one of the military commanders
10 who meets with Wadih El Hage and he's one of the military
11 commanders that Wadih El Hage is going to lie about in 1997
12 and 1998.
13 So how did somebody become a member of al Qaeda?
14 Well, you heard from two sworn members. You heard from Jamal
15 Al-Fadhl, the third man to take the oath, and he said that
16 when you take the oath, you pledge allegiance to the emir,
17 Usama Bin Laden, and you pledge allegiance to the group al
18 Qaeda.
19 And what he meant by that was that you are able, and
20 you are ready and willing and able to do whatever it is they
21 ask you to do that is Islamically correct, as they determine
22 what is Islamically correct through their scholars. And one
23 example that Jamal Al-Fadhl gave you was that he said that if
24 you are in al Qaeda and you take the bayat, you are a doctor
25 and they ask you to wash a car, you wash the car. You do what
5234
1 they ask you to do, when they ask you to do it, and you carry
2 it out.
3 And that's precisely what the witness Kherchtou told
4 you -- that he took the same oath and that he understood that
5 he had to follow the Islamically correct orders of al Qaeda
6 and of the emir, and that he would swear allegiance to Bin
7 Laden and the group.
8 Now, you learned a great deal about the structure of
9 this organization al Qaeda. The undisputed leader is Usama
10 Bin Laden and you learned that under Bin Laden there are
11 committees. The governing council is known as the Shura
12 Council, and the prominent members you heard about. You heard
13 about several, but the ones you heard about that you see over
14 and over again in this case, Abu Hafs, the military commander;
15 Ayman al Zawahirial, the person who is also head of EIJ, the
16 person who was in that picture with Bin Laden.
17 Another person that was on that committee was Abu
18 Fadhl al Makkee. Different than Jamal Al-Fadhl. Abu Fadhl al
19 Makkee is somebody you are going to hear a great deal about.
20 He is going to be on other committees and he's going to serve
21 a very interesting role that we'll talk about later on.
22 Then there was the military committee. I talked to
23 you about what al Qaeda means by military, but the two
24 prominent members of that committee were Abu Ubaidah and Abu
25 Hafs; the money and business committee, and this was run by
5235
1 this person Abu Fadhl al Makkee that I mentioned to you about,
2 and Jamal Al-Fadhl described him for you. He said that Abu
3 Fadhl al Makkee was the person who married Usama Bin Laden's
4 niece. He was the person who had his leg amputated below the
5 knee.
6 And Abu Fadhl al Makkee, ladies and gentlemen, is
7 somebody who in 1997 al Qaeda is going to believe is
8 cooperating with America, and you are going to hear how the
9 group reacts to that. We're going to go through the
10 conversations where Abu Hafs, Wadih El Hage's deputy, is on
11 the phone with other al Qaeda members and they are panicking
12 because they think that this Abu Fadhl al Makkee -- and
13 they're going to describe him, with the amputated leg and the
14 person who is with the Sheik Bin Laden's family -- is
15 cooperating with America. And in their reaction, you will see
16 precisely how this group operates, what it is that motivates
17 them, what it is they fear and what it is they want to attack,
18 and that is the United States.
19 Now, then there's the fatwah committee. The fatwah
20 committee issues these orders. These are the scholars that
21 Jamal Al-Fadhl talked about and this is what forms the basis
22 of what is Islamically correct within al Qaeda. And two of
23 the prominent members you heard about were Ayman al Zawahiri,
24 the person who is in that three-person picture, and another
25 person by the name of Abu Hajer.
5236
1 If we can display Government Exhibit 106 is Abu
2 Hajer. Abu Hajer is an important person because he is
3 somebody who is going to work for some of these companies that
4 al Qaeda is going to create in Sudan and he's going to work
5 with Wadih El Hage. Abu Hajer is somebody whose business card
6 Wadih El Hage is going to have in 1997, and Abu Hajer, as
7 we're going to go through the chronology, is going to issue
8 some fatwahs that are going to justify, in al Qaeda's eyes,
9 the activities that they are going to carry out against
10 America.
11 Finally, ladies and gentlemen, you heard about the
12 media committee, and you heard about this both from Jamal
13 Al-Fadhl and from Kherchtou. And they talked to you about
14 they publish the Jihad paper and they had this funny name for
15 the guy who ran it Abu Musab al Reuter. And they thought that
16 was funny.
17 The reason that this committee is important, ladies
18 and gentlemen, is because one of the methods that al Qaeda
19 uses in its war against America is to recruit people, and
20 propaganda is something that is very important to them. It is
21 important to recruit people, to train them, so they can carry
22 out operations, and propaganda is important because it is one
23 of the ways in which they seek to terrorize their enemies.
24 And you see no better example of that than when the
25 group claimed responsibility for the embassy bombings in
5237
1 Nairobi in Kenya, those claims of responsibility that you saw
2 were sent to London and then re-sent out to the media
3 organizations the day after the bombing. And we'll go through
4 these and explain how you know that those are al Qaeda claims.
5 Now, both Jamal Al-Fadhl and Kherchtou talked to you
6 a great deal about the methods that al Qaeda operated, and one
7 of the things that was very important to them was maintaining
8 secrecy. Security and secrecy were very important to protect
9 themselves from the Americans and from others that they
10 perceived as their enemies.
11 From the very beginning, they were protective of
12 their secrets, and throughout they were concerned about
13 learning about those who they thought were informants against
14 them. And Jamal Al-Fadhl told you that al Qaeda would seek
15 out and kill anybody they suspected of being informants
16 against the group.
17 What that tells you, ladies and gentlemen, in no
18 uncertain terms, is this is not a charity organization. This
19 is not a benevolent group. This is a group that is very
20 serious about its business and they will do anything they can
21 to maintain secrecy. And the other thing it tells you is that
22 they're going to be very careful about who they trust, who it
23 is they're going to talk about al Qaeda business around.
24 And it is from that that you know who it is that's in
25 the inner circle of al Qaeda, it is from that that you know
5238
1 that whether or not somebody observes somebody taking a bayat,
2 they knew who was in and who was not in, who they could talk
3 about business to, al Qaeda business, and who they couldn't.
4 And that is something that looms very important in this case
5 when it comes to determining who is involved in this
6 conspiracy and what it is that they did.
7 Now, another thing that al Qaeda did to protect
8 itself was it made liberal use of aliases, aliases such as,
9 for example, Bin Laden would be known as Abu Abdallah, or al
10 Qa Qa. And Government Exhibit 4, which I believe you all have
11 a copy of, is a series of pictures with people's names and
12 their aliases as testified to you by Kherchtou.
13 And you see other corroboration of this, but another
14 person who had an alias is Abu Hafs. And Abu Hafs, the
15 military commander, he went by the name Abu Khadija, he went
16 by the name Abu Fatima. And other evidence shows that Abu
17 Hafs goes by the name Mohamed Atef, and Mohamed Atef is a name
18 you're going to see in Khalid al Fawwaz's address book, one of
19 people in London. And you are going to see references to Abu
20 al Hafs in Nairobi.
21 The witness, Jamal Al-Fadhl, talked about a couple of
22 other people he knew and he only knew their aliases, but you
23 will see from other evidence who these people are. He
24 mentioned to you, for example, somebody by the name of Abu
25 Anas, and Jamal Al-Fadhl described Anas al Liby as a computer
5239
1 expert.
2 And what you see is that Kherchtou will describe for
3 you, and did describe for you, that Anas al Liby was somebody
4 he received surveillance training with and that Anas al Liby
5 was somebody who was very good with computers. And what you
6 saw was there was a search in Manchester that came in by way
7 of stipulation, one of these many stipulations, and some of
8 the documents that were found in this house, which a passport
9 found in the house shows us is this guy Anas al Liby's house.
10 The computer contains documents that talks about Jihad and
11 talks about the methods of doing Jihad, about using aliases
12 and using fake passports and the need to attack, among other
13 things, the embassies of your enemy.
14 Somebody else that Jamal Al-Fadhl talked about was
15 somebody he knew as Abu Fazhul, somebody he described as
16 Swahili and French from The Comoros, which he thought was the
17 moon. And you know from other evidence, including Kherchtou,
18 that that is Harun. Harun will carry out the bombing in
19 Nairobi. He will be the guy who rents the bomb factory. He
20 will be the guy that gets the utility vehicle. He will be the
21 guy that stays behind in Nairobi to clean up, just like
22 Khalfan Khamis Mohamed does in Dar es Salaam.
23 And Harun is Wadih El Hage's deputy. He is the one
24 who uses El Hage's phone. He uses his computer. He's one of
25 the people that El Hage will lie about in September of 1997
5240
1 and 1998.
2 Al Qaeda, as you know, was a transnational
3 organization. People from all over the world joined it and
4 people within al Qaeda traveled all over the world. And al
5 Qaeda, as Jamal al Fadhl told you, trained its members on how
6 to travel secretly so they wouldn't draw attention from
7 people. Al Qaeda trained its members to shave their beards
8 and to wear Western clothes to avoid detention by Western
9 intelligence agencies.
10 And both he and Kherchtou describe for you that the
11 group would use fake passports, and this is one of the many
12 niche businesses that you are going to see al Qaeda gets into.
13 It's their lifeblood, it's how al Qaeda is able to get their
14 people in and out of countries without being detected.
15 Kherchtou described for you two people who he said
16 helped do the passports for al Qaeda. One was somebody he
17 knew by the name of Abu Mohamed el Masry and the other one was
18 Harun. And you're going to see Kherchtou doesn't know this,
19 but later on you're going to see evidence that Harun and El
20 Hage actually did this.
21 You see that there were travel stamps in the
22 computer, and we will go through the conversations where Wadih
23 El Hage and Harun are speaking with al Qaeda members,
24 arranging for the delivery of passports for al Qaeda people.
25 DHL calls and letters which clearly establish, just as
5241
1 Kherchtou said, that Harun is involved in this. And you're
2 going to see that El Hage was with him all the way.
3 Now, both Jamal Al-Fadhl and Kherchtou describe for
4 you the al Qaeda training camp experience. They even
5 described many similar camps, again, many of the names. You
6 heard about places called Miram Shah and Khalid Ibn Walid and
7 the al Farouq Camp and the Jihad Wal Camp and the Sadeek Camp.
8 And during these camps, the group gets training in weapons,
9 they get training in mortars, they get training in explosives,
10 they get training in counter-intelligence, and some of these
11 names, some of these camps are the same places where Mohamed
12 Odeh and Mohamed Al-'Owhali are training later on.
13 Now, by 1990, the foundation for al Qaeda is in
14 place. Bin Laden, Abu Hafs, Abu Ubaidah, Ayman al Zawahiri
15 are at the top of the organization. And in August of 1990,
16 something that is very significant in al Qaeda lore happens,
17 and that is Iraq invaded Kuwait. And in response to that
18 invasion, you know this by way of stipulation, President Bush
19 dispatched the first of the American troops, with the
20 agreement of the Saudi government, to Saudi Arabia. And he
21 did that on August 7th, 1990.
22 And eight years later, ladies and gentlemen, that is
23 when al Qaeda will bomb the embassies in Nairobi and in Dar es
24 Salaam. You see, the American military presence in Saudi
25 Arabia is something that becomes the cause of al Qaeda. You
5242
1 will see this in what Al-Fadhl tells you about Bin Laden's
2 private statements to al Qaeda members and you see this and we
3 will go through this in Bin Laden's public statements.
4 More than anything else, he says that it is the duty
5 of al Qaeda and, in his view, everybody, every Muslim, to do
6 anything in their power to drive the Americans from Saudi
7 Arabia, to kill them anywhere they are. And on August 7th,
8 1998, the anniversary of the arrival of those troops, that is
9 precisely what al Qaeda did. That is precisely what they did.
10 Now, also in 1990 the evidence shows that that is
11 when Mohamed Odeh arrives in Afghanistan. Earlier in his life
12 he had been in the Philippines and he had been studying
13 architecture and engineering, something that he would use
14 later on.
15 Just like Kherchtou, Odeh arrived at the Bait al
16 Ansar Camp where he left his valuables, just like Kherchtou
17 described for you, and he went to al Farouq Camp and he took
18 training in small arms and he took training in map reading and
19 he took training in basic explosives which included TNT, the
20 same material that would be used to blowup the embassies in
21 1998.
22 Now, you know that after Odeh completes his training,
23 he stays around in Afghanistan and he works as a mechanic and
24 he's around for some of the battles in Afghanistan and that's
25 where he is in 1990. And we'll come back later on as we go
5243
1 through the chronology.
2 Now, Jamal Al-Fadhl told you that at some point in
3 1991, 1992 al Qaeda wanted to leave Afghanistan and set up
4 somewhere else. There was some concern in the group about
5 where to go. One of the places that he considered was the
6 Sudan, but there were some people within the organization that
7 were troubled by this because they didn't know if it was an
8 Islamically acceptable place to be.
9 And the person who persuaded the group that it was
10 acceptable to go there was this person Abu Hajer. And Abu
11 Hajer is the person I mentioned to you who is on the fatwah
12 committee and he will issue several fatwahs. Abu Hajer says
13 that it is okay for al Qaeda to go there because the
14 organization that runs the Sudan The National Islamic group is
15 a group al Qaeda work with.
16 So you know from what al Qaeda told you is that the
17 group in fact moved to Sudan, and when the group got to Sudan,
18 one of the things that Jamal al Fadhl himself did was he would
19 purchase farms, farms that the group would use to meet, farms
20 that the group would use for what he called refresh training
21 in some of the terrorist tactics that al Qaeda would teach its
22 members.
23 And it was after the group moved to Sudan and after
24 the American forces arrived in Saudi Arabia that Bin Laden and
25 Abu Hajer begin to speak privately to al Qaeda members about
5244
1 Bin Laden's and al Qaeda's views about their duties with
2 respect to Americans. The bottom line was that Americans had
3 to be attacked, and Bin Laden and Abu Hajer issued a fatwah to
4 the members of al Qaeda that they would have to fight the
5 United States to drive them from the Gulf.
6 Now, at some point in 1992, the defendant Odeh elects
7 to join al Qaeda and he takes the same bayat that Kherchtou
8 and Al-Fadhl did: To follow the emir's orders; to do what the
9 group asks. And what you learn is that Odeh then goes and
10 receives additional training, advanced training in explosives,
11 where he learns how to figure out what type of explosive to
12 use and how much of that explosive to use in carrying out an
13 operation.
14 And one of the people who trains him is somebody by
15 the name of Abdel Rahman. And Abdel Rahman, ladies and
16 gentlemen, is going to show up at the Hilltop Hotel in Nairobi
17 just days before the bombing in Nairobi, and he's going to
18 meet with Mohamed Odeh just days before the bomb goes off in
19 Nairobi.
20 Also in 1992, you heard from the witness Kherchtou
21 and he described for you a different type of training that he
22 received. He was ordered to get this training by Abu Hafs,
23 the military commander, and he told you that was training that
24 was offered by somebody he knew as Abu Mohamed al Amriki, and
25 we see him in Government Exhibit 4, page 5. Abu Mohamed al
5245
1 Amriki, and Amriki means the American. And you see him
2 pictured there and the fake names for Abu Mohamed al Amriki
3 listed there.
4 This person, ladies and gentlemen is Ali Mohamed.
5 Ali Mohamed, and just to give you a sense of who Ali Mohamed
6 is, he is the person whose house is searched in California in
7 1998. He is a person who has computer documents and has other
8 documents that show him in communication with Wadih El Hage
9 and other al Qaeda members, and he is one of the people who
10 lurks in the background through this whole conspiracy.
11 He provides training, he carries out operations, and
12 he maintains contact with critical members in al Qaeda and he
13 is part of the long list of al Qaeda members that Wadih El
14 Hage is going to lie about in the Grand Jury in September of
15 1997 and 1998.
16 And what Kherchtou told you about the training he was
17 offered is he was trained with a small group of people, and
18 one of the people he was trained with went by the name of Anas
19 al Liby. And he's also pictured in Government Exhibit 4-9.
20 Anas al Liby is one of the people that Kherchtou trained with,
21 and to put it into context, Anas al Liby is one of people he
22 is going to visit in Kenya in 1993 with some camera equipment.
23 He is going to be one found on Moi Avenue, about 500 meters
24 from the American Embassy, and his picture is going to be
25 found in the files of Wadih El Hage in Nairobi in 1998.
5246
1 Now, what is it that these folks were trained in?
2 Well, Kherchtou told you that they were trained how to make
3 surveillance of a target, and he described for you how they
4 would learn to target buildings, to collect information on
5 that building, for example, by taking pictures, and they
6 learned how to use small cameras and to take pictures
7 surreptitiously.
8 And they would learn how to develop these pictures
9 and to put this information into a report, a report that would
10 be marked secret, that would tell the reader when the report
11 was prepared, what the target was. The target would be given
12 a number, and then somebody else would carry out whatever it
13 was they were going to do with this.
14 One of the things that Kherchtou described for you
15 was that, in addition to learning how to target the exterior
16 buildings, the group would learn how to go into a room. And I
17 don't know if you remember, but during his testimony when he
18 described this, he looked around in this room, almost doing a
19 quick surveillance himself, and it was very instructive to
20 you, ladies and gentlemen, because it tells you something
21 about al Qaeda. It tells you that there's a part of al Qaeda
22 that remains in every single one of these people.
23 Jamal Al-Fadhl, when he testified and he was asked
24 questions, Can you tell us how al Qaeda did this? Can you
25 tell us how al Qaeda did that? Did you notice every now and
5247
1 then he would say "we." We would do it this way. We would do
2 it that way.
3 This is a group that trains its members very
4 effectively, ladies and gentlemen. One of the things that
5 Kherchtou said to you about Anas al Liby -- he was the person
6 we just saw in that picture -- Anas al Liby was somebody very
7 good with computers. He bought a computer, in fact, in
8 connection with training.
9 Remember what Jamal al Fadhl said. He heard of
10 somebody Anas who was a computer expert, and you're going to
11 see additional evidence of Anas al Liby's expertise in
12 computers.
13 (Continued on next page)
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
5248
1 MR. KARAS: (Continuing) One of the things that
2 Kherchtou said to you that he learned in this training was
3 that there were four parts to an operation. There was
4 surveillance; there was targeting, which is what the bosses
5 would decide; there were facilitators, the people who would
6 supply; and then there were the executors, the people who
7 would carry out the operation. Ladies and gentlemen, you are
8 going to see that those four parts of an operation are very
9 similar to what Mohamed Al-'Owhali described to Agent Gaudin
10 in his confession. That is precisely what he was instructed
11 about, precisely the way Al Qaeda teaches its people that an
12 operation has to be carried out.
13 The corroboration from what Kherchtou says is seen in
14 one of the computer documents from Ali Mohamed's house in
15 California, Government's Exhibit 353. As I said, this is one
16 of the documents that is found on a computer in Ali Mohamed's
17 house. At the bottom of this page you see, it is written as
18 MO3 Iana plan. Number one, you write the date of the writing
19 of the plan; 2, the date of the starting of the execution; 3,
20 specifying the target; 4, the team doing the drawing and the
21 description; 5, the equipment; 6, the cover. That's how you
22 carry out a surveillance operation and that's what Kherchtou
23 said he was trained in and that's what you see in that
24 document.
25 One of the other documents found in Ali Mohamed's
5249
1 computer describes the four levels of organizing an operation,
2 Government's Exhibit 355, another document found in Ali
3 Mohamed's computer. At the very top there, you see how it is
4 described, the idea of working. Remember, one of the codes
5 that you learned about Al Qaeda, jihad is called work. Work
6 is not 9 to 5, doing your job and getting paid a salary, work
7 is doing jihad. Ali Mohamed describes it just as, and there
8 he says just like Kherchtou told you, headquarters,
9 information, preparation, execution, the four phases to an
10 operation that Al Qaeda is trained in, just as Kherchtou
11 described for you.
12 Kherchtou told you that after completing some of this
13 surveillance training, he took part in some electronics
14 training. He didn't graduate in the course but learned about
15 remote controls to be used in watches, radios and so forth,
16 and he mentioned to you that he himself knew that by 1992
17 there was discussion among Al Qaeda that the United States was
18 the enemy of Islam, that the United States was the enemy of
19 Islam. Indeed, by 1992 and 1993, the witness Jamal al-Fadl
20 told you that Bin Laden and Abu Hajer had issued a very
21 specific fatwah regarding the United States, that it was their
22 argument that the prophet Mohamed would not tolerate two
23 religions on the Holy Land and therefore they had to be
24 attacked. In their view, what the United States was doing was
25 Islamically correct. In their view, what that required, what
5250
1 that obligated was attacking the United States.
2 There has been some discussion about what is
3 Islamically correct and what isn't Islamically correct. You
4 are not a court that decides that. This isn't an Islamic
5 court. That's not the point, ladies and gentlemen. Whether
6 the imam Siraj Wahhaj is correct that the prohibition is that
7 there can only be two religions in Mecca or whether that
8 covers Saudi Arabia is not a question that you have to
9 resolve, because what matters is what Al Qaeda thinks, because
10 it is based on that premise that they carry out the actions
11 that they do, and from their perspective a long, long time
12 ago, it was the obligation of their members to carry out these
13 attacks.
14 Jamal al-Fadl described for you that these statements
15 and these fatwahs would be issued, that meetings would be held
16 among the inner circle of Al Qaeda, people who could be
17 trusted, at the guesthouse in the Riyadh section in Sudan. He
18 described to you that one of the people who would attend some
19 of these meetings would be the defendant Wadih El Hage.
20 Remember, ladies and gentlemen, what I said earlier. Only
21 those they trust can attend these meetings. You have to be
22 trusted to be allowed in.
23 One of the things that Al Qaeda did in 1992 and '93
24 in Sudan was set up a business network. Remember what Jamal
25 al-Fadl told you about Bin Laden's business. He told you in
5251
1 one story about how the group went to him and said the
2 business isn't going that well. And Bin Laden said to them
3 our purpose is bigger than business.
4 The business is bigger than jihad, ladies and
5 gentlemen. It provides resources that finance the operations.
6 It provides a way that employs the people that you want to
7 keep employed. It provides terrific cover if you want to
8 bring in munitions or have people travel. Al-Fadl told you
9 about the plane that went up with sugar to Afghanistan and
10 returned with guns and rockets. It's a great cover.
11 Al-Fadl described for you some of the companies that
12 were called Wadi al Aqiq. There was the company called Al
13 Hijra, the construction company, the farm company, and Al
14 Qudurat Transportation Company. The farm company, for
15 example, maintains the farms where Al Qaeda can meet and train
16 its members. Some of the prominent members of Al Qaeda were
17 some of the employees of these companies. They were some of
18 the managers. But first and foremost they were Al Qaeda
19 members. So yes, there was a lot of business going on. But
20 the motive wasn't profit. This wasn't an attempt to get on
21 the Fortune 500. This wasn't Money Incorporated, ladies and
22 gentlemen, this was about Jihad Inc. This was the purpose to
23 these businesses and this is why Al Qaeda used them.
24 One of the things that the witness Jamal al-Fadl
25 described for you that he did for the companies was, he was in
5252
1 charge of the payroll for the Al Qaeda people. Remember, he
2 described that people would get paid two salaries. They would
3 get paid a salary if they worked for the company, and those
4 who worked for the company and who worked for Al Qaeda got a
5 stipend. It was Jamal al-Fadl who was one of the people who
6 would hand out that Al Qaeda bonus, if you will.
7 Jamal al-Fadl told you that the person he trained to
8 replace him was the defendant Wadih El Hage. As far back as
9 in Sudan in 1993, this is one of the things that Wadih El Hage
10 does for Al Qaeda. Jamal al-Fadl gave you a very detailed
11 description of the offices that Al Qaeda had, the Wadi Al Aqiq
12 offices. Remember he said this person had an office, the
13 first office on the left and the second office on the left.
14 He described for you an office in the residential section of
15 Khartoum that was very exclusive, where Bin Laden had an
16 office and Abu Hajer had an office and Wadih El Hage had an
17 office. To get to Abu Hajer and to get to Bin Laden, you had
18 to get through El Hage. El Hage very early on serves as the
19 gatekeeper to both Abu Hajer and Bin Laden.
20 You remember the testimony of Essam al Ridi. He is
21 the person that we all remember who crashed Bin Laden's plane.
22 He is the person who described for you that same office, that
23 very exclusive office in that section in Khartoum in 1993.
24 Yes, Al Qaeda would sometimes send its people to buy
25 tractors. Yes, they would buy bicycles. Yes, they sold
5253
1 sesame seeds. But they also made efforts to buy chemical
2 weapons, and al-Fadl gave you that very specific story about
3 the group's efforts to obtain nuclear weapons. Nuclear
4 weapons, we submit, are not weapons that one uses when you
5 target one victim, it is when you go after targeting entire
6 people. That is what he was trying to do as far back as 1993,
7 al-Fadl told you.
8 Something else happens in 1992, 1993, and that
9 something else, ladies and gentlemen, is the peace-keeping
10 effort in Somalia. You know that at some point the United
11 States government joined the United Nations effort in Somalia,
12 and you heard from Dr. Samatar that there was mass starvation
13 in Somalia and the United Nations showed up in an effort to
14 deal with that problem.
15 Ladies and gentlemen, Al Qaeda had a different view
16 of that mission. The American presence in Somalia angered Al
17 Qaeda. They saw it as an effort to colonize Somalia, an
18 Islamic country. You heard that Abu Hajer joined with Usama
19 Bin Laden issue a fatwah to the members of Al Qaeda to do what
20 they can to stop the Americans, to drive them from Somalia.
21 The specific words that Bin Laden used were, we have to cut
22 off the head of the snake.
23 As far back as 1993, this is what is on Al Qaeda's
24 mind, the United States presence in Somalia.
25 Abu Hajer in his fatwah described how it was
5254
1 Islamically acceptable to attack the infidel, to attack the
2 enemy even if that meant that you were going to kill what they
3 called innocent third parties. Jamal al-Fadl told you about
4 how Abu Hajer relied on this scholar Ibn al Tamiyeh, who gave
5 the parable of the Tartars and the battle that justified these
6 attacks even if it meant killing innocent people.
7 Ladies and gentlemen, you are going to see that Bin
8 Laden is going to rely on this person Ibn Tamiyeh. In the
9 August 1996 declaration against the United States, Bin Laden
10 makes clear that we will do whatever it takes to drive
11 Americans from the Gulf, exactly the way al Fadl described it
12 for you. You saw it in a different form. When Khalfan Khamis
13 Mohamed was asked does it occur to you that you were going to
14 kill Tanzanians and not Americans, Khalfan Khamis Mohamed said
15 yes, that's part of the job, but if they're innocent, Allah
16 will take care of them, and if they're not, then they are
17 going to get what they deserve. That's exactly what al Fadl
18 said Abu Hajer told the group. If they are innocent, they
19 will go to paradise. If not, they will get what they deserve.
20 Is this really Islamically correct? I don't know.
21 But is it what Al Qaeda believed? Absolutely. And once they
22 adopt that belief, it makes perfect sense that they would
23 carry out among other things the operation of East Africa in
24 August of 1998.
25 So once Bin Laden and Abu Hajer raise a call to arms
5255
1 with respect to Somalia, Somalia becomes a magnet for Al Qaeda
2 people. Jamal al-Fadl described for you that Abu Hafs the
3 military commander took two trips. The first was for all
4 practical purposes a scouting mission. When he came back from
5 this trip he told Jamal al-Fadl that I went down there, I
6 don't think we can take America head on. This is what Jamal
7 al-Fadl said. He said there are different tribes down there.
8 There is no one in control. But we will start a little bit
9 and if it goes good we'll go bigger.
10 You know, the witness Dr. Samatar described for you
11 the situation in Somalia, that there were many tribes and that
12 they were fighting amongst each other and fighting
13 collectively against other tribes. That is exactly what Abu
14 Hafs recognized when he went there.
15 Ladies and gentlemen, Al Qaeda didn't storm the
16 beaches with an army and we are not submitting to you that Al
17 Qaeda members were the ones that fired the rockets or the
18 bullets or set off the mines. What we are saying to you is
19 that Al Qaeda sent people to Somalia to pursue its goal to
20 drive the Americans out of Somalia. If that meant training
21 people to carry out operations, that's what they would do. If
22 it meant training some who would train others, that's what
23 they would do.
24 At bottom what this reflects is that as far back as
25 1993, Al Qaeda is going to focus wherever America is and do
5256
1 whatever it thinks it can to carry out its mission. Abu Hafs
2 recognized the need and the limitations, but nonetheless, as
3 you will see, Al Qaeda did what it could to drive the
4 Americans out.
5 In fact, Jamal al-Fadl described a second trip that
6 Abu Hafs took, and when he returned from the second trip he
7 said that Al Qaeda was responsible for what happened to the
8 Americans. Again, does that mean he is saying that Al Qaeda
9 members were the ones that fired the guns? Not necessarily.
10 They are responsible, whether or not he is even telling the
11 truth, feel responsible, which tells you a great deal about
12 their mind set.
13 When the call to arms goes out, help comes from
14 everywhere. From Khartoum -- again, we are talking about
15 1993 -- you remember the testimony of Essam al Ridi, the pilot
16 who was called by Wadih El Hage when he was back in Texas to
17 see about buying a plane for Bin Laden. One of the things
18 that El Hage asked Essam al Ridi was if a plane would have
19 enough range to go from Pakistan to Sudan because he wanted to
20 know if Essam al Ridi would help deliver Stinger missiles from
21 Pakistan to Sudan, at precisely the same time that American
22 forces are in Somalia.
23 The other thing that Essam al Ridi told you was after
24 he bought the plane and brought it to Khartoum, Wadih El Hage
25 asked him to fly five members of Al Qaeda from Khartoum to
5257
1 Nairobi, which borders Somalia to the southwest. Essam al
2 Ridi told you these five people got on a plane and he
3 described the plane and that's all he told you. But remember,
4 Kherchtou told you that he remembers hearing that the Bin
5 Laden plane flew five people down from Khartoum to Nairobi,
6 one of them being Abu Hafs, the military commander, and that
7 those people went on to Somalia.
8 Same story, different perspectives, just like Mr.
9 Butler said. Different people from Al Qaeda who have
10 different perspectives, giving you from beginning to end, the
11 efforts by Al Qaeda and El Hage to help Al Qaeda fulfill its
12 goal with respect to Somalia.
13 Ladies and gentlemen, this is one of many examples
14 where you see Wadih El Hage acting as the facilitator for Al
15 Qaeda, not the mediator, the facilitator. Think of it in
16 terms of an army, but remember, this isn't really an army.
17 When an army fights, there are people who go to the front, but
18 there are important logistics people, facilitators who have to
19 make sure that the people at the front are fed, that they are
20 clothed, that they get communications, that they will get
21 messages. That is the role that Wadih El Hage serves. No.
22 We are not going to present any evidence that he wired any
23 bombs, that he offered any training, that he received any
24 training. But that doesn't make him not in this conspiracy.
25 On the contrary, what the evidence shows is that he provides
5258
1 an essential role for Al Qaeda. Remember what Kherchtou says?
2 You don't have to fire a gun to be in Al Qaeda. You don't
3 have to fire a gun to be part of this. Kherchtou was one of
4 the facilitators and you will see others, and that is one of
5 the roles that Wadih El Hage plays in this conspiracy.
6 Kherchtou described the perspective from Nairobi, the
7 help that was offered in Somalia from the south. Remember, he
8 said that he was specifically ordered to go to Nairobi to help
9 out any way he could. He was a facilitator. He was somebody
10 who was there to provide housing. He was somebody who was
11 there to provide visas and translating if they needed, and
12 Kherchtou told you about some of the people that went into
13 Somalia on behalf of Al Qaeda. He described somebody by the
14 name of Abu Mohamed el Masry, who we know is al Saleh. He
15 described Saif al Adel and a person by the name of Shuaib. We
16 will talk about those people later on.
17 In particular what Kherchtou told you was that he
18 remembers Harun, Wadih El Hage's future deputy, telling you
19 that he and Saleh, this person known as Abu Mohamed el
20 Masry -- just to give you some perspective, this is a person
21 pictured in Government's Exhibit 119. This is Saleh. And
22 that Harun told Kherchtou that he and Saleh went into
23 Mogadishu in Somalia and worked with some of the local tribes
24 to try to construct a truck bomb to attack the UN forces that
25 were there, an effort that was unsuccessful. And Harun told
5259
1 Kherchtou that they were there one day in a neighborhood in
2 Mogadishu in a building when they saw helicopter gun fight,
3 helicopter firing in a building that was in the neighborhood.
4 Harun told Kherchtou that after that they decided they had to
5 get out because they might get caught, some of the people that
6 went to Somalia, ladies and gentlemen, that you will see over
7 and over again, all of which is a reflection of what Al Qaeda
8 was doing at the time and who they were targeting.
9 Kherchtou told you about the electronics contractor
10 who worked in Pakistan, person who worked with the remote
11 devices, he was in Nairobi at the time. One of the other
12 people that Kherchtou said was in Somalia was the person he
13 knew as Marwan. That's the defendant Odeh. In fact you
14 remember the defendant Odeh in his statement to the FBI said
15 in fact that he was given an order by Bin Laden through an Al
16 Qaeda intermediary, somebody by the same of Saif al Adel, to
17 go to Somalia, and the mission was that Al Qaeda was going to
18 train a group the most closely aligned to Al Qaeda. That's
19 what Odeh did. He went to Somalia, the southeastern part of
20 Somalia, and he provided training to one of the groups there.
21 Remember, what Odeh told the group was, this is a group that
22 feared, just like Al Qaeda did, that the UN was going to cause
23 this group to lose its power, and Odeh described a fire fight
24 that involved the tribe and a UN force down in the southern
25 part of Somalia.
5260
1 When he was in Somalia, Odeh met up with Abu Hafs,
2 the military commander of Al Qaeda. Abu Hafs told Odeh that
3 what he did was, he went to Mogadishu and he met with some of
4 the groups, and one of the people he met with was Fahad Aidad,
5 one of the more prominent warlords in Somalia. Abu Hafs told
6 Odeh that Al Qaeda had agreed to work with Aidad and others to
7 attack the Americans. Again, just like Abu Hafs described,
8 tribes fighting tribes, go in a little bit and see if it's
9 good, and maybe we will go bigger.
10 The other thing Odeh told the FBI, while he was in
11 Somalia he met with somebody named Daroud, who told him that
12 he had participated in attacks against the United Nations and
13 the United Nations was leaving.
14 The final thing to consider about Odeh and Somalia,
15 ladies and gentlemen, he told the FBI he was there in March
16 1993 and he left in November 1993, again, at the heart of the
17 time when the American forces are in Somalia, the heart of the
18 time that all this other activity that Al Qaeda is engaging in
19 to drive the Americans from Somalia is going on.
20 That is where Al Qaeda sits in 1993, and you see the
21 import of Somalia in a number of ways. First, it tells you
22 about the mind set, and we talked about that. Second, who Al
23 Qaeda sends to Somalia introduces you to some of the people
24 that you will see play a more prominent role in this
25 conspiracy as it evolves and develops. The third thing is,
5261
1 you will see a number of different ways it corroborates
2 precisely what Kherchtou told you about al Fadl, where he too
3 claims credit for what happens in Somalia.
4 The last thing, ladies and gentlemen, the reason
5 Somalia is important, it establishes the link between Al Qaeda
6 and Nairobi. Remember what I said at the beginning. The
7 thing about this conspiracy and why it makes sense for us to
8 do this chronically, you see that events have a cause and
9 effect relationship. Because Al Qaeda wanted to target
10 Somalia, they decided they had to set up operations in
11 Nairobi. Once they set up operations in Nairobi, they have a
12 foundation in place that they are going to make use of five
13 years later to attack the embassies in East Africa.
14 What you know not only from Jamal al-Fadl and not
15 only from Kherchtou but from some of the documents that were
16 seized and the phone records and communications, it is that Al
17 Qaeda has offices all over the world. It is like a
18 multinational organization. It has hubs. It has headquarters
19 in Afghanistan. It has headquarters in Sudan. It has a hub
20 in Nairobi. It has a hub up here in Azerbaijan. We will go
21 through telephone calls with Al Qaeda people in Germany.
22 There were documents seized in England. But one of the key
23 hubs is going to be Nairobi. And of course if you are Al
24 Qaeda, you want to make sure that the people you have running
25 that hub are people you trust and people who will do what you
5262
1 need them to do, something that will play out as a very
2 important factor as we go through the evidence.
3 THE COURT: Is this a good time?
4 MR. KARAS: Yes, your Honor.
5 THE COURT: We will take a break.
6 (Jury excused)
7 THE COURT: Mr. Wilford.
8 MR. WILFORD: Your Honor, may we be heard in the
9 robing room?
10 THE COURT: Yes.
11 (Pages 5263 through 5265 sealed)
12 (Continued on next page)
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17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
5266
1 (Recess)
2 (Jury present)
3 MR. KARAS: May I proceed, your Honor?
4 THE COURT: Yes, please.
5 MR. KARAS: We left off in Nairobi in 1993, and what
6 I was saying was that the witness Kherchtou was the person who
7 had been sent to Nairobi to the base of operations, the new
8 base in Nairobi at the time that Al Qaeda was targeting the
9 American presence in Somalia. Kherchtou told you about two
10 people that he met when he first got to Nairobi. The first
11 was somebody who he knew by the name of Nawawi. We see
12 pictured here in Government's Exhibit 4-12. Nawawi's real
13 name is Ihab Ali, and you see a couple of his other nicknames,
14 Abu Suliman, and Joseph Kenana and Abu Jaffar al Tayar. He is
15 another person who lurks in the background as we go through
16 this chronology. He is somebody who is an Al Qaeda member,
17 and he is somebody who ends up in Florida and somebody who is
18 going to be exchanging communications with Wadih El Hage,
19 communications that Wadih El Hage denied having any knowledge
20 of before the grand jury in September of 1998. We will talk
21 about those communications, but this is somebody that
22 Kherchtou told you he met in 1993 in Nairobi.
23 Another person who he met there is displayed in
24 Government's Exhibit 4-13. This was somebody he told you he
25 knew among other names as Abu Khalid al Nubi down at the
5267
1 bottom. This, ladies and gentlemen, is Mustafa Fadhl, who
2 also goes by the name Abu Jihad and Khalid. Khalid is a name
3 you will see in some of the documents that Wadih El Hage
4 brings back, documents that talk about the new policy that
5 Wadih El Hage brings back, to militarize the cell in East
6 Africa when he returns from his visit with Bin Laden in 1997.
7 You will see references to Khalid in some of those documents.
8 Mustafa al-Fadl is one of the prominent members of the cell in
9 East Africa and he is a person who among other things is going
10 to be in charge of the operation in Dar es Salaam to blow up
11 the embassy in Dar es Salaam. He is the person who is
12 identified by Khalfan Khamis Mohamed as the person who
13 approached him to do the jihad mission in March of 1998. He
14 is the person that Khalfan Khamis Mohamed lives with at that
15 bomb factory that Khalfan Khamis Mohamed rented at 213 Ilala.
16 This is what I was saying earlier, ladies and
17 gentlemen. You see these participants in this case come up
18 early. They are participants in the conspiracy to murder US
19 nationals.
20 Let me just say for a moment, by the way, when I talk
21 about the conspiracy to murder US nationals and Al Qaeda's
22 involvement, I am talking about the first count in the
23 indictment, the count which charges a conspiracy among the
24 people you will see named in that indictment that include
25 these defendants and others, some of whom were members of Al
5268
1 Qaeda, to murder nationals of the United States. What I ask
2 you to bear in mind, and we will go through the counts,
3 probably tomorrow, that there are four conspiracies. There is
4 a conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction against
5 American targets, there is a conspiracy to kill the officers
6 and employees of the United States government, and there is a
7 conspiracy to destroy American buildings by way of explosives.
8 So when I say the conspiracy, what I am referring to, in
9 shorthand, is the first count, the conspiracy to murder
10 nationals of the United States. We will talk about the other
11 conspiracy counts. But I wanted to alert you to that at this
12 point as we go through the evidence.
13 One of the things that Kherchtou said that he was
14 supposed to do was to learn how to fly, and he was sent to a
15 school in Nairobi. He told you that when he first got to
16 Nairobi, he stayed at a Ramada Hotel and that after he met
17 Nawawi and Mohamed Abu al Nubi, he met some other people,
18 including Abu Ubaidah al Banshiri, the person who is the
19 military commander of Al Qaeda. What Kherchtou told you about
20 Abu Ubaidah was that Abu Ubaidah lived a secret life in
21 Nairobi. He had a second wife in Nairobi, he had another wife
22 that was, I believe, up in Khartoum. Kherchtou told you that
23 that was something that very few people knew about, that
24 Ubaidah had a second wife and family, that it was something
25 that he was keeping secret. You may remember the testimony of
5269
1 Ashif Juma, the person who was with Abu Ubaidah in the ferry
2 accident, he is the brother-in-law of Abu Ubaidah. He told
3 you that when Abu Ubaidah got married to his sister, there was
4 nobody from Abu Ubaidah's side of the family who was at that
5 wedding. That aligns precisely with what Kherchtou told you
6 about the life that Abu Ubaidah was living in Kenya at the
7 time.
8 The other person that Kherchtou introduced you to was
9 somebody by the name of Khalid al Fawwaz, who is pictured in
10 Government's Exhibit 4-11. You will see his aliases down
11 below, Abu Omar al Sebai and Hamad. What Kherchtou told you
12 was, for example, when he needed expenses paid for the flight
13 school or the hotel, he would go to Abu Ubaidah, and if Abu
14 Ubaidah wasn't around, he would go to this person pictured in
15 government 4-11, Khalid al Fawwaz. Fawwaz was somebody who
16 helped run the base in Nairobi for Al Qaeda. He worked under
17 Abu Ubaidah. He is someone you will see shortly is replaced
18 by the defendant Wadih El Hage.
19 One of the things that Kherchtou told you about Abu
20 Fawwaz, and this is a common refrain within the Al Qaeda
21 story, Fawwaz tried to start a business in Nairobi, and he
22 named it Asma, and it was named after Fawwaz's daughter. The
23 business didn't work out. He tried to import some vehicles
24 from Dubai, and at the end of the day the business failed
25 because the cars were expensive and he couldn't resell them.
5270
1 One of the ways you know Kherchtou is telling you
2 exactly the truth about this, there are documents found in
3 Wadih El Hage's files that belong to Khalid Fawwaz. For
4 example, you see Government's Exhibit 626 on the screen.
5 Government's Exhibit 626 is one of the documents that I
6 mentioned. This is an articles of association of this company
7 Asma Ltd. that Kherchtou described Khalid al Fawwaz tried to
8 find. This is the first page. If you take a look at the
9 bottom of the first page, you see the name of the attorney who
10 prepared these papers, M.M. Chaudhri. That is a name that
11 Kherchtou testified about in connection with the group's
12 efforts to free Fawwaz when he was arrested by Kenyan
13 authorities, something we will talk about in a minute.
14 If you take a look towards the end of this document,
15 you will see who the ostensible board of directors is of this
16 company. Mohammed Karama Salim, businessman; Khalid al
17 Fawwaz, businessman; and Jalal Fouad, businessman. Just like
18 Kherchtou told you, Fawwaz starts the business, and the person
19 at the bottom, Jalal Fouad, you will see, is Abu Ubaidah, the
20 person who dies in the ferry accident, Abu Ubaidah the
21 military commander who Wadih El Hage is going to not only lie
22 about but even deny that he knew him by that name Jalal.
23 So you see, as far back as 1993 and into 1994, Khalid
24 al Fawwaz and the others are playing out the Al Qaeda play
25 book in Nairobi. They are establishing businesses, they are
5271
1 living in Nairobi, but they are actually also carrying out the
2 activities of Al Qaeda. You will see the connections here
3 between these two gentlemen in this business.
4 There were other documents that were found among
5 Wadih El Hage's files and we are not going to display them
6 now. We will talk about them later. But there were phone
7 records registered in Khalid al Fawwaz's name, Government
8 Exhibit 626. A copy of Fawwaz's passport, Government's
9 Exhibit 622A. There was a stamp for Asma Ltd., Government's
10 Exhibit 629, and a business card for Abu Karama Muslim,
11 Government's Exhibit 630.
12 You heard from Kherchtou that before Ramadan in 1994,
13 which there was a stipulation on was February of 1994, so
14 before that, he remembered his former surveillance trainer Abu
15 Mohamed al Amriki come to Nairobi with the person Anas al
16 Liby, the person with whom he received the surveillance
17 training. Remember Anas al Liby and Ali Mohamed. Ali
18 Mohamed, the trainer who Kherchtou knew as Abu Mohamed al
19 Amriki, and the computer expert, who did the computer training
20 on surveillance. What Kherchtou told you was that they
21 arrived sometime before February and other Al Qaeda people
22 show up right about this time: Abu Hafs, the military
23 commander; Abu Fadhl al Makkee, one of the founders, leader of
24 Al Qaeda; and Abu Ubaidah.
25 This is precisely when it was that Ali Mohamed
5272
1 arrived. If you look, for example, at Government's Exhibit
2 362, this is Ali Mohamed's passport. If you take a look at
3 page 7 of that, you see an entry stamp for his arrival into
4 Nairobi on the 9th of December 1993. If we take a look at
5 Khalid al Fawwaz's passport, which I had mentioned earlier is
6 Government's Exhibit 622A, and one of the documents found in
7 Wadih el Hage's files, there you see the Saudi passport for
8 Khalid al Fawwaz, and there you see on the left, and being
9 highlighted for you, is the entry stamp for December 17, 1993.
10 What Kherchtou tells you is that Abu Mohamed al Amriki and
11 Anas al Liby set up a photographic operation in Kherchtou's
12 apartment. They set up a camera and photo developing
13 equipment and folders and they set up a lab. He told you that
14 one day he was walking down the street on Moi Avenue about
15 five hundred meters from the American embassy, and Abu
16 Moustafa Karama. He told you he knew that Al Qaeda was
17 targeting the United States. He also told you this is a time
18 when Abu Hafs, the military commander, and Khalid al Fawwaz
19 was also in Nairobi. What I submit to you, ladies and
20 gentlemen, is that what Kherchtou was telling you about as
21 corroborated by some of the other physical evidence is that Al
22 Qaeda members and those associated with Al Qaeda are there to
23 conduct surveillance of American targets. One of the targets
24 that you know they were near with a camera was the American
25 Embassy. You will see evidence, of course, that other people
5273
1 in this conspiracy participated in the bombing of the American
2 Embassy.
3 Anas al Liby, the person with the camera, he is the
4 person I mentioned earlier was living in Manchester in the
5 United Kingdom. By way of stipulation you learned there was a
6 search of this place in Manchester and one of the things found
7 in this search was a passport. If you look at Government's
8 Exhibit 1675, you see the passport and the name there, Al
9 Raghie Nazeh, if you see on the top right. You see the
10 picture and you compare that to the picture of Government's
11 Exhibit 112. If you compare it also on the right-hand side of
12 the screen to Government's Exhibit 604, 604 is a series of
13 passport-size photos that are found among Wadih El Hage's
14 files in that MIRA office in 1998, and one of those photos is
15 a photo of Anas al Liby, who has that passport in Manchester
16 in the United Kingdom. One of the things found in the search
17 of Anas al Liby's house is a document that is a manual on
18 terrorist activities. In fact, if you look at Government's
19 Exhibit 1677, the second page, the document is entitled
20 Declaration of Jihad Holy War Against the Countries, Tyrants,
21 Military Series. On the 12th page of that document there is a
22 description about how to organize for operations, and it
23 describes forged documents, counterfeit currency, apartments
24 and hiding places, communication means, transportation means,
25 and on down. At the bottom of that document there is a
5274
1 description that one of the things this document advocates
2 attacking, number 7, blasting and destroying the embassies and
3 attacking vital economic centers.
4 So, ladies and gentlemen, you have in 1993 the person
5 who does the surveillance training for Al Qaeda, the person
6 who is the expert in the computers, the person with the camera
7 near the embassy, developing pictures in a secret lab,
8 attending meetings with other prominent people in Al Qaeda, at
9 a time when Al Qaeda is targeting the United States.
10 Now we get to 1994. 1994, during Ramadan, Kherchtou
11 tells you, which you know is in February 1994, Kherchtou tells
12 that you Khalid al Fawwaz, among others, gets arrested, and
13 one of the people who helps out to get Khalid al Fawwaz
14 released is Abu Fadhl, the person pictured in Government's
15 Exhibit 117, again, Mustafa Fadhl, the person that Kherchtou
16 met when he first got to Kenya, the person who is going to
17 carry out the operation to bomb the embassy in Dar es Salaam.
18 What Kherchtou told you was that when Fawwaz got arrested, he
19 reached out for a lawyer named Mr. Chaudhri, the lawyer who
20 prepared the documents for Asma Ltd., who told you about their
21 efforts to get him. Kherchtou also told you that the group
22 contacted Abu Ubaidah who was at the time in Sudan to spend
23 the time and money to get Khalid Fawwaz out, and Abu Ubaidah
24 gave his blessing.
25 Eventually they get Khalid Fawwaz out from jail and
5275
1 what you learn from Kherchtou and you see in the other
2 exhibits, Khalid al Fawwaz leaves Nairobi. What I submit to
3 you, ladies and gentlemen, is, he leaves Nairobi and he goes
4 to London, which you will see him and we will talk about,
5 because he has attracted the attention of the authorities, and
6 to take the heat off the group Khalid al Fawwaz is going to
7 get out of town to make sure the attention he is attracting
8 doesn't spill over to the others in the group. You will see
9 this played out by Wadih El Hage three years later.
10 What Kherchtou tells you is that when Khalid al
11 Fawwaz leaves, soon thereafter, who arrives from Sudan but the
12 defendant Wadih El Hage. He specifically described it as
13 Wadih El Hage took over. Kherchtou told you that when Wadih
14 El Hage arrived, he lived with Wadih El Hage. First they
15 lived together in a hotel. Then he told you that Wadih El
16 Hage rented a place, Fedha Estates, which had a house and
17 separate back place where he would stay. You know that is
18 exactly right, because Agent Coleman who testified about the
19 search of the Wadih El Hage's house, you remember he testified
20 that they got some tapes in that separate back house. What
21 does Kherchtou telling you about being with Wadih El Hage in
22 Nairobi? He tells you that he personally sees him meet with
23 Abu Hafs, the military commander of Al Qaeda. He says they
24 meet two or three times in Wadih El Hage's house in Nairobi.
25 Kherchtou was there for those meetings. He tells you that El
5276
1 Hage and Abu Hafs took one of the cars that belonged to Al
2 Qaeda and took a trip to Mombasa, and wouldn't tell Kherchtou
3 what they were doing there.
4 Kherchtou also told you about how they came to Wadih
5 El Hage and Kherchtou about arranging some travel for Abu Hafs
6 and specifically told him do not tell Abu Mohamed al Amriki
7 because I do not want him to know the alias I am traveling on.
8 So when he needed to make a secret trip and wanted people to
9 facilitate the trip, he went to the people that he trusted.
10 Kherchtou told you about it, and he told you it was him and El
11 Hage the military commander trusted. It is the same Abu Hafs
12 that Wadih El Hage will lie about in the grand jury in 1997
13 and 1998.
14 Kherchtou also told you that Abu Hafs and Wadih El
15 Hage met together many times and that Wadih El Hage was one of
16 the people in on Abu Ubaidah's secret life in Kenya. He told
17 you the story about the watch that had Wadih's name on it and
18 ultimately ended up with Abu Ubaidah's wife. Kherchtou also
19 told you the story about Abu al Nalfi, the person with the
20 amputated leg, purchased dogs for security and Kherchtou went
21 out and got these dogs and arranged to have them shipped to
22 the Sudan.
23 What else happened in 1994? Mohamed Odeh settles in
24 Mombasa in Kenya, along the coast. He is set up in a fishing
25 business by Abu Hafs, the same military commander, who gives
5277
1 him a boat and a couple of employees and agrees to give him an
2 Al Qaeda salary. You know about some of this business because
3 of some of the documents found once again in Wadih El Hage's
4 files. If you look at Government's Exhibit 614, 614 is a
5 letter -- you can see it is dated January 1995, from Mohammed
6 Karama, who appoints Mohamed Odeh, and he gives an i.d.,
7 1773666, an i.d. that you will see is the i.d. number that was
8 obtained when he got his identification in Kenya, which we
9 will see in Government Exhibit 507 on the right. It is being
10 highlighted for you. There you see Odeh's Kenyan i.d. number.
11 There are a couple of other things that are
12 interesting about this document regarding Odeh's i.d. number.
13 If we pull up on the left Government's Exhibit 508 and if we
14 highlight down at the bottom where it talks about mother's
15 names, where each applicant is to give their mother's names --
16 I just want to highlight the lower section of each one -- on
17 the left, and now it's been magnified for you, is the
18 application for Mustafa Fadhl. You will see that he lists his
19 mother as Marion Omar Hassan. By the way, he claims he was
20 born in Mombasa. Let's look at what Odeh puts down for his
21 mother's name. Miriam Omar. The other thing you see on that
22 document is that Odeh lists his country of birth as Kenya,
23 which is something he did not tell the agents. He told the
24 agents he was not from Kenya.
25 The other thing that happens in 1994 -- remember I
5278
1 told you Khalid al Fawwaz, the person that Wadih El Hage
2 replaced, after his release he goes to London, England, and
3 what he does is, he sets up an organization called the Advice
4 and Reformation Committee. It is set up with the support of
5 Usama Bin Laden. If you look at Government's Exhibit 1606, a
6 document found in Khalid al Fawwaz's house in London, this is
7 a document that establishes by way of resolution -- and you
8 see the signature there of Usama Bin Laden, and if we look at
9 Government's Exhibit 1606-T, you see that July 1994 is when it
10 is that Khalid al Fawwaz is set up as the leader of the London
11 office of the Advice and Reformation Committee. What I submit
12 to you, ladies and gentlemen, is, the Advice and Reformation
13 Committee is another front organization. It is something
14 again that is out of the Al Qaeda play book. They establish a
15 front. They can do what apparently are legitimate activities
16 that are used to shield a second line of work, work that
17 supports the activities of Al Qaeda.
18 Towards the end of 1994, Kherchtou tells you that Ali
19 Mohamed, Abu Mohamed al Amriki, comes back to Nairobi and that
20 there is a meeting that takes place just among Kherchtou and
21 Abu Mohamed al Amriki. What he says is that Abu Mohamed told
22 Kherchtou that Abu Hafs and he, Kherchtou, were supposed to go
23 do some surveillance work of French targets in Senegal and
24 that they were going to do that together, but that they ended
25 up not going because what happened was, according to
5279
1 Kherchtou, there was a phone call that came in on the mobile
2 phone that Wadih El Hage had, and Wadih El Hage had some
3 issues that he needed to resolve in the United States, some
4 problems.
5 What you see in Government's Exhibit 364C, one of
6 those many summary charts that you saw, this one is calls from
7 a number in California, 408-244-1209. That is Ali Mohamed's
8 phone back in California. You see on October 18, 1994, two
9 calls: 254, which is the country call for Kenya, 7120221,
10 which is the mobile phone number that El Hage used, just as
11 Kherchtou described for you.
12 What you know by way of stipulation is that Ali
13 Mohamed was dealing with the American authorities back here in
14 the United States. There are discussions with an FBI agent,
15 there are discussions with a prosecutor, and there are
16 telephone calls at right around the same time these meetings
17 are going on, again from Ali Mohamed's phone. You can see the
18 calls there back and forth to the numbers in America. And you
19 also see a call there on December 20 to the mobile phone for
20 Wadih El Hage. And then again down at the bottom on December
21 22 there are two calls. So while Ali Mohamed is dealing with
22 the American officials, he is maintaining contact with the
23 Wadih El Hage mobile number in Nairobi.
24 That is where things stand as of 1994. You have met
25 some of the participants in Al Qaeda, some of the members in
5280
1 Al Qaeda, some of the people who went to Somalia to further Al
2 Qaeda's goals there, and you see that the Nairobi base of
3 operations is firmly in place by 1994. You saw Harun, and he
4 was one of the people who went to Somalia. You saw Mustafa
5 Fadhl, one of the Al Qaeda members who will show up later in
6 the bombing in Dar es Salaam. Mohamed Odeh is set up in his
7 Al Qaeda fishing business. Khalid al Fawwaz, one of the
8 leaders within the base in Nairobi, has moved on to London.
9 And of course, Wadih El Hage, his replacement is in place by
10 1994.
11 In May of 1996, you heard from Kherchtou and from
12 others that people learned that Abu Ubaidah drowned, the
13 people within Al Qaeda learned. And you heard firsthand what
14 happened from the witness Ashif Juma, because he was on the
15 ferryboat with Abu Ubaidah. If we look at Government's
16 Exhibit 257, you see exactly where it is that this accident
17 took place. There was a lot of discussion about Lake
18 Victoria, and you see that Lake Victoria is basically on the
19 Kenya, Tanzania border.
20 Soon after the accident, you heard from Ashif Juma,
21 Harun shows up to conduct an investigation of the accident,
22 and in fact there was a videotape that was played for you
23 where Harun is identified as one of the people who was
24 captured on that videotape. One of the things that Kherchtou
25 told you was that everybody in Al Qaeda knew about Abu
5281
1 Ubaidah's drowning because everybody in Al Qaeda respected Abu
2 Ubaidah. In particular, Kherchtou told you when he spoke to
3 Wadih El Hage about Abu Ubaidah's death, Wadih El Hage cried,
4 which is something that you should bear in mind when Wadih El
5 Hage denies having any knowledge about that ferryboat incident
6 and denies participation in the investigation of the ferry
7 accident itself.
8 What did Ashif Juma tell you? He told you that Wadih
9 El Hage referred to the person he knew as Jalal, that Abu
10 Ubaidah was referred to by El Hage as Jalal, something that
11 Wadih El Hage is going to deny in front of the grand jury two
12 years later. If you look at Government's Exhibit 603, which
13 is effectively a note, an IOU, it is signed by Wadih El Hage
14 and it involves Ashif Juma. It commits Ashif Juma to having
15 borrowed the amount of 9 million Tanzanian shillings from
16 Mohammed Karama through Jalal Fouad. Remember, Jalal Fahad
17 was the name you saw on the articles of incorporation of Asma,
18 the business that Khalid al Fadhl set up. This is Abu
19 Ubaidah, ladies and gentlemen, and this is Wadih El Hage
20 signing a contract where he is referring to Jalal Fouad, Abu
21 Ubaidah.
22 One of the things that Ashif Juma told you was that
23 there was a discussion that he had with Wadih El Hage in a
24 hotel that was near Lake Victoria and that Wadih El Hage
25 specifically asked what Ashif Juma knew about Abu Ubaidah.
5282
1 What they were concerned with, ladies and gentlemen, what Al
2 Qaeda was concerned with, what Harun and El Hage were there to
3 investigate was whether or not any secrets that Abu Ubaidah
4 had with him, any objects were going to fall into the wrong
5 hands. That is why El Hage and Harun are there. You will see
6 later on evidence that they actually prepared a report which
7 they distribute to other people who are connected with this
8 case, and in particular we are going to go through a report
9 that was found in, of all places, Ali Mohamed's house in
10 California during the search in 1998, a report that Ashif Juma
11 read and said was accurate and said he did not prepare. Among
12 other reasons, he doesn't read, write or speak Arabic.
13 The other main event that happens in 1996 is in
14 August, and this is when Usama Bin Laden issues the
15 declaration of jihad against the United States. It is issued
16 on August 23, 1996, and if we take a look at one of the
17 copies, Government's Exhibit 1600A-T, this is a copy that is
18 found in Khalid al Fawwaz's place in London. We will go
19 through this, but remember that we showed you during the trial
20 that Khalid al Fawwaz had an electronic copy of this, that
21 there was a directory of files, there was a directory listing
22 under the message and electronic copies actually found on a
23 computer disk in Khalid al Fawwaz's house. This is going to
24 be the document, ladies and gentlemen, where Bin Laden is
25 going to now take public, take public his view that the
5283
1 Americans have to be driven from the Saudi Arabian gulf by
2 whatever means are necessary.
3 If we look at the second page of the document, the
4 first thing you notice in the second full paragraph is, within
5 this paragraph about halfway down, there are references to
6 some people that Bin Laden is going to talk about again and
7 again. One of the people he refers to about halfway down the
8 line that begins with the word heaven, he mentions Omar Abdel
9 Rahman in America. He says in his words, the crusader Jewish
10 alliance killed the symbols of honest scholars and advocates
11 and was sent by no one but Allah.
12 (Continued on next page)
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
5284
1 MR. KARAS: (Continuing) And remember what the
2 witness Jamal al-Fadhl told you: That there were people
3 within al Qaeda that were angry at America because of the
4 arrest of Omar Abdel Rahman and that some people left the
5 group because they were disappointed that al Qaeda didn't do
6 something to retaliate about the arrest. Well, here you have
7 corroborating what Al-Fadhl is telling you. Bin Laden voicing
8 his anger at the United States for the arrest of Omar Abdel
9 Rahman.
10 Now, the other thing that this document mentions is
11 two other scholars, somebody by the name of al-Hawali and
12 somebody by the name of al Tawbah, and we'll see those names
13 come up later in connection with the claims for
14 responsibilities.
15 Now, if we go to the next, the last full paragraph
16 down there, remember I mentioned to you earlier about how the
17 witness, Jamal Al-Fadhl, described this fatwah that Abu Hajer
18 had given about how it was proper to kill innocents in the
19 course of attacks against infidels, and the basis for this
20 were the teaching of Ibn al Tamiyeah.
21 There you see, ladies and gentlemen, Usama Bin Laden
22 is talking about Ibn al Tamiyeh, and what he specifically
23 mentions is the story of the Tartar. "Furthermore, Ibn al
24 Tamiyeh, after mentioning the Tartar and their behavior in
25 changing the law of Allah: The ultimate aim of pleasing
5285
1 Allah, raising his word, instituting his religion and obeying
2 his messenger, peace be upon them, is to fight the enemy in
3 every aspect and in complete manner: If the danger to the
4 religion from not fighting is greater than that of fighting,
5 then it is a duty to fight them even if the intention of some
6 of the fighters is not pure, i.e., fighting for the sake of
7 leadership or if they do not observe some of the rules and
8 commandments of Islam."
9 It may very well be that killing innocents is not to
10 be sanctioned, but if the choice is defeat by the enemies of
11 Islam, then you do what you have to do. That is how Bin Laden
12 interprets Ibn al Tamiyeh and that is the basis for his call
13 to his followers -- to carry out the attacks against the
14 United States, because that is the number one priority.
15 Now, Bin Laden doesn't mince words, and at the bottom
16 of the 11th page of this document, if you highlight the last
17 paragraph down there, "Though we know the regime," referring
18 to the Saudi regime, "is fully responsible for what had
19 happened to the country and to its tiresome people that the
20 cause of disease and its tribulations is the occupying
21 American enemy so all effort must be directed at this enemy,
22 kill it, fight it, destroy it, break it down, plot against it,
23 ambush it, and God the almighty willing, until it is gone."
24 And now what Bin Laden is doing is he's taking the
25 statements that he privately shared with the members of al
5286
1 Qaeda in the guesthouse in Khartoum, Sudan and he is taking it
2 public.
3 Ladies and gentlemen, Bin Laden didn't wake up that
4 morning and decide that, oh, there are troops in America for
5 five years so this is the cause we're going to take on. This
6 is the evolution of the theme that he established for al Qaeda
7 since the troops arrived, since al Qaeda set up its operations
8 in Khartoum, since Bin Laden and Abu Hajer preached to the
9 other members of al Qaeda that it was their mission to drive
10 the American forces from Saudi Arabia. This is the foundation
11 of what Bin Laden believes and everything else feeds off of
12 that.
13 Everywhere he looks, he sees the American enemy and
14 he says that every effort must be pooled to kill the American
15 enemy. And you'll remember that the witness Jamal Al-Fadhl
16 told you that when he first approached the Americans in 1996,
17 he said, you're going to want to talk to me because these
18 people are waging a war against you. And they may want to
19 attack one of your embassies. As far as back as 1996 that is
20 what one of the members of al Qaeda believed to be the case.
21 Now, another thing that happens in 1996 that tells
22 you a great deal about the activities in this case is that the
23 group purchases a satellite phone, within three months of the
24 declaration of Jihad. And the satellite phone that you heard
25 about was the one that Marilyn Morelli from Ogara Satellite
5287
1 Networks testified to, and she told you some basic facts about
2 satellite phones -- that they are often used in remote areas;
3 that if you want to call a satellite phone, you have got to
4 know the three-digit prefix that corresponds to the ocean
5 region; and the satellite phone isn't like any other ordinary
6 phone where you use it, you get the bill and you pay it, you
7 have to purchase minutes in advance, using one of those cards
8 that comes with a number and then you call off the number of
9 minutes that you have.
10 Now, you saw the documents that show that a person by
11 the name of Ziyad Khalil purchased this phone, and his name
12 appears on the records, Government Exhibit 592. And there are
13 a series of documents in there where he is the one who
14 purchases this phone on November 1, 1996. And ladies and
15 gentlemen, this phone -- you saw this chart many times
16 throughout this trial -- is the phone that Bin Laden and the
17 others will use to carry out their war against the United
18 States.
19 682505331 is the phone number that is assigned to
20 that phone, and in 1996 up through October 1998, if you wanted
21 to call the phone, you had to dial 873 and then the number.
22 And what you see, ladies and gentlemen, is this phone appears
23 in the address books of many of the people connected to this
24 case, starting with Wadih El Hage. The pop-up phone book,
25 Government Exhibit 304, the phone book that's found in Wadih
5288
1 El Hage's house, page 11, there's a reference there to Hafusa,
2 Abu Hafs, 873682/505331.
3 Khalid al Fawwaz, the person that El Hage replaced in
4 Nairobi, he's got several references in his phone books. If
5 we take a look at Government Exhibit 1629, which is one of the
6 address books that's found in Khalid al Fawwaz' house, this is
7 a translation of one of the pages. He does not put Abu Hafs
8 down, he goes with Dr. Mohamed Atef, 873-682505331.
9 And you know that Abu Hafs is Mohamed Atef, because
10 there is a telephone call that comes from, I think -- excuse
11 me, that goes to Wadih El Hage's number and there is a message
12 left with El Hage's wife saying Abu Hafs is calling, it's
13 Mohamed Atef. And Khalid al Fawwaz is referring to Mohamed
14 Atef using the satellite phone number.
15 He's got another reference in Government Exhibit
16 1631, which is another address book found in Khalid al Fawwaz'
17 house, and that is a copy of the address book itself. Now,
18 we'll get to the translation in a minute, but if you see the
19 number on the left there, 837655, and if we go to the
20 translation, and that's part of the translation, Mohamed Atef,
21 and there is a number in Karachi and then the other number
22 that's assigned to Mohamed Atef, 837655.
23 Now what's interesting about that, Mohamed Atef,
24 remember, is Abu Hafs, and if you will remember -- we'll go
25 through this -- all the fax headers that we took a look at
5289
1 during the trial, and Kandahar Communications, AFG, and the
2 number there was 837655. This is Government Exhibit 2550,
3 this is a map of a Afghanistan. Kandahar is one of the
4 provinces in Afghanistan.
5 So Fawwaz and others who are involved in the
6 conspiracy to murder U.S. nationals are getting communications
7 from Mohamed Atef in Kandahar, Afghanistan from the number
8 837655. Mohamed Atef is assigned this number, according to
9 Khalid al Fawwaz, and that number, the satellite phone number.
10 It also appears in the Casio of somebody by the name
11 of Ibrahim Eidarous. There are three people in London, ladies
12 and gentlemen, who were part of the conspiracy to murder U.S.
13 nationals. Eidarous, Government Exhibit 129, is his picture
14 with his aliases. Ibrahim Daoud Abu Abdulla, he's the cell
15 leader for EIJ, that joint venture group I mentioned by
16 Zawahiri in London, and he's got a listing in his Casio.
17 If you take a look at Abu Abdallah. Now, Abu
18 Abdallah, you will remember from Government Exhibit 4-1, is
19 one of the aliases for Usama Bin Laden, and you see how he's
20 got it listed there is Abu Abdallah, "at" sign, "at" sign,
21 "at" sign, this is an important number, and what's the number
22 he's got: 873682505331.
23 So the cell leader for EIJ has got this number,
24 Khalid al Fawwaz, one of the al Qaeda members who was in
25 Nairobi and in London has got the number, and Wadih El Hage
5290
1 has the number. And the number is ascribed in these address
2 books to either Abu Hafs or Bin Laden.
3 How else do you know? Well, because the phone was
4 actually purchased through this person Ziyad Khalil by Khalid
5 al Fawwaz, who was one of the critical members in this
6 conspiracy.
7 Government Exhibit 1626D, and this is a security
8 report that is prepared by Khalid al Fawwaz, and if you take a
9 look, this is actually found on his computer. If you take a
10 look down at the bottom there, it has been highlighted for
11 you, he's telling the group what it is that needs to get done.
12 And what he says on the administrative issues, in order to
13 solve the problem of communication, it is indispensable to buy
14 the satellite phone. And Fawwaz is going to act as the
15 quintessential facilitator and he's going to purchase the
16 phone.
17 If we could take a look at Government Exhibit 593,
18 which is among the many invoices for the minutes that were
19 purchased for the phone, remember you have to purchase the
20 minutes in advance, and what this is, this is correspondence
21 from Marilyn Morelli, the person who testified, to Ziyad
22 Khaleel. And you see the date there, May 8, 1997, and she's
23 responding to his request for the purchase of minutes. And
24 she explains, here are the instructions.
25 And 593 contains another piece of paper, 593-4, which
5291
1 is the actual invoice itself, and she told you this is what
2 gets sent out. You see M circled there and the date, you see
3 597, and it says add minutes transaction order, and down at
4 the bottom are the numbers you need to activate the phone to
5 use the minutes.
6 Let's put that, if we could, on the left side of the
7 screen. The document on the left side of the screen is in the
8 business records of Ogara Satellite Networks. It's a copy of
9 the minutes invoice that is sent from Ogara to this person
10 Ziyad Khaleel. On the right, Government Exhibit 1625, what
11 you have now before you is Government Exhibit 1625.
12 Government Exhibit 1625 is a copy of the minutes invoice that
13 is found in Khalid al Fawwaz' house when the Scotland Yard
14 officer searched it in 1998, and it's the May 8, 1997 purchase
15 of minutes.
16 So Ziyad Khaleel purchases the minutes on May 7 and
17 he sends it to Khalid al Fawwaz in London, and we'll go
18 through the records and you know that this is in Khalid al
19 Fawwaz's phone because, among other reasons, the phone is
20 constantly calling Khalid al Fawwaz's home number in London.
21 And we'll go through that in second.
22 If we could take a