Osama bin Laden who once served as a spokesman for Al Qaeda will appear in a New York courtroom on Friday to face terrorism charges that could result in life imprisonment.
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Document: Official Indictment Against Sulaiman Abu Ghaith
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Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, who is married to one of Bin Laden’s daughters,
Fatima, is to be charged with conspiracy to kill Americans, according to
an indictment released Thursday. Justice Department officials described
him as a propagandist who they believe has not had an operational role
in Al Qaeda for years and did not participate in the attacks on Sept.
11, 2001, or in any plots against the United States. But one law
enforcement official said that Mr. Abu Ghaith, 47, was the most senior
Qaeda figure to face criminal trial in New York since America’s war
against the terrorist network began.
Details about Mr. Abu Ghaith’s arrest were sketchy on Thursday, but
officials said he was originally detained last month while staying in a
hotel in Ankara, Turkey, after crossing the border from Iran, where he
had been living for about a decade. According to one person in
Washington briefed on the matter, Turkish officials rebuffed demands by
the Obama administration to directly hand him over to the United States,
choosing instead to deport him to Kuwait, his home country. On a
stopover in Amman, Jordan, American officials took him into custody and
flew him to New York.
Jordan’s spy service, the General Intelligence Directorate, is one of
the Central Intelligence Agency’s closest partners in the Middle East.
Mr. Abu Ghaith was a Muslim preacher and teacher in Kuwait who spoke out
against Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990. In 2000, he
traveled to Afghanistan, where he met Bin Laden and eventually married
one of his daughters. He attracted wide attention in the days after the
Sept. 11 attacks by making statements defending the attacks, some of
them carried on Al Jazeera.
According to an indictment unsealed Thursday, Mr. Abu Ghaith appeared
with Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahri, who was then Bin Laden’s deputy,
and warned the United States and its allies that a “great army is
gathering against you.” He called upon “the nation of Islam” to do
battle against “the Jews, the Christians and the Americans.”
He also urged people at a guesthouse in Kandahar, Afghanistan, to swear
allegiance to Bin Laden, and on the night of the World Trade Center and
Pentagon attacks, Bin Laden summoned him and asked for his assistance,
which he agreed to provide, according to the indictment.
The arrest of Mr. Abu Ghaith was the rare occasion in which a Qaeda
operative was detained overseas rather than killed. The Obama
administration has expanded the use of targeted killing operations in
Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, asserting that they are justified when
there is no possibility of capture.
Spokesmen for the C.I.A. and the White House declined to comment.
Mr. Abu Ghaith went to Iran in 2002, one of a few Qaeda operatives who
traveled there in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks. Intelligence
officials have long debated how the group of operatives — several who
are members of Al Qaeda’s “shura council” — has been treated inside
Iran, and his trial could shed light on its members’ lives there. Some
officials described them as being under a kind of house arrest, and
point out that Iran — a country run by a Shiite Muslim theocracy — would
be wary of any alliance with Al Qaeda, a Sunni terrorist network.
Others believe that Iran might at least be using the group to keep open
communication channels with senior Qaeda leaders in Pakistan.
In recent months, American spy agencies have picked up indications that
the Qaeda operatives inside Iran — including Saif al-Adel, an Egyptian
who is the terrorist group’s senior operative in Iran — might be trying
to l return to their home countries.
George Venizelos, the assistant director in charge of the New York
F.B.I. office, compared Mr. Abu Ghaith’s position in Al Qaeda to the
consigliere in a mob family, or propaganda minister in a totalitarian
regime. He said Mr. Abu Ghaith used his role to persuade others to join
“Al Qaeda’s murderous cause.”
Seth Jones, a terrorism expert at the RAND Corporation, said, “He had
serious religious credibility inside of Al Qaeda.” Mr. Jones said that
it was unlikely that Mr. Abu Ghaith would have intelligence about any
active Qaeda plots, but that he could be a useful source of information
about the movement of the group’s operatives through Iran.
In 2010, the Obama administration abandoned plans to bring five men
charged with plotting the Sept. 11 attacks — including the accused
mastermind, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a far more significant Qaeda figure —
to trial in the same courthouse in Lower Manhattan where Mr. Abu Ghaith
will appear Friday, blocks from the World Trade Center site.
The turnaround came in the face of nearly unanimous pressure from New
York officials and business leaders after Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of
New York withdrew his initial support for the plan, saying the security
costs and disruption would be too great. The police commissioner,
Raymond W. Kelly, had outlined a plan for securing the trial that
involved transforming a section of Lower Manhattan into an armed camp,
blanketed with police checkpoints, vehicle searches, rooftop snipers and
canine patrols. But should Mr. Abu Ghaith go to trial, officials said,
the proceedings would most likely draw far less attention and create far
fewer problems.
Three terrorism defendants, who were extradited from Britain in October, are already facing trial in Manhattan.
They include Abu Hamza al-Masri, the fiery Islamic preacher who has been
charged with conspiring in a 1998 kidnapping of American and other
tourists in Yemen and in trying to help establish a terrorist training
camp in Oregon, and Adel Abdul Bary, charged with conspiring in the 1998
bombings of two United States Embassies in East Africa. Both have
pleaded not guilty.
But the plan to put Mr. Abu Ghaith on trial in New York City drew immediate criticism.
Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan, the chairman of the
House Select Intelligence Committee, said in a statement that Qaeda
leaders captured on the battlefield should not be brought to the United
States to stand trial. “We should treat enemy combatants like the enemy —
the U.S. court system is not the appropriate venue. The president needs
to send any captured Al Qaeda members to Guantánamo,” he said.
Julie Menin, the former chairwoman of Community Board 1 in Lower
Manhattan, who opposed the earlier plan to try senior Qaeda operatives
in New York, said she was in favor of a Manhattan trial for Mr. Abu
Ghaith.
“I think it is a very different situation,” said Ms. Menin, who is
running for Manhattan borough president and said her opposition to the
earlier trial was based on the intense disruption that security
precautions would have brought to the neighborhood.
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