In the coverage of Michael B. Mukasey, President Bush's nominee to replace Alberto Gonzales, the line in his resume that has resonated the most with the media is his experience presiding over the 1995 terrorism trial of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman.
The blind Sheikh, a top al Qaeda confederate who was cited in the infamous Crawford Texas PDB just weeks before 9/11, was convicted with nine others in the so-called "Day of Terror Plot" to blow up New York's bridges and tunnels, the U.N. and the FBI's New York office.
Citing the trial in a Sept. 20 New York Times piece that lionized the ex-judge, reporter Adam Liptak described how Mukasey, with "a few terse, stern and prescient remarks," sentenced the blind sheik to life in prison:
"Judge Mukasey said he feared the plot could have produced devastation on 'a scale unknown in this country since the Civil War' that would make the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, which had left six people dead, 'almost insignificant by comparison.'"
Liptak was correct in citing the 1993 Twin Towers bombing in his story, but he failed to mention that the "Day of Terror" trial was really a desperate attempt by the FBI's New York office and prosecutors for the Southern District of New York (Mukasey's old office) to mop up after their failure to stop the blind Sheikh's "jihad army" prior to its first two attacks on U.S. soil: the murder of Rabbi Meier Kahane in 1990 and the Trade Center bombing on Feb. 26, 1993.
Worse, during the 1995 trial, Judge Mukasey helped bury the significance of Ali A, Mohamed, a shadowy figure who was working at the time for both Osama bin Laden and the FBI.
If Mohamed had been called to the stand and cross-examined in open court, defense lawyers could have ripped open the scandal of how the FBI failed to stop the first Trade Center attack. More important, they could have exposed the depth and breadth of al Qaeda's shocking plan to attack America, six years before 9/11.
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