Al-Qaida cell had video of LV sites

John Solomon

Monday, Aug. 9, 2004 | 11:13 a.m.

WASHINGTON -- Authorities have a second surveillance videotape made by terrorists showing Las Vegas and other U.S. destinations.

The tape comes in addition to one that came to the public's attention last year during the trial of four men accused of operating a terrorist cell in Detroit.

Local authorities in Las Vegas were unaware of the first videotape when it was revealed in April 2003 in the first major terrorism trial after Sept. 11. The second tape was obtained when Spanish authorities broke up an al-Qaida cell in 2002.

Special Agent Dave Nanz, a spokesman with the Las Vegas office of the FBI, said that both tapes were reviewed by local authorities on May 3, 2003.

"Both the Detroit and Madrid tapes were reviewed by the FBI and Metro Police," Nanz said. "We aren't aware of any new tapes."

Metro Police Undersheriff Doug Gillespie did not immediately return phone calls this morning. He also refused to meet with a Sun reporter who was waiting at his office this morning.

Both tapes obtained by the Associated Press show surveillance of casinos in Las Vegas including the MGM Grand; various landmarks in New York, including the World Trade Center; and Disneyland in California. Both tapes showed nearly identical footage of security, information on how cars could access the landmarks and other footage potentially useful for staging an attack.

Some law enforcement officials have labeled the tapes surveillance footage, while others have said they appear to be nothing more than tourist video.

"It's in the eye of the beholder," Nanz said. "They're (al-Qaida) using it as surveillance, but the footage is the same thing a tourist could shoot at these locations.

"It's not like it was footage from the bowels of the MGM or these other locations."

The Spanish tape, which dated to 1997, included "footage of several potential targets of al-Qaida" and was later carried via courier to al-Qaida leaders in Afghanistan, according to Spanish documents provided to U.S. authorities. Prosecutors obtained the Spanish footage from a Justice Department terrorism expert just weeks before the trial and even created several slides that would identify for jurors the numerous similarities between the Detroit and Madrid videos.

The Spanish footage is just one example of prosecutors' complaints that they had not received needed help from the Justice Department and were prevented from introducing some of their most dramatic evidence in the courtroom, internal memos indicate.

As a result, jurors in the trial of four men accused of operating a terror cell in Detroit never heard testimony from an Osama bin Laden lieutenant or saw video footage of European operatives casing U.S. landmarks. Prosecutors believed both would have connected the defendants to al-Qaida.

The department's terrorism unit "provided no help of any kind in this prosecution," the U.S. Attorney's office in Detroit wrote in one memo, claiming that superiors in Washington hindered the case and sent a lawyer who chose to play basketball rather than assist prosecutors at trial.

The Detroit case ended last summer with the convictions, hailed by the Bush administration, of three men who were accused of operating a sleeper terror cell that possessed plans for attacks around the world.

A fourth defendant was acquitted, however, and only two of the four men originally arrested were convicted of terrorism charges. Now the convictions are in jeopardy because of an internal investigation into allegations that defense lawyers were denied evidence that could have helped them.

Whatever the outcome, internal documents obtained by The Associated Press and more than three dozen interviews with current and former officials detail how the differences between Washington and the field office kept important evidence from being shown to jurors.

"We were butting heads vigorously with narrow-shouldered bureaucrats in Washington," said Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Convertino, the lead Detroit prosecutor. He now is under investigation by superiors in the capital.

"There was a series of evidence, pieces of evidence, that we wanted to get into our trial that we were unable to do. Things that would have strengthened the case immeasurably, and made the case much stronger, exponentially," Convertino told the AP.

Prosecutors had planned to show slides from both the Detroit cell's video and the Spanish footage at the trial.

"The Detroit cell and the Spanish tapes identify three identical targets for surveillance," said one of the slides, which jurors never saw. A different slide said the two tapes follow the al-Qaida training manual because "surveillance is inserted into seemingly innocent tourist videos."

The Spanish tapes show an al-Qaida operative panning the World Trade Center with a video camera and shooting the skyline through which the hijackers flew planes into the twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001. The operative even puts his arm around a statue outside the towers as well as around the statue of a bull near Wall Street.

Both tapes also include extensive footage of Hollywood, Disneyland and the Las Vegas casinos.

"Let's go to the hotel since we finished filming the casinos and we made $100,000 tonight," the Spanish operative says on one of the tapes, according to transcripts made by Spanish authorities.

Prosecutors were told by superiors they could not introduce the Spanish tape unless they went through a lengthy bureaucratic process, known as the Letters Rogatory, that establishes chain of custody for foreign evidence.

The process would take months to complete through diplomatic channels. With just weeks before the trial and no willingness in Washington to delay the trial, prosecutors abandoned the evidence, Convertino said.

That meant the Detroit tape was introduced at trial in isolation, with jurors given no chance to see how closely it resembled a tape U.S. officials knew had reached al-Qaida's leadership.

Another example of what prosecutors are calling a lack of cooperation centers on information about a planned attack on an airbase.

The FBI had learned before the trial that Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, al-Qaida's training camp chief, told interrogators after his capture that bin Laden had authorized an attack on the Incirlik air base in Turkey where U.S. military jets flew missions over Iraq for the past decade, Convertino said.

The interrogation was deemed important because the FBI found in the Detroit terror cell's apartment sketches of the same Turkish base, including flight patterns of U.S. jets. Al-Libi's testimony would have connected the Detroit defendants to a planned al-Qaida attack, Convertino said. But, he said, al-Libi was "spirited off from Afghanistan to Egypt and we were not able to interview him or use him as a witness."