SEATTLE — The would-be millennium bomber who crossed the border from Canada with a trunkload of explosive materials to blow up Los Angeles International Airport has instead blown holes in his former terrorist network, court documents and interviews show.
Since his conviction in 2001, Algerian expatriate Ahmed Ressam, 37, has provided information on more than 100 suspected terrorists, helped shut down clandestine Al Qaeda cells and exposed valuable organizational secrets of the global terrorist network.
Now, after years of delays, he faces sentencing scheduled for today.
In recent weeks, a dispute over the level of his continuing cooperation has produced stacks of court documents disclosing for the first time much of the thwarted terrorist's contribution to investigators.
Ressam's cooperation, his defense lawyers contend, has saved countless lives, including those of FBI agents who otherwise wouldn't have known that a sneaker they had seized from would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid contained a virtually undetectable but powerful explosive device.
Interviews with investigators and counter-terrorism officials, as well as documents filed by federal prosecutors, confirm significant details entered in the court record by Ressam's lawyers. Much of the defense argument about the value of information Ressam provided is undisputed by prosecutors in their briefs.
Defense lawyers offered more details than prosecutors in their campaign to win a reduced sentence for Ressam. In one memorandum, they suggest that before Ressam began cooperating in the summer of 2001, U.S. authorities incorrectly focused on Osama bin Laden as the sole mastermind of all Islamic terrorist operations against the U.S.
"It is our understanding that based on Mr. Ressam's information, the intelligence-gathering community confirmed for the first time that the Afghanistan training camps did not operate under the sole authority of Osama bin Laden, but rather, involved a number of leaders and groups with similar objectives," defense lawyers said in documents arguing that Ressam's assistance warranted considerable leniency from the judge.
"This was important news to the intelligence community and was relayed to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence," the lawyers said.
One U.S. counter-terrorism official familiar with the case confirmed that Ressam provided the FBI, CIA and other authorities with names and job descriptions of numerous terrorist leaders, who, like Bin Laden, were "emirs" who helped operate Afghan training camps to prepare their soldiers for jihadist missions in their homelands.
