Post September 11 trial 'hindered by Washington bureaucracy'

PROSECUTORS in the first major terror trial after September 11 were hindered by superiors from presenting some of their most powerful evidence.

This includes testimony from an al-Qaida leader and video footage showing Osama bin Laden's European operatives casing American landmarks, Justice Department memos show.

The department's terrorism unit "provided no help of any kind in this prosecution," the US Attorney's office in Detroit wrote in one of the memos, which detail bitter divisions between front-line prosecutors and their superiors in Washington.

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 probe into allegations that defence 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," Assistant US Attorney Richard Convertino said. He is the lead Detroit prosecutor who is now under investigation in Washington.

"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," Mr Convertino said.

For instance, 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 authorised an attack on the Incirlik air base in Turkey where US military jets flew missions over Iraq for the past decade, Mr 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 US jets. Al-Libi's testimony would have connected the Detroit defendants to a planned al-Qaida attack, Mr Convertino said.

But al-Libi was "spirited off from Afghanistan to Egypt and we were not able to use him as a witness," Mr Convertino said.