Department of Homeland Cover Ups

Who investigates Al-Qaeda finanical ties? That, you might imagine, would be the real way to unearth the sleeper cells we're all supposed to be so worried about.

Shortly after 9/11 it was Operation Greenquest, "the high-profile federal task force set up to target the financiers of Al Qaeda and other international terrorist groups." The aggressive, Customs-led task force was folded into Homeland Security, sending both the FBI and its minders at the Department of Justice into a tizzy. They "demanded that the White House instead give the FBI total control over Greenquest."

Who was stridently asking for control of Operation Greenquest?

Greenquest was created by former U.S. Customs chief Robert Bonner just after the September 11 terror attacks, Greenquest agents have conducted some of the Bush administration’s best-publicized and most controversial terrorist-finance cases—including a series of raids against the offices of Islamic charities in the Washington area last year...

FBI officials have derided Greenquest agents as a bunch of “cowboys” whose actions have undermined more important, long-range FBI investigations into terrorist financing. Greenquest sources in turn accuse the FBI of jealousy...

The FBI-Justice move, pushed by DOJ Criminal Division chief Michael Chertoff and Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson, has enraged Homeland Security officials, however. They accuse the bureau of sabotaging Greenquest investigations—by failing to turn over critical information to their agents—and trying to obscure a decadelong record of lethargy in which FBI offices failed to aggressively pursue terror-finance cases.

“They [the FBI] won’t share anything with us,” said a Homeland Security official. “Then they go to the White House and they accuse us of not sharing … If they can’t take it over, they want to kill it.”

One prime example of the tension is the investigation into Ptech, the Boston-area computer software firm that had millions of dollars in sensitive government contracts with the Air Force, the Energy Department and, ironically enough, the FBI. In what turned into a minor embarrassment for the bureau, the firm’s main investors included Yasin Al-Qadi, a wealthy Saudi businessman whom the Bush administration had formally designated a terrorist financier under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Al-Qadi has vigorously denied any connection to terrorism.

The Ptech case turned into an ugly dispute last year when company whistleblowers told Greenquest agents about their own suspicions about the firm’s owners. Sources close to the case say those same whistleblowers had first approached FBI agents, but the bureau apparently did little or nothing in response. With backing from the National Security Council, Greenquest agents then mounted a full-scale investigation that culminated in a raid on the company’s office last December. After getting wind of the Greenquest probe, the FBI stepped in and unsuccessfully tried to take control of the case.

It's nice to know Michael Chertoff no longer has to work so hard to keep a lid on all the unpleasantness.

It's hard to find much on Al-Qadi that's recent on the web. A lot of the original links seemed to have been purged. Time passes; servers do get cleaned out.

Still, if you play with Google, you can find this:

Ptech's customers included sensitive government and intelligence agencies such as the FBI and the Air Force. "But until last fall," the GLOBE reported on Jan. 22, 2003, "few seemed aware an early financial backer of Ptech was Yasin al-Qadi, a Saudi businessman named as a suspected terrorist financier by the Bush Administration in October 2001." ...

The tale begins almost right after the 9/11 attack, when, in October of 2001, handful of ex-Ptech employees alerted the FBI to evidence indicating that the firm had Saudi terror connections ...

Almost a year later the Boston FBI had still done nothing about it. They had, in fact, shut down their cursory investigation and taken no action ...

Thus Ptech was still operating at the highest levels of American society in the Spring of 2002, when the firm showed up hustling business at the door of Wall Street's JP Morgan Chase. The question is "why?" ...

Indira Singh, who later became a whistleblower, was an unwitting eyewitness to the "train wreck."

"I invited Ptech to come down and give a presentation and a customized demo to JP Morgan Chase," states Singh, who was a consultant to the bank on "risk architecture," an arcane software specialty which calculates enterprise risk. In one of the story's many ironic twists, Singh was at the time designing a system to help JP Morgan Chase detect terrorist money laundering.

When Ptech showed up, Singh quickly realized that she was witnessing her worst fears about compromised security come true ...

Moreover, she learned, Yasin Al-Qadi had been fingered by the Bush Administration in October 2001, over six months before. So how was it that Ptech was still making presentations to top American companies six months later? ...

When Singh flew to Washington D.C. to meet some of the ex-Ptech employees to verify their allegations, she received another shock. "I met with five extraordinarily scared people. These people were scared for their lives, and for their families. Some were about to leave the country. They told me, 'Indira, you don't know who you're dealing with.'

Sadly, when she told us what happened next, it came as no surprise: When Singh alerted authorities, and her employer, what she encountered was the inexplicable wrath of a top Wall Street Bank, as well as an official wall of silence at the FBI ...

After talking to the Boston FBI, Singh said she had been ''shocked'' and ''frustrated'' to learn that the FBI had not alerted any of the government agencies using Ptech software that there were questions about the company's ties to suspected terrorist fund-raisers ...

When we first heard whistleblower Indira Singh tell her story it sounded so incredible that we would have found it unbelievable, except that we had already encountered stories like it in Venice, of witnesses bullied and intimidated by authorities into silence.

For example, the FBI was all over tenants at the Sandpiper Apartments across the street from the Venice Airport, to keep them from talking about Mohamed Atta's two-month long 'shack-up' with an American girlfriend named Amanda Keller.

In addition to warning Keller not to talk, a warning she took so seriously she left town and disappeared from view, FBI agents bullied and intimidated apartment residents who remembered the pair, and even the apartment manager of the complex, Charles Grapentine, an ex-marine, who told us grimly, "They called me a liar, and told me to keep my mouth shut. Nobody likes to hear that: that they didn't see something they know they saw."

Atta and Amanda's next door neighbor, a 50-year old housewife named Stephanie Frederickson, confirmed the apartment manager's remarks.

"The question they asked was always the same," she told us. "You aren't saying anything to anybody, are you?"

Now, it seems that FBI agents in Boston were engaged in equally-dubious behavior. Mistakes, malfeasance, and even missed opportunities to avert the Sept 11 attack... There's been a regular drumbeat of depressing news about the FBI.

Singh told us that disgruntled Boston FBI agents told her privately that their hands were tied on Ptech, because, they said, "Saudis have been given a free pass for 9/11."

"And that," says Singh, "is when I began to get really scared."''