Jamal al-Fadl

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Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl (Arabic: جمال أحمد الفضل‎) was a Sudanese militant and former associate of Osama bin Laden in the early 1990s.

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[edit] Career

Al-Fadl was recruited to the Afghan mujahideen "through the Farouq mosque in Brooklyn" (presumably when he was in the U.S. in the mid 1980s), and he became a "senior employee" of al-Qaeda. After embezzling $110,000 from the organization, al-Fadl "defected". He contacted the CIA via the US's Eritrean embassy and, receiving encouragement from FBI special agents Jack Cloonan and Dan Coleman (who were "seconded" to the CIA's Bin Laden unit), he returned (after staying in Germany for a while) to the United States, in spring 1996.

For the next three years Cloonan and his colleagues oversaw al-Fadl in a safehouse. From December 1996 Al-Fadl began to provide "a major breakthrough of intelligence on the creation, character, direction, and intentions of al Qaeda"; "bin Laden, the CIA now learned, had planned multiple terrorist operations and aspired to more" — including the acquisition of weapons-grade uranium. Al-Fadl, who had "passed the polygraph tests he was given", became a key witness in the US v. bin Laden trial that began in February 2001.[1]

[edit] Legal 'Creation' of Al-Qaeda

In January 2001 the trial began in New York of four men accused of the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in east Africa . The U.S also wanted to prosecute Osama bin Laden in his absence under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). To be able to do this under American law, the prosecutors needed evidence of a criminal organisation, which would then allow them to prosecute the leader, even if he could not be linked directly to the crime.

Jamal al-Fadl was taken on as a key prosecution witness, who along with a number of other sources claimed that Osama bin Laden was the leader of a large international terrorist organisation which was called "al-Qaeda".

[edit] References

  1. ^ Andrew Marshall, "Terror 'blowback' burns CIA ...", Independent on Sunday, Nov. 1, 1998 (copy); 9/11 Commission Report, chapter 2, pp.58-9, 62; ibid, chapter 4, pp.109, 118 (HTML version); ibid, chapter 11, pp.341-2 (HTML version); Coll, Ghost Wars, pp.155, 336, 367, 474; Jack Cloonan interview, PBS, July 13, 2005; Michael Scheuer interview, PBS, July 21, 2005; Jane Mayer, "Junior: The clandestine life of America's top Al Qaeda source", The New Yorker, Sept. 4, 2006 (issue of Sept. 11, 2006).

[edit] See also

[edit] External links

Copies of al-Fadl's testimony in USA v. Osama bin Ladin et al. at the Monterey Institute of International Studies: