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. Only two of the convictions, however, were charges related to terrorism. The third man was convicted only of fraud. And a fourth defendant was acquitted. Now, all 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," Assistant US Attorney Richard Convertino said in an interview. 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," Convertino said.
For example, the FBI had learned before the trial that Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, Al Qaeda's training camp chief, told interrogators after his capture that bin Laden had authorized an attack on the Incirlik air base in Turkey where US military jets had flown 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 US jets. Libi's testimony would have connected the Detroit defendants to a planned Al Qaeda attack, Convertino said. But Libi was "spirited off from Afghanistan to Egypt, and we were not able to interview him or use him as a witness," Convertino said.
