The French Betrayal of America

Book by Timmerman Kenneth R

Chapter 1
Le Divorce

When I first met him, many years ago, the butt end of his .357 Magnum peeped out whenever he unbuttoned his coat. Today, he has given up the Magnum in favor of around-the-clock bodyguards. At the time of the September 11 attacks on America, French counterterrorism judge Jean-Louis Bruguière arguably knew more about Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network than any man alive. I bumped into him in the staircase of a secluded wing of the Palais de Justice in Paris in early October 2001 just ahead of a scheduled interview and remarked the almost boyish gleam in his eye. He had just come back from interrogating a detainee and looked like a cat that had swallowed a canary.

"You've heard about Moussaoui?" he said, unable to suppress a wide grin. Zacarias Moussaoui was the alleged twentieth hijacker who had been arrested on August 17, 2001, by Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) agents because of suspicious activity while attending the Pan Am International Flight Academy in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The case against Moussaoui being worked up by lead U.S. prosecutor Rob Spencer in Alexandria, Virginia, was in trouble. Evidence tying Moussaoui to al-Qaeda was circumstantial, as were his ties to the 9/11 hijackers. Indeed, the initial grand jury indictment against Moussaoui was a boilerplate document for the overall conspiracy that mentioned him by name only a handful of times. But Moussaoui had left a long trail behind him in France. If anyone had the goods on him, that would be Bruguière.

"There are new developments that are going to be of great interest to our friends in Virginia," he said with a toss of his head up toward his office. With Bruguière, that meant a file a foot high crammed with seized documents, flowcharts of conspiratorial telephone calls, interrogation transcripts, and reports from French intelligence on Moussaoui's travels, his friends, and his bank accounts. Bruguière liked to call al-Qaeda and its followers a global "spider's web." Since 1995, with method and determination, he had been pulling it apart thread by thread.

The French judge has received letters of commendation from former FBI Director Louis Freeh and from Attorney General John Ashcroft, thanking him for his help in convicting al-Qaeda terrorists in the United States, in particular "Millennium bomber" Ahmad Ressam, who plotted to blow up Los Angeles International Airport on New Year's Eve 1999. At Bruguière urging, French intelligence gathered on-the-ground intelligence on bin Laden's rat line into Afghanistan and his support network in Pakistan, which he personally provided to the United States in a still-classified March 1995 report. The information was so detailed it included the names of top al-Qaeda recruitment officers, detailed rosters of foreign cells, and photographs of safehouses and "welcome centers" in Islamabad, Peshawar, and elsewhere. Even more significantly: it traced the rat line back to recruiting centers in Europe, Asia, and North America. Bruguière had twice tried to warn the Clinton administration of imminent terrorist threats from al-Qaeda networks operating inside the United States, but was waved off. When by luck an alert U.S. Customs officer in Port Angeles, Washington, caught Ressam as he got off the ferry from Vancouver, British Columbia, with a truck filled with explosives, Bruguière not only turned over his files to the U.S. prosecutors: he gave detailed testimony at the trial that helped put the would-be Millennium bomber in jail for life, as I first revealed in a Reader's Digest exclusive. Now that cooperation was about to come to an end, just when America needed it the most.

Shortly after our meeting on October 8, 2001, the French Ministry of Justice put the kibosh on Bruguière's effort to assist the Moussaoui prosecutors by providing documents that could be introduced at trial. The French claimed they had a "moral" objection to providing the documents because Moussaoui, a French citizen of Moroccan descent, could face the death penalty for his crimes. French officials, of course, tried to paint a less dire portrait. "We gave the United States all the intelligence we had on this and indeed all other terrorist cases," a senior French official knowledgeable of the intelligence exchanges on al-Qaeda later told me in Paris, insisting that nothing had gone awry. "But French law prevents us from turning over any evidence to a U.S. prosecutor if it could help convict a French citizen to death."

The formal U.S. request for documentary assistance was known as an international rogatory letter. It had to be presented through the Ministry of Justice, which turned down the U.S. request. Bruguière complained and ultimately met with the visiting U.S. prosecutor that fall, against the will of Socialist justice minister Elisabeth Guigou. "Even if I couldn't give him documents, I agreed to walk him verbally through all we had," Bruguière said. That included the dates of Moussaoui's trips to Afghanistan, his contacts with bin Laden trainers, his precise role in the "spider's web," and lots more. Yet despite Bruguière's willingness to help, the U.S. prosecutors returned home empty-handed, because the French government wouldn't allow the judge to turn over the documents they desperately needed.

Attorney General John Ashcroft told the French during meetings in Paris in May 2003 that the lack of cooperation meant that the Justice Department probably would be forced to abandon its case against Moussaoui and hand him over to the Pentagon for trial before a military court instead. The depth of Ashcroft's deception at the lack of cooperation on the Moussaoui case must be measured by the extent of Bruguière's knowledge and his potential to help. Just one week after Moussaoui's arrest in August 2001, Bruguière had sent a fax to the FBI. "I told them Moussaoui was dangerous, that he'd been trained in Afghanistan. I told them he was capable of carrying out a terrorist attack. I told them to look at his laptop, because that was where he stored all of his contact information and plans. But by the time they got around to it, well after September 11, he had succeeded in erasing everything of interest from the hard drive."

Why did the French government show such solicitude for a self-avowed Islamic extremist, who dismissed his defense attorneys in a courtroom temper tantrum, claiming they were "Jewish zealots," "pigs," and "bloodsuckers"? Until 1973, France used to put criminals to death by lopping their heads off on the guillotine. They executed political prisoners as recently as 1963, when the last of four members of the Organisation de l'Armée Secrète that had organized a military putsch to overthrow de Gaulle was executed by a firing squad. But in the early 1980s, French president Mitterrand abolished the death penalty. Now, it seemed, his successor was bent on making sure the United States could not execute criminals in our own country, even if they were proven guilty of conspiring to mass murder. It was just one more example of a growing French effort to offer their values and political culture as a self-righteous "moral alternative" to America's.
From the Hardcover edition.