The Times of London reports that then Vice-President Cheney’s insistence on arresting a member of al Qaeda nearly jeopardized the investigation that led to the recent conviction of three men for plotting what some have called a second 9/11:
Dick Cheney, the former US Vice President, nearly destroyed Britain’s efforts to bring the airline bomb plotters to justice, police and intelligence experts said today.
By ordering the early arrest of Rashid Rauf, the bombers’ link man in Pakistan, Washington forced British police to detain the suspects in the UK before all the evidence had been gathered, it was claimed.
Yesterday three British Muslims – Abdulla Ahmed Ali, Tanvir Hussain and Assad Sarwar – were finally convicted of plotting to blow up seven transatlantic airliners in mid-air in a co-ordinated attack intended to surpass the horror of 9/11. But the plotters were arrested before they had bought the airline tickets that would have been the ultimate proof of their intentions. Police fear that several key figures of the plot have remained free.
Andy Hayman, who was the Metropolitan Police’s Assistant Commissioner Specialist Operations at the time of the plot, said he believed that the White House had grown jittery as the British updated them of the mounting evidence of a plot targeted at American cities.
Although Britain was running the investigation, including a massive round-the-clock surveillance of 200 suspects, the UK was not warned that Rauf – the al-Qaeda facilitator who kept the English plotters in touch with bomb experts and terrorism trainers in Pakistan – was going to be arrested.
“We believed the Americans had demanded the arrest and we were angry we had not been informed.”
Heyman expands on that point in an Op-Ed in today’s edition of the Times:
Fearful for the safety of American lives, the US authorities had been getting edgy, seeking reassurance that this was not going to slip through our hands. We moved from having congenial conversations to eyeball-to-eyeball confrontations.
We thought we had managed to persuade them to hold back so we could develop new opportunities and get more evidence to present to the courts. But I was never convinced that they were content with that position. In the end, I strongly suspect that they lost their nerve and had a hand in triggering the arrest in Pakistan.
The arrest hampered our evidence-gathering and placed us in Britain under intolerable pressure.
Fortunately, the Brits made the arrests — except for Rauf, who may or may not have died in Pakistan at the end of last year — and got the evidence they needed to get the convictions I wrote about yesterday. Nonetheless, it seems pretty clear that the order from Cheney nearly jeopardized the entire operation and nearly permitted the plotters to get away to fight another day.
