INS DEPORTED AL QAEDA-LINKED TERROR SUSPECT WITHIN DAYS OF OKC BOMBING

J.M. Berger has doggedly followed the terrorist trail for more than a year, especially as relates to alleged "dirty bomber" Jose Padilla and his possible role in the Oklahoma City bombing. Berger's newest story is a mind-blower:

Seven days after the Oklahoma City bombing, the INS agreed to deport a brother-in-law of Osama bin Laden who had been implicated as a possible accessory to the attack by a jailhouse confession and documents relating to bomb construction.

At the same time, the government agreed to remove allegations of terrorism from Mohammed Jamal Khalifa's INS records and to return evidence seized from his luggage.

That evidence was...interesting:

Evidence in the FBI's possession at the time potentially implicated the Saudi businessman in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the airliner bombing plot and the Oklahoma City bombing. Khalifa was formally named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the World Trade Center case.

While in jail, Khalifa fought deportation to Jordan, where he expected a death sentence for terror-related activity. When that sentence was dropped due to a change in the evidence against him, he decided to stop fighting deportation and instead request it. He got his wish. Intervention on his behalf to allow deportation came from top officials:

On April 26, 1995, Khalifa abruptly changed strategy and requested the deportation proceed. His lawyer blamed an "anti-alien climate" generated by the OKC attack for his change of heart.

The U.S. government not only agreed to Khalifa's request for deportation to Jordan, but in exchange for his cooperation it expunged terror-related charges from his INS record, according to contemporaneous newspaper accounts of his INS hearing in the Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner.

According to author Peter Lance, the Justice Department had wanted to hold Khalifa and investigate his alleged ties to terrorism as early as December. But Secretary of State Warren Christopher wrote a three-page letter to Attorney General Janet Reno in January urging that the deportation proceed.

Read the whole thing--there is much more than what I have quoted here, and it's compelling. The government had one of the few terrorists in the world who could possibly link all three of the most deadly terror attacks in US soil in the past decade, and they let him go. Worse, they gave him all the evidence they had against him, which was quite a bit. Bomb recipes that matched both the 1993 WTC bombing and the OKC bombing, manuals for terrorist tactics, the works--and they gave it all back. Since Khalifa is allegedly one of al Qaeda's money men, having him in hand could have allowed the government to unravel and stop bin Laden's money flow system years ago, possibly preventing 9-11 and the war we're fighting today. And we may never know if there was an Arab terrorist connection to Oklahoma City.