The word from Chicago is that-
...to become the 44th president...
We did manage to question most of the people
who left 422 North Park around the time of the shooting.
But there were a few people who didn't come forward,
including the man seen leaving
at the time Molini tried to get into the building.
We showed the tapes to the security guards,
but they didn't recognize him.
So we searched through the employee list.
It's true that we did start to look at Islamic names first,
but, as we see it, it's not racial profiling as some have suggested.
It's just a common sense approach to a situation of this kind.
Turned out this man had recently got a job
with an I.T. firm on the 18th floor.
We identified him as Jamal Abu Zikri.
The forensics guys went to work on Zikri's apartment,
basically recovering anything that could contain
fibers or a trace that could link Zikri
to 422 North Park or to the weapon.
But my main focus was how Zikri did at interview.
In what was obviously
a very tense atmosphere-
going into the Metro Correctional Center,
up to the fourth floor,
into the "A" interrogation room-
everyone was rather distraught,
rather tense.
And there in the room sat a man
who appeared to have
no emotional turbulence whatsoever.
Conspicuously cool.
I went in with the intention of having just a pleasant conversation with him,
just to get a measure of him,
to get a feel for him.
And my immediate impression
was that this was a man with no conscience whatsoever.
He read as a sociopath, essentially-
no identifiable emotion
behind what he was saying,
no visible state of mind.
He seemed completely unaffected by my questions.
We might have been talking about wallpaper samples
rather than the shooting of a president.
he didn't seem to be too concerned
with being singled out for questioning.
I think he understood
that his proximity to the event
was the reason he was there.
But he seemed baffled by the idea
that we would consider him an actual suspect.
I found that he was- if anything,
he was overacting his innocence.
I didn't believe a word he said.
After we had just sort of established
what I took to be the timbre of the conversation,
I went ahead and just sort of tried to blindside him with that,
and just asked him as casually as I could,
you know, "So, you good with guns?"
and he said, "No. "
and I said, "You ever used a gun?"
he said, no, he never had.
and I said, "Listen, Jamal...
you're not doing yourself any favors here.
We have photos at your home of you holding a rifle. "
and he said, "Oh, that.
That's from my military service back in Syria.
Everyone had to do it,"
as if, oh, that slipped his mind.
My impression is that the Syrian draft
is not something that one would forget quite so easily.
A source with the FBl here in Chicago tells us
the suspected assassin is, in fact, a Syrian man-
Jamal Abu Zikri.
We don't know for a fact where exactly he's being held
at this particular point in time,
but we do know that he has been taken into custody,
and we have gotten confirmation that he is of Syrian descent.
We also know that authorities are...
The pressure on every journalist
to find out just who the hell they had arrested,
and who the prime suspect was, was intense.
and I think whoever ultimately leaked it,
whether it was an FBl guy or a cop or whoever, I don't know-
whoever leaked it probably did it
because they were so angry that Bush had died.
Minutes after it got out that he was Syrian,
I went into a teleconference with the CIA director of domestic intel,
and he told me that Mike Haydon had called.
He wanted an urgent review of all Syrian intelligence.
He wanted us to take a look at every Syrian national
who'd been back to Damascus within the last six months.
Now, I come out of this teleconference
and I'm pinching myself
'cause this is not the way I want to go.
And one of our agents, Ted Fenzell, runs up to me,
and he says, "Rob... the president's on the line. "
I'm thinking this is some kind of a sick joke.
I'm ready to punch him in the face, and he says to me,
"No, Rob, President Cheney's on the line. "
And President Cheney says,
"Rob, I know you got a lot to do,
but take another look at Assad.
Go over this again. See if it links to him in any way. "
And I say to him, "Mr. President,
we have nothing that points in this direction.
This is just the media jumping to conclusions. "
And he says, "I know, I know,
but take another look at it,
and if you see any obstruction from Damascus,
I want to be the first to know. "
Publicly, the Syrians were saying they were cooperating,
they were doing all they could,
but privately they were stonewalling.
that morning, I had had a request
for Zikri's military service detail
flatly refused by the Syrian Defense Ministry.
Of course, the White House guys were all over this.
Even Cheney was down in the weeds on this one.
So when the Syrians turned down our request,
I knew that they were really going to feel the heat.
The Secretary has decided to recall
the US ambassador to Syria, Margaret Scobie
for urgent consultations
following the brutal murder of President Bush.
Ambassador Scobie delivered a message to the Syrian government
expressing our deep concern as well as our profound outrage
over this heinous act of terrorism.
President Cheney has ordered the USS Nimitz
back to the eastern Mediterranean.
State and Defense Department officials
refused to rule out air strikes against Damascus. Likely targets include-
Joining me now is Tariq Khoudry,
one of the most outspoken critics
against the Ba'athist regime
of the Syrian dictator Bashar Assad.
Mr. Khoudry, are you not surprised
that a Syrian national may actually have been involved
in this assassination?
Oh, not at all. This is a state-sponsored assassination-
Syrian state-sponsored assassination-
just like they did with Rafiq Al-Hariri,
the prime minister of Lebanon.
That's a strong statement, sir.
What kind of specific information do you have on which to base it?
I've seen official documents that back this up,
such as the Syrian intelligence hit list.
And I've seen it with my own eyes,
and Al-Hariri's name was there.
A hit list including politicians
from not only the Middle East but the United States?
I believe so.
There were many names beside the Lebanese officials.
There were names of Sharon,
President Bush, Vice President Cheney.
And I know this was done with the blessing of Bashar Al-Assad himself.
He had an agenda. Everybody knew it.
He would have said that the Syrian secret service
was responsible for fixing the Super Bowl
if he thought that that would get Assad kicked out sooner.
Cheney had been obsessed with Syria
and getting rid of Assad for years.
I think that the Syrian secret service
did assassinate the Lebanese prime minister.
I don't think there's much question about that.
But to then say
that they are responsible for killing Bush, that's quite a leap.
And after a couple of days,
I think Cheney realized he was never going to sell
the Syrian story to Congress,
so he turned his attention closer to home.
In an emergency closed session this morning,
Congress voted unanimously
to approve a series of amendments to the Patriot Act.
President Cheney said the new measures, dubbed "Patriot lll,"
will give the FBl more powers
to predict and prevent acts of terrorism
and improve security for federal officials.
Patriot lll gave us better tools
to go after suspected terrorist organizations,
homegrown radical groups,
which might harm our national interests.
It broadened the definition of terrorism.
There are those who would criticize the Patriot Act.
But, frankly, the president of the United States was assassinated.
So...
in my view we weren't doing enough.
Fellow citizens,
in this national vigil of mourning
we show how much America loved this good man
and how greatly we will miss him.
there was a kindness, simplicity,
and goodness of character
that marked all the years of his life.
The cheerful spirit that carried him forward
was more than a disposition.
It was the optimism of a faithful soul
who trusted in God's purposes
and knew those purposes to be right and true.
And it was the vision and the will of George Bush
that gave hope to the oppressed,
shamed the oppressors,
and overcame evil with good.
He was a providential man
who came along just when our nation and the world
most needed him.
Fellow Americans,
here lies a graceful and a gallant man.
I was honored to be asked
to write the eulogy for President Cheney.
I wanted to convey
President Bush's moral commitment.
He had...
that power,
that strength of leadership
that I believe was invested in him by God.
We received an anonymous letter pre-9/11
from someone in the Bridgeview community,
Chicago's Palestinian neighborhood.
It suggested that several members of the local mosque
had attended terrorist training camps in Afghanistan.
After 9/11, they were interviewed
and put under intensive surveillance for two full years.
But all we had were the original flights to Pakistan.
We could find no proof that any of them
had ever crossed into Afghanistan,
no evidence of any kind to suggest
that this was some kind of a plot,
and nothing to connect either one of them with Al-Qaeda.
But then, just into the third week of the investigation,
one of my agents, Kate Nicholls,
came running down the corridor with a photograph
from the time of the Bridgeview investigation.
In the photograph was Zikri
with a Yemeni national named Khaled Leqawi
who we believe was in Chicago on a recruiting mission
in the spring of 2001.
And, sure enough,
Zikri was on a plane to Pakistan
in April of 2001.
In the second week of questioning,
I mentioned Leqawi,
and... he gave me
that same stonewall, blank shrug.
Didn't know the man, wasn't familiar with the name.
I pressed harder. "Leqawi-
you're sure you don't know that name?"
"No, never heard it before. "
Then I showed him the photograph,
and...
he froze a moment.
and then there was this...
sudden collapse of confidence.
I said, "Listen, Jamal...
I know you were in Afghanistan, you know?
I just want you to tell us. "
And he sat there for a moment,
perhaps considering his options,
and then he said, "Okay.
All right, I was there. "
I first heard from a guy
in the Trace and Fiber Department down the hall,
and they had found
gunshot residue on his jacket.
Gunshot residue is what we call...
associative evidence.
It's not discriminating evidence,
meaning that it's...
you can't really convict somebody of...
firing a gun based on gunshot residue.
It's only sort of a backup.
And then, it got to my department,
and a colleague of mine
said he had a match, a fingerprint match.
and what he had was a partial print
from the crime scene.
and... he found
nine points of comparison
to Zikri's print from the database.
So I thought it was promising,
but not the sure-fire evidence
that we needed.
It was...
nine points of comparison.
Uh...
people have been convicted on less.
The Attorney General's office in D.C. was ready
to charge Zikri as soon as they heard about the trip to Afghanistan.
So when the forensics evidence came in, that was it.
There were still other lines of inquiry, yeah,
other suspects that we were following up,
but they immediately diminished in importance
in the face of such compelling forensic evidence.
Earlier today,
an indictment was unsealed in Federal Court
in the Northern District of lllinois,
charging Jamal Abu Zikri
with the assassination
of the president of the United States with a rifle.
As outlined in the indictment,
Mr. Zikri took part in Al-Qaeda training in Afghanistan,
and conspired with others to commit this brutal act.
This case is being brought in part
because prosecutors and law enforcement agents
were able to share information
from a multiagency investigation
under the provisions of the USA Patriot Act.
The link between Jamal Abu Zikri and Al-Qaeda
shows once again the nature of the enemy
that we're facing in the War on Terror.
The last thing we need is to convey the impression
that terrorists can change our policies
through violence and intimidation,
that they can force the government of the United States to change course
if they inflict enough violence.
The FBl was desperate to link Zikri with others
because it was an embarrassment for them if they couldn't link him.
If they couldn't make it part of a conspiracy,
then it was more difficult to prove the terrorism motive,
which they deeply needed to do.
Even if my client had been to Afghanistan,
it may not be irrelevant, but it's certainly not material.
What it was really useful for was to propel forward
this conveyor belt of terrorism
that they needed to convince people
that this was the motive for the case.
I think the weight they gave it
is testimony itself to how weak the forensic case was.
Gunshot residue is notoriously unreliable.
And, in fact,
the prosecution witnesses admitted
that the GSR that was found on Jamal's jacket
could have been contamination-
someone else could have picked it up.
It's very easy to contaminate
gunshot residue evidence.
That means that the whole case
boiled down to one partial print.
Madam Foreperson, has the jury reached
a unanimous verdict on the case presented to you?
Yes.
Have you signed and printed your names?
Yes.
All right, if you will give the sheet to the bailiff.
Ms. Clerk, if you will read the verdict, please.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you have returned the following verdict:
"The people of the United States of America
versus Jamal Mohammed Abu Zikri,
file number 02CRS281.
We, the 12 members of the jury,
unanimously find the defendant
guilty of the assassination
of President George Walker Bush,
with a rifle, this the 10th day of May 2008."
Signed by the foreperson, Cheryl Jones.
Is this your verdict, so say you all?
Yes.
Jamal is devastated by the outcome of this trial
and obviously we're all dismayed by the verdict.
But he wants to continue to fight.
And so, on Monday, I will be filing an appeal on behalf of my client.
My client's destiny in this case
was sealed from the minute that Brock stood up
at that DOJ press conference in October
and said the words, "Al-Qaeda assassin,"
and they knew that.
I mean, Al-Qaeda equals guilty.
And there was not one citizen in this country
that was going to
come to the proceedings
with an open mind after that.
I mean, they knew what they were doing.
Juries love forensic evidence,
and it's popularly believed to be
100o/ accurate
and free of bias.
People lie. Everyone knows that.
But a fingerprint match
is a great silent witness.
It's... it's definitive.
The reality
is a little different.
there isn't a forensics examiner in history
who hasn't somehow been compromised
by that pressure to get results.
They seemed to be working backwards in this case.
They had a hypothesis of guilt,
and then they tried to fit the evidence to prove that.
And that's not science.
I did my own analysis of the print from the crime scene.
I did it several times.
And it was reasonable,
but reasonable isn't good enough in this situation.
I was told that this case was
too big to...
leave unsolved in the lab,
and too big to lose in court,
and that basically I should...
put up or shut up.
My skepticism and...
objectivity wasn't needed,
it wasn't helping.
And that's what made my position untenable.
I resigned under protest
because I couldn't do my job properly.
Right up to the start of the trial, we had
over 300 investigators trying to identify, or find a link to,
any fellow coconspirators.
We didn't find any evidence
that he'd ever planned to do anything,
commit any acts of terrorism when he got back from Afghanistan.
At the time, politically, it was very difficult
for anyone in the agency or the administration
to accept that Zikri had acted alone,
that...
any one man could have planned and carried out this assassination.
But...
that was when we still believed that Zikri was the assassin.
Here in Rock Island, there's not a person
that doesn't have some connection to the war,
that doesn't have somebody in active service-
A father, son, daughter.
So when our boys go off to war,
they know that they have our support.
My father was in the Army.
I'm considered an Army brat.
My...
and I married...
a man that my father would be proud of.
He served in the first Gulf War, Desert Storm.
Was a decorated major.
And my sons followed in their father's footsteps.
Of course a parent worries.
Who wouldn't?
But it was the best thing that happened to Casey.
He was going down the wrong path,
experimenting with drugs,
and... the Army whipped him into shape.
I'm proud of my son.
I'm proud that he did
what was needed to protect us.
He had the guts and the courage to serve his country.
My experience in Iraq was slaughter.
We were fighting arrows with guns over there.
Once you take a life...
you know, you lose a piece of yourself.
You're basically just sitting around waiting for your turn.
When we left, we thought we was going over there because of 9/11,
and to look for these weapons of mass destruction, which we never found.
You know, so we had to tell ourselves something-
we were fighting for freedom,
freedom of the Iraqi people.
It was obvious that they didn't want us there.
No, they didn't want us there at all.
Casey had just gotten back from his tour,
and... That's when we got
our knock on the door-
that David had...
been hit by a roadside bomb
just outside of Mosul.
They said his Humvee turned over...
and...
that was it.
It's the hardest thing I'd ever dealt with.
We all dealt with it in our own way.
My husband and I tried to...
tried to console each other and be there for each other.
Casey just went off to himself.
I wanted him to come home so we could take care of him,
because I was not going to lose Casey
like I-
like I lost David.
My husband Al woke up early that morning,
told me he was going to Chicago to bring Casey back.
Casey said he was in Chicago looking for work,
but I knew he'd gone back on drugs.
I knew the president was going to be visiting that night,
but I didn't know anything about any protesters or anything like that.
I knew Casey didn't- wouldn't have anything to do
with any Cindy Sheehan kind of protesting,
or anything like that going on.
He didn't believe in it.
I'd heard on the news that Bush had been shot.
My heart just...
dropped...
and all I could do was pray.
I was trying to call my husband on his cell phone,
but I never got an answer.
I just wanted to know that our son was okay.
I was upset when I was locked up,
but it kind of ended up being a good thing.
It was a wake-up call for me.
Made me realize, like...
I had to get my shit together 'cause this wasn't me.
Everything that was going on in my life, that wasn't me.
I was sitting in the room by myself,
and they came in that morning and told me I could go.
First thing I did was
I went to a phone and called my mom.
She was crying like crazy.
I didn't really understand at first what was going on.
I thought maybe she had heard that I was...
you know, locked up.
Maybe she was scared for me or something.
Or I thought she was upset by,
you know, what happened to the president.
Then I realized it was my father.
I found out that morning...
some people walking their dogs
found my father in his car.
Felt like somebody's just, like, ripped my heart out.
There was so much shit I wanted to say to him, you know?
My dad had been sick for a long time-
for a long time, at least since he had got back from the-
You know, from the Gulf War,
when I was a little kid.
Then what happened to David,
that just pushed him right on over the edge.
'Cause he never talked about David.
He never once mentioned David.
He left me a note.
They gave me a copy.
He said, "Everything I stood for
and raised you to stand for has turned bad.
There is no honor in dying for an immoral cause...
for lies.
I love my country but I love God...
and the sons he gave me even more.
I must do the right thing by you and by David.
George Bush killed our David,
and I cannot forgive him for that. "
I never read it.
The man who wrote that note was not my husband.
That was an act of a desperate man...
who felt helpless, who felt powerless.
They told me,
"Don't worry, son.
We know it's not your father.
We already have the guy who...
who did it. He's Al-Qaeda. "
Casey Claybon was described
as a very troubled Iraq War vet
who probably had P.T.S.D.,
who had a long history of drug use.
And there were a couple of paragraphs on the third or the fourth page
of the "Chicago Sun-Times," and then that was it.
It all kind of got buried
with all of the talk of Syria and Al-Qaeda,
and it just kind of got swept under the rug.
And by then, we were into the trial.
You have to understand the context.
Casey Claybon was not the only person
trying to tell us who killed the president.
The United States is the home of the conspiracy theorist.
We received literally thousands of tips from within the US.
We investigated...
radical environmentalists, pro-choice groups,
the Revolutionary Communist Party of America.
Virtually every radical Islamic group
was posting claims of responsibility on their websites,
not to mention all the Bush-hating lunatics who were out that day.
We even had a white supremacist from Alabama
who tried to claim responsibility for it.
Turns out he wasn't even in Chicago that day.
It's true that we didn't prioritize
Aloysius Claybon as a potential suspect.
But in any investigation you have to look at what's in front of you
and decide where to direct your resources.
By the time we found Claybon,
Zikri was already in custody,
a guy who'd basically admitted
that he had provided material support for terrorism.
He fit the profile.
There was compelling forensic evidence
linking him to the crime scene.
And I'm fairly confident that any other investigator
would have drawn the same conclusions.
On July 4th, I received a phone call
from a special agent from the lllinois State Police.
He told me that Casey had found,
amongst his father's belongings,
a detailed map of downtown Chicago
marked up military-style.
He read for me
one specific paper
that he'd found amongst Aloysius's things.
And I recall, as he...
read it to me, I started to get a sick feeling
in the pit of my stomach.
Basically,
the document that Aloysius had was a survey report.
It detailed the exact motorcade route,
all the president's movements and security arrangements that day.
So it was like,
"Trailblazer onstage at 19:15.
Trailblazer exits Sheraton west entrance at 20:10,"
and so on.
The minute I read the note he left me,
I knew my father had killed bush.
I knew it.
Then when I found the map, I thought people would finally listen to me,
and I had to tell the truth.
That's what my father stood for-
truth and honesty.
You know, to try to do the right thing.
And I felt like this was the right thing to do,
even though I know it would cut right through my mom.
I knew the man they had convicted was innocent,
so I had to do it.
Aloysius Claybon knew where the Secret Service
was deployed. He knew the entrances, the exits.
He could work out where Bush was exposed,
and therefore where the vantage point would be.
For a long time we were unable to identify
the man seen crossing the service area beneath 422.
Now we believe the identity of this male
is probably Aloysius Claybon.
Now the survey report is not something that many people get to see.
There were 107 administration officials
or Secret Service personnel,
who either saw it or had access to it
up to 10 days ahead of the visit.
We have interviewed every individual
with access to this schedule.
Finding the source of the leak
is the focus of a massive investigation.
In my opinion, someone leaked it to the protest community,
including Molini,
and someone from there passed it on to Al Claybon.
People have said that the hatred on display that day
somehow gave the killer license to shoot Bush.
That's not really for me to comment on.
What I'm interested in as a federal investigator
is finding exactly who furnished the killer
with the information that allowed him to commit this crime.
Under the powers afforded us by Patriot lll,
we have kept a constant scrutiny
of e-mail traffic and telephone communications
of every protest group in relation to this matter.
And I remain confident that we will find the persons involved.
I think maybe because Al's dead
the authorities have just felt they can sit on the Zikri appeal.
I mean, let's face it-
They were unable to link Zikri to any accomplices.
All they had on him was that he had traveled
and taken some vacations to exotic locales,
and had attended the wrong summer camp.
But as far as most people are concerned,
either he's still guilty, or, if not, he at least flirted with terrorism.
So who cares if he's locked up?
My dad, he lived for the Army.
You know, he was proud of serving, proud of America.
And he lived for me and David.
I just think he felt...
he felt like Bush destroyed all that.
Split & Resynck: *** Xenzai ***