Tim Sumner

faith and service, Life and Death

That Dark Night North of Nuremberg

by  • 

Map of Ferris Barracks, circa 1975.

Map of Ferris Barracks, circa 1975, with an enlargement and graphics added.

May 1975
U.S. Army base, Ferris Barracks, Erlangen, West Germany

The two unarmed Unit Police (UP) soldiers called the Military Police (MP) Desk a block away and reported a “Blond-haired white male driving an older tan Fiat” had twice rolled slowly down the street outside and passed the Main Gate, staring hard at them. (The other gates were closed after midnight and MPs often checked IDs for suspects after major crimes. Criminals looked carefully before attempting to enter there.)

Further, they reported the rear license plate matched the ‘Be on the lookout’ BOLO alert that I had sent them, except the last two numbers were reversed; they read 37, not 73.

Bingo!

But I had a problem: My three MP patrols were miles away on cases, investigating that rape outside a disco bar, a stabbing in a Gasthaus up north, and a fatal traffic accident on the autobahn.

I told our awesome and ancient interpreter, Mr. “Senior” Wasner, to lock the front door and then call the German Police. Then I tossed the arms room’s keys into the evidence safe and locked it, grabbed my flashlight, and went out the back. I once ran the 100-yard dash in high school in 10.6 seconds; the gate was a mere 75 yards away.

I ran fast past the Post Chapel. Yet my fear that I had missed catching him subsided for ahead of me, beyond the fence line, I could hear the faint sound of a vehicle approaching on Artillerie Strasse.

As I reached the street, I slowed to a walk about 40 feet from the gate shack. The suspect turned slowly left into the gate, with his speedy Fiat in neutral. The driver, Sergeant “W” (name changed), saw me and gunned his engine, grinding the gear. But he would soon hit the clutch and run me down out there directly in front of him.

He must have noticed my Army-issued .45 Caliber Model 1911 pistol was aimed his way. Or perhaps he saw the MP armband on my left shoulder and heard me shouting “Halt or I’ll shoot” for he turned the wheel hard to the right and hit the 18-inch-high painted stone curb.

His car conked out.

The UPs in the gate shack had dived for cover. I talked “W” out of his car, handcuffed him, locked the car, and told them to not let anyone other than MPs and GPs touch it.

I perp-walked him through the MP station backdoor less than 3 minutes after I had left there and secured him in the detention cell. After unlocking the front door, I read him the standard legal rights warnings, which he waived. The collected evidence was damning. He confessed but then pled not guilty at his arraignment to charges of Rape and Assault with Intent to Commit Grievous Bodily Harm.

However, it was only zero-300 (3 AM). I had eight cases to type into the MP blotter, three Serious Incident Reports (SIR) to have a patrol co-op to the Nuremberg MP Station and Provost Marshal’s Office, and an Army Master Sergeant with four slashed tires sleeping in his car blocks away waiting for me to send a “spare” patrol.

No problem. I was done by change-of-shift at zero-800. I went back to the barracks, ate breakfast, and hit the rack.

At noon, Sergeant First Class (SFC) “D.C.”, my Platoon Sergeant who was from North Carolina, flipped my mattress and me onto the barracks room floor.

“The MP Station Operations Sergeant wants to see you – right now. Throw on some civvies. A patrol is waiting outside.”

No, I had not forgotten anything, except that SFC “B” was “by the book.”

I was not expecting coffee and a medal, but a chewing out and threat to have me court-martialed for “going AWOL” from the MP Desk for three whole minutes was a bit much. I took it at the position of attention, requested permission to obtain a lawyer before answering his questions, and was dismissed.

I returned to report to “D.C.” – as ordered – and briefed him. He was livid and put me on the phone with First Sergeant Repass, our MP Company’s “Top” Soldier. The latter was former Infantry, former Special Forces, and a highly decorated Vietnam Veteran.

Repass said, “Great work! Get some sleep. I will speak with SFC Black.”

I slept like a baby and was back on the MP Desk that evening. “W” went to prison at Fort Leavenworth. Sometimes you have to improvise. I was a mere Specialist Fourth Class – with all of fifteen months in service – and was filling in on the Desk for they were short of Sergeants, and later awarded an Army Commendation Medal.

Good times.

Epilogue

SFC Black was white and a decent guy, but he was difficult to deal with at times. He soon retired. Before leaving, he invited me over to his house for lunch where his wonderful half-black and half-German wife served us a fine meal. He went on to become a successful black-and-white photographer.

His equally stringent replacement, the brilliant and funny Staff Sergeant Thomas Jackson – who was black and no one’s Uncle Tom – “tolerated” me for a few weeks until new Sergeants arrived and were assigned to the MP Desk.

I went back to road MP patrol duty where I belonged.

Sergeant “W’s” court martial panel could have sentenced him to life in prison for raping a 16-year-old drunk German girl in that parking lot. Yet he came face-to-face with his own mortality and to rest facing God’s house that dark May night. 

The defense cross-examined none of the prosecution witnesses – not one. The victim testified against him yet asked the jury to show mercy to her attacker, to not sentence him to life. She added that she would live, grow, find love, and dance again. There was not a dry eye in the courtroom – not one. He was the sole witness for the defense, read a statement expressing deep remorse to the girl, and then repeated his confession to the jury. The jury convicted and sentenced him to 6 years.

The Almighty will render final judgment.

—

Afterword

fiat (n.) 1630s, “authoritative sanction,” from Latin fiat “let it be done” (used in the opening of Medieval Latin proclamations and commands) … In English the word also sometimes is a reference to fiat lux “let there be light” in Genesis i.3. … Perhaps Sergeant W came to see the light that dark night north of Nuremberg.

Updated May 31, 2022

9/11, al Qaeda, FISA, Mike Lee, Patriot Act, President Trump, Rand Paul

Renew the Patriot Act provisions or risk another 9/11

by  • 

A police officer plays Taps in The Pit at the WTC's Ground Zero on the 1st anniversary of 9/11.

A police officer plays Taps in The Pit at the WTC’s Ground Zero on the 1st anniversary of 9/11

Before the Patriot Act, the FBI would have been stymied had it conducted a counter-terrorism investigation involving a now infamous American agent of a foreign power.

Anwar al-Awlaki was born in the United States.

Apparently, Senators Rand Paul and Mike Lee believe the only thing worth remembering about him is President Obama “illegally” had him killed in Yemen using a Hellfire missile. (No matter that al-Awlaki: had sent “panty bomber” Abdulmuttalab to blow up a passenger plane over Detroit; attempted to blow up a DHL cargo airplane in flight; had become the well-publicized spiritual leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP); and was heavily guarded in Yemen’s remote tribal areas – sending Americans into those wilds to arrest him would have been difficult and dangerous.)

Others vividly recall that al-Awlaki twice met with 9/11 hijackers.

I agree with former federal prosecutor Andrew C. McCarthy that the collection of metadata should be abolished. Further, I agree that federal judges are unqualified to conduct national security. Republicans and Democrats in Congress have repeatedly abdicated their oversight responsibilities of our intelligence community. Now, some Republicans are seeking to give the FISA court even more authority; far too many Democrats – who seek to vest America’s foreign enemies with our Constitutional Rights – are cheering them on.

Senators Paul and Lee seem to assume America could also safely let the business records and roving wiretap provisions of the Patriot Act expire after March 15, 2020.

Yet Americans would be less safe, and what would have happened had the FBI investigated Anwar al-Awlaki before 9/11 helps to demonstrate why. He was an American and without a suspected crime to bring before a federal criminal court judge, the FBI’s counter-intelligence investigators would have needed to clear each subpoena for business records and wiretap with the FISA court.

The background

In late 1999, Saudi Arabia informed our CIA that members of al Qaeda were about to meet in Malaysia. While Khalid al-Mihdhar was en route to there, the CIA had a foreign intelligence agency enter his hotel room and copy his passport which included an open-ended visa to the United States.

Khalid al-Mihdhar was known by the FBI to be the son-in-law of Ahmed al-Hada who ran al Qaeda’s telecommunications relay in Yemen. In 1998, U.S. embassy (Nairobi) bomber Mohamed Rashed Daoud Al-Owhali told the FBI he called al-Hada’s phone number to relay messages to Osama bin Laden. The FBI’s NYC field office was investigating the two embassy bombings and conducting counter-terrorism investigations of al Qaeda; al-Mihdhar entering America would have caused the FBI to investigate.

In January of 2000, the CIA failed to inform the FBI that future hijacker al-Mihdhar had a visa to enter the United States.

That April, the CIA then failed to tell the FBI that al Qaeda member and future hijacker Nawaf al-Hazmi (who the CIA observed with al-Mihdhar in Malaysia) arrived in Los Angeles from Thailand on January 15, 2000. The CIA did not know that al-Mihdhar was also on that plane; the agency with the authority to investigate inside the United States (the FBI) soon discovered it after 9/11.

Further, in 2006, the CIA’s Inspector General reported that none of the “50 to 60” people at the CIA who read – before 9/11 – about al-Mihdhar’s visa and al-Hazmi’s arrival in Los Angeles had complied with the CIA’s own directive requiring those officers to place the two on the terror watch list.

What might have been

What if the CIA had ensured their January 2000 cable was sent to the FBI? And what if the FBI placed al-Mihdhar on the terror watch list, opened up an investigation, and he was spotted when he arrived in Los Angeles the following week?

To that point, al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi had committed no federal crime. It would have necessitated an intelligence investigation that would have almost certainly led to al-Awlaki.

And al-Awlaki’s travels almost certainly would have led the FBI to Hamburg, Germany. (More on this in a moment.)

An FBI informant lived in the same apartment complex and socialized with al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar. The latter had a home phone for his apartment, using his real name, and was listed in the San Diego directory. But except for nine phone calls to his father-in-law’s number in May of 2000 after his wife gave birth in Yemen, he did not use that phone to communicate with anyone involved in the 9/11 plot. (The NSA did not routinely investigate calls between known foreign threats and those in America before the Patriot Act due to, as former FBI Director Robert Mueller later testified, “an abundance of caution for the privacy of U.S. persons.”) 

The FBI’s informant also observed two Saudi Arabians from those once secret ‘28 pages’ socializing with al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi. One of those Saudis lived in that same apartment complex in San Diego. Both regularly attended prayers services conducted by al-Awlaki. Both received significant funding from the Saudi government (which had also funded the mosque).

If fact, one of those Saudis brought al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi to meet al-Awlaki at that mosque within days of their arrival in January of 2000.

The other Saudi communicated with Ramzi bin al-Shibh in Germany by both phone and email several times during 2000 supposedly (per those emails) looking for a wife to marry.

And bin al-Shibh was the plot communications relay between 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and lead hijacker Mohamed Atta.

That same Saudi’s last communication with bin al-Shibh was in December 2000 just days after al-Hazmi and Flight 77 hijacker pilot Hani Hanjour moved from San Diego to the East Coast. (al-Mihdhar left the country in June of 2000 and returned to America in 2001.) Hanjour and al-Hazmi then visited al-Awlaki at his new mosque in Virginia. The latter had moved there during the fall of 2000.

Anwar al-Awlaki traveled extensively. That same fall, he spent a week in Europe including several days in Hamburg, Germany. The first thing a hotel there asks for when you register is your passport to confirm your identity. Strangely, Germany’s investigators were unable to find out where al-Awlaki stayed while there.

Atta and bin al-Shibh operated out of Hamburg.

Atta first came to America in June of 2000 and he traveled frequently. After 9/11, the FBI’s search of flight records revealed a Mohamed Atta flew on the very same flight number – just one day later – direct from Frankfurt to San Francisco as al-Awlaki did immediately after visiting Hamburg. The FBI never determined either Atta’s or al-Awlaki’s whereabouts for several days after those flights. Then, al-Awlaki showed back up in San Diego and Atta traveled to the East Coast a few days later.

Andrew McCarthy pointed out that the business provision of the Patriot Act, “also known as Section 215, simply gives intelligence agents the same kind of power that criminal investigators have to compel production of documents.” Before the Patriot Act was enacted, the FBI could not issue a subpoena, a National Security Letter, concerning al-Awlaki during an intelligence investigation. 

When al-Awlaki returned from Hamburg, the FBI would have had to go to the FISA court every time they needed business records as they tracked him after he arrived in San Francisco and perhaps met with Atta.

How did al-Awlaki communicate ahead of time with those he visited with in Hamburg during the fall of 2000? After 9/11, the FBI did not find communications from his known devices to anyone in Hamburg. Yet had they conducted an intelligence investigation, they would not have been authorized to conduct a roving wiretap of his communications; the law, prior to the Patriot Act, did not authorize it.

Perhaps the Saudi who called and emailed Ramzi bin al-Shibh communicated for him with al-Awlaki’s hosts in Hamburg. Or perhaps al-Awlaki used other phones or communication methods such as emailing from computers outside his home. Alas, we’ll never know.

If the Patriot Act provisions expire, we will resume taking the same risks we took while an American agent of al Qaeda assisted in the mass murder of 3,000 people here. We’ll risk another 9/11 – or worse. President Trump and every Member of Congress should take that into consideration.