As defense claims Ressam breakdown, U.S. says it must end 2 major terror cases

Prosecutors say Ahmed Ressam's "aborted cooperation" with federal agents will force them to dismiss charges against two major terrorism suspects, including one who reportedly planned to detonate a gas truck in a Jewish neighborhood in Montreal.

Defense attorneys, meanwhile, filed a report by a psychiatrist that blames the government for Ressam's recalcitrance. Dr. Stuart Grassian says Ressam suffered a mental breakdown after years of solitary confinement and repeated interrogations.

The 37-year-old Algerian feels abused and betrayed by prosecutors and agents who wrung him dry of information, and then came back over and over again until everything he'd said "began blurring together into a hopeless muddle," the report says.

Ressam will appear in Seattle next week before U.S. District Judge John Coughenour for sentencing on charges that he plotted to detonate a powerful bomb at the Los Angeles International Airport during the Millennium celebration. He was captured Dec. 14, 1999, in Port Angeles coming off a ferry from Canada in a rental car loaded with explosives and bomb-making materials.

When he was convicted in the spring of 2001 and was facing a minimum of 65 years in prison, Ressam, who was trained in Osama bin Laden's terrorist camps in Afghanistan, agreed to cooperate in exchange for leniency. Prosecutors say Ressam has not lived up to a deal that could have limited his sentence to 27 years; they are now asking the judge to send him to prison for 35 years.

Defense attorneys say information Ressam has provided has saved lives and helped disrupt the al-Qaida terrorism network worldwide. They say he should receive a 12 ½-year sentence.

In filings yesterday, Manhattan Assistant U.S. Attorney Robin Baker said both of the alleged terrorists the government will have to dismiss charges against — Abu Doha in London and Samir Ait Mohamed in Canada — likely "pose serious threats to national security." The cases against them were filed on the strength of Ressam's earlier statements and can't proceed because, in recent years, he has increasingly obfuscated and contradicted himself, prosecutors claim. Since February, he hasn't talked at all, Baker said.

"His decision to stop cooperation has serious negative consequences for the United States," she said, including a loss of confidence in America by Canada and Great Britain, both allies in the war on terror.

Bin Laden meeting alleged

Dismissing the indictment against Doha is particularly galling, Baker said. Doha, Ressam has said, recruited for al-Qaida in Western Europe and ran the Algerian sector of the Khalden terrorist training camp in Afghanistan, where Ressam trained. Doha reportedly once met with Osama bin Laden to offer his Algerian trainees for jihad against the West. He's been in custody in England since July 2001.

"In light of Ressam's cessation of cooperation, the government will have no choice but to dismiss the charges against Abu Doha and withdraw the extradition request," Baker wrote.

Likewise, the United States will stop extradition proceedings against Mohamed, a former law student and alleged member of Ressam's terrorist cell in Montreal. Ressam said Mohamed helped him obtain forged documents and weapons and once asked Ressam to help him obtain materials to build a bomb to kill Jews in Montreal.

He is awaiting extradition from Canada on an indictment in New York based almost entirely on Ressam's statements.

Baker says Ressam began faltering in his cooperation in 2002, and that he has become increasingly more difficult. She also alleges Ressam's long confinement in solitary is his own fault. Prosecutors say they offered in 2002 to place him in a special protection program in prison, which would have moved him out of solitary, but he refused.

Need to right wrongs

He's been in that program since April 2004, the prosecutor said.

But Grassian, a psychiatrist who has studied and written on the impact of solitary confinement on mental health, said the damage had been done.

Ressam, he writes, was a man with a strong sense of dignity and a need to right wrongs. He turned to terrorism because of outrage over his poor upbringing in Algeria. Once arrested and stripped of this illusion, Ressam tried to regain his dignity by trying to right his earlier wrongs, Grassian said.

But this early enthusiasm has turned to bitter disappointment over months of confinement and the repeated drudgery of interrogations, the psychiatrist said. By his count, Grassian says, Ressam has been interviewed no fewer than 65 times by agents from the U.S., Canada, Italy, Germany, England and France. Eventually, the psychiatrist said Ressam became confused, and then angry.

"Every time I think about it, I get upset — the way they treated me, the questions," Grassian quotes Ressam as saying. "They abuse and use people — they manipulate. They knew I was tired and weak, and they kept asking me questions — never stopped."

Ressam has since resigned himself to a life in prison.

"No hope, all my life in solitary, but at least I could stop this heartache," the psychiatrist said Ressam told him. "The only way to have peace is to give up hope."

Mike Carter: 206-464-3706 or mcarter@seattletimes.com