COMPLETE COVERAGE | FRONT LINES | AMERICA AT HOME | INTERACTIVES »

Terror prosecutor: bin Laden 'will be brought to justice'

White expects that bin Laden "will be dealt with militarily."

NEW YORK (CNN) -- The former federal prosecutor who has sent more terrorists to prison than any other in the United States said Tuesday her only regret is that she never got to put Osama bin Laden on trial.

"My biggest frustration I have is that bin Laden is still out there," said Mary Jo White, 54, who served as the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York from early 1993 until last month. She is the only U.S. official to press criminal charges against the Saudi exile and terrorist leader.

"I've always fully expected that bin Laden would eventually be captured and brought to justice," White said.

Terrorism defined her tenure, starting with the first attack on the World Trade Center, on February 26, 1993, nine years ago Tuesday. White sat down with CNN on the bombing anniversary in her first television interview since leaving office.

VIDEO The former federal prosecutor who has sent more terrorists to prison than any other in the U.S. says she believes Osama bin Laden will be brought to justice (February 27) Play video (QuickTime, Real or Windows Media)

In all, her office achieved across-the-board convictions in a half-dozen historic terrorism trials, starting with six men who carried out the 1993 World Trade Center truck bombing. That attack killed six people, injured more than a thousand and caused more than a billion dollars in property damage.

"Pretty early on we realized it went beyond an isolated bombing of the Trade Center itself," White said.

She convicted the Trade Center bombing mastermind, Ramzi Yousef, twice. The second was for plotting, with others, to blow up a dozen passenger jetliners over the Pacific in a 48-hour spree that would have killed thousands.

White also convicted the blind Egyptian cleric, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, and a group of his followers for a foiled plot to bomb New York City targets that included the United Nations, the FBI building, and the Lincoln and Holland tunnels.

Last year, White's office achieved convictions against four bin Laden followers for the coordinated bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, where 224 people, including 12 Americans, were killed, and more than 4,000 were injured. The four defendants received life sentences.

"Every time you neutralize and incapacitate a dangerous terrorist, it means some bombs aren't built and detonated, some people aren't assassinated, some plots never get hatched," White said.

But convictions are "not going to deter other would-be terrorists," she said.

Bin Laden first indicted in 1998

Informants helped in several of her terrorism cases, but the government has had precious few cooperating witnesses from inside al Qaeda.

"You go wherever any conceivable strand of evidence will take you. It's very rare, there certainly wasn't anyone inside the terrorist organization who turned or flipped early on, and so that makes it much more difficult," White said.

She said bin Laden -- first known in U.S. intelligence circles for funding the mujahedeen who fought the Soviet invaders in Afghanistan in the 1980s -- hit her radar screen in 1995, when Yousef was captured in a Pakistan safehouse funded by bin Laden. The Saudi was on a list of unindicted co-conspirators in the Rahman terror plot the following year.

In 1996, the government's case against bin Laden grew when a third man to swear allegiance to al Qaeda, Jamal Al Fadl, became a key U.S. government informant about the organization's inner workings.

White's initial terror conspiracy indictment against bin Laden came in June 1998, but it was sealed. "You don't want to advertise we're going to come get you," she said.

Later, bin Laden was charged publicly by White with conspiring to kill Americans and destroy U.S. property, for orchestrating the East Africa embassy bombings in 1998 and for training Somali tribes who fought U.S. Army Rangers in Mogadishu in 1993.

White said the Clinton administration recognized the danger of al Qaeda, but she also said she wishes the former president exercised the military option to stamp out al Qaeda. President Clinton ordered retaliatory missile attacks on bin Laden's camps inside Afghanistan within two weeks of the 1998 embassy bombings, but never struck like that again.

White said she would "like to have seen ... from my small corner of the world, what's happening now to have happened then."

Now, White said, she would support military tribunals for captured al Qaeda soldiers. She believes those courts would be constitutional and said they would make it easier to safeguard top-secret evidence.

"I think we have to be careful about that -- not to use it on the credit card guy, who provides that kind of assistance, but to use it on the real leaders," she said.

As for the September 11 conspirators, White said that with the apprehension of Zacarias Moussaoui -- charged with terrorism conspiracy in federal court in Virginia and suspected of being a possible 20th hijacker, on United Flight 93 -- "we have our arms around who was here."

However, no matter how many Islamic fundamentalist terrorists are behind bars -- a few dozen put there by White herself -- she see no lessening in the ongoing terrorist threat.

"There's no question you're talking about ... a large multiple of that number when you talk globally," she said.

In her office on September 11

On the morning of September 11, White was in her office just blocks from the Trade Center when the suicide plane attacks occurred. She visited Ground Zero the next day.

"Very impressive planning, obviously a stunning attack, but also at its base pretty simple, which makes it all the more frightening in a sense," White said. The attacks killed nearly 3,000 people in New York. "There's nothing as terrorizing ... or galling as having innocent civilians attacked. I mean nothing else gets your attention like that does."

White's jurisdiction led her to prosecute a range of crimes, from white-collar securities fraud on Wall Street to organized crime.

"Wherever the money is you will find the mob," she said.

Al Qaeda is a highly organized criminal enterprise like the Mafia, she said. But the "Mafia tends to almost exclusively commit crimes for money and greed" while the goal of terrorists "is to topple any government that doesn't subscribe to their view of the correct state of Islam," White said.

White had planned to step down last fall but stayed longer because of the September 11 attacks. "I was not about to leave then. I was never asked to leave the office. I was never asked to stay," she said.

Although the Justice Department has decided to prosecute the first two post-September 11 terrorist-related cases in Virginia, one of her former deputies is the lead prosecutor in the Moussaoui case. Another is leading the prosecution of John Walker Lindh, the American charged with fighting alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan.

For White, the near future holds a schedule of speeches and possibly a book -- about terrorism. And she'll be keeping an eye on bin Laden.

"I do believe he will brought to justice. I don't know how he will be brought to justice. It is my expectation that he will be dealt with militarily," White said. "It certainly from my perspective would not have to be in an American courtroom."