Experts differ on terror suspect's value as informant

As an American who a federal indictment claims has worked with al-Qaida, Bryant Neal Vinas could be immensely valuable to counterterrorism investigators, experts said Thursday.

But as a relatively recent convert to Islam with Western roots, it's unlikely that Vinas had significant access to senior al-Qaida leadership when he trained with the group in 2007 and 2008, others conclude.

Vinas' case highlights the difficulty of gauging how informative captured terror suspects can be for American investigators, said Steven Weber, the director of the Institute of International Studies at the University of California.

"Al-Qaida is a very dispersed organization that has done a really good job of compartmentalizing information," said Weber, a Baldwin native. "They're very conscious of the fact that people are going to get caught. They're going to be very wary about giving this guy any insight."

But if the government's account of Vinas' activities holds true, the Patchogue man would be one of very few Westerners to have joined al-Qaida and be willing to tell investigators about it.

"This kind of opportunity is not just rare, it doesn't happen," said Evan Kohlmann, a consultant who has testified for the federal government in terrorism cases. "We've only had a handful of people who have gone to training camps and have returned and have been willing to cooperate with the government."

Frank Cilluffo, the director of the Homeland Security Policy Institute at George Washington University, believes that whatever value Vinas, 26, had to investigators has probably been exhausted.

"My gut tells me that he was deemed valuable enough that they kept this sealed for a while so they could get every bit of information from him," said Cilluffo, who is originally from Port Washington.

Matthew Levitt, the director of the Stein Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said Vinas' true value is in adding another layer of knowledge about how terror groups operate.

"Someone who's been through there recently is tremendously valuable in terms of understanding the culture of the organization," Levitt said. "He did not become the world's No. 1 terrorist, but he did go and did get trained and experienced firsthand al-Qaida 2.0. Someone like this could be very, very useful."

Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford), the ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, agreed: "A guy like this does give us a window into al-Qaida," he said. "A guy like this is invaluable. How high it goes, I don't know. It's not like a million-man army."

But other experts said Vinas has ample motivation to embellish his knowledge to try to curry favor with investigators.

"Given how careful al-Qaida is about who knows what, it would seem unlikely that he could know an extraordinary amount about the top leadership," said Karen Greenberg, the executive director of the Center on Law and Security at New York University.