Gold9472
01-07-2007, 11:12 AM
Book Review: Peter Lance Indicts FBI/DoJ, but Leaves CIA as Unindicted Co-conspirator
http://911truth.org/article.php?story=20070106133625637
by Michael Richardson
1/7/2006
Most of the journalistic foundation for the 9/11 truth movement is a vast mosaic of articles, each containing one or more significant fragments, and most have been written by journalists who had no particular dedication or greater awareness of 9/11. Those who have written in depth about 9/11 have used this mosaic (and of course have been aided considerably by resources like Paul Thompson's Complete 9/11 Timeline), but few actually do on-the-ground journalism. Peter Lance is one of the few investigative journalists who has dedicated himself to the historical thicket of 9/11. In addition to using the mosaic, he travels to interview people, develops contacts inside the key agencies, gets his hands on damning FBI 302 documents, and bothers people who deserve to be bothered. For the last four years, he has obsessed on 9/11 and many of its deep-political tendrils, producing the equivalent of dozens of rich, original articles.
Lance's implied theory of 9/11 — that the 9/11 hijacking plot basically slipped past the greasy fingers of a corrupt and egotistical DOJ/FBI — no doubt irritates many in the movement for truth about 9/11 for whom the "inside job" theory is creed, yet he has unearthed some of the most important gems in the struggle to bring real truth and justice to 9/11. Most importantly, he has shown how the efforts of the Southern New York division of the Justice Department, since the early 90s, have been half-baked, ridiculously negligent, and at times blantantly criminal. His work has been instrumental in fleshing out the continuum between the New York cell of the Blind Sheikh (proto-al Qaeda) in the early 1990s and the crimes of September 11, 2001, tracking the FBI all along in its failures and refusals to expose, arrest, and convict. In Triple Cross, a whole chapter is given to a New Jersey check cashing store which, had the FBI used common sense and monitored the place once they knew, early on, that it was a hub of al Qaeda activity, they probably would have snuffed out the 9/11 plot before Clinton had left office. Lance has also definitively fingered Dietrich Snell as the 9/11 Commission staff member who forged the Commission's official timeline into a deception by claiming that the 9/11 plot was conceived in 1998 — two years after Snell's DOJ office had known of a planes-as-missiles plot from interrogations of Abdul Hakim Murad.
Ali Mohamed is a neglected rosetta stone for understanding al Qaeda, and with Triple Cross, Lance has created the most expansive and detailed account of this "master spy" to date. He also shows how Mohamed's U.S. exploits were interwoven with key people and events covered in Lance's two previous books (1000 Years for Revenge and Cover Up), as Mohamed had trained the Blind Sheikh's followers in New York in the early 1990s during the time Mohamed was stationed at Fort Bragg. The re-telling of earlier narratives makes this book Lance's definitive oeuvre on 9/11, but Triple Cross still reads like a new book; first because most of us would need a refresher on the sprawling material, but also because Lance has unearthed quite a few more fascinating nuggets. For example, he further solidifies the case that Ramzi Yousef, from his New York jail cell in 1996, orchestrated the timed bombing of TWA Flight 800. After the publication of his last book, Sibel Edmonds put him in touch with a "recently retired NSA staffer" who saw a translation of an NSA intercept originally spoken in Baluchi (Yousef's native tongue) which read, "Flight 800 . . . what had to be done has been done." This intercept had also been mysteriously, temporarily removed from the normal translation stream long enough to exclude it from the FBI's Flight 800 investigation.
Ali Mohamed was involved with most of the major al Qaeda attacks against U.S. interests: the assassination of Rabbi Meier Kahane in 1990, the 1993 WTC bombing, the African Embassy bombings in 1998 and, even though he was arrested in late 1998, Lance proposes that he also helped train some of the 9/11 hijackers in hijacking techniques. Astoundingly, Mohamed participated in these operations while also being a U.S. citizen, being enlisted in the U.S. military (serving at Fort Bragg on two occasions), and being an FBI informant in California. Importantly (and much more on this below), he also had ties to the CIA. Lance shows Mohamed moving snake-like between U.S. agencies and military postings, often flaunting his activities with al Qaeda at a time when the FBI certainly knew what this meant. Importantly, in the early 90s, Mohamed was debriefed about Bin Laden and al Qaeda by FBI and NSA counter-terrorism officers, but all records of this interview — which would prove that the government was aware of Bin Laden's anti-U.S. intentions years earlier than it has claimed — have been "lost."
Lance has a serious, longstanding bone to pick with the Southern New York division of the DoJ and the FBI, and has followed them for years, tracking their mindboggling misjudgments and fits of corruption. Patrick Fitzgerald was in charge of bringing bin Laden to justice prior to 9/11, and while he convicted some members of al Qaeda, he also botched the tracking of the remnants of al Qaeda after 2000, and allowed Ali Mohamed to plea bargain his way to, it seems, eventual release.
The title-concept of the book, "Triple Cross," is for Lance mainly hyperbole, a kind of mega-double-crossing, a masterful fleecing and betrayal of U.S. agencies, for Lance views Mohamed as, at his core, an al Qaeda spy who was fundamentally allied to Ayman al Zawahiri and al Qaeda, even as he was a U.S. citizen and served in the U.S. Army. As Lance tells it, Mohamed basically tied together the shoelaces of the U.S. team as it also struggled with information walls, corrupt agents, and bureaucratic in-fighting. The characterization of Ali Mohamed as a triple spy or triple agent (as opposed to a double agent) is also for Lance hyperbole, because he describes Mohamed as a connection between two major parties — the U.S. and al Qaeda. Yet there are clues in Triple Cross that "triple agent" could be more literal. Mohamed as "triple agent" makes more sense when one considers whether Mohamed's role with the CIA was at odds with the basic missions of the U.S. military and the FBI.
Lance's principal FBI source, Jack Cloonan, relays a story told to him by someone at CIA: In 1984, Mohamed "walked into the CIA station in Cairo" to volunteer as an asset, and was assigned to penetrate a Hamburg, Germany mosque. Mohamed then, according to this story, "gave up the operation," and was supposedly, thereafter, dropped or "spurned" by the CIA. (A very similar story is also told by Lawrence Wright in The Looming Tower, but is unattributed.) But there is reason to doubt this story because, in 1985, according to one press account Lance cites, Ali's ability to travel freely into the U.S. "was the result of an action initiated by Langley". (Wright describes this as a "visa waiver program" — making it sound more routine.) Lance also speculates that the CIA "may have run interference for Ali as he sought entry to the United States and a position of influence at Fort Bragg." The CIA was apparently using Mohamed, along with the rest of the nascent al Qaeda network, as an asset in the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Lance asks: "Did Ali Mohamed . . . maintain his ties to the CIA? Did he get a leg up with his visa and help slipping past the watch list?"
Lance's questions about Mohamed's ties to the CIA end rather precipitously here, though he does reveal a clear pattern of support coming from the CIA (or, one could theorize, the DIA). He quotes a Boston Globe story from 1995, that "Ali's 1985 entry into the United States 'was the result of an action initiated by Langley'." A California associate of Mohamed is quoted as saying, "Everyone in the community knew he was working as a liaison between the CIA and the Afghan cause." But Lance's references to CIA are only an implicit raising of questions. Clearly, other questions need to be asked more explicitly: What was Mohamed's relationship to the CIA? What allegiances, obligations, and benefits would have resulted from such ties? What would the implications have been of "maintaining" such ties and allegiances until 1998 when Mohamed played a key role in the African embassy bombings? Lance applies none of his normal investigative zeal to Mohamed's CIA role, and this makes for a serious black hole in Triple Cross.
Importantly, Ali Mohamed may have worked for the CIA before 1984, when he was still an officer in the Egyptian army. On the first page of Triple Cross, Lance describes a crestfallen Mohamed speaking before a federal judge in 2000: "In short but deliberate sentences, Mohamed peeled back the top layer of the secret life he'd led since 1981, when radical members of his Egyptian army unit gunned down Nobel Prize winner Anwar Sadat." Later, Lance describes how, during the actual assassination, Mohamed had been at Fort Bragg (in North Carolina) on an officer exchange program, and that this had "shielded him from the Sadat murder indictment." This involvement with the Sadat assassination is an important piece of the puzzle because, according to other sources, the CIA was to some degree responsible for Sadat's killing. Joseph Trento, in his 2005 book, "Prelude to Terror," interviewed former high-ranking CIA agents about this period in Egypt, and one of Trento's fragments puts a new lens over Ali Mohamed. Trento describes how protecting Sadat had actually been a task assigned to the CIA:
Orchestrating much of what was going on in Egypt was a CIA agent named William Buckley . . . Operating out of Cairo Station, Buckley supervised a vast array of spies within Sadat's regime. In 1980, Buckley was put in charge of training Sadat's personal bodyguards after the CIA took over the contract from J.J. Cappucci and Associates....
Neil Livingstone, who by this time was involved in J.J. Cappucci, described the operation. "We did the training of Sadat's praetorian guard to protect Sadat. And then the contract was taken away from us and [given] back to the Agency, and he got killed. We never would have permitted the kind of security that was evident at the time Sadat was killed," Livingstone said. 1
Trento also reports that Sadat's vice president Hosni Mubarak had been on the CIA payroll in the late 70s, and that he had been having his palms greased by a weapons delivery company called EATSCO — a CIA front/side company run by the notorious Edwin P. Wilson. According to Trento, Anwar Sadat had, by 1980, started an investigation into Mubarak's corrupt involvement with EATSCO. Both the CIA and Mubarak had motives to have Sadat dead. The CIA of course, having the contract to protect Sadat, possessed the means, at least to leave a critical security door open. As a "master spy" who spoke four languages, as an officer in the very unit that assassinated Sadat, and as someone who at the very time of Sadat's assassination in 1981 had been part of a U.S.-Egypt officer exchange program to Fort Bragg (the seat of U.S. Special Forces), it is not a stretch to infer that Ali Mohamed had been among CIA station chief Buckley's "vast array of spies within Sadat's Regime". Mohamed's (apparent) extremist leanings, and his status as an officer raise the possibility that he knew about the assassination plot while also being a "liason" to the CIA.
End Part I
http://911truth.org/article.php?story=20070106133625637
by Michael Richardson
1/7/2006
Most of the journalistic foundation for the 9/11 truth movement is a vast mosaic of articles, each containing one or more significant fragments, and most have been written by journalists who had no particular dedication or greater awareness of 9/11. Those who have written in depth about 9/11 have used this mosaic (and of course have been aided considerably by resources like Paul Thompson's Complete 9/11 Timeline), but few actually do on-the-ground journalism. Peter Lance is one of the few investigative journalists who has dedicated himself to the historical thicket of 9/11. In addition to using the mosaic, he travels to interview people, develops contacts inside the key agencies, gets his hands on damning FBI 302 documents, and bothers people who deserve to be bothered. For the last four years, he has obsessed on 9/11 and many of its deep-political tendrils, producing the equivalent of dozens of rich, original articles.
Lance's implied theory of 9/11 — that the 9/11 hijacking plot basically slipped past the greasy fingers of a corrupt and egotistical DOJ/FBI — no doubt irritates many in the movement for truth about 9/11 for whom the "inside job" theory is creed, yet he has unearthed some of the most important gems in the struggle to bring real truth and justice to 9/11. Most importantly, he has shown how the efforts of the Southern New York division of the Justice Department, since the early 90s, have been half-baked, ridiculously negligent, and at times blantantly criminal. His work has been instrumental in fleshing out the continuum between the New York cell of the Blind Sheikh (proto-al Qaeda) in the early 1990s and the crimes of September 11, 2001, tracking the FBI all along in its failures and refusals to expose, arrest, and convict. In Triple Cross, a whole chapter is given to a New Jersey check cashing store which, had the FBI used common sense and monitored the place once they knew, early on, that it was a hub of al Qaeda activity, they probably would have snuffed out the 9/11 plot before Clinton had left office. Lance has also definitively fingered Dietrich Snell as the 9/11 Commission staff member who forged the Commission's official timeline into a deception by claiming that the 9/11 plot was conceived in 1998 — two years after Snell's DOJ office had known of a planes-as-missiles plot from interrogations of Abdul Hakim Murad.
Ali Mohamed is a neglected rosetta stone for understanding al Qaeda, and with Triple Cross, Lance has created the most expansive and detailed account of this "master spy" to date. He also shows how Mohamed's U.S. exploits were interwoven with key people and events covered in Lance's two previous books (1000 Years for Revenge and Cover Up), as Mohamed had trained the Blind Sheikh's followers in New York in the early 1990s during the time Mohamed was stationed at Fort Bragg. The re-telling of earlier narratives makes this book Lance's definitive oeuvre on 9/11, but Triple Cross still reads like a new book; first because most of us would need a refresher on the sprawling material, but also because Lance has unearthed quite a few more fascinating nuggets. For example, he further solidifies the case that Ramzi Yousef, from his New York jail cell in 1996, orchestrated the timed bombing of TWA Flight 800. After the publication of his last book, Sibel Edmonds put him in touch with a "recently retired NSA staffer" who saw a translation of an NSA intercept originally spoken in Baluchi (Yousef's native tongue) which read, "Flight 800 . . . what had to be done has been done." This intercept had also been mysteriously, temporarily removed from the normal translation stream long enough to exclude it from the FBI's Flight 800 investigation.
Ali Mohamed was involved with most of the major al Qaeda attacks against U.S. interests: the assassination of Rabbi Meier Kahane in 1990, the 1993 WTC bombing, the African Embassy bombings in 1998 and, even though he was arrested in late 1998, Lance proposes that he also helped train some of the 9/11 hijackers in hijacking techniques. Astoundingly, Mohamed participated in these operations while also being a U.S. citizen, being enlisted in the U.S. military (serving at Fort Bragg on two occasions), and being an FBI informant in California. Importantly (and much more on this below), he also had ties to the CIA. Lance shows Mohamed moving snake-like between U.S. agencies and military postings, often flaunting his activities with al Qaeda at a time when the FBI certainly knew what this meant. Importantly, in the early 90s, Mohamed was debriefed about Bin Laden and al Qaeda by FBI and NSA counter-terrorism officers, but all records of this interview — which would prove that the government was aware of Bin Laden's anti-U.S. intentions years earlier than it has claimed — have been "lost."
Lance has a serious, longstanding bone to pick with the Southern New York division of the DoJ and the FBI, and has followed them for years, tracking their mindboggling misjudgments and fits of corruption. Patrick Fitzgerald was in charge of bringing bin Laden to justice prior to 9/11, and while he convicted some members of al Qaeda, he also botched the tracking of the remnants of al Qaeda after 2000, and allowed Ali Mohamed to plea bargain his way to, it seems, eventual release.
The title-concept of the book, "Triple Cross," is for Lance mainly hyperbole, a kind of mega-double-crossing, a masterful fleecing and betrayal of U.S. agencies, for Lance views Mohamed as, at his core, an al Qaeda spy who was fundamentally allied to Ayman al Zawahiri and al Qaeda, even as he was a U.S. citizen and served in the U.S. Army. As Lance tells it, Mohamed basically tied together the shoelaces of the U.S. team as it also struggled with information walls, corrupt agents, and bureaucratic in-fighting. The characterization of Ali Mohamed as a triple spy or triple agent (as opposed to a double agent) is also for Lance hyperbole, because he describes Mohamed as a connection between two major parties — the U.S. and al Qaeda. Yet there are clues in Triple Cross that "triple agent" could be more literal. Mohamed as "triple agent" makes more sense when one considers whether Mohamed's role with the CIA was at odds with the basic missions of the U.S. military and the FBI.
Lance's principal FBI source, Jack Cloonan, relays a story told to him by someone at CIA: In 1984, Mohamed "walked into the CIA station in Cairo" to volunteer as an asset, and was assigned to penetrate a Hamburg, Germany mosque. Mohamed then, according to this story, "gave up the operation," and was supposedly, thereafter, dropped or "spurned" by the CIA. (A very similar story is also told by Lawrence Wright in The Looming Tower, but is unattributed.) But there is reason to doubt this story because, in 1985, according to one press account Lance cites, Ali's ability to travel freely into the U.S. "was the result of an action initiated by Langley". (Wright describes this as a "visa waiver program" — making it sound more routine.) Lance also speculates that the CIA "may have run interference for Ali as he sought entry to the United States and a position of influence at Fort Bragg." The CIA was apparently using Mohamed, along with the rest of the nascent al Qaeda network, as an asset in the fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Lance asks: "Did Ali Mohamed . . . maintain his ties to the CIA? Did he get a leg up with his visa and help slipping past the watch list?"
Lance's questions about Mohamed's ties to the CIA end rather precipitously here, though he does reveal a clear pattern of support coming from the CIA (or, one could theorize, the DIA). He quotes a Boston Globe story from 1995, that "Ali's 1985 entry into the United States 'was the result of an action initiated by Langley'." A California associate of Mohamed is quoted as saying, "Everyone in the community knew he was working as a liaison between the CIA and the Afghan cause." But Lance's references to CIA are only an implicit raising of questions. Clearly, other questions need to be asked more explicitly: What was Mohamed's relationship to the CIA? What allegiances, obligations, and benefits would have resulted from such ties? What would the implications have been of "maintaining" such ties and allegiances until 1998 when Mohamed played a key role in the African embassy bombings? Lance applies none of his normal investigative zeal to Mohamed's CIA role, and this makes for a serious black hole in Triple Cross.
Importantly, Ali Mohamed may have worked for the CIA before 1984, when he was still an officer in the Egyptian army. On the first page of Triple Cross, Lance describes a crestfallen Mohamed speaking before a federal judge in 2000: "In short but deliberate sentences, Mohamed peeled back the top layer of the secret life he'd led since 1981, when radical members of his Egyptian army unit gunned down Nobel Prize winner Anwar Sadat." Later, Lance describes how, during the actual assassination, Mohamed had been at Fort Bragg (in North Carolina) on an officer exchange program, and that this had "shielded him from the Sadat murder indictment." This involvement with the Sadat assassination is an important piece of the puzzle because, according to other sources, the CIA was to some degree responsible for Sadat's killing. Joseph Trento, in his 2005 book, "Prelude to Terror," interviewed former high-ranking CIA agents about this period in Egypt, and one of Trento's fragments puts a new lens over Ali Mohamed. Trento describes how protecting Sadat had actually been a task assigned to the CIA:
Orchestrating much of what was going on in Egypt was a CIA agent named William Buckley . . . Operating out of Cairo Station, Buckley supervised a vast array of spies within Sadat's regime. In 1980, Buckley was put in charge of training Sadat's personal bodyguards after the CIA took over the contract from J.J. Cappucci and Associates....
Neil Livingstone, who by this time was involved in J.J. Cappucci, described the operation. "We did the training of Sadat's praetorian guard to protect Sadat. And then the contract was taken away from us and [given] back to the Agency, and he got killed. We never would have permitted the kind of security that was evident at the time Sadat was killed," Livingstone said. 1
Trento also reports that Sadat's vice president Hosni Mubarak had been on the CIA payroll in the late 70s, and that he had been having his palms greased by a weapons delivery company called EATSCO — a CIA front/side company run by the notorious Edwin P. Wilson. According to Trento, Anwar Sadat had, by 1980, started an investigation into Mubarak's corrupt involvement with EATSCO. Both the CIA and Mubarak had motives to have Sadat dead. The CIA of course, having the contract to protect Sadat, possessed the means, at least to leave a critical security door open. As a "master spy" who spoke four languages, as an officer in the very unit that assassinated Sadat, and as someone who at the very time of Sadat's assassination in 1981 had been part of a U.S.-Egypt officer exchange program to Fort Bragg (the seat of U.S. Special Forces), it is not a stretch to infer that Ali Mohamed had been among CIA station chief Buckley's "vast array of spies within Sadat's Regime". Mohamed's (apparent) extremist leanings, and his status as an officer raise the possibility that he knew about the assassination plot while also being a "liason" to the CIA.
End Part I