Another 9/11 Coverup in the Making?
By Rory O'Connor, AlterNet. Posted August 23, 2006.
>>>>>snip
The latest wrinkle is a nasty public spat between the National Geographic Channel, which plans to broadcast "Triple Cross: Bin Laden's Spy in America" on Aug. 28, and author Peter Lance, whose new book forms the basis of the documentary.
Lance is an Emmy-winning former reporter-producer for ABC News. His book, "Triple Cross," which will be released in September, accuses law enforcement officials of negligence in tracking down Ali Mohamed, an alleged al-Qaeda agent in the United States for years before Sept. 11. The book says Mohamed was hired by the CIA and worked for the FBI, all the while providing information to the terrorists. The book also contains, according to Lance, "a major new insight" into why the Pentagon killed the Able Danger operation in April 2000.
It involves the discovery by Able Danger operatives that Ali Mohamed was a member of Osama bin Laden's inner circle. Mohamed turned up in FBI surveillance photos as early as 1989, training radical Muslims who would go on to assassinate Jewish militant Meir Kahane and detonate a truck bomb at the World Trade Center. He not only avoided arrest, but managed to become an FBI informant while smuggling bin Laden in and out of Afghanistan, writing most of the al-Qaeda terrorist manual and helping plan attacks on American troops in Somalia and U.S. embassies in Africa. Finally arrested in 1998, Mohamed cut a deal with the Justice Department, and his whereabouts remain shrouded, unknown.
''The FBI allowed the chief spy for al-Qaeda to operate right under their noses,'' Lance said. ''They let him plan the bombings of the embassies in Africa right under their noses. Two hundred twenty-four people were killed and more than 4,000 wounded because of their negligence."
Lance contends that when Pentagon officials realized how embarrassing it would be if it were revealed that bin Laden's spy had stolen top-secret intelligence (including the positions of all Green Beret and SEAL units worldwide), they decided to bury the entire Able Danger program. Lance further states that his book also contains evidence that Patrick Fitzgerald (of later Scooter Libby/Valerie Plame fame) covered up key al-Qaeda intelligence in 1996, when he was then an assistant U.S. attorney in New York. To Lance, Fitzgerald was "one of the principal players in the government's negligence, who engaged in an affirmative coverup of key al-Qaeda-related intelligence in 1996."
Lance believes "Fitzgerald was hopelessly outgunned by Mohamed, a hardened al-Qaeda spy, who was bin Laden's personal security advisor." Despite two face-to-face meetings with Mohamed, whom Fitzgerald called "the most dangerous man I've ever met," he left him on the street, which allowed Mohamed -- who actually planned the surveillance for the African Embassy bombings -- to help pull off that simultaneous act of terror in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7, 1998, in which 224 died and more than 4,000 were injured.
There is also a chilling tie-in in the book to the airliner-bombing plot revealed last week by the British intelligence. Much of the key intelligence that Fitzgerald helped to bury in 1996 was directly related to the Bojinka plot, a scheme by original WTC bomber and 9/11 architect Ramzi Yousef to smuggle small improvised explosive devices aboard up to a dozen U.S. bound jumbo jets exiting Asia.
The revelations, says Lance, proved "too hot to handle" for the National Geographic Channel, which is two-thirds owned by Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp (which also owns Lance's publisher, HarperCollins). "The Feds have gotten to them, there is no doubt," Lance told me in an interview. "National Geographic has abandoned the truth and acquiesced to pressure from the government."
Television critic Glenn Garvin first reported the flap in a Miami Herald piece that characterized Lance's reaction to the program as a "watered-down whitewash" that was "like doing 'Schindler's List' from Hitler's perspective.''>>>>>>snip
"The second lie is that the documentary 'was never supposed to be based solely' on my book," says Lance. "The truth is that from the beginning Nat Geo hired me to do a documentary exclusively based on my work. This was my show from start to finish. But now we're at a point where a major cable network, reporting on an issue of national importance, is backtracking on proof of how the FBI folded on the road to 9/11. What's worse, in a few days this documentary will air with my name on it!" Lance concludes, "This is a ridiculous lie, since they've cut me out of the process and rolled over in favor of the feds.">>>>snip
http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/40693/
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