MB Civic

http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/29/1438234

Peter Lance is a great reporter, dots the “i’s”, crosses the “t’s” … He’s not coming out and saying it but I think this book is trying to poke holes in the whole “War on Terrorism” meme. That the whole Al Qaeda story is just a myth cooked up by the FBI/CIA out of anti American sentiment in the Middle East in order to set up justifications to go to war if and when needed. Similar to the communist threat as justification to intervene in various 3rd world countries in the Cold War. Imperialism masked as anti-totalitarian/patriotic ideology.

Here’s key parts of what Lance has to say …

…Right after 9/11, when I began, really “How did this happen?” and “Could it happen again?” were my two questions. So, what I did was, I read all 40,000 pages of the Southern District [FBI] cases. I read every book on the subject, 10,000 articles. You know, Paul Thompson has — I’ve worked closely with Paul Thompson of cooperativeresearch.org and basically, you know, began developing sources inside and outside of the bureau. And one day, I woke up — after the first book, I showed tremendous negligence by the bureau, and then gross negligence, in my second book, to the point of suppression of some evidence. And I still couldn’t connect the dots. And one day, I woke up, and I went, “Ali Mohamed is the key.” I mentioned him briefly in my first two books. And there had been about a dozen articles on him, which I cite in the beginning of the book. New York Times had done pieces on him. But no one had ever looked at him in depth…

Ali Mohamed, Amy, on the other hand, was the principal — not only did he do the surveillance for the bombing in 1993, but bin Laden himself, according to Ali’s testimony, pointed to the pictures and said, “This is where I want the suicide truck bomb to go.” Five years later, that’s exactly where the bomb in Nairobi went off. Ali sustained the cell. He interacted regularly with Wadi al-Hajj, and yet he’s also an FBI informant on the West Coast from 1992.

Lance ties Patrick Fitzgerald, who was the FBI’s main lawyer assigned to catch Bin Laden, to Ali Mohamed…

[Fitzgerald] became famous on the African embassy bombing case, which was called US v. Bin Laden in February of ’01. But he ended up convicting one primary player, Wadi al-Hajj…Ali Mohamed, Amy, on the other hand, was the principal — not only did he do the surveillance for the bombing in 1993, but bin Laden himself, according to Ali’s testimony, pointed to the pictures and said, “This is where I want the suicide truck bomb to go.” Five years later, that’s exactly where the bomb in Nairobi went off. Ali sustained the cell. He interacted regularly with Wadi al-Hajj, and yet he’s also an FBI informant on the West Coast from 1992. Amy, this man trained the original World Trade Center bombing cell. He trained the —

AMY GOODMAN: You mean in 1993.

PETER LANCE: In 1993. The cell that worked with Ramzi Yousef to do the first World Trade Center bombing. He trained El Sayyid Nosair, the Egyptian who murdered Rabbi Meir Kahane in 1990. In fact, he stayed at his house. He used to come up weekends from Fort Bragg, and he would bring top-secret — I have like 30 pages of heretofore classified documents in the book. And he would bring these top-secret memos from Fort Bragg, and he’d give them to Nosair. They found them the night after the rabbi’s murder in Nosair’s apartment. And they also found two operatives, Abu Halima and Salameh, that night. They arrested them. And these men were photographed, along with Nosair, in Calverton, Long Island in 1989. Now, this was when Bush 41 is in the White House.

The New York office of the FBI… they followed a group of men — MEs, they called them, for Middle Eastern men — and they followed them, Amy, from the Al Farooq Mosque on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn out to the shooting range, where they’re firing automatic weapons in the middle of the summer. And of the men photographed by the FBI when Bush 41 was in the White House, three were later convicted in the Trade Center bombing. One, Nosair, was convicted both initially for the gun charges and the rabbi’s death, and eventually Patrick Fitzgerald and Andrew McCarthy convicted him in what was called the “Day of Terror” plot, the bridge and tunnel plot.

So the FBI had Ali Mohamed’s cell on the radar in ’89. They had Ali himself working as an informant from 1992. And he is literally, as you pointed out — he moved the entire al-Qaeda leadership from Afghanistan to Sudan. He set up the al-Qaeda training camps. He trained bin Laden’s personal body guard, lived in bin Laden’s house and, as I said, was the primary player behind the African embassy bombings.

I prove in this book — and I challenge Patrick Fitzgerald who refused to talk to me, but I challenge him to show me where they could not have prevented the African embassy bombings. Squad I-49, this elite squad of FBI units, which he was effectively directing, had a wiretap on the home in Kenya of Wadi al-Hajj. They searched Wadi al-Hajj’s house, Amy, in August of ’97 in Kenya. They found Ali Mohamed’s phone number and contact information in Sacramento.

Patrick Fitzgerald himself had a meeting with Ali Mohamed, face to face, in Sacramento in October, at which point Ali said to him — and by the way, at this point Ali Mohamed is a naturalized US citizen, an Army veteran getting a pension, you know, from the US Army — he said to Patrick Fitzgerald across the table, “I love bin Laden. I do not need a fatwa to attack America. I have a number of sleepers who I can make operational like that. And I could just” —

AMY GOODMAN: And this, you have from what, this information?

PETER LANCE: From Jack Cloonan, the principal agent who was at the meeting. He was the principal agent — one of the two or three principal agents in Squad I-49, was at the meeting. So it’s, you know, from the mouth of the agent who was there. And after the meeting, Patrick Fitzgerald turned to Cloonan and said, “That is the most dangerous man I have ever met. We cannot leave him on the street.” And yet, they did, Amy, for ten more months, only to have the bombs go off.

Instead of saying that it was a Gov’t conspiracy, Lance takes the “negligence” tack and calls for more investigation…

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think needs to happen now?

PETER LANCE: What I think needs to happen is there needs to be a real investigation of 9/11, not staffed by alumni of the very agencies that, you know, were asleep at the switch in the years leading up to 9/11. It should be staffed by American citizens, journalists, scholars, widows, the Jersey girls should be on it. It should be fully funded, and it should have subpoena power…

So rather than jump on the 911 Truth bandwagon, it looks like Democracy Now, with help from journalists like Lance, is taking a back-door approach. Highly recommend reading the whole interview at http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/11/29/1438234
– MAB