shawa
CNO
Joined: 03 Sep 2004
Posts: 2004
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 Posted: Wed Aug 30, 2006 4:42 pm Post subject: Able Danger: Nat. Geographic Channel’s Whitewash |
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I used to think that National Geographic was apolitical. But just like the 9/11 commission, they bowed to the political pressure.
IMO, Patrick Fitzgerald is a myopic idiot who is only adept at CYA. (to the peril of our security.)
ABLE DANGER BLOG
| Quote: | Tuesday, August 29, 2006
Official statement from Peter Lance
I watched the documentary last night, and you could tell they were trying to fill in for the missing interviews with Peter Lance. They did acknowledge it was based on his book, but only in a credit near the beginning which was on screen a few seconds. The documentary definitely had a pro-FBI slant, especially toward the three FBI agents who were interviewed and their good friend Patrick Fitzgerald. Here is a statement from Peter Lance in response to the show last night:
TRIPLE CROSS: Nat Geo Channel’s Whitewash of the Ali Mohamed Story
By Peter Lance
In the fall of 2005 I was approached by Jonathan Towers, producer of Inside 9/11, a four-hourdocumentary on the road to 9/11 in which I was one of 60 journalists and government officials interviewed. I told Towers that I was working on a new investigative book exposing FBI negligence in its nine year failure to stop Ali A. Mohamed, al Qaeda’s chief spy who infiltrated the Bureau, the CIA and the Green Berets at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
Towers immediately optioned my research and flew me to Washington where I presented TRIPLE CROSS, my new book to John Ford, programming president of the Nat Geo Channel.He bought the project in the room, declaring, “I don’t know how we can’t do a documentary.”
Over Christmas I wrote a 12 page ten-act treatment outlining the two key parts of the Ali Mohammed story: First, how he’d come to the U.S. in 1985, seduced a California woman intomarriage, enlisted in the U.S. Army and got himself assigned to the JFK Special Warfare Schooland Bragg. From there, as he stole top secret documents for his chief sponsor, al Qaeda’s No. 2 Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, Mohamed commuted to New York City on weekends where he trained key members of the first WTC bombing cell and the notorious “Day of Terror” cell responsible for a plot to blow up the U.N. and the bridges and tunnels into Manhattan.
In 1991 Mohamed moved bin Laden and 100’s of al Qaeda terrorists from Afghanistan to Sudan, set up al Qaeda’s training camps in Khartoum and literally wrote al Qaeda manual ofterror. In 1993 he trained members of the al Qaeda contingent that downed two U.S.Blackhawk helicopters in Somalia, brokered a meeting between bin Laden and the head of Hezbollah and personally took the pictures of the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi that Osama binLaden himself used to target the suicide truck bombs that killed 224 in Kenya in 1998.
That part of my research was presented in the Nat Geo documentary that aired on Monday.
But that was only half of my story. The other half was the astonishing saga of how the two bin Laden “offices of origin” -- the FBI’s New York Office (NYO) and the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the SDNY, allowed Mohamed to operate with impunity for years. How key special agents in the bin Laden Squad (I-49) like Jack Cloonan desperately played catch-up as Mohamed planned the Embassy bombings. How John Zent, Ali’s west coast control agent was totally outgunned by him, getting caught up as a material witness in a grisly triple homicide in Fresno in 1992 when he should have been riding herd over the al Qaeda sleeper. How it was Zent who vouched for Ali and got him released from Canadian custody in 1993 – allowing him the freedom to help plan the Blackhawk Down operation and the Embassy bombing plot.
My most astonishing, findings involved Patrick Fitzgerald, the former head of OrganizedCrime and Terrorism in the SDNY, who had allowed Ali to remain free as early as 1994 eventhough he named him as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Day of Terror. Another of my key findings was that Fitzgerald buried probative evidence of an al Qaeda New York cell in 1996.
Beginning in January 1996 Fitzgerald effectively ran Squad I-49, but I learned that despitewiretaps on the key cell members and hard evidence in 1997 that Ali Mohamed (an FBIinformant) was a major player in the Embassy bombing plot – he allowed him to remain free.
Most shocking were two face to face meetings Fitzgerald had with Mohamed in 1997. After the first meeting in April “Fitzie,” as Cloonan called him, declared Ali “the most dangerousman” he’d “ever met” and announced that “we cannot let this man out on the street.”
But Fitzgerald did, even though in October of 1997 Ali told him that he loved bin Laden and didn’t need a fatwa to declare war against the U.S. where he’d become a naturalized citizen. Fitzgerald had convicted blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and 9 others for seditious conspiracy two years earlier, yet he permitted Mohamed to operate in the open and didn’tarrest him until after the simultaneous truck bombings in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7th, 1998 which followed Ali Mohamed’s 1993 surveillance with surgical precision.
Fitzgerald and Cloonan then took more than 18 months to get a plea bargain out ofMohamed, who never truly betrayed al Qaeda. They kept him in Manhattan Federal jail for 9 months on a John Doe warrant for fear the media would get wind of their negligence and actually prevented him from testifying in the Embassy bombing trial in 2001 because of the embarrassment that cross-examination of Mohamed would cause the Bureau and the Justice Department who had allowed bin Laden’s top spy to work as an FBI informant.
Worse, while they had Ali in custody for three years, Fitzgerald and Cloonan failed to extract the 9/11 plot from him, even though they knew that the plot had commenced in 1994 in Manila, almost four years before Ali’s capture and as the man who had lived with bin Laden and personally trained his security detail, Mohamed knew every twist and turn of it........
~SNIP~
Further, as I report in TRIPLE CROSS (the book) Dietrich Snell, a key SDNY prosecutor who served with Fitzgerald, covered up crucial evidence of FBI negligence before the 9/11 Commission and flushed key links between al Qaeda and the New York cell of blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman turned-up by the Army’s Operation Able Danger in the year 2000.
Tonight’s documentary gave lip service to the tragic Ali Mohamed story but failed to provide a single word of critical analysis to help viewers understand what a disservice Feds like Cloonan and Fitzgerald did to this country in causing citizens to rely on the FBI and Justice Department to protect them, while they were continually outgunned by bin Laden’s #1 spy.
When my book comes out I’ll connect those dots and set the record straight. But for those viewers who thought that they got the truth on Ali Mohamed from the Nat Geo Channel, I can assure them, as the principal investigative reporter to uncover his story, they got a whitewash. |
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“I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.” (Thomas Paine, 1776) |
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