WWW.911TRUTH.ORG CALLS PETER LANCE'S WORK "A KEY TO THE 911 TRUTH MOVEMENT"
http://www.peterlance.com/
CONTACT PETER LANCE:
pl@cinema21group.com
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How to Smuggle Explosives into an Airplane
http://www.peterlance.com/howto.htm
FBI#302's ...these will blow you away....!
http://www.peterlance.com/
EXAMPLE: FBI MEMO 3/7/96
http://www.peterlance.com/3796p1.htm
Cover Up
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | January 27, 2005
Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Peter Lance, a five-time Emmy-winning investigative reporter and author of the bestselling 1000 Years for Revenge: International Terrorism and the FBI -- The Untold Story. He is the author of the new book Cover Up: What the Government Is Still Hiding About the War on Terror.
FP: Mr. Lance, welcome to Frontpage Interview
Lance: Great to be talking with you.
FP: What motivated you to write this book?
Lance: Cover Up began as an effort to answer the two big unanswered questions left after I had finished 1000 Years of Revenge. To get an overview of my findings in that book, your readers can sample the 32 page illustrated Timeline from 1000 YEARS at my website under “Terrorism.”
Like the book, the Timeline goes back 12 years to 1989 and traces al Qaeda's treacherous development of the 9/11 plot, focusing primarily on the how the New York office of the FBI (NYO) the Osama bin Laden "office of origin," failed repeatedly to interdict the plot.
The two big questions, which I sought to answer at the end of that book were:
1) Why did the U.S. Justice Department ignore probative evidence from the Philippines National Police (PNP) in 1995 that Ramzi Yousef, the original World Trade Center bomber, had conspired with his uncle Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM) as early as 1994 to set in motion the plot that culminated on 9/11?
In the spring of 1995, Col. Rodolfo B. Mendoza, a leading PNP investigator who had interrogated Yousef's lifelong friend and co-conspirator, Abdul Hakim Murad, gave the U.S. Embassy in Manila evidence that Yousef and KSM already had chosen had six targets: the WTC, The Pentagon, CIA HQ at Langley, VA, The Sears Tower in Chicago, the Transamerica Tower in San Francisco and an unnamed nuclear facility.
Col. Mendoza also had evidence that up to 10 Islamic radicals were then training in U.S. flight schools. This was 1995.
I found FBI NO/FORN memos from that year proving that the Bureau had this intelligence, but they dropped the ball. I wanted to find out why.
It should be noted that the detailed intelligence from Col. Mendoza was for a plot involving the hijacking of airliners that was completely distinct from the Bojinka plot in which Yousef, KSM, Murad and a 4th conspirator, Wali Kahn Amin Shah, planned to plant Casio watch powered-nitroglycerine bomb triggers aboard up to a dozens U.S. jumbo jets exiting Asia with U.S. tourists.
That plot went way beyond the initial plane to hijack a small plane and fly it, laden with explosives, into CIA Headquarters, an early scenario which Murad had discussed with Col. Mendoza in the early days of his 67 day interrogation. Yousef had even undertaken a "west test" bombing of a Casio Nitro device which he planted under a seat in the 26th row of Philippine Airlines Flight #434 on the morning of December 11, 1994.
Planted on the first leg of a two-leg flights, Yousef got on board, pieced together the apparently innocuous components of the bomb and exited the flight after hiding it in the life jacket pouch below seat 26K. He mistakenly believed that the center wing fuel tank of the 747-100 began at the 26th row.
In fact that tank runs below the 17th to 25th rows. So Yousef was a few feet two short.
Nonetheless, after he exiting, while PAL #434 was heading toward Japan, his device exploded with such force that it blew a hole in the passenger floor and killed Haruki Ikegami, a 24 year old Japanese national in seat 26 K.
The heroic pilot was able to get the plane on the ground. But now Yousef knew that if he and his cohorts merely moved the devices FORWARD a few rows, the downward blast would ignite the fuel tanks, turning the jumbo jets into flying bombs. They intended to do this on up to 12 flights when they had a fire in their Manila bomb factory on the night of January 6th, 1995 and the Bojinka plot was foiled.
However, at the same time that they plotted Bojinka (and a third plot to kill the Pope who was to arrive in Manila in early January 1995) Yousef and KSM had well in motion the hijack-airliners-fly-them-into-buildings scenario that culminated on 9/11.
Col. Mendoza, who was the Richard Clarke of The Philippines, when it came to his knowledge of Islamic radicalism, was very clear with the U.S. government and warned our officials in in the spring of 1995 of that PRECISE plot which unfolded six years later.
The Justice Department seemingly failed to pursued this extraordinary warning and I wanted to know why.
2) The second question left unanswered, when I had finished my first book, was why did the FBI and Justice Dept. treat the hunt for KSM so differently than the public hunt for his nephew -- which had successfully brought Yousef to ground?
Yousef was arrested in early February, 1995 in a bin Laden controlled guesthouse in Islamabad, Pakistan after a tip to the U.S. State Department from an informant that Yousef had recruited. This young South African (Istaique Parker) wanted the $2 million reward being offered under a program called Rewards for Justice that was the brainchild of the late Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) agent Bradley Smith.
During the two years since Yousef had fled New York on the night of the first WTC attack (February 26th, 1993) he had been the object of a worldwide public manhunt. Newsweek ran stories with banner headlines like The World’s Most Wanted and the State Dept. even printed posters touting the $2 million reward on matchbook covers that they circulated by the thousands through the middle east.
Parker finally gave up Yousef, but the day he was arrested by DSS and DEA agents on February 7, 1995, I recounted in my first book, how an FBI agent got to the 20 room guesthouse late and blew a chance to grab Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was staying in a ground floor room.
In fact, KSM was so audacious that he gave an interview to Time magazine on the Yousef takedown using his own name "Khalid Shaikh." But by the time FBI agent Brad Garrett got there KSM was gone.
This didn't stop Garrett from participating in a 60 Minutes II story in the fall of 2001 in which he took false credit for the Yousef takedown.
Meanwhile, back in 1995, rather than doing a Wild West style worldwide search using the same rewards posters that had brought Yousef down, the Justice Dept. changed tack. For unknown reasons they indicted KSM along with Yousef in 1996 but kept the indictment sealed and his name from the press.
The first mention of KSM came on the inside "jump" page of a New York Times story in Janaury, 1998, on the day after Yousef was sentenced in the Southern District of New York for both the WTC and Bojinka plots. The story covering the sentencing had a cryptic reference to one "Khalad Shaikh" believed to be a relative of Yousef's.
By this time -- by all accounts -- KSM was well into executing the 9/11 plot.
The question was, why didn't the Justice Dept. and the FBI make his name public immediately in 1995 when they received evidence from Col. Mendoza that KSM had conspired with his nephew Ramzi to hijack airliners and fly them into buildings? Why seal the indictment and why not make KSM the subject of the same kind of public international dragnet that captured Yousef?
The Feds made a big deal out of grabbing the overweight, bug eyed KSM in March of 2003 in Pakistan, but by my reckoning they had blown at least two chances to grab him earlier before all those people died on 9/11 -- once in 1995 the day Yousef was caught and later in 1996 when the Feds learned KSM was in Doha, Qatar, and cooled their heels waiting while a Qatari official spirited him out of the country to the Czech Republic.
In any case, I got the answer to both of my questions as I was research book two: Cover Up.
FP: In Cover Up, you show that the government has covered up its own counter-terror failures. Tell us a bit about these.
Lance: The second half of Cover Up is a painstaking analysis of the 9/11 Commission and it's effective whitewash. I go into great detail with evidence of how
-the Commission was hopelessly skewed on both the right and the left;
-how the staff was riddled with conflicts of interest -- almost half of the staff members were alumni of the very intelligence agencies they were asked to judge;
-how both Democrats and Republicans, cherry picked evidence and limited the scope of the investigation to 1998 forward in order -- I believe -- to ignore the culpability of the FBI, CIA and other agencies for failing to stop Osama bin Laden's 12 year juggernaut;
-how, in effect, the fix was in on this Commission from day one -- there was an intentional decision to limit the damage across three presidential administrations and eliminate ANY accountability or blame for what I call the biggest intelligence failure since The Trojan Horse.
The second half of the book chronicles this whitewash and focuses particularly on Dietrich Dieter Snell, the former Asst. U.S. Attorney (AUSA) who co-prosecuted Yousef in the 1996 Bojinka case.
Snell, who could have answered both of the questions left over at the end of my first book, should have been a WITNESS before the 9/11 Commission, but instead they hired him as Senior Counsel and one of the Team Leaders.
It was Snell who took my "testimony" after I "testified" before the Commission on March 15th, 2004. When I showed up in the closed door conference room at 26 Federal Plaza (the same building that houses the FBI's NYO) Snell was accompanied by Marco Cordero, an FBI agent on loan to the Commission.
No stenographer was present, nor was there a recording device. Snell, merely pulled out a small notebook and started jotting down notes. I was warned ahead of time, by a source inside the Commission that more than 90% of the witness intake was anecdotal like this -- that the image of people like Condi Rice delivering sworn testimony in open session -- was more of an aberration.
Anyway, later in this interview you'll understand what it sham it was for somebody like Dieter Snell to take my "testimony." In my mind he was one of the fixers, hired early on to sanitize the Commission's final report.
FP: Briefly illuminate for us the story of terror mastermind Ramzi Yousef and TWA 800.
Lance: The first half of Cover Up is the most explosive. I present probative evidence that the crash of TWA #800 on July 17th, 1996 which killed 230 people, was an al Qaeda act of terror -- a bombing that was effectively the second biggest mass murder in U.S. history.
I prove this using the FBI's own documents: #302 memos, and, for the first time I shatter the FBI/NTSB K-9 theory -- the only explanation for the presence of high explosive residue in the wreckage absent a bomb.
I had eluded to this in 1000 Years of Revenge -- along with a chapter, by the way, which linked Ramzi Yousef and KSM via Terry Nichols to the Oklahoma City bombing.
This was long before Jayna Davis' intriguing book The Third Terrorist which was the object of one of your earlier interviews. She agrees with me on the Yousef-Nichols connection, but we disagree as to Yousef's paymaster. She suggests it was Iraq. I say OBL and furnish proof in the form of evidence showing that Yousef's Manila cell was financed directly by bin Laden via his Saudi brother in law Mohammed Jamal Khalifa.
However, in 2003, in neither case -- OKC or TWA #800 did I have the level of evidence I uncovered in the Spring of 2004. Much of it is in the pages of Cover Up or on my website under FBI #302's.
FP: Can you give us some of the specifics?
Lance: In the weeks prior to the downing of TWA 800 the FBI was alerted by Colombo crime family member Gregory Scarpa Jr. that Ramzi Yousef -- who was in a cell next to Scarpa Jr. at New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) -- was arranging to have his al Qaeda cohorts plant a bomb aboard a U.S. airliner. The reason? To provoke a mistrial in the Bojinka case, the first of two federal trials facing Yousef.
Yousef even shared with Scarpa the intricate details of his schematic of the same Casio-nitro bomb trigger device, he had placed aboard PAL #434 in December 1994.
Keep in mind that had the Bojinka plot been fufilled, up to a dozen U.S. jumbo jets would have had their center wing fuel tanks blown apart by Casio watch-nitroglycerine bomb triggers placed in the life jacket pouches of seats located over the tanks.
Yousef's only mistake with PAL #434 was in bomb placement, not bomb design.
Now, in the spring of 1996, weeks prior to Yousef’s trial for the Bojinka plot, the bomb maker began sending elaborate notes and bomb schematics to inmate Scarpa—who -- unknown to Yousef -- had begun working as an informant for the FBI, and passed them on to his Bureau contacts.
His original motivation was to get some downward release time on his sentence if convicted in the RICO trial he was facing.
Over the next 11 months from March, 1996 to February, 1997, Scarpa Jr. delivered dozens of copies or photographs of Yousef's notes which the FBI then summarized in their own internal #302 memos.
One note, in which Yousef told Scarpa Jr. that the high explosive RDX could be substituted for nitroglycerine was titled “How to Smuggle Explosives Into An Airplane.” Both the sketch and the note are reproduced in Cover Up and at peterlance.com under FBI #302s.
As proven by these heretofore secret #302 memos also reproduced in the book, Scarpa’s intelligence warned the Feds of Yousef’s impending bomb-on-board plot to effect a mistrial.
CLICK FOR FULL INTERVIEW:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=16795
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PETER LANCE BIOGRAPHY
Peter Lance is a five-time Emmy-winning investigative reporter now working as a screenwriter and novelist. With a Masters Degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a J.D. from Fordham University School of Law, Lance spent the first 15 years of his career as a print reporter and network correspondent.
He began his career as a reporter for his hometown paper, The Newport, R.I. Daily News. There he won the coveted Sevellon Brown Award from the A.P. Managing Editors Associa-tion. Lance next moved to WNET, the PBS flagship in New York, where he won an Emmy and the Ohio State Award as a producer- reporter for Channel 13's news magazine THE 51ST STATE.
Later, while working as a writer and producer for WABC-TV Lance won his second Emmy along with the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism prize for WILLOWBROOK: THE PEOPLE VS. THE STATE OF NEW YORK, an exposé on a notorious institution for the mentally retarded.
While getting his law degree, Lance worked as a Trial Preparation Assistant in the office of the District Attorney for New York County. Moving to ABC News as a field producer in 1978, Lance won yet another Emmy for his investigation of an arson-for-profit ring in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago.
In 1981 Lance became Investigative Correspondent for ABC News. Over the next five years he covered hundreds of stories worldwide for ABC NEWS 20/20, NIGHTLINE, and WORLD NEWS TONIGHT.
He was a member of the first American crew into Indochina after the end of the Vietnam War. He chased rebel insurgents through the Plaine Des Jarres in Laos and members of the Gambino Family through the toxic wastelands of New Jersey. He tracked knife-happy surgeons in the Deep South and nuclear terrorists through the twisted streets of Antwerp. Then, in 1987, he took a break from no
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