Attempted Censorship by U.S. Attorney (Patrick Fitzgerald)

On June 16, the paperback edition of Triple Cross: How Bin Laden’s Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets and the FBI by Peter Lance will be released by HarperCollins.

This is happening despite a prominent U.S. Attorney’s best efforts to stop it.

Since this book was first published in hardcover in 2006, Patrick Fitzgerald, US Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois in Chicago (the same Patrick Fitzgerald of the Valerie Plame investigation) has repeatedly attempted to have the publisher bury the book, and to prevent publication of the paperback edition.

Lance, who is a five-time Emmy-winning investigative reporter with other books on terrorism under his belt, spent four years compiling “evidence that the best and the brightest in the two bin Laden offices of origin…had committed multiple acts of negligence in the 12 years leading up to 9/11 in their failure to stop the al Qaeda cell, trained by Ali Mohamed.”

U.S. Attorney Fitzgerald sent three threatening letters to the publisher charging libel, and held up the publication of the paperback edition for 18 months. [Just yesterday Fitzgerald sent an additional letter to HarperCollins, threatening to sue; things are heating up.]

Initially, HarperCollins did not react to the threats, calling the book “an important work of investigative journalism,” but when Fitzgerald continued to protest, using U.S. Attorney Chicago letterhead, the publisher decided to re-vet the entire book, which took a year.

When finished, only a couple of inconsequential sentences were rewritten or corrected, leaving the essential arguments, evidence and documentation completely intact.

This is an instance of a publisher standing up to one of the most powerful government officials in the U.S., but it is also an example of the chilling effect of censorship attempts, because for over a year Lance could do no other work than re-vetting every sentence of his book.

Not a great situation for any author but perhaps the most responsible action by HCP in this case because now the situation is clear: though Fitzgerald’s name no longer appears in the title, Lance’s book remains intact and contains some new material, including a section on Fitzgerald’s attempts to kill the book.

I’ve been in communication with this author, and I really believe his is a book and an issue to watch.

Until this new edition of Triple Cross hits the stands on June 16, it is still in jeopardy. The first edition of Triple Cross received no major reviews, and most likely you do not have a copy in your library.

Please read about it on Lance’s website and order it to make sure your library users have access to this information: ISBN 978-0-06-118941-8.

Whether or not you are totally convinced by the arguments in this book (meticulously researched material, definitely NOT conspiracy theories) what is important is that Triple Cross holds high level government officials accountable for negligence in their dealings with known terrorist operatives during the period leading up to the 9/11 attacks.

It is unacceptable that this particular high-level government official has acted so aggressively to stop a book because it is critical of him – this must be the case, since nothing libelous was written. If anything, we need more genuine investigative journalism and discussion of this kind.

For me, as someone who fought, along with many of you in ALA and other organizations, against the USA PATRIOT Act, illegal surveillance, torture policies, and other violations of civil liberties that have been foisted upon us in the name of the “War on Terror,” Triple Cross is important because it makes a clear and compelling case that official negligence, misplaced priorities, turf wars, and arrogance – not lack of the appropriate laws and methods to fight terrorism – contributed greatly to the debacles that have since befallen the American and, indeed, the people of the world.

And not one person high in the chain of command has been held accountable for any of it! So (1) tell HarperCollins you appreciate them standing behind this book and (2) please purchase it for your library. Don’t let it be buried. Let it lead to more public examination and discussion of ongoing U.S. policies and priorities.

Peter Lance will be holding a press conference to detail the attempted book-banning on June 16th in the John Peter Zenger Room of The National Press Club.

You can learn more about Triple Cross and get updates on Lance’s anti-censorship campaign at

If you want more information about how Lance’s critical coverage of Fitzgerald might have led to Fitzgerald’s attempts to bury the book, you can read his attached article, “The Chilling Effect.”

THE CHILLING EFFECT

By Peter Lance http://www.peterlance.com

In 2002 I drove away from a dangerous town in the Northern Philippines with a packet of classified intelligence proving that the al Qaeda bomb maker who exploded a 1,500- pound urea-nitrate device below the World Trade Center in 1993 was the same terrorist who’d set the 9/11 plot in motion two years later in Manila.

Four years to the month after I’d left my clandestine meeting with an official of the Philippines National Police, I stood among a group of reporters outside Supreme Court in Brooklyn as a phalanx of angry ex-FBI agents surrounded the man once known in The Bureau as Mr. Organized Crime.

Swatting back the press like a mob of angry soccer hooligans after a losing match, they were protecting R. Lindley DeVecchio, an exsupervisory special agent who’d just been indicted on four counts of murder.

I had covered DeVecchio in my book Cover Up, which the Brooklyn D.A. had referred to as “the springboard” for their investigation. As the perp walk moved down Jay Street, the defendant -- just released on $1 million bail -- shot me a predatory look.

At that point, I was writing a new book connecting the dots on the tangled story of how al Qaeda met the mob and it soon put me in the crosshairs of the ex-agent’s defense team.

Not only did I get subpoenaed and faced jail if I didn’t cough up my confidential sources, but after the book was published, the most powerful Federal prosecutor in the country demanded that it be killed.

I’d become the latest target of Patrick Fitzgerald, the Chicago U.S. Attorney the Washington Post had called a “relentless prosecutor.”

Somehow I’d peeled back the layers on some dark spots in his otherwise stellar resumé and Fitzgerald, described by a former colleague at Justice as “Elliot Ness with a Harvard degree and a sense of humor” was not amused.

The man who jailed billionaire Conrad Black and indicted Gov. Rod Blagojevich has enjoyed an almost unblemished reputation for honesty and integrity, but he’s also used his power to intimidate the media in ways not seen since the McCarthy era.

The story of how he came gunning for me, sheds new light on his position as uber prosecutor and rips the covers off a series of mistakes he made in the years leading up to 9/11.

The evidence I unearthed stems from Fitzgerald’s tenure in the mid 1990’s as cohead of the Organized Crime-Terrorism Unit in the Southern District, the flagship U.S.

Attorney’s Office in New York that turned out stars like Rudolph Guiliani and ex-FBI Director Louis Freeh. In 1995 after President Clinton issued Decision Directive 39, a secret order targeting Islamic terrorism, Fitzgerald was tasked to direct I-49, the elite “bin Laden” squad in the FBI’s New York Office. It would be a career-making position for Fitzgerald, the son of an Irish immigrant doorman.

In years to come he emerged as the Department of Justice’s leading bin Laden authority. In a February 2006 Vanity Fair profile he was described as a “crusader,” with “scary smart intelligence,” and “a mainframe computer brain.”

2 The lead prosecutor in United States v. bin Laden, the African Embassy bombing case in 2001, Fitzgerald was rewarded for his indictment of the Saudi billionaire with an appointment as U.S. attorney in Chicago, a city infamous for political corruption. In short order Fitzie, as his friends call him, amassed what a local reporter called “a remarkable string of courtroom victories,” convicting a host of dirty pols and white collar criminals from Democratic Gov. George Ryan to Tony Rezko, an early benefactor of Barack Obama.

If that wasn’t enough to keep him busy, in December 2003 Fitzgerald was tapped to become Special Counsel in the Valerie Plame CIA leak investigation. It would be his job to determine whether presidential aide Karl Rove or Vice President Dick Cheney had outed former CIA operative Valerie Plame in an effort to punish her husband, for alleging that the Bush White House had used false intelligence to justify the invasion of Iraq.

Suddenly, Fitzgerald had become a hero for the left, with Bush critics certain that the dogged prosecutor with the altar boy image would take the leak probe all the way to the V.P. People magazine even tabbed him as one of the “Sexiest Men Alive.”

Then, after 27 months and a multi-million dollar investigation, Fitzgerald succeeded in convicting only a second-tier player of perjury and obstruction.

Lewis “Scooter” Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff, got a thirty-month sentence. But it was later commuted by President Bush, allowing Libby to escape jail. In fact, the only person who got locked up, was Judith Miller, the New York Times reporter who served 85 days for contempt after Fitzgerald demanded she turn over her confidential sources.

“Despite his reputation as a tough-minded prosecutor, Fitzgerald failed to go after the big fish,” said Jason Leopold, the ex-Dow Jones L.A. Bureau Chief who covered Plamegate. Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen termed it “a train wreck - mile after mile of shame, infamy, embarrassment and occasional farce.”

The jailing of Miller seemed particularly draconian when it was later discovered that virtually from the start, Fitzgerald had known the I.D. of the actual leaker: Richard Armitage, a Bush Deputy Secretary of State.

The Wall Street Journal called Fitzie “a loose cannon.” Even progressive columnists worried about his invasive tactics. “Let’s remember that you and I still don’t know exactly why Miller was ordered by the court to go to jail,” wrote Carol Marin of Chicago Sun-Times. “That’s because the written opinion of the U.S. Court of Appeals... contains six blank pages... the information redacted at the request of U.S. Attorney Fitzgerald...

That level of secrecy in a court ruling has stunned constitutional lawyers.”

In December 2008 Fitzgerald came under fire for telling a media circus that the charges against Blagojevich “would make Lincoln roll over in his grave.”

All incoming administrations have the right to replace any of the 93 U.S. Attorneys nationwide but who in the Obama administration would risk removing him after Blago subpoenaed White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Senior Advisor Valerie Jarrett?

Like his Chicago predecessor Elliot Ness, Patrick Fitzgerald had established himself as almost untouchable.

Given that kind of power, you can imagine how I felt in October of 2007 when I got a call from Mark Jackson, general counsel for my publisher HarperCollins. He read me a letter he’d just received from Patrick Fitzgerald himself:

“I write to demand that Harper Collins cease publication, distribution and sale of the current version of (Triple Cross); issue and publish a clear and unequivocal statement acknowledging that the book contains false statements about me; refrain from publication of any updated version [and] take no steps to transfer the rights to any other person or entity to publish the book in any form.”

~~~~

Rest here:

http://www.libraryjuicepress.com/docs/lancestory.pdf

________________________

I'm don't subscribe to Lance's version of the Iraq/Plame/Wilson scenario .. and I still believe Fitzie gets fits of legal fact delusion that blindingly overtake his intellect. It is curious that he's flexing his muscles so hard with Lance and this book.

From Amazon.com:

###

Triple Cross: How bin Laden’s Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets, and the FBI—and Why Patrick Fitzgerald Failed to Stop Him

“Product Description

“This is the most dangerous man I have ever met. We cannot let this man out on the street.”

—Assistant U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, 1997

In the years leading to the 9/11 attacks, no single agent of al Qaeda was more successful in compromising the U.S. intelligence community than Ali Mohamed.

A former Egyptian army captain, Mohamed succeeded in infiltrating the CIA in Europe, the Green Berets at Fort Bragg, and the FBI in California—even as he helped to orchestrate the al Qaeda campaign of terror that culminated in 9/11.

As investigative reporter Peter Lance demonstrates in this gripping narrative, senior U.S. law enforcement officials—including the now-celebrated U.S. attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who personally interviewed Mohamed long before he was brought to ground—were powerless to stop him.

In the annals of espionage, few men have moved between the hunters and the hunted with as much audacity as Ali Mohamed.

For almost two decades, the former Egyptian army commando succeeded in living a double life. Brazenly slipping past watch lists, he moved in and out of the U.S. with impunity, marrying an American woman, becoming a naturalized citizen, and posing as an FBI informant—all while acting as chief of security for Osama bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri.

Known to his fellow terrorists as Ali Amiriki, or “Ali the American,” Mohamed gained access to the most sensitive intelligence in the U.S. counterterrorism arsenal while brokering terror summits, planning bombing missions, and training jihadis in bomb building, assassination, the creation of sleeper cells, and other acts of espionage.

Building on the investigation he first chronicled in his previous books, 1000 Years for Revenge and Cover Up, Lance uses Mohamed to trace the untold story of al Qaeda’s rise in the 1980s and 1990s.

Incredibly, Mohamed, who remains in custodial witness protection today, has never been sentenced for his crimes. He exists under a veil of secrecy—a living witness to how the U.S. intelligence community was outflanked for years by the terror network.

From his first appearance on the FBI’s radar in 1989—training Islamic extremists on Long Island—to his presence in the database of Operation Able Danger eighteen months before 9/11, this devious triple agent was the one terrorist they had to sweep under the rug.

Filled with news-making revelations, Triple Cross exposes the incompetence and duplicity of the FBI and Justice Department before 9/11 . . . and raises serious questions about how many more secrets the Feds may still be hiding.

http://www.amazon.com/Triple-Cross-Penetrated-FBI-Fitzgerald/dp/B00164GE0O/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1244125175&sr=1-2

~~~

Hmm .. Able Danger ... memories of more coverups and obstruction.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Amazon is already taking pre-orders