Posted on 09/12/2004 6:18:22 PM PDT by wagglebee
The 9/11 Commission rejected evidence that al-Qaida may have played a role in the 1996 downing of TWA Flight 800, investigative reporter Peter Lance claims.
What's more, says Lance, the evidence of an al-Qaida link was first presented to 9/11 Commissioner Jamie Gorelick when she was deputy attorney general under President Clinton.
On Thursday, Lance shared details of his new book, "Cover-up: What the Government Is Still Hiding About the War on Terror," with ABC Radio Network's John Batchelor.
Documents uncovered by the former network news reporter show that weeks before TWA Flight 800 exploded off the coast of Long Island, Ramzi Yousef – mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bomb plot and the author of the blueprint for the 9/11 attacks – warned the FBI he was preparing to blow up a U.S. airliner.
"They had an informant in a federal prison cell in lower Manhattan who'd been passing notes to the FBI from Ramzi Yousef," Lance told Batchelor.
While in jail Yousef was befriended by fellow inmate Greg Scarpa Jr., who was awaiting trial on a racketeering charge and who occupied the cell between the al-Qaida bomber and his partner, Abdul Hakim Murad.
Scarpa, who saw a chance to reduce his sentence by sharing what he found out with counterterrorism probers, agreed to act as a conduit for messages passed between Yousef and Murad.
The mobster began secretly cooperating with the FBI, which went so far as to allow Yousef to make phone calls to the Middle East so they could monitor them.
Lance told Batchelor, "At least one call went to his uncle, Khalid Sheik Mohammed," who masterminded the 9/11 plot based on Yousef's blueprint.
By the spring of 1996, Yousef's notes to Murad became ominous – featuring detailed schematics of the bombs to be used and how they could be smuggled past airport security.
On May 19, 1996, Yousef told Scarpa that he advised his people to start the bombing of airplanes.
According to a translated summary of his note to Murad that same day:
"Yousef gave a very detailed paper on how to smuggle explosives into an airplane. He referenced RDX explosives and 747 airliners. He gave detailed information on the weights of explosives and flying heights of airplanes and the types of explosives to be used as well as where they should be placed in the airplane."
Two months later almost to the day, TWA 800 – a Boeing 747 – exploded in midair, killing all 230 passengers and crew aboard.
The Justice Department's decision to keep Yousef's warnings to Scarpa under wraps during the Flight 800 investigation was political, said Lance – a bid to cover up tracks that should have been followed but weren't.
Likewise the 9/11 Commission, where ex-Justice official Jamie Gorelick played a role in determining which evidence was relevant to their probe – and which was not.
It's all very complicated. I would denounce the way the Weaver family and the Branch Dividians were treated regardless of their personal beliefs -- even if I did disagree with their ideologies.
What about Egypt Air 990? The story is the pilot said "I make my decision now" and pushed the yoke over and crashed into the Atlantic. What was happening on that plane?
Curiosity got me too. Found the below.
By the way, there are some excellent links off this thread--thanks all.
Update - 21 March 2002
WASHINGTON: The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) on Thursday blamed the crash of EgyptAir Flight 990 on the actions of its copilot. The NTSB report said the co-pilot cut power to the engines and sent the plane downward to the sea. The NTSB report did not offer any reason for the copilot's actions. There has been press speculation that he committed suicide. The NTSB said it had no evidence of any mechanical problems with the Boeing 767, which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off the Massachusetts island of Nantucket in October 1999. The airliner crash killed 217 people.
http://www.emergency.com/1999/egyp990.htm
An excellent letter, which all American Muslims should be asked to co-sign. It would be instructive in the positive and negative.
bttt
Book Promo -- Cover Up: What the Government Is Still Hiding About the War on Terror, by Peter Lance, HarperCollins
http://www.harpercollins.com/catalog/book_xml.asp?isbn=0060543558
Ever since 9/11, investigative reporter Peter Lance has been leading the fight to expose the intelligence gaps that led to 9/11. Now, in the follow-up to his bestselling 1000 Years for Revenge, he returns with devastating new evidence that the government has been covering up its own counterterror failures since the mid-1990s -- and continues today.
In Cover Up, Lance shows how the government chose again and again to sacrifice America's national security for personal motives and political convenience. In its first half, he unveils shattering new evidence that terror mastermind Ramzi Yousef ordered the bombing of TWA 800 from his prison cell in order to effect a mistrial in his own terror bombing case. Astonishingly, the FBI was alerted to Yousef's plans in advance by a prison informant who even passed along his detailed sketch of a bomb-trigger device -- a document seen here for the first time. And Lance reveals the shocking reason the Justice Department suddenly ruled the crash an accident despite overwhelming evidence of the bombing -- throwing away its best chance to penetrate the cell that was already planning 9/11.
And the outrage doesn't stop there. In Part II, Lance offers an unofficial "minority report" on the 9/11 Commission, critiquing it as the incomplete, highly politicized "Warren Commission of our time." He explores potential conflicts of interest among its members, from the staff director who wrote a book with Condoleezza Rice, to the former Clinton deputy attorney general who participated in a critical meeting that upended the TWA probe. He exposes the report's false contention that the 9/11 plan was conceived in 1996, when the FBI had knowledge that the plot was in motion as early as 1994. And, in a heart-stopping, minute-by-minute chronicle of the attacks, he asks dozens of unanswered questions about the defense failures of that day -- from why fighter jets weren't scrambled for almost an hour after the hijackings, to why the president and several of his top military advisers remained virtually incommunicado for more than half an hour after it was clear that America was under attack.
At a time when America feels no safer than ever, Cover Up will lend new eyes to readers who want the full story behind the 9/11 attacks -- and inspire us all to keep demanding the truth.
UQ Wire: Review - Peter Lance's ''Cover Up''
13th September 2004, 1:57 pm
Opinion: www.UnansweredQuestions.org
Distribution via the Unanswered Questions Wire
http://www.unansweredquestions.org/ .
Connecting The Dots
S.B. Writer Peter Lance Dismisses
9/11 Commission Report in Cover Up
Review by Nick Welsh
From http://www.independent.com/news/news928.htm
Peter Lance is one outraged man. An award-winning, freelance investigative reporter now ensconced in Montecito, Lance has just released a new book, Cover Up: What the Government Is Still Hiding About the War on Terror, blasting the official report recently completed by the 9/11 Commission that details some of the wholesale intelligence failures preceding the most deadly attack ever to take place on American soil.
"The last official body created and funded to get a 'full account' of the greatest mass murder in U.S. history has cherrypicked the evidence, skewed the findings, covered up compelling evidence of negligence on the part of the U.S. intelligence community," Lance said in a recent interview. "When they set out, the commissioners said they would conduct the most thorough and complete investigation ever. They haven't. Instead they've tried to give us a false sense of assurance they got to the bottom of what went wrong. It's a fraud upon the American people."
'They've tried to give us a false sense of assurance they got to the bottom of what went wrong. It's a fraud upon the American people.'
- Cover Up author Peter Lance
Most inflammatory, in his book Lance claims that in 1996, high-ranking FBI and Justice Department officials turned a deliberate blind eye on documentary evidence provided by a high-ranking mob snitch that a key Al Qaeda terrorist, Ramzi Yousef, behind bars for the original bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, was actively plotting to blow up what turned out to be TWA Flight 800, which exploded 13,000 feet in the air above Long Island in the summer of 1996, killing all 230 passengers and crewmembers on board. After a 16-month investigation, the FBI blamed that tragedy on mechanical failure. Given that Yousef's uncle, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, was one of the masterminds behind the September 11 plot, Lance contends the FBI blew yet another golden opportunity to prevent 9/11 from ever occurring.
Intense, wiry, and endowed with James Bondian good looks and a crisp handshake, Lance is given to exhaling huge volumes of difficult-to-pronounce names, incriminating facts, and startling revelations in a single breath, all delivered in the semi-sensational rat-a-tat-rhythm of tabloid journalism. Only the alarm clock ring of his cell phone gives him cause for pause. Lance strives to be cool and professional, but radiates the urgency of a man on fire. After 10 minutes in his presence, you wonder whether he's had a good night's sleep in the three years since Osama bin Laden attacked the World Trade Center. But after half an hour, you begin to wonder how you'll get to sleep in the future.
Lance is upset, in part, because the commission chose not to name names or assign blame. "They haven't admitted that any person failed anything. Instead they talk about 'institutional flaws.' Well, institutions are filled with individuals, spear-carriers and policymakers alike. This is akin to saying, 'We have a problem with Enron, but we're going to let the company keep operating with the same people at the top.'"
But most fundamentally, Lance is angry because the commissioners didn't go further in their investigation. By limiting most of their inquiry to events that occurred since 1998 - and by setting the start of the 9/11 conspiracy in 1998 rather than 1995 - Lance charged that members of the commission never acknowledged, let alone addressed, a host of missed opportunities that would have allowed federal justice officials to stop the lethal chain of events that concluded with the attacks upon the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. "And that's a cover-up," he said.
See Much More Here...
http://www.independent.com/news/news928.htm
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