Peter Lance is back hawking his latest book, Triple Cross.
Unfortunately, it does not come with a “Buyer Beware” label. Peter, in
my judgment, confuses self-promotion with analysis and is prone to jump
to conclusions not supported by actual evidence. Consider for example
Lance’s specious claim in his recent post on Huffington Post, touting
his book and his accomplishments:
What isn’t known and will be revealed for the first time in
Triple Cross was that Ali Mohamed had been acting as an FBI informant
on the West Coast since 1992 – a year before the WTC bombing carried
out by the same cell members he’d trained.
Really? Here’s what Kit R. Roane; David E. Kaplan; Chitra Ragavan wrote in the January 8, 2001 edition of US News and World Report (Vol. 130 , No. 1; Pg. 25):
Ali Mohamed is a man of many faces: Egyptian intelligence
agent, U.S. Army paratrooper, FBI informant, aide to accused terrorist
mastermind Osama bin Laden. Before bombs shattered U.S. embassies in
Kenya and Tanzania, Mohamed says, he scouted possible targets and
personally brought bin Laden photos of Nairobi sites. “Bin Laden looked
at the picture of the American Embassy,” he claims, “and pointed to
where a truck could go as a suicide bomber.”
Or, how about the November 4, 2001 article in the San Francisco Chronicle by Lance Williams and Erin McCormick:
According to Steven Emerson, a terrorism expert and
author who has written about the case, Mohamed by the early 1990s had
also established himself as an FBI informant.
“He agreed to serve (the FBI) and provide information, but in fact he
was working for the bad guys and insulating himself from scrutiny from
other law enforcement agencies,” Emerson said in an interview.
Got the picture? Peter thinks that writing
about something that has been in the public domain for almost six years
is a first-time revelation.
But let’s not stop there. Peter also engages in hyperbole and
pronounces on “facts” that on closer scrutiny are wrong or
inaccurate. In the same HuffPo puff piece he writes:
[Ali Mohamed] got himself assigned to the highly
secure JFK Special Warfare Center (SWC) at Fort Bragg, N.C. — the
advanced training school for officers of the Green Berets and Delta
Force.
“Highly secure JFK Special Warfare Center”?
It would help if Peter would actually visit these sites. For
starters, the correct title is the JFK Special Warfare Center and
School (USAJFKSWCS). But it is not a highly secure facility
by any stretch. Anyone who is on Fort Bragg or Pope Air Force
Base can drive right up to the headquarters. Peter also is wrong
with his claim that USAJFKSWCS is the advanced training school for
officers of the Green Berets and Delta Force. The school is
devoted to the training of Special Forces, both officers and
enlisted. The USAJFKSWCS does not train Delta Force. In
fact, they do not even acknowledge that there is a Delta Force.
Just call them and ask.
Beyond Peter’s sloppiness with basic facts, the real flaw with his
breathless pronouncements is that he is the ultimate Monday morning
quarterback. Note, Peter has never held a security clearance in
his life. He has never recruited and managed informants. He
has never put together evidence for a criminal case and successfully
prosecuted it. Nonetheless, he wants you to believe that he can
prove that the key to unlocking the 9-11 plot was plain as day and that
negligence by Patrick Fitzgerald and a host of FBI agents allowed it to
go forward.
Peter does a slick job of intermixing facts and conjecture to create
the impression that he has a special truth. Consider the
following from Peter:
Using evidence from the SDNY court cases,
interviews with current and retired Special Agents and documents from
the FBI’s own files, I prove in Triple Cross that Patrick Fitzgerald
and Squad I-49 in the NYO could have prevented those bombings – not
just by getting the truth from FBI informant Ali Mohamed, but by
connecting him to Wadih El-Hage, one of the Kenya cell leaders.
Here’s the truth—there is not one document, piece
of court evidence, or retired FBI agent that supports the claim that in
the year prior to the bombing of the US Embassies in East Africa Ali
Mohamed was recorded stating his intent to attack those
embassies. Not one. You see, clever Peter uses the benefit
of hindsight to insist that law enforcement officers and prosecutors
only had to look and listen to see the threat. If they had
listened to wiretaps they might have heard something. If they had
kept tighter rein on Ali Mohamed he might have spilled the beans.
Yes, and if Peter was not such a cheap shot artist he might have
written a book worth reading.
Peter’s venom spewed at Patrick Fitzgerald is particularly crazy. Consider the following claim by Lance:
How was it that Fitzgerald, the man Vanity Fair
described as the bin Laden “brain,” possessing “scary smart”
intelligence, had not connected the dots and ordered the same kind of
“perch” or “plant” to watch Sphinx that the Bureau had used against
Gotti?
Well, for starters, prosecutors in the United
States are not like prosecutors in France. Fitzgerald and other
junior prosecutors do not have the luxury of waking up each morning and
deciding on their own to follow a hunch. Moreover, they normally
don’t direct Federal investigations. The investigative part is
handled by FBI agents who run field offices. They collect
evidence until they have a case put together that enables them to
secure an indictment or an arrest warrant and then the prosecutor gets
involved. Once again, Peter misses a basic fact that anyone
who has watched Law and Order already knows.
What we do know about Patrick Fitzgerald is that he succeeded in
putting terrorists behind jail without violating the Constitution or
torturing a soul. He deserves better than to be attacked by a
lightweight like Lance.
If you are planning to buy Peter’s new book I suggest you get a big box
of Kosher or Sea Salt. You’ll need to take more than a grain of
salt to get thru Peter’s mess.
