Why is Patrick Fitzgerald threatening to sue HarperCollins for publishing the re-issue of Peter Lance's "Triple Cross"? Well, here are some actual reasons that a big-time player like Fitzgerald would want the book dead... and it's got nothing to do with defamation or libel.
Well, I guess Patrick Fitzgerald is going to have to sue HarperCollins, just like he threatened. He says that Peter Lance's book, Triple Cross contains lies and false accusations about him, and thus, the book must be pulped!
The real problem with Lance's book is not that it is brimming with lies, but rather that Lance's tendentious prose enforces the general paradigm put forward by the 9/11 Torture Commission*, while at the same time exposing seriously problematic aspects of the run-up to 9/11 that fail to lay down and die like they should. (Or more accurately, like some people want them to die.)
Lance writes of his on-going brouhaha at Playboy.com;
"I’d become the latest target of Patrick Fitzgerald, the U.S. attorney for Chicago and former special counsel in the CIA leak investigation. I’d raised some questions about his record on counterterrorism, and Fitzgerald, described by a former colleague at Justice as "Eliot Ness with a Harvard degree and a sense of humor," was not amused.
The man who jailed publishing magnate Conrad Black and got Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich indicted has enjoyed an extraordinary reputation for honesty and integrity, but he’s also used his power to intimidate the media. The story of how he came gunning for me sheds light on his methods as a prosecutor and calls into question certain decisions he made in the years leading up to 9/11.
The evidence I unearthed stems from Fitzgerald’s tenure in the mid-1990s as co-head of the Organized Crime-Terrorism Unit in the Southern District of New York, the U.S. attorney’s office that turned out Rudolph Guiliani and Louis Freeh. In 1995, after President Clinton issued Decision Directive 39—a secret order targeting domestic and international terrorism—Fitzgerald was assigned to effectively supervise I-49, the elite bin Laden squad in New York’s FBI office. It would be a career-making position for Fitzgerald, the son of an Irish immigrant doorman...
...Back on my trip in 2002 I’d received classified evidence about Yousef’s Manila plans from Colonel Rodolfo B. Mendoza of the Philippines National Police. I was shocked to find that Mendoza had sent the same intel in 1995 to the U.S. embassy in Manila, where it was forwarded to prosecutors in the Southern District.
I had traced the chain of custody, interviewing the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service agent who picked up the intel from Mendoza at Camp Crame in Manila and stood by as the FBI legal attaché at the U.S. embassy sent it to the SDNY. The agent confirmed an earlier account he’d given that Mike Garcia and Dietrich Snell, the assistant U.S. attorneys who later prosecuted Yousef, "almost certainly had access to the materials." By December 1995 Garcia and Snell were working directly under Patrick Fitzgerald.
In short, the SDNY had more than five years’ prior warning of Ramzi Yousef’s hijacking scenario."
Perhaps you haven't heard of this. Most people haven't. The 9/11 Torture Commission didn't bother mentioning it. I mean, why worry anybody's pretty little head over the fact that the FBI and the SDNY had the nuts and bolts of the 9/11 plot in their hot little hands since 1995.
You see, along with the Bojinka Plot, the man in charge of decoding Ramzi Yousef's laptop also found an alternative to "Project Bojinka"**;
"Decoding Yousef's computer was not difficult. I bypassed the passwords and immediately accessed the files. The principal job was reading the files and summarizing them. This was done using a text search program.
This was how we found out about the various plots being hatched by the cell of Ramzi Yousef. First, there was the plot to assassinate Pope John Paul II. We learned that a suicide bomber would approach the Pope and detonate a bomb that he would be carrying, killing the bomber, the Pope, and the people around both of them. Because the Pope was coming to Manila, we thought this was the principal plot and prime reason for the group to be in Manila.
Then, we discovered a second, even more sinister plot: Project Bojinka, or a Yugoslav term for loud bang. This was a plot to blow up 11 airlines over the Pacific Ocean, all in a 48-hour period. The planes would have come from Seoul, Hong Kong, Taipei, Tokyo, Bangkok, Singapore, and Manila. Even the airlines and the specific flight numbers had been chosen. There was a document where calculations had been made on how to set the timers on the bomb to be placed on each flight so that they would explode within a set time.
Then we found another document that discussed a second alternative to crash the 11 planes into selected targets in the United States instead of just blowing them up in the air. These included the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia; the World Trade Center in New York; the Sears Tower in Chicago; the TransAmerica Tower in San Francisco; and the White House in Washington, DC. Murad himself was to fly the plane that would be crashed into the CIA headquarters.
Lance offers an explanation as to why the Torture Commission didn't share this info with the public; Snell was Senior Counsel to the 9/11 Commission.
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And then there's the whole Ali Mohamed thing.
Researcher Peter Dale Scott has given the Fitzgerald/Mohamed relationship close scrutiny;
...I wrote of Ali Mohamed, the close ally of Osama bin Laden and his mentor Ayman al-Zawahiri. It is now generally admitted that Ali Mohamed (known in the al Qaeda camps as Abu Mohamed al Amriki — "Father Mohamed the American") worked for the FBI, the CIA, and U.S. Special Forces. As he later confessed in court, he also aided the terrorist Ayman al-Zawahiri, a co-founder of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and by then an aide to bin Laden, when he visited America to raise money.
The 9/11 Report mentioned him, and said that the plotters against the U.S. Embassy in Kenya were "led" (their word) by Ali Mohamed. That’s the Report’s only reference to him, though it’s not all they heard.
Patrick Fitzgerald, U.S. Attorney who negotiated a plea bargain and confession from Ali Mohamed, said this in testimony to the Commission;
Ali Mohamed. .... trained most of al Qaeda’s top leadership – including Bin Laden and Zawahiri – and most of al Qaeda’s top trainers. He gave some training to persons who would later carry out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.... From 1994 until his arrest in 1998, he lived as an American citizen in California, applying for jobs as an FBI translator.
Patrick Fitzgerald knew Ali Mohamed well. In 1994 he had named him as an unindicted co-conspirator in the New York landmarks case, yet allowed him to remain free. This was because, as Fitzgerald knew, Ali Mohamed was an FBI informant, from at least 1993 and maybe 1989. Thus, from 1994 "until his arrest in 1998 , Mohamed shuttled between California, Afghanistan, Kenya, Somalia and at least a dozen other countries." ...
...Let me say this again: one of al-Qaeda’s top trainers in terrorism and how to hijack airplanes was an operative for FBI, CIA, and the Army.***
Ali Mohamed was questioned after 9/11, and apparently knew the plot well.
You know what? Go ahead and sue HarperCollins, Patrick Fitzgerald, because more people need to know about this stuff.
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* Sigh, yes of course I mean the 9/11 Commission.
** Sometimes that archive.org link doesn't load; here is a back-up.
*** See a video of Scott presenting this info at the 1:02:50 mark; right here, introduction by Ray McGovern.