triple cross

* peter lance:

"Here's an irony in a story pregnant with them:

Patrick Fitzgerald made his bones as a terror fighter by prosecuting U.S. vs. bin Laden, the trial of the African Embassy bombers that he and squad I-49 failed to stop. As a reward he was appointed U.S. Attorney in Chicago and got tapped as Special Prosecutor in the Valerie Plame CIA leak investigation. We now know that even after learning the identify of the Plame leak source -- Bush retainer Richard Armitage - in the early weeks of the investigation, Fitzgerald still subjected the New York Times and Time magazine to a barrage of subpoenas unseen since the McCarthy era - going so far as to force the jailing of ex-Times reporter Judith Miller for 85 days. Until now, Patrick Fitzgerald has been famous for two things: prosecuting al Qaeda members and chilling the press.

With the publication of Triple Cross his failure to contain bin Laden's master spy will now be on the record. The book hits the stores on Tuesday, November 21st. Inside there's a 32 page illustrated timeline documenting Fitzgerald's negligence. Part One and a selection of documentary appendices can be accessed now by linking to www.peterlance.com."

* xymphora:

"Lance’s argument, as far as I can make sense of it, is that Patrick Fitzgerald ordered the lifting of surveillance over the New Jersey al Qaeda cell, surveillance that would have stopped the September 11 attacks, in order to protect a series of Mafia investigations which were imperiled by an internal affairs investigation of a possibly dirty FBI agent. This argument doesn’t make any sense, and Lance himself doesn’t seem very sure of himself (“That's the only explanation I've been able to come up with . . .”), but I guess whatever it takes to sell a book . . . .

Lance mentions Ali Mohamed, but treats the entire Mohamed story as if he was an al Qaeda agent who had infiltrated the Pentagon (thus following the Official Story of 9–11). It is much more likely, given his kid-gloves treatment since his arrest (and is he still in jail, or relaxing on a beach somewhere?), that Mohamed was a Pentagon agent who had infiltrated al Qaeda, and either:

1. was doing the Pentagon’s bidding when he arranged terrorist acts; or
2. was ‘turned’ at some time during his service, a fact unnoticed by his Pentagon handlers, and the kind of thing that needed to be covered up.

The most likely reason why the New Jersey cell was not being investigated by the FBI is that the FBI was ordered to lay off, because an over-zealous FBI investigation might have buggered up an ongoing operation by a higher power (i.e., the Pentagon)."