Brent Colton is a retired CIA operations officer now in the employ of the Creighton Corporation, a privately owned think tank that advocates various opinions on world issues, but it’s his clandestine job to solve the dirty problems for their private clients for a million dollar fee with no questions asked. When recovering stolen technology from a Vietnamese industrialist, Colton obtains evidence that he secretly partnered with a U.S. Senatorto rig the recent presidential election and elect him to the nation’s highest office.

THE 9/11 TRAGEDY: A CONSPIRACY OF GOVERNMENT INCOMPETENCE?
by Terry Heath, 2006

A new book postulates that the tragedy of 9/11/01 was not the actions of any conspiracy on the part of those working inside the United States government as many millions of Americans believe but was instead the result of massive incompetence by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald in tracking the presumed Islamic suspects who perpetrated that act of terrorism which claimed almost 3000 American lives.

That is the opinion of investigative journalist Peter Lance who has spent the last five years examining those many aspects of the events leading up to the 9/11 attacks and reports the details of his discovery in the new book ‘Triple Cross’ that is published by Regan Books.

Lance is a five-time Emmy Award winning TV and print reporter who has also written television screenplays and a novel. He obtained a Masters Degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a law degree from Fordham University Law School. His other books that looked into America’s recent terror attacks were ‘1000 Years For Revenge’ and ‘Cover-Up.’

He is currently promoting his new non-fiction expose on a nationwide publicity tour to raise awareness of the many missed opportunities those working in the federal government had regarding Al-Qaeda in this country and the world that date back to the 1981 assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. He states the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented if the FBI had done their job and not drop the ball, either by missing obvious opportunities or on purpose to hide their botched and tainted investigation into an unrelated case involving many of the same agents conducting an observation on the members of a New York organized crime family when the two matters became intertwined.

Lance writes that the FBI was hoodwinked by Ali Abdel Saoud Mohamed, an Egyptian national turned American citizen, who ostensibly came to the United States in the mid-1980’s to become an informant for the Bureau. But he actually was a confidant to Osama Bin Laden once Al-Qaeda made plans to attack the United States! Lance states that Mohamed was allowed to remain free for years, despite the suspicions of many of those involved in the hunt for terrorists at the FBI and CIA of his true intent, while he planned and executed multiple acts of terror including the 1998 dual African Embassy bombings that killed over 200 people.

He reports that Mohamed had been on the FBI’s radar since at least 1989 when that agency’s Special Operations Group photographed an enclave of Mohamed’s trainees firing AK-47’s at a Long Island, New York shooting range. Yet, despite their prior knowledge of this cell, the Bureau ended its investigation of those suspects and conducted no follow-up inquiries. That missed opportunity paved the way for multiple acts of terror by these same participants in the years that followed.

Lance reveals in the tome that of all those personally trained by Mohamed to commit terrorist acts that were filmed by the FBI that year, one went on to kill Rabbi Meier Kahane in 1990, three were convicted in the World Trade Center bombing of 1993 that killed six and another was jailed in a failed plot to blow up bridges and tunnels in Manhattan in 1995.

He begins the book by stating the 9/11 investigation has become a cold case five years after that crime took place in hunting for additional suspects, with no criminal convictions of those believed to be involved who are still alive nor are any additional inquiries regarding the greatest terrorist attack on U.S. soil currently planned.

He then focuses on Mohamed who, according to Lance, is the key to most of the Al-Qaeda attacks in America during the last 15 years.

The author claims that U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald, who’s been investigating the Valerie Plame CIA leak case for the past few years, met Mohamed in person in 1997 when he was investigating the terrorist organization and called the one-time Egyptian military officer ‘the most dangerous man I have ever met’ and vowed ‘we cannot let this man out on the streets.’

But the federal prosecutor did nothing for ten additional months in detaining the suspect while the African Embassy bombings were orchestrated by associates under Mohamed’s direct control.

So who was Ali Mohamed, the individual who was able to fool the U.S. Army, the FBI and CIA? Known by his fellow terrorists as ‘Ali the American,’ he was the quintessential double agent who deceived our personnel while doing the bidding of Osama Bin Laden.

1981: Is in the same Egyptian military unit that assassinates Anwar Sadat but is in the United States on an officer exchange program when that act occurs so escapes suspicion from both countries even though he publicly sympathizes with the killers.

1984: Gets a job at EgyptAir to monitor how airline security is done at the urging of radical friends. The CIA unwittingly hires him to monitor activities at a Shiite mosque but the agency appears disappointed with his work when he allegedly blows his cover.

1985: Arrives in America. (With CIA help?) Meets and marries an American woman within six weeks of arrival so he can keep his immigration status and eventually become a U.S. citizen.

1986-88: Joins the U.S. Army after beginning to set up sleeper cells. Is assigned to a highly secret unit in the army where he photocopies top secret documents to send back to his Al-Qaeda friends.

1989: Is photographed by agents of the FBI training future terrorist participants at a gun range in Long Island, New York. But the feds don’t follow up on their discovery.

1990-1995: Makes many trips to Africa and Asia where he assists the terrorists involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, helps move Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan to Sudan and trains Bin Laden’s personal body guard.

1996-1998: Continues to plan the 1998 African Embassy bombings, the 2000 USS Cole suicide bombing and had knowledge of the upcoming 9/11/01 attacks.

Mohamed was finally arrested by the FBI one month after the embassy bombings had occurred and was held for nine months on a ‘John Doe’ warrant before finally being charged with a crime.

He was allowed to plead guilty in October, 2000 to the embassy attacks and was placed into the federal witness protection program where he remains today incognito some six years later and still hasn’t been officially sentenced for those crimes by the presiding judge. Lance says Mohamed’s current whereabouts are unknown but he does get periodic visits from his American wife.

Lance saves his best criticism on what went wrong in preventing 9/11 for Patrick Fitzgerald and the many missed opportunities those in the FBI and CIA had for the decade Mohamed was on the loose and doesn’t mince words in his complaints of Fitzgerald. He points out that Mohamed told Fitzgerald in 1997 that he had hundreds of Al-Qaeda sleeper agents ready to go operational but the FBI has yet to locate any of these potential terrorists. Fitzgerald also allowed Mohammed to plead guilty and avoid the death penalty but Mohamed never revealed the 9/11 plot to the U.S. Attorney despite the arranged plea agreement and pledge to cooperate with government officials.

The author also discloses that Fitzgerald and other top government law enforcement officials destroyed evidence of what Al-Qaeda was planning back in 1996. The material purged included plans the organization had made for a liquid-based airliner bomb plot that could have been a precursor to the August, 2006 scare that was revealed by the British and affected worldwide civilian passenger commuting for weeks.

Lance claims these and the many other missed opportunities revealed in the book show that there was no government complicity in the 9/11 attacks, just a massive cover-up by many in the federal law enforcement bureaucracy to hide their own incompetence and tainted personnel.

When asked if Fitzgerald has publicly commented on his allegations in the book, Lance responded, “not yet.”

Lance does say that once the new Democratic controlled Congress takes over in Washington in January that one of the first acts of legislation they should enact is to take the jurisdiction of protecting America from domestic terrorism away from the FBI and transfer it to the Secret Service because that federal agency would be better able to handle such a function.

When questioned how soon the United States is to a new terror strike Lance didn’t hesitate with a response.

“I believe that Al-Qaeda, which takes years to plan attacks, will strike the U.S. homeland again, soon,” he stated. “Last summer’s transatlantic airliner plot, which has forced Americans to carry limited liquids on flights, was a mirror of Ramzi Yousef’s 1995 Bojinka plot, about which evidence was suppressed by the Department of Justice in 1995.”

And how could such an attack on a civilian airplane be accomplished? Lance says, “see the FBI 302’s used in the appendences in ‘Triple Cross.’ You’ll note that the ‘kite’ or note from Ramzi Yousef, architect of both attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993 and 2001 entitled ‘How to Smuggle Explosives into an Airplane’ referenced acetone peroxide, the essential chemical that the British Intelligence Service MI-5 discovered was to be used in the August, 2006 plot.”

Terry Heath California E-Mail readermail@terryheathbooks.com