04/30/10 – Peter Lance – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
It's Peter Lentz, author of Thousand Years for Revenge, Cover Up.
That one's about the 9-11 Commission.
Al Qaeda's spy, Triple Cross, and the Terror Timeline.
And in fact, I'll go ahead and urge all of you now, and for those of you in the chat room, remind people who are showing up late to check out PeterLentz.com.
And if you look at the front of the page there, on the right-hand side, you'll see the Terror Timeline.
Click on that PDF file and you can follow along this timeline through this interview.
This is the story of Al Qaeda and the September 11th attack on America.
Welcome to the show, Peter Lentz.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott.
I was with you in 05.
I listened to the interview last night, and I was amazed at how the material, as the French say, plus de change, plus de la même chose.
The more things change, the more they stay the same, right?
Yeah, I guess so.
I'm glad, and thank you very much for translating the French for me.
That wasn't going to work there.
All right.
Now, I kind of don't want to even get into this at all, but let me do a little bit of a disclaimer here, which is that the reason that I'm not a 9-11 truther is because even though I am an Oklahoma City bombing truther, and I have been since 1995, I decided after September 11th that rather than, you know, going off the deep end, I would be patient and I would wait and see maybe if some real journalism would get done on the issue and see what I could find out.
I never did read the 9-11 commission report, Peter, but I've read A Thousand Years for Revenge, and certainly the terror timeline.
I've read Lawrence Wright and Peter Bergen and Steve Cole, and two by James Bamford on September 11th, and basically you are one of those major sources of information that are, you know, the reason I believe, about Al-Qaeda and the terror war that we're in now.
So thanks for that, and you're my disclaimer.
I don't have to be a truther because I looked at real journalism written by Peter Lance.
Well, thank you.
Listen, first of all, it's great to be in that company.
I want to talk to you about Lawrence Wright at some point because, you know, he won the Pulitzer Prize for The Looming Tower, and he's a great writer for The New Yorker, and I've quoted him, and I've cited some of his material on Dr. Ahmed Al-Zawahiri in my books, but, you know, Lawrence wrote a, if you read The Looming Tower, which I encourage everyone to read, he has 30 separate references to Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, the brother-in-law of Osama Bin Laden, who was the absolute leader of the, I mean the financier, he was the money, the bag man of the Manila cell, Ramzi Youssef KSM Manila cell that begot the 9-11 plot, and he never mentions Lawrence Wright in this book, which is kind of, which is very critical to CIA, but very passive about the Justice Department and the FBI.
He never mentions the fact that Khalifa was actually captured.
The system worked.
In December of 2004, Khalifa was captured in Northern California.
Many believed on his way to meet this Al-Qaeda spy, Ali Mohammed, and he had in his possession a Newton, remember the Newton, the precursor to the iPhone and the iPad?
Well, he had a Newton PDA, which was chock full of intelligence that linked him to the New York cell, the World Trade Center bombing cell, Youssef, etc., you know, I mean, amazing stuff.
And Jamie Gorelick, who was then Deputy Attorney General in the Clinton administration, later went on to become one of the 9-11 commissioners, working with the Secretary of State at the time, literally kind of pushed this guy out of the country.
The Jordanians wanted him because he was, he had a conviction for an Al-Qaeda murder plot, and he had a death sentence hanging over his head, and he was very motivated, Scott, to talk, and this guy literally was pushed out of the country, and there's a full account of it in my book, Triple Cross.
People go to the timeline, they scroll down, they'll find that section around 1995.
What I'm getting at here is we all have pieces of this story, and Lawrence Wright has contributed, but even a guy on that level, he won the Pulitzer Prize, Lawrence Wright leaves out large portions of the story.
I've never had a chance to talk to him.
Apparently there's a film opening at the Tribeca Film Festival relating to his work on Al-Qaeda, and he's a great journalist, but I was astonished when I read the book, because how do you, he even interviewed Khalifa, who was later murdered, by the way.
How do you tell that story about Khalifa and leave out this extraordinary story, unless you have blinders on, unless you go into the story like, you know, maybe I don't want to impute any motive to him, but there are liberals that don't want to be critical of the Clinton years, and God knows there are conservatives that don't want to say anything critical of the Bush bookends, okay?
And my approach to this, Scott, has been pure truth-gathering, you know?
Yeah, a little bit less partisan in nature.
Well, and listen, you know, all motivations and what have you aside, even if, you know, blinders aside, no journalist can do all of the work in even a series of books, you know, that's really kind of the whole point, is you've got to read all of your stuff, or as much of it as you can read, you've got to read James Bamford if you want to know about the NSA.
Nobody covered what the NSA knew about this thing before it happened, other than Bamford.
It is a matter of bits and pieces, but it's also a matter of, you know, using real discrimination, and I think, you know, what's important that, well, I don't want to just make this whole interview the anti-truther thing, I just want the truth, you know?
No, no, I agree.
But I think they ignore the fact that there is such a thing as al-Qaeda, that these guys were in America, they killed the Rabbi Kaneh back in 89, and it's the same group of people all the way through leading up to September 11th, and it's not like they're all just actors in some CIA movie or something.
You know, Scott, you know the thing that I, you know, Alex Jones, I ended up having a brawl with him one night on Coast to Coast AM.
I literally, if we'd been in each other's presence, there would have been blood on the ground, you know?
Because I, these guys that, the inside job theorists of the world, first of all, I'm open to anything, okay?
I'm open, if somebody can demonstrate to me hard evidence that the plane didn't hit the Pentagon, you know, that kind of stuff, I'm open to anything.
But here's the problem with the inside job theory, this theory that al-Qaeda was a creation of the government, that there's a shadow government, that 9-11 was some kind of crazy government conspiracy.
The problem with it is that it ignores the existence of this real threat from radical Islam, which is real.
It doesn't just threaten the U.S. and Western democracies, it threatens any freedom-loving people in the Mideast, in the world.
The freedom-loving Islamists it threatens, okay?
And it's real, and if you go back and study the history of it, we can understand why it happened and how it's developed.
And if you subscribe to the inside job theory, what happens is you let the government, the guys that should be held accountable in the FBI and the CIA, you let them off the hook, you know?
It's kind of like, there's enough extraordinary material that I produced, and Lawrence Wright and Steve Call and Bamford, who I hugely admire, these other writers have produced that is so astonishing that begs these people to be held to accountability, that if you come up with this inside job thing, it's kind of like you're just ignoring what needs to be fixed right now in our system.
And I'm hoping in the two hours today, we can talk about Anwar al-Awlaki, this cleric that they recently approved an assassination of, his connections to Fort Hood.
I broke that story, I actually broke the story on Coast to Coast on the 28th of December.
I was the first journalist to speculate his connection to both the Christmas bomber and Fort Hood.
And there have been three major intelligence failures relating to terrorism in the U.S. homeland in the last year by the FBI that did cost lives and could have cost many lives if the Christmas bomber had succeeded.
And this is what we need, in my opinion, to focus on.
How do we get the system fixed and improved and get a real accounting of 9-11 so that the pathology that continues to exist in the FBI can be excised and we can get a better system?
Well, and also I want to go ahead and disclaim on your behalf here, for those who might leap to conclusion that if you say that there actually is a threat here, that somehow you're in with the neoconservatives or something, I know from your record that you are no warmonger by a long shot.
And you were against the Iraq war, I remember, back in 2002 and 2003.
And it's not the same to say there's such a thing as al-Qaeda as it is to say, yeah, whatever the Republicans want to do about it is great.
Yeah, and I also think that I absolutely was against the Iraq war, and I'm highly critical of what's going on right now in Afghanistan, even though I think initially, as I said to you back in 2005, the proper thing was to go into Afghanistan, but obviously Bush utterly failed in rooting out bin Laden, and our policies now, we haven't learned from what happened to the Russians, we haven't learned from our own Vietnam experience about what it means to try and occupy a country.
And also, what I'd love to get into later, and this is a broader discussion, but all the teatbaggers, everybody wants to cut wasteful spending in government, right?
I mean, it's a big game, we all do.
Every American is sick and tired of their increasing amounts of their paycheck going to taxes for things that they don't believe in.
Nobody ever has the guts to come out and say we need to cut military spending.
Nobody.
It's like this holy area that nobody goes near.
And you know, when I was a correspondent for ABC News, I did many, many stories on military cost overruns.
Scott, I did a whole investigation of the Pershing 2 missile, which was a ballistic missile, nuclear weapon, deployed in Europe, that I proved in a series of pieces for ABC News was deployed before it was ever fully tested.
We put a nuclear weapon on the ground in Europe that could have caused an incredible catastrophe, and it had never been fully tested.
So I did pieces like that routinely for ABC News, and one of the areas that I, you know, if you want to talk about it, is we need to rein in military spending.
We cannot be the cops of the world.
Clearly there are threats to our security, and al-Qaeda is one of them, but we need to focus and we need to understand that we just can't be the police force for the world.
There's a big controversy right now about whether or not there should be a continuing military base in Okinawa and where it should be.
Now, I believe there should be because I think we need to be strategic, and the United States does need to have, as a world power, needs to project its strength worldwide.
I do believe that, and I think we need to do it to protect democracy, but how we do it, the amount of money we spend, the weapon systems that continue to get funded, you know, is really subject to debate, and something that even Democrats, the Republicans have pushed the Democratic Party so far to the right.
Bill Maher recently joked last Friday night, he said, Barack Obama is a moderate Republican.
If you really think about it, I mean, Bill Clinton was a moderate Republican, and so the agenda has been pushed so far to the right, particularly by Fox News, that nobody even wants to debate issues that, in the 80s when I was at ABC News covering things, you could debate military weapon systems.
Now it's like a sacred cow.
Oh, if we vote against anything for the military, then we're going to be putting our men and women who are in harm's way at risk.
It's ridiculous.
You just need to do it in a more effective way.
Yeah, we spend a trillion dollars a year on the world empire.
There's just no doubt about it, and here's where the rubber meets the road, Peter Lance, and you confirm this, you say whatever you like, you can dispute it if you like.
It's our world empire that got us attacked from 1989 all the way through the September 11th attack and onwards.
What we're talking about here in the broad sense is blowback against the American empire in the Middle East.
Well, you and I had a slight disagreement about that when I listened to the interview last night from 05.
I think it's a combination.
There's no doubt that one of the foundations of the radical Islamic movement today is the notion of any foreign troops in their countries.
That's true.
However, there's also an enormous amount of pathology.
What we're facing today is kind of a development of an ideology that's come from the last 30 years or so that started with a guy called Hassan al-Banna, an Egyptian theoretician, another one called Syed Qutb, who were radicals and looked back and began to reinterpret the Koran as jihad as opposed to a task.
They interpreted it as holy war, and they kind of militarized the Koran.
Well, here's my thing about that, though.
I mean, aren't these guys just the Fred Phelps Church of the Middle East, or isn't it just our militarism that makes them seem credible?
I mean, you know, Eric Margulies, the great reporter who covered the Afghan war in the 1980s, likes to tell the story of a meeting with bin Laden's mentor, Abdul Azam, who told Margulies straight to his face in no uncertain terms in, I think, 1986, as soon as we're done with the Russians, you're next until the empire is off the Arabian Peninsula.
Yeah, but remember, it's not just about the empire.
It's also about their own secular Islamic governments, okay?
You have to take both into consideration, Scott.
It's like anything.
You asked me, you suggested earlier we need to keep an open mind about the origins of 9-11, and we need to consider all the factors.
It's not just a matter of America's military presence worldwide.
You call it the empire.
That's okay.
It's fine.
You can interpret it.
What I'm trying to say is that these guys, when Ali Mohammed, and this is the story of Triple Cross is really, we can get into it, hopefully, the story of this al-Qaeda spy, Ali Mohammed, and he actually succeeded in literally infiltrating the CIA briefly in Hamburg in 1984, had his cover blown, got on a watch list, got past the watch list, got on a plane into America on a TWA flight from Athens, met an American woman on the plane who he seduced on the plane, married her six weeks later at a drive-thru wedding chapel in Reno, and then he ends up in Silicon Valley at her house where he sets up an al-Qaeda sleeper cell.
He then enlists in the U.S. Army, and he ends up, Scott, at the John F. Kennedy SWCC, the Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where the elite Green Beret officers train and elite Delta Force officers train.
And without a security clearance, this guy is coming up on weekends to New York where he trains the original World Trade Center bombing cell, the guys responsible for the original World Trade Center bombing.
And when he was at Fort Bragg, he was hiding in plain sight, and they actually made a video of him, a training video.
And in the video, Ali Mohammed is talking.
This is paid for with taxpayer money by the Army.
In the video, he says, it is the responsibility of every Muslim to change Dar al-Harp into Dar al-Islam.
And what he's saying is, in Arabic, Dar al-Harp is a situation where you have an Islamic country without an Islamic theocracy, such as Egypt.
You need to change that into Dar al-Islam, a country like Iran, which has an Islamic theocracy government.
In other words, all of Islam, every Muslim in the world, has a responsibility by force to change, to have a revolution in his country, to overthrow any secular government.
Now, they're talking about Muslim on Muslim here.
They're not just talking about Muslims getting U.S. troops out or Russian troops out.
So that's what I'm trying to get at is, like, just as Abdul Abzan, who, by the way, everybody believes was later murdered by bin Laden in November of 89, on his way to Juma Friday prayers with his sons, died in a car bomb.
And my book recounts how that was the takeover of Al-Qaeda.
What became Al-Qaeda took over his worldwide network of fundraising for the Mujahideen, called the MAK.
They had dozens of fundraising centers worldwide.
In 1989, the Russians were dispatched in February.
In November, they're still pulling in, Scott, millions and millions of dollars worldwide in cash.
And a couple of million a year in Brooklyn alone, at this center, at the Al-Kifas Center at the Al-Farooq Mosque in Brooklyn.
So by killing Abdul Abzan, bin Laden and the blind sheikh and Dr. al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian hierarchy under bin Laden of Al-Qaeda, were successful in setting up what I say was an Al-Qaeda cell, a brick and mortar outpost in New York, in November of 1989.
And out of that, that's where the first World Trade Center bombing conspiracy happened later the day of terror plot.
So all I'm trying to say here is it's a complicated story.
But Al-Qaeda remains a threat.
And I want to make an announcement here on this program.
I'm going to reveal this for the first time.
I talk about, in the interview we did the last time, and I talked about the timeline, I talk about this extraordinary guy named Ahmed Salem, E-M-A-D-S-A-L-E-M.
And if you go, let me see on the timeline where it is here.
Is there any chance you could pull up the timeline on your, do you have a computer in front of you?
Yeah, I'm looking at the timeline here.
We're looking for 1993 now?
Yeah, if you look at the bottom of page 5, 1991, you'll see that Ahmed Salem was, he was the antithesis of Ali Mohammed.
He was a good ex-Egyptian army officer.
He was a major.
Ali Mohammed was a radical from the unit that murdered Sadat, and he somehow escaped prosecution for the Sadat assassination, and later ended up infiltrating the U.S. military.
Well, this gentleman, Ahmed Salem, always loved America from the time he was a little kid in Egypt, and rose to the rank of major in the Egyptian army.
And one night, and this is all information I've since learned, because he reached out to me, he's been in witness protection for years, and he reached out to me, I was in New York lecturing at NYU last November, he reached out to me, we met.
We are now collaborating on a series, we're going to do a book together, and an article, and it's going to be published in a national magazine, and I can't announce it right now, but it's going to be out in June.
And Ahmed Salem is this incredible hero.
This guy, he's the anti-Ali Mohammed, right?
And he comes to America, and has so many immigrants.
When he lived in Egypt, he was really well-known.
Omar Sharif is one of his best friends.
He was the kind of guy you could go to if you wanted to get a tour of the Giza pyramids at midnight.
You know, he was kind of a fixture in Cairo.
He really had servants.
You know, he was a player over there.
Okay, he comes to America, and as so many immigrants do, he falls on hard times, he's working as a cab driver, so he ends up working at this hotel called The Woodward, which was then kind of a fleabag hotel north of Times Square, Broadway and 55th Street.
And one night, he's at the desk at this hotel, and in walks this beautiful ex- she's still an FBI agent, Nancy Floyd.
She's from Texas, by the way, the great state of Texas, and she's like this petite redhead.
There's a picture of her in the timeline, and she comes in, and she's working Russian foreign counterintelligence.
That's her job, to see if there are any Russians at the UN who might be in flagrante delicto in one of these hotels, right?
You know, so she and Salem become friends, and he ends up doing a series of little favors for her relating to the INS and other cases.
And one night, he basically says to her, there's a man in this city more dangerous than the worst KGB hood.
And she says, who?
And he goes, Omar Abdel-Rahman.
And she starts to write R-A-C-K, and he says, no, it's R-A-H, Rahman, the blind sheikh.
And he tells her that the blind sheikh is essentially the real- he believes he's actually the head of al-Qaeda.
He's certainly the spiritual head of al-Qaeda.
And the blind sheikh, who was blinded virtually at birth, and memorized the Koran by the time he was 11, has a Ph.
D. from Al-Hazara University, the oldest university in the Arab world.
And he's one of the few people that can issue a fatwa, you know, religious decree.
And he became radicalized in his development, and he was accused in the murder of Sadat, and he was jailed, but he was never, you know, eventually, they didn't have enough evidence.
He also was arrested for the murder of a series of Coptic Christians in Al-Haq, another Egyptian town, but he also beat that rap in Egypt, okay?
And he was being held under house arrest, and he escaped.
Where did he end up?
Peshawar.
Here's the- now getting back to the military empire.
He ends up in Peshawar, Pakistan, which is, as you know, during the Afghan war against the Russians was the staging area for at least $3 billion in covert U.S. aid, which many believe was matched dollar for dollar by $3 billion in Saudi aid.
So the blind sheikh is there, and he's like one of the conduits for the U.S., and he's working with a guy named Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.
Now, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar today is one of our greatest enemies.
He's a major Taliban leader.
And yet, at that time, he was one of our buddies.
So there's your blowback, brother.
I mean, you know, absolutely blowback.
I use the word a lot in my books that the- our, you know, aid to the Mujahideen against the Russians helped to create, helped to radicalize, helped to train al-Qaeda.
And what is- by the way, what does al-Qaeda need?
You know, a lot of people understand that it translates in Arabic as the base, but what it really is is the database.
When Dr. al-Zawahiri was also jailed for the Sadat assassination, he was like, if you look at the timeline, go back to page- I think it's on page one.
You'll see the second picture is Dr. al-Zawahiri in a jail cell.
He's got his finger up.
You know, he was- he spoke English.
You can see that footage in The Power of Nightmares.
Good.
Okay, great.
Well, he was, as you know, from a very prominent Egyptian family.
One of his grandfathers was ambassador to Saudi Arabia.
There's a street in Cairo named after al-Zawahiri.
And he was a surgeon, and he spoke English and was like the spokesman for the people held for the Sadat assassination.
He got out and formed the EIJ, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which he merged, which was actually kind of another version of the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been outlawed, so they just kind of changed the name.
He then merged that group with bin Laden in Afghanistan.
They formed al-Qaeda.
So what happened was- I can't think of her first name.
It's a brilliant writer named Weaver who wrote in The New Yorker said, the war against the Soviets- I think it's Mary Ann Weaver.
The war against the Soviets was the Spanish Civil War of radical Islam.
It brought blue-eyed Chechens.
It brought a guy named Abdurajab Janjalani from the Philippines, who later formed the Abu Sayyaf.
It drew Islamists from all over the world to fight the Soviets.
And the database of those names- the bin Laden and company took down all those names when those guys went back to their host countries, and that database created the network we now know as al-Qaeda.
So the blind Sheikh is right up there in the early stages of the formation of that radical network.
He gets on a watch list, but again, because of his belief, because of his help with the CIA, he gets past the watch list, shows up in 1990 July in New York City at JFK.
He's picked up by a red-headed Egyptian, and as I say throughout my work, this is Egyptian, Egyptian, Egyptian.
Below bin Laden, the hierarchy of al-Qaeda is all Egyptian.
Mohammed Attaf, who was later believed to have been killed in the invasion of Afghanistan in November of 2001, Dr. al-Zawahiri, the blind Sheikh Ali Mohammed, and there's a red-headed Egyptian named Mahmoud Abu Halima, and you'll see his picture go down on the timeline to page 3, top of the page.
You'll see Abu Halima, the redhead, he had a brother, twin brother, looked exactly like him, 6'2".
Next to him, Mohammed Salama, a little Palestinian guy.
El-Sayed Nasser, Nasser is another Egyptian who was working as a janitor in the courthouse, civil courthouse in lower Manhattan, across from the Law and Order courthouse.
And then this guy, Nidal Ayyad, who was a Rutgers grad, a Kuwaiti.
Well, those guys on July of 1989, this is when Bush's father is in the White House, on four successive weekends, you see the picture above them is a surveillance picture.
Who took it?
The FBI, the Special Operations Group of the FBI.
They follow these guys from the Al-Farouk Mosque.
What's the Al-Farouk Mosque?
That's the Al-Kifa Center of this network funding the Mujahideen in Atlantic Avenue.
So somehow the FBI gets onto these guys, all of whom are trained by Ali Mohammed.
He's coming up from Fort Bragg and training them about small weapons, you know, munitions, etc.
And they're photographed on four weekends, hundreds of photos of these guys.
And for unknown reasons, they drop the investigation.
It's one of the unanswered questions.
It's one of the questions the 9-11 Commission never answered, etc.
And of those men, Abu Lima Salama and Ayyad were convicted in the World Trade Center bombing conspiracy.
The first Trade Center bombing.
Nasser was convicted, along with another black Muslim American called Clement Hampton-El, in the Day of Terror plot to blow up the bridges and tunnels.
And all of them were trained by Ali Mohammed.
And all of this is blowback from the Afghan war.
And I want to now get to where Ahmed Salem fits into this whole story, but I'll take a breath if you want to jump in here.
I feel like I'm doing a monologue, and I'm happy to have you jump in.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I'm happy to have you do monologues, too.
But, yeah, I'll throw in a couple of things here.
The first one is that I think that we're in complete agreement about the crazy kind of religious ideology of the bin Ladenites.
All I'm saying is nobody would listen to them or join up with them if it wasn't for the foreign policy that makes them seem right.
That's why I compare them to Fred Phelps.
You know, there's always going to be a lunatic screaming on the street corner.
The question is whether people pay attention to him.
But then the second thing is I wanted to kind of give a shout out to your hero Salem here.
He's why or at least certainly stands out in my mind as one of the major turning points in my life of deciding the importance of talk radio and getting truth out to people.
Because I was on a work crew forced to listen to Rush Limbaugh all day.
And in 1996 or 97 or something, and a caller called up and said, everybody read the New York Times from October 28th, 1993.
It's all about click and dial tone.
And so I remember the date and I went and Googled it and I went and looked through the New York Times.
And, wow, the FBI had an informant inside the plot to bomb the World Trade Center.
And then somehow the World Trade Center still got bombed anyway.
Peter.
Okay.
Now, this is.
Oh, wow.
That's so important.
And, you know, by the way, I contacted Ahmed last night.
I told him I was going to do this interview today and I'm sure he'll he'll get it off the archive tonight.
But anyway, and I want to I want to get in.
I want to tell you what an amazing guy this is.
I mean, of all, you know, when you do this kind of work, Scott, that I've been doing since since 9-11, I've been on this story.
It gets depressing, man.
Because you see, I mean, day after day, you keep putting the pieces together and the dots and so little changes.
Valerie Caproni is one of the great villains of this story.
And she is the general counsel of the FBI.
And only only two weeks ago at a Judiciary Committee hearing did Congressman John Conyers, the chairman, have the gut to call for her to be fired.
And it was it was a hearing in which he and James Jamie Sensenbrenner, who, you know, to the right of Genghis Khan, actually both agreed.
It was like the first time I'd ever in recent memory that Republicans and Democrats agreed on anything.
And Valerie Caproni, who I want to talk to you about later, made allegedly her office more incursions into the Patriot Act and more violations of civil liberties post 9-11 than you can imagine.
It's still the general counsel of the FBI.
You're listening to Peter Lance.
He's the author of A Thousand Years for Revenge, Cover Up and Triple Cross.
You can find his website at PeterLance.com.
OK, go ahead.
Yeah.
And if people, as we might as well say, remind them on the upper right hand corner of the website, there's this timeline, 32 page.
I like to call it the little golden book of terror.
And you can download it for free and you can kind of follow along because this is an epic story that begins in 81 with the murder of Sadat and goes all the way up to the present.
So, you know, you can follow along and it's a very visual story.
But anyway, I met Salem getting back to him.
So I met anyway, he reached out to me when I was speaking at NYU.
We got together and we are now he's now beginning to tell me in great detail the full truth.
You know, I think the reason he reached out to me and I'm happy to say this is he said that I had reported on him more accurately than any of the other writers who had written about him.
And a number of books have been done that focus on this part of the years leading up to the World Trade Center bombing.
But there's actually there's a famous tape.
If you Google his name, it's E.M.A.D. and then S.A.
L.E.
M. pronounced I'm at Salem.
I used to think it was a mod Salem, you know, when I was on with you in 05, but now he told me how to pronounce his name correctly.
You'll find that there's a tape that that Paul DiRenzio, who's a good friend of mine, is a really good reporter for WBA.
I came across this tape.
And if you if you listen to the tape, it's a tape of IMAD talking to an FBI agent named John Anticev.
And if you listen to it, the way the tape plays, it sounds as if the FBI actually caused the World Trade Center bombing.
OK, and it and it and it's given fuel to the to those people who believe in the in the inside job theory.
In fact, S.A.
L.E.
M. is now he's given me other tapes and explained to me he was not.
The tape was made in a few days, I believe, after the bombing, when they were trying to get him to come back in.
And and I'll tell you what he did.
He ended up going back undercover.
And he's the main reason they convicted the blind shake and nine others in the day of terror plot.
He was on the stand for more than a month.
It was under withering cross examination.
There were 11 separate lawyers for the other defendants that he he stood his ground and they convicted this dangerous man, the blind shake.
So I met did not was not in any way, shape or form what he was talking about.
He says we was building the bomb that was planted under the world.
And what he is in is Egyptian at the time.
And his English is obviously so much better now.
What he was really saying is they had a bombing plot that they were where he was going up to Attica and he was visiting El Sayed Nasser, who was the you know, the guy who killed Rabbi Meir Kahani like X number of months after the blind shake.
The first Al Qaeda blood, blood spilled by Al Qaeda on American soil was murder of Meir Kahani.
So I met Salem was recruited by Nancy Floyd.
He agreed to risk his life for five hundred dollars a week, which is what he was getting at the hotel.
And he went undercover and they gave him like three months to get close to the blind shake.
And in fact, he did it in like within weeks.
And if you look at page the timeline, let me see where it is.
The picture of him, I think it's the bottom page six.
You see him with the blind shake.
That's like a picture from The New York Times, like the new bodyguard of the blind shake that, you know, he's walking around, you know, and he's literally he gets an FBI van and he drives the blind shake to Detroit where the shake happens to kill Mubarak, president of Egypt.
And, you know, he's doing this incredible stuff, but he was not wired.
His deal with the FBI is I will not wear a wire because I'm sleeping on the floors of mosques.
I have family in Egypt, and if they make me, I'm dead.
And so is my family.
So they agreed to let him go in as a deep penetration asset.
OK, and then what happened is this guy named Carson Dunbar.
You know, as you look at page seven at the top, Dunbar is the picture below Louis Napoli.
He's an ex-New Jersey state trooper, has no terrorism experience, but typically FBI.
He worked his way up in the New York office, kind of a paper guy.
And what do they give him?
Joint Terrorism Task Force.
They put him in charge of terrorism with no training.
He was arrogant.
He didn't like Nancy Floyd because she was such a strong woman.
And this is my opinion.
I've interviewed Carson and his attitude was, even when I interviewed him, was the same.
He didn't like, he thought Salem was too uppity.
And Salem's two control agents, and you see the pictures above, John Antiseb and Lou Napoli, were never around.
So Nancy's doing double duty.
Ahmed would come back at night from these guys, and he had to vomit this stuff out every night because, you know, he's not wearing a wire.
So he had to be debriefed every night.
Well, Antiseb and Napoli, Antiseb did have some medical issues for a while.
It was gone and Napoli wasn't around.
So Nancy Floyd was working Russian counterintelligence all day long.
She'd meet Ahmed at night at the TGI Fridays down by 26 Federal Plaza in New York, the FBI office.
And she would then go upstairs, type up the FBI's serial report, drive home to Connecticut, and then come back the next day.
This was going on for months and months.
Finally, Carson Dunbar, after Salem had been doing this for months and producing incredible intelligence, Dunbar says, you've got to take a polygraph.
What?
What do you mean?
You're doubting my, you know, veracity?
What are you talking?
And he beats, like, a couple of polygraphs.
The story, which is going to be, which I'm going to have in this article coming out in June, is a fantastic story about how he beat these polygraphs, because he's an experienced intelligence guy, and he knows how to beat a polygraph test.
And all the polygraphs came back inconclusive.
Okay?
They couldn't tell whether he was lying or not.
So, but he had been trustworthy, and he delivered.
And so Dunbar says, you have to wear a wire.
And he says, and so he changed the rules of engagement after this man had been undercover and gotten so close to the blind sheik, understand, is the spiritual head of al-Qaeda.
Okay?
Do you understand what kind of intelligence opportunity that is for the FBI to have a guy inside that close to the blind sheik?
And so Dunbar says, I'm sorry, that's it.
And so Salem withdraws.
Dunbar says, it's my way or the highway.
Salem withdraws.
Now the FBI loses its eyes and ears.
So when that tape on WBAI was a tape of Ahmed, I'll explain how he made the tape later, because I want to stay in the sequence of the story.
So Ahmed is now out.
And now it's like the summer of 1992.
And now the blind sheik calls al-Qaeda and gets Ramzi Yousef shows up, a real bomber, a world-class bomber trained at Swansea Institute in Wales.
And he comes and he's working in New Jersey to build what's going to become the 1,500-pound urea nitrate bomb placed under the World Trade Center that kills six and injures 1,000 on February 26, 1993.
And he's working in a bomb factory.
Who's helping him every night?
Abu Ulema, the redhead.
Salema, the little Palestinian guy.
Nadel Ayad.
All these guys that have been in Calvin and photographed by the FBI are helping him do the bomb.
Now, Ahmed had been, when he was undercover, had been going up to Attica to visit al-Sayed Nasser, who was convicted in just the shooting.
He never was convicted of the murder of the rabbi, but the shooting.
And he's trying to get Ahmed, before he was pushed out by Dunbar, to blow up what they call 12 Jewish locations around New York City, the Diamond District, some synagogues, etc.
And Ahmed, in typical fashion of a mole undercover, is vamping.
You know, he's like getting fuses and pretending he's going to do stuff.
And, of course, he isn't.
He's just gathering intelligence.
When he later refers in that WBA plot, we were building the bomb that was planted.
He's talking about the original bombing plot that he was involved in, not Ramzi Youssef.
And he made that clear to me in no uncertain terms.
And he's produced a new tape that I guarantee you will shock you.
I promise you, once we reveal that tape, I'll come back on your program and we'll play it.
It will blow you away when you hear the tape that confirms that the government was not involved, but the government clearly could have stopped the bombing.
OK, Scott?
This is the tape of what?
His conversation with his...
This is the tape of his conversation with the same FBI agent, John Antisev, after the fact, after the bombing, in which he basically confirms that the FBI could have prevented the bombing.
OK, but not...
There's a difference between you could have stopped something and being the cause of it.
OK, let's just draw...
We need to draw a demarcation line here so that these people, the inside job theorists of the world, don't say the FBI was planning to bomb the World Trade Center.
OK?
I mean, there's a difference.
But, you know, it's still criminal negligence, as far as I'm concerned, in terms of the Bureau's failure.
But we'll get to that in a minute.
Let me just continue the story, OK?
So, anyway, Yousef is building the bomb.
And I met...
They were kind of weaning him.
He was getting $500 a week because he had to get a new job.
And he told the brothers...
Basically, the way he got out of meeting with them every day is he said, you know, the FBI is looking at me, and I have to kind of withdraw.
So they accepted that.
So he kind of pulled back.
And he met with Nancy Floyd in, I think, like October of 1992.
Now, Yousef is in town for a month already.
And, by the way, when Yousef got to JFK, where did he go?
He makes a beeline for the Al-Khifa Center at the Al-Farooq Mosque, the same place I told you that all these guys had been followed by the FBI out of.
And Abu Ulema, this redheaded cab driver who was supposed to be the getaway driver of the night of the Kahani murder, and who 9 to 7 Napoli had actually gotten a search warrant in his apartment at one point, never found anything.
Abu Ulema is helping Yousef build a bomb, along with Salama, the little Palestinian guy.
So Ahmed catches wind that something is going on, that some new guy is in town, but he can't get close enough because he's afraid to get too close, you know, because he's not really officially working with the FBI anymore.
And he doesn't know, you know, which end is up.
And he's already, in his mind, he's already been pushed out by a senior FBI guy, Carson Dunbar.
But he's loyal to Nancy Floyd, who is a fantastic agent, by the way.
And he says to Nancy, pretty much, as she gave him the last 500 bucks, there's something going on, follow Abu Ulema.
Now, in my first book, when I recounted this story, I heard from sources close to Floyd that he said, follow Abu Ulema and Salama.
He has since told me, no.
He said, I just told her to focus on Abu Ulema, the redhead, 6'2", Egyptian redhead.
And he's got a twin brother.
How many guys like this can there be in the New York City area?
Just 12.
And he said, and by the way, the FBI, as I told you, Antiseb and Napoli knew about this guy.
They fingerprinted him.
They searched his apartment.
And Nancy said, well, I don't think Dunbar will approve the surveillance, you know, basically, because I'm on the out now.
You know, you're on the out, et cetera, you know.
So anyway, they don't follow these guys.
They don't follow his advice.
Not because of Nancy Floyd, OK?
Because of management.
And now the problem goes on.
Pardon me for a second here.
I've got to stop you here because I never have been able to wrap my head around this part of it.
What was Carson Dunbar's problem?
I mean, nutshell again, you've got two heroic, you know, Mulder and Scully, gumshoe-level FBI agents who have the world's greatest informant inside America's most dangerous crime ring.
And then you have a supervisor who refuses to allow them to do their job.
Was it he had a personal problem with the agents under him or he just was obsessed with John Gotti instead?
Or what is the problem?
All right.
I'm going to give you a few more details, but I don't want to give away everything that we're going to—Imet and I are going to reveal in this book, OK?
Well, give me a little bit of Dunbar's motivation because I don't understand.
I'm just going to describe what I know.
It's not up to Peter Lance to get in the mind of Carson Dunbar.
I'm going to give you the facts that have been related to me.
When I met Salem, when Dunbar took over, he demanded that Salem come and see him in his office at 26 Federal.
And Nancy—and again, I don't want to quote Nancy Floyd because she's active duty, and I got her story by talking to sources close to her, OK?
So if I say Nancy said, it's not like Nancy told Peter Lance because I don't want to get her in trouble.
She's got a few more years to go before she gets her pension.
And I don't want to—because I'll tell you later what they did to Nancy Floyd after this, OK?
So Nancy Floyd says—or, you know, people close to Floyd say to Carson, Carson, you can't bring him in to 26 Federal Plaza.
He's undercover.
You know, Nasser worked in the courthouse across Federal Foley Square.
The guy's undercover.
We can't—so bring him in.
Bring him in.
This is how arrogant Carson Dunbar was.
So they bring Salem down, and they get him upstairs, and Carson's sitting behind his desk.
Now, Nancy, Antisev, Napoli, and I think there was another agent there, are standing at the back of the office.
And Ahmed described it.
They were like schoolboys standing there afraid, like they're in the principal's office, and Carson's the principal.
And they've got their hands crossed in front of them.
You know, like they're like—their hands are low.
You know, like they're like trembling children in front of this guy.
This is the kind of—this is the way he treated people under him.
And they leave, and Salem walks right up and sits in front of his desk.
And Carson didn't like that.
He said, who—you know, and Carson was, like, affronted by the fact that Salem had enough confidence to walk up and sit down in front of him across the desk.
So then Carson gets up and walks around and takes his shoes off in front of Salem, which is an insult to anybody in the Arab world if you know anything about it.
President Bush found out about it, you know, at one point when some guys were shooting, you know.
And basically what he said to him—and this is the word that I met Salem told me.
You come here with sand in your shoes from Egypt thinking you can tell me how to do my job?
That's Carson Dunbar talking to the most valuable undercover asset the FBI has ever known.
Another place where I have to interrupt.
You know, six people died in that World Trade Center bombing.
But tell me, wasn't the plan to knock one tower over into the other, and could they not have killed, I don't know, 50,000 people or something?
Yeah, well, Yusef later told the feds that he wanted to have a Hiroshima event.
He wanted—that's exactly what he wanted to do.
But remember, this is 1992.
This is long before the World Trade Center bombing.
This is the summer of 1992, okay?
But what's really important is this.
Carson Dunbar is a guy that's promoted into a job that he's not qualified to have because he has no terrorism experience.
And he is sitting there with this arrogant attitude, okay?
And when I met him in 2002, I interviewed him.
He showed up at the Starbucks at Rockefeller Center, and he was wearing—he was retired, but he had like a blue suit on, white shirt, red tie, little FBI pin in his lapel.
And he was fastidiously dressed but incredibly arrogant.
And even then, in 2002, after—years after Ahmed Salem had become the government's star witness, because I haven't gotten to the point of the story yet where he ends up convicting the blind shake going back into the cell, and he literally said the man was a liar and a fabricator.
To this day, to that day, he was still trying to defend his bad decision, which forced Ahmed Salem out of the cell.
So to try and answer your question without having the benefit of Ahmed here, and eventually, I hope that he will come forward and talk.
Because his life is still being threatened from two or three different sources.
Ahmed basically was pushed—was given no other choice but to withdraw from the cell.
Now, here's the deal.
And this relates to this WBAI tape that you've heard before, that people will hear if they Google it.
When—like one or two days after the bombing, 1993, a month into Clinton's presidency, Ahmed is watching this, and he is like—he feels terrible.
He feels guilt.
He feels guilty that he didn't stay in the cell, even though, you know, it would have been insane under the circumstances to wear a wire and to get discovered.
He's such a great man.
He's such a humanitarian.
And he loves America so much that he feels terrible, right?
So Ante Savinopoli—and this is a story that I have in Triple Cross that no one ever got.
I got this from Lou Napoli himself.
The night of the bombing, Mary Jo White, who later became the U.S. Attorney, was just about to become U.S. Attorney.
This feisty little woman is pacing back and forth in the office of Jim Fox, who was then the assistant director in charge of the New York office, who later was fired by Louis Freeh, by the way, because he went on a show.
He went on like a local talk show in New York and openly said, we didn't have anybody inside.
We didn't have any—you know, there's no way we could have stopped this.
And he basically, you know, he was fired by Louis Freeh for actually saying that later, okay?
But Jim Fox is there, and Mary Jo White, and she's pacing, and they're freaking out.
And, you know, a month into Clinton's presidency, this bombing has happened, and Napoli and Ante Savinopoli are in the room.
And the FBI is actually saying Serbian terrorists did it.
That was the original press report, okay?
And Louis Napoli elbows Ante Savinopoli, and he looks at White and says, we had a guy inside.
She, what?
She stops and she turns.
What are you talking about, you had a guy?
We had a guy.
Yeah, we had like another—what do you mean you had a guy?
Where is he?
Get him in here.
And Louis says, well, he's probably going to want a million bucks because we treat him so badly.
She says, I don't care what it takes.
Get this guy in here tomorrow, okay?
So they go up and they pick up Imus from his apartment in the Upper West Side.
Now listen to this.
He is so mistrustful of the FBI because of the way they treated him, because not Nancy Floyd, but Dunbar and company, that he begins making what are later called bootleg tapes of the FBI, okay?
He tapes the FBI agents because he's afraid they're going to try and blame him for this.
You know what I'm trying to say?
He had every right to believe that given Dunbar's actions.
Do you understand what I'm saying, Scott?
So he starts bugging these guys.
And that tape that's on WBAI, I think there were 77 separate bootleg tapes that were later produced, and that tape is one of them.
But he's talking in his Egyptian, in his broken English at the time, he's talking about we was building the bomb.
He's talking about the first original investigation, not that he was involved in any way, shape, or form with Ramzi Youssef.
He never met him.
I think if you go back over that, I've been over this with email correspondents before, and I think he says they here and they there, and it's kind of not specific.
And you can interpret it one way or the other.
You know the guy.
He's verified for you exactly what he meant now.
Yeah, but when you hear this other bootleg tape where he talks to Antiseb and Antiseb confirms, I don't want to get too detailed, but it's a blockbuster when it comes out.
I got dibs on the first interview with Salem when he starts talking.
Well, you might have to stand in line behind Oprah, but anyway, we'll see.
We'll see what happens.
But anyway, certainly early on, and I can't speak for him, but I'm sure that when the time comes, because when he will really, I know when he listens to this tonight, hopefully, he'll be really moved by the fact that your career was changed by this New York Times story that you sought out.
You actually did the initiative after they cut the thing off on the radio.
And I had no Internet.
I went down to the library and went through the microfiche.
Wow.
Well, good for you.
Well, that story by Ralph Blumenthal, who did a lot of the original reporting on the bootleg tapes, that story came out just before the Day of Terror case, because here's what happened.
This is what happened next, which is a fantastic story.
So I'm at Salem now, agrees to go in undercover, and they say they're going to pay him a certain amount of money.
I don't agree on how much it is.
He just risks his life.
He just says, I'm going, brother.
Nobody harms my America.
That's the line he gave me, which is a beautiful line.
So he goes back to the cell, and he starts dealing with these guys, and he meets a guy named Siddiq Ali, and he's literally – and by the way, the story of what happens next, of how they wire a warehouse in Queens, and they're going to build five versions of the Ramzi Youssef ammonium nitrate fuel oil bomb, or his was a urea nitrate fuel oil bomb.
They've got five of these things, and they're going to – the intent of the plot is to blow up the Bridges and Tunnels, the Washington Bridge, the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, the FBI headquarters, the U.N.
I mean, this is like a mega plot, okay?
But it's all being watched 24 hours in this warehouse by the FBI.
There's no danger to America.
He's getting all these guys in this sting operation.
He's risking his life.
At every step of the way, and he's with the blind Sheikh.
Now, here's another thing that's incredible, okay, that's in this story, that's going to be in this story in the magazine and then the book in more detail.
At one point, the blind Sheikh says, I want you to sweep my apartment.
He's like living with the blind Sheikh in his apartment, and the Sheikh says, I want you to sweep it because I'll see if there are any bugs.
So he calls Anticep and says, look, I need the latest state-of-the-art bugging device so I can go and this guy wants me to do this tonight.
And Dunbar will not let – Dunbar is so mistrustful, and even now, even at this point where he's trying to round up these guys, that he won't.
And he says – he orders them to go to Radio Shack to buy some device, and they have like a stretched limo that they used to use to pick him up with tinted windows.
And these three FBI agents – I may not believe the cop, but he's in the Joint Task Force – Anticep and another guy, Steve Vieira, are running around from Radio Shack, and they're calling Dunbar and he goes, no, it's too much.
Find another one.
Find a cheaper one.
And they're literally spending an entire day – can you believe this Keystone Cops story?
It's true, okay?
And underscores how this Carson Dunbar continues to give this – and this man is risking his life.
And this man, he's in the room with the Shack, and there are like six guys outside that would cut his throat in a heartbeat if they understood what he was doing.
And so finally he says, I've got to go.
So he goes to like a spy store and buys one on his own with his own money because he has to do it.
Now listen to how brilliant this man is.
What he does is he sets the calibration on the thing such that it picks up virtually anything and it goes off, okay?
And so he goes around the apartment and he makes the Shack believe that every part of the apartment has an FBI bugging device in it except the kitchen, which is a very small area, because his intent is going to be to get the Shack in the kitchen and record him making whatever the words are that the FBI needs to get an indictment, okay?
Well, how brilliant can you get, right?
But does the FBI give him like a great state-of-the-art bugging device to pick up the Shack?
No, they give him a briefcase which has got like an inaugural recorder in it and it's got like a red light that goes on from time to time.
He has to cover that up.
It's like get smart, like, you know, level technology from the late 50s or early 60s instead of the state-of-the-art because Dunbar doesn't want this guy, doesn't trust him.
Well, I wish I could say it was unbelievable, Peter, but it's not.
All right, go ahead.
Yeah, let me stop you here for just a second.
We're at the top of the hour here.
We're talking with Peter Lance.
He's the author of Triple Cross and 1,000 Years for Revenge and cover-up behind the 9-11 Commission Report.
Website is PeterLance.com.
If you look at the right side of the page there, you can find the PDF file of the terror timeline, which we're going through here.
And I've got to point out here we're about halfway through and we've still got to at least touch on Khobar Towers, about Yusef in the Philippines and the Bojinka plot, and we have to talk about the September 11th attacks.
We've got about one hour.
I want to take a short break, let you go get a drink of water or whatever you want to do, and same for the audience, too.
And we'll be right back after this with Peter Lance.
Everything was submitted with a receipt, and now it's questionable.
It's not questionable.
It's like a little out of ordinary.
All right.
I don't think it was.
If that's what you think, that is fine.
But I don't think that because we start already building the bomb, which went off in the World Trade Center.
It was built by supervision from the bureau and the DA, and we were all informed about it, and we know that the bombs start to be built.
By who?
By your confidential informant.
What a wonderful, great case.
And then he put his head in the sand.
I said, oh, no, no, no.
That's not true.
He is son of a bitch.
Okay.
It's built with a different way in another place, and that's it.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio on Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas.
I'm going to cut your music short halfway through for you there, but we're going to get back to this interview with the great Peter Lance, author of A Thousand Years for Revenge, Cover-Up, Triple Cross, the Terror Timeline.
We're looking at it right now.
If you go to PeterLance.com and look at the right side of the page there, you can find the PDF file to follow along here.
And, well, we're talking about the history of Al-Qaeda, and really I think it's fair to say that Peter's books really describe the history of a bunch of good cops trying to do their job and their bosses not letting that happen for about 12 years straight, culminating in the September 11th attacks on the United States.
Is that about right, Peter?
Absolutely.
And, you know, just to kind of wrap up the Ahmed Salem story so that we can move on to Yusuf, et cetera, what he ended up doing was they had this warehouse in Queens, and the Dunbar continued to be so mistrustful of him.
At one point there was a fuse, a live fuse that they had.
Now, the live, there's no way that this fuse could have been used to detonate one of these bombs in the making because the bombs weren't at the stage where they could have been detonated.
But they, for credibility, he had to bring a real fuse in.
So when Dunbar found out about that, one day he decided, well, we can't have a live fuse in, we've got to take it out.
So have Salem take it out.
Well, Salem says, no, I'm not taking that out because they're going to wonder where it is.
What are you talking about?
You're risking my life, you know?
And so Dunbar apparently has another FBI agent go in and remove the fuse when these guys aren't around.
And Salem almost jumped on a plane and left town at that point, you know what I mean?
So he was continuing, even though he's risking his life in this huge operation, he's basically continually mistrusted by Dunbar.
And ultimately, when they did the takedown, they didn't even tell him they were coming in.
He got injured during the takedown.
He was actually hospitalized at one point with chest pain.
They thought he was having a heart attack.
And they literally gave him like three hours for he and his family to go into witness protection.
No warning whatsoever.
His wife, Karen, was a German immigrant jewelry designer, beautiful woman, and he had his two children from his first marriage in Egypt living with him.
And they literally gave them three hours, and they whisked them into witness protection.
So when I tell this whole story with him in the book, and we're just going to begin to tell some of it in this magazine article that will be out in June, we will tell the untold story of his life on the run.
They had to change their identities 14 times in witness protection.
He had nothing but praise, by the way, for the U.S. Marshals Service, which does a remarkable job under very difficult conditions.
And at one point, literally, he had gotten like the first payment.
They finally gave him over a million dollars for doing what he did.
And by the way, if they had just stayed with him in the fall of 1992, there never would have been a World Trade Center bombing, as you'll later hear.
But anyway, they gave him like 100, I can't think of how much, 116,000 of the initial funds.
And he finally, he and his family were able to buy a house somewhere in California, finally begin to settle down.
And a few weeks later, his daughter was a teenager who was at school, and there was an article in a magazine or a newspaper, and the teacher was talking about terrorism.
And his daughter accidentally kind of blurted out, oh, that's my dad, you know, proudly.
And the marshals knocked on the door.
You have three hours to move, and they had to move because they were compromised, and they lost the house, you know.
This is what this man has endured for his country.
He should have gotten the presidential medal for what he did.
And Nancy Floyd should have gotten a corner office in the Hoover Building for recruiting arguably this most important asset in the history of the war on terror.
What do they do?
They said they opened an OPR, an internal affairs investigation on her that lasts for more than four years.
They leak a story to the New York Post, the temptress and the spy, suggesting she was having sex with someone, which is absolutely untrue, and confirmed by the bootleg tapes that they were absolutely professional.
He thought of her, you know, like a sister.
You know, they were just totally professional.
And Nancy literally was suspended for two weeks.
They took her shield and her gun.
And why?
Insubordination to Carson Dunbar.
Now, that tells you what is wrong with the FBI.
Instead of recognizing that they had blown it the first time, you know, with this guy, and he came back, and he was on the stand with Andrew McCarthy and Patrick Fitzgerald on this day of terror plot, 30 days?
Do you have any idea what it's like to be cross-examined by 11 different lawyers for 30 days who are looking to trip you up on every single thing?
And he stood, he withstood that, and they got the conviction of the sheik and nine others.
And instead of rewarding Nancy Floyd, she gets busted for insubordination to Carson Dunbar and humiliated.
So that's the problem with the Bureau, that pathology of cover up our screw-ups, as opposed to, like, admitting we're wrong.
How do we fix the system?
How do we improve?
Let's have transparency.
How do we get, you know, a better, you know, system for intelligence gathering?
People like Nancy Floyd, the young recruits out of Quantico, look at the Nancy Floyd story, and they go, oh, boy.
And so what happens is in your first, you know, couple of years out of the Bureau, you're doing 95% of your time you spend on casework and 5% looking over your shoulder.
By the time you've been on the job for five years, you're spending 20% looking over your shoulder.
By the time you're on the job ten years, you're spending half your time looking over your shoulder.
And one of her mentors, Len Prednishankis, this incredible FBI agent who was a Latvian emigre, who got a Bragg wall, Scott, that you would not believe, because he brought over many of the defectors during the Cold War in, you know, New York, and he debriefed Solzhenitsyn.
He was an amazing guy.
He was Nancy's mentor.
And he said to me, Peter, you have two great days in the FBI.
The day you get your shield at Quantico, the first day you become an agent, and the second day is your KMA date.
I said, what's your KMA date?
And he says, you kiss my ass date.
And I said, what's that?
He said, that's the first day after you hit 20, because if they want to open an OPR, internal affairs investigation on you at that point, you can put your papers in and retire.
I'm like, what?
He says, yeah.
I said, wait a minute, you're telling me that after 20 years in the FBI, you would live in fear that they would open an internal affairs investigation?
He said, yeah, Peter, that's what we live with day in and day out.
So the point I'm trying to make is instead of having these agents just feel free to, look, we know, Scott, there's office politics probably at your radio station and every place I've ever worked, there's always office politics, and we always have to look over our shoulders and be politically defensive.
We get it.
I understand that.
But to have that kind of obsession in an agency where you end up, the more time you put in on the job worried about whether or not you're, like, following the rules and going to upset Carson Dunbar versus going out and showing initiative.
Nancy Floyd performed the way the cops in the French Connection did.
You know, Sonny Grasso and Eddie Egan.
Remember the famous movie, They're Up All Night, Gene Hackman, they're watching that guy.
I mean, that's how cops make cases, man.
Because bad guys don't go home at 5 o'clock.
You know, Frederick Whitehurst, he said, and, you know, I think Rick Ojeda in the Oklahoma bombing case, not to get off onto that tangent right now, is another good example of this.
But Frederick Whitehurst told me once, the great whistleblower from the FBI crime lab, that, you know, you use your imagination and you think of an FBI agent saying, hey, boss, you know, I stumbled onto this crime that's going on and all I need is some money and authority and maybe a trip down to the judge to see about a warrant.
And the idea that the average American would have from, like, some G-man TV show from the 50s would be that the boss says, well, good work, Jenkins.
Go ahead and do your job.
And that does not happen ever, ever, ever at the FBI.
That is not how it works.
And even if they follow your lead, they're going to assign it to somebody else, not the guy who's been working the case.
They're going to screw up everything.
Their job 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and through 10 is protecting the FBI and the American people come last, last.
Well, the agent, the incredible agent in Minneapolis that tried to get the warrant on Zacharias Moussaoui, you know, the FISA warrant.
Yes, Colleen Rowley.
We just talked with her a few weeks ago.
No, but not Colleen.
I'm talking about the agent.
I'm having a brain freeze.
I'll think of his name in a minute.
When he tested for this incredible agent who was an ex-F-14 pilot, he was a top gun pilot who became – talk about the best of the best, right?
He becomes an FBI agent, and he's in Minneapolis, and he understands being a pilot the significance of trying to take lessons to where you don't really care whether you can land a plane, a F-47.
You just want to take off.
So he is the one that goes in and gets the warrant, tries to get the warrant, and is crushed by the officials in Washington.
And later at the Moussaoui trial, he blew his FBI career because he was honest.
You know what he said?
Criminal negligence.
My bosses were guilty of criminal negligence.
The same kind of thing went on.
And anyway, so that pathology exists to this day in the FBI.
And I must say, this is one positive sign.
Now the FBI has him go to Quantico regularly and lecture to ASACs.
The Carson Dunbars of the world today, he gets to lecture to now, which I think is a really hopeful sign.
And, you know, he just got back last week, and he's going again.
So that's a good sign that they're at least listening to him.
But one of the stunning things in Triple Cross – and, again, by the way, people can go on my website and go to Amazon.
You can buy this book for like $11.
You can even get the hardcover for $11, and the paperback is the same amount.
The paperback, which is the book that Patrick Fitzgerald tried to kill, has even more.
It's 26 more pages in it.
But basically, Ahmed Salem is a hero.
His story will be told, and people will get the full truth of what happened prior to that bombing.
And one of the things I told in the book in Triple Cross is there's still less than 50 Arabs speaking FBI agents today.
There are 6,000 agents assigned to counterterrorism.
And none of them are translators.
Yeah.
But listen to this.
Also, if you go on my website, you'll see that there's a system.
They spent hundreds of millions of dollars on this virtual case file system because we all know that after 9-11, they were accused of, you know, having this paper-driven culture.
And, you know, they literally had the FedEx, the pictures of the hijackers the next day.
They didn't have the ability to even, like, you know, attach them as PDFs to e-mails.
I mean, this is the FBI.
So they spent hundreds of millions of dollars on this data overhaul system, and it fails.
And then they hire Lockheed Martin Corporation, okay, to spend hundreds of millions of dollars more on this new system after this Trilogy system fails to do this new system called Sentinel.
Well, James Comey, C-O-M-E-Y, this is all on my website.
If you scroll down to my home page, James Comey was the Deputy Attorney General in the Bureau at the time when they let this contract out to Lockheed Martin, okay?
In 2005, the final phase of Trilogy was scrapped.
The Bureau put out bids for a new system.
Comey became General Counsel to Lockheed Martin in August of 2005, and by March of 2006, Lockheed landed a $305 million contract with Sentinel.
The Bureau's new attempt to overhaul a paper-driven system.
Well, there's a latest report on Sentinel coming out that it's not going to be fully deployed, and there's another $30 million, you know, over budget.
And Republican Chuck Grassley was critical, as he should have been.
You know, how is it that almost coming up on the 10th anniversary of 9-11 next September, how is it that the FBI still doesn't have a system where every agent in the field can use a PDF or an iPhone and go right into the FBI files and punch in keywords relating to, you know, a suspect and not have it linked?
How is it that that doesn't happen?
In a way, I'm kind of glad.
It's the only thing that's keeping us the slightest modicum of, you know, in the slightest modicum of freedom in this society is these people's complete incompetence.
They just use it all against us, not to protect us.
But anyway, time preference here.
We've got 40 minutes, and we've got a 9-11 attack here to talk about.
And I guess we've got to skip the Khobar Towers, but maybe if you could talk a little bit about the Bojinka plot and, you know, Ramzi Youssef, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, how it is that you're certain that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is buddies with Osama bin Laden and Ramzi bin al-Shih bin Mohammed Atta and et cetera.
Okay.
Well, here's what happens.
So Ramzi Youssef tries to have this Hiroshima event.
He tries to put the bomb in the B-2 level under the North Tower, and he tries to have it fall into the South Tower.
And, in fact, Ramzi was a genius at making these devices, but he failed.
In this instance, and one I'll tell you about in a minute about bomb placement, because the World Trade Center sat in a bathtub, like a three-foot-thick bathtub that kept out the Hudson River in lower Manhattan.
It was all land, you know, like landfill.
So they created this huge kind of concrete bathtub that these two towers sat in, and if he had ever put the bomb that was in the Ryder truck next to the seawall and it had blown through the seawall, the entire Hudson River would have come in and interdicted all the subway tunnels.
It would have made 9-11 look like a Disney movie.
Okay?
But, in fact, what he did is he put it in this parking level, and it was so powerful, Scott, it blew down through four floors of rebarred 11-inch-thick concrete.
Okay?
So it was just an act of God that he put it in the wrong spot.
But one of the things I have in my books that's extraordinary is I found this out, that about a week and a half after the bombing, when they searched the computer of Nadal Ayyad, the FBI, this is the Kuwaiti Rutgers grad who had gotten some of the chemicals, but on the surveillance in 1989 that they took, he had a, Yusup dictated a new threat, a letter claiming credit.
The original letter was mailed as they drove out of the garage that day.
They mailed a letter.
The New York Times said, and they called themselves the 5th Battalion of the Liberation Army, and they took credit for the bombing.
And later that night, Yusup was jealous.
He was watching.
He was in the first-class lounge of Pakistan Airlines, the JFK, watching on Channel 2, CBS Local, which is the only one that had its transmitter on the Empire State Building.
The other two were dark because they were on the Trade Center.
And he sees that the FBI is giving Serbian terrorists credit, so he's jealous.
So he calls Ayyad, and he says, I want you to, and he dictates a new letter.
And they find this letter a week after, Scott, a week after the Trade Center bombing.
And it basically says, we know what we did wrong.
We're going to come back, and the Trade Center will be one of our targets.
The FBI had that threat to the Trade Center in 1993, March.
Okay?
So Yusup now goes, and he tries to kill Benazir Bhutto at one point in Pakistan with a bomb.
And he ends up in Manila.
And he has a cell in Manila in the fall of 1994.
And these are the four principal cell members.
His uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who's his uncle, a guy named Wali Khan Amin Shah, who was an Uzbeki who fought along with bin Laden in Afghanistan.
And bin Laden, when he did the interview with John Miller at ABC, called him the lion.
He loved this guy, Wali Khan.
And the fourth member was Abdul Hakim Murad.
And Abdul Hakim Murad was Yusup's lifelong friend from Kuwait, who had been a pilot trained in four U.S. flight schools.
Okay?
And one of the myths surrounding the Manila cell of Ramzi Yusup that was incorporated into the 9-11 report was that all that he had ever threatened to do was, threatened to do was have this Bojinka plot.
And the Bojinka plot was actually one of three plots that they conceived.
The Bojinka plot was a plot to smuggle explosive, the components of explosive devices, make kind of like mini-bombs aboard 12 U.S. airliners flying from Asia to the U.S.
They'd get on a flight in, let's say, Hong Kong, a United flight that would fly to Singapore.
And on that first leg, they'd build a bomb.
They'd put it in a life jacket pouch in a seat above the fuel tank of the plane.
And they'd get off.
This is a non-suicide plot.
And then as the plane went on its next leg over the Pacific, boom, the bomb would blow.
It would act as kind of a blasting cap and blow up the gas tank of the fuel tank of the plane, use it to detonate the plane.
They planned to do this on 12 U.S. airliners.
And Yusup actually did what he called a wet test on a Philippine Airlines plane in December of 1994.
He got on in Manila in the early morning hours on a flight to Cebu, onto Narita in Japan, plants this device, but he puts it in seat 26K, thinking that the fuel tank on the 747-100 began under the 26 row, but, in fact, it was under the 24th row, like a yard and a half closer to the cockpit.
So, again, placement error, okay?
Not a bomb error.
So he gets off and goes back to Manila.
The plane's on its way to Narita in Japan and blows, blows.
There's a Japanese national, Ikigami, in the seat, gets killed.
It blows a hole through the floor of the plane, but the pilot heroically lands the plane.
Now they know it's going to work.
Times 12.
They're plotting that.
Later, the 9-11 Commission tries to say that that was the only plot that we uncovered, and we didn't uncover any other plot to hijack planes, which is a whole different scenario.
The bombs as missiles plot realized on 9-11, except for some evidence that there was a plot to fly a plane, a small plane with explosives, into the CIA.
That's what the 9-11 Commission reported, okay?
Now, Yusef, in fact, had a Toshiba laptop computer, and he had a bomb factory in Manila with KFM, Wali Khan, and Murad, and they were plotting three plots.
One was to kill the Pope, who was going to be there in January.
They were going to put bombs along his parade route, which their bomb factory overlooked the parade route, and they were going to kill thousands by detonating pipe bombs.
The second plot was the Bojinka plot, but the third plot was a full-blown plot later realized on 9-11.
Initially, I said in my first book that the targets were the Trade Center, the Pentagon, the CIA headquarters, a nuclear facility, the Transamerica Tower, and the Sears Tower.
But I since learned from Rafael Garcia, the Filipino computer expert that the Philippines National Police hired to de-encrypt the laptop that they later found that the White House was also a target, okay?
So what happened was, the night of January 5th, they had a fire in their bomb factory.
Yusef and Murad, they fled.
We don't know where KSM was at the time.
And they kind of reconvened at a 7-11 nearby, and Yusef says to Murad, you've got to go back and get my laptop, because I have everything on there.
So Murad goes back, and he's captured by this heroic Philippines officer, Ida Farescal, who was a captain in the local precinct.
And she grabs him, and they go up, and they see this bomb factory.
It's got pictures of the Pope's parade route, cassocks, hair dye, contact lenses where they wanted to disguise themselves as Westerners, you know, bombs in various stages of, you know, including the Bojinka device with the Casio watches that were going to set her, you know, this shocking stuff.
And they find the laptop.
So they arrest Murad, and Murad is interrogated.
And here's where ward aborting doesn't work.
They ward aborted him for a couple of days.
They tortured him in that kind of manner.
Didn't say a thing.
You know, most people, when they're tortured, they'll either give up their mother and give inaccurate information, or they'll go deeper.
And he just went deeper.
He got hardened.
So this heroic Philippines colonel named Rodolfo Mendoza took over, and using a combination of trickery and guile and threats to turn him over to the Mossad, unlocked and unwrapped him over the next 60 days, and he gave up the full-blown what we now realize is the 9-11 plot.
Colonel Mendoza then sent that information to the FBI legate, the legal attache in Manila, and we now know that that information, and I know this because I actually interviewed the diplomatic security agent, Sam Kamalowicz, who took the package to the embassy and saw it addressed to the Southern District, that information ended up going to the prosecutors, Dietrich Snell and Mike Garcia, who would later prosecute Ramzi Youssef when they captured him later for the Bojinka plot.
They tried him for the Bojinka plot in 1996.
Now, here's the point.
Colonel Mendoza sent this information, and I interviewed Colonel Mendoza, and Colonel Mendoza gave me like two inches thick of formally classified documents, and they include the name of a guy named Khalid, Khalid, Khalid, throughout this material.
I came back from the Philippines in March of 2002 with this material, and I then went to HarperCollins, and I had already written a book proposal, and I had never written a book like this before, but I went to this Judith Reagan, the controversial publisher who was later fired over the OJ book, but she was very gutsy, outside-the-box thinker.
The day I went there, Scott, I had this proposal.
I had this name Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
That guy's name had never been mentioned before in the media, outside of one little cryptic reference in the New York Times from January of 1998, the day Youssef was sentenced.
So I go in there, and as fate would have it, on the day I went to see Judith Reagan, the New York Daily News had a front-page story with Khalid Sheikh's picture, the mastermind of 9-11.
The FBI says he's the mastermind.
So I took the Daily News, and I put my proposal on the table, and she brought the book in the room.
And that's how I began to focus on the importance of the Ramzi Youssef cell, tracing its links to al-Qaeda, finding this information about Mohammed Jamal Khalifa bin Laden's brother-in-law, who was the financier of the cell, and basically going back and looking retrospectively.
Now, it's easier for me.
I'm criticizing these guys after the fact.
My job is much easier than them in real time having to put the dots together.
But it's not just – if you go to my website on the left, you'll see that Dan Rather's picture, when my first book came out, Dan Rather did two pieces on the CBS Evening News, on my first book, A Thousand Years for Revenge.
And he shows video, undercover video of Salem.
And he said, Dan Rather, literally I said to him in an interview, not just a dozen times did the FBI have warnings, dozens and dozens of times between this Calverton surveillance in 1989 of the same cell and 9-11.
And if you go to the beginning of Triple Crust, if you look at the beginning of my book, Triple Crust, you will see in both the hardcover and the paperback, I have a cast of characters right in the beginning of the book.
And it's really a very limited universe.
From the feds, Patrick Fitzgerald is like the head of the, quote, good guys.
You know, Patrick Fitzgerald was the co-head and later head of organized crime and terrorism in the Southern District Prosecutor's Office in New York.
The two Bin Laden offices of origin, the war on terror was fought as a series of legal cases up until 9-11, investigated by the New York office of the FBI, Joint Terrorism Task Force, and prosecuted by the lawyers in the Southern District.
The first World Trade Center bombing trial in 1994, the Day of Terror trial I talked about with Salem in 1995, the Bojinka trial in 1996, there was a second World Trade trial with Yousef in 1997, and the African Embassy bombing trial in 2001, which Patrick Fitzgerald presided over.
Now, all those trials were, like, below Fitzgerald, you've got, like, 20 feds.
You've got, you know, this very limited universe of feds.
And on the bad guy side, under Bin Laden, you've got a very limited universe of people.
This is not like hundreds of players here, and you have to say, well, how could they have not connected this?
You know, if there's 200 guys across the country, you can say, well, I can understand how stovepiping, which is what the 9-11 Commission blamed this on, might have resulted in problems.
But these are the Squad I-49 that Patrick Fitzgerald was presiding over, Squad I-49, which is called the Bin Laden Squad, from January of 1996 forward.
It was Patrick Fitzgerald, the FBI agents, were Jack Clunan, Harlan Bell, Frank Pellegrino, Dan Coleman.
These are limited guys that were investigating all this stuff.
And what happened was, and this is what I reveal in Triple Cross, Ali Mohamed was literally an FBI informant from 1992 on.
He's an FBI informant, okay?
Ali Mohamed, the Stone Al Qaeda spy.
And Ali Mohamed is plotting this African Embassy bombing plot from 1993 on.
And he's working with this bozo of an agent named John Zent on the West Coast, who's supposed to be his control agent.
And if you read my book, you'll see that John Zent, during this period, is involved in this grisly homicide involving his daughter, who was the fiancé of a kid who killed his whole family.
So John Zent was completely preoccupied and totally outgunned by Ali Mohamed.
And Ali Mohamed, at one point in 1993, is arrested in Vancouver, the system works, the Mounties, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, grab him.
He's trying to infill, he's trying to bring an Al Qaeda terrorist named Marzouk into America.
So they grab Marzouk, and then they grab Ali Mohamed, and they're sweating him.
They have an interrogation going on for hours.
As much as the Canadians ever sweat anybody, I don't know, I think they're probably pretty polite up there in Canada.
But anyway, Scott, they're working this guy.
Finally, around midnight, he writes and he says, This is my control agent, John Zent.
I work for the FBI.
And they call Zent, and Zent vouches for Ali Mohamed.
They let him go.
Where does he go?
Within months, he goes to Nairobi, Kenya, where he begins taking the pictures of the U.S. Embassy that, a year later, bin Laden points to his pictures and said, that's where I want the truck bombs to go.
And in 1998, five years after Ali Mohamed began the plot, the bombs go up in exactly the same spot that bin Laden pointed to.
220-some people killed, thousands injured in Kenya and Tanzania in this plot.
And Ali Mohamed is in the middle of it.
And yet, during this period, in 1994, he meets with Andrew McCarthy, who prosecutes the Day of Terror case.
He snookers him, tells McCarthy that I'm running a scuba diving business in Kenya.
McCarthy believes him, apparently, lets him go, even though he's named as an unindicted co-conspirator, along with bin Laden and the Day of Terror plot.
That would be Andy McCarthy, number one proponent of governmental lawlessness over there at the National Review, right?
That would be the same Andy McCarthy who is now the ultimate hypocrite trying to say that they shouldn't have the KSM trial in New York, which is absolutely wrong.
We need to have the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohamed in New York City as all the other trials have been conducted, except for Mosawi in Virginia.
All of the war, the al-Qaeda-related trial.
And by the way, here's the reason for this, and I've talked about this.
Not only do the Jersey girls want it, and these are these courageous women who lost their husbands, who are the only reason the 9-11 Commission even came into being, but you have 2,071 homicides, most of which happened in New York County, in Manhattan, man.
And we still have a thing in America called the rule of law.
Yeah, the district wherein the crime shall have been committed?
Something like that?
Yeah, exactly.
A little technicality called the Constitution.
Yeah, called an absolute mandate with no exceptions, right there in Amendment 5.
Anyway, no big deal.
But here's what's important about this.
This is what is so important.
I'm really glad we got to this point in the programs, and this is so relevant, Scott.
The reason that that trial has to happen in Manhattan is because that trial is going to be the last opportunity for there to be any kind of an airing of the FBI incompetence on the road to 9-11.
Now, there is no way that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is going to escape justice.
And the reason is that, apart from, even if, and they should exclude all the water-boarded torture testimony, it should be excluded for constitutional reasons.
But, Khalid, people forget, and I have a thing on my website about this on the homepage, people forget that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, down in Guantanamo, at an open hearing, completely unpressured and unmotivated by anybody, confessed to his involvement in the World Trade Center bombing.
He's got it.
It's on record.
He already did it.
Well, wait a minute now, because, I mean, he also confessed to, you know, killing Santa Claus and causing, you know, tidal waves and every terrorist attack that ever happened since 1952 or something in there.
I would say, more importantly, he bragged to Yosef Fauda from Al Jazeera before he was ever arrested.
Well, yeah, we know that.
That's true.
But he also, the Santa Claus thing is not going to hold water.
He was very specific.
He had this X number of counts.
If you go to my website, it's on the homepage, scroll down.
He is very specific in this hearing, I think it was in March of either 06 or 07, in Guantanamo, at an open hearing, about his involvement.
So what I'm trying to get at is to those people who argue that, well, you know, we're giving all these, you know, we're at war with these guys, we're giving all these guys all these freedoms that they don't deserve.
This is a crime committed.
He deserves to be tried the way his nephew, Ramsey, was tried twice, the way Abolima, Selema, the blind sheik, all of these guys were tried in the Southern District for crimes committed.
And, you know, to those who say, well, what about if they commit crimes overseas?
Well, the African embassy bombing was overseas, and Patrick Fitzgerald made his bones, got the job in Chicago as a result of that trial.
So here's what they don't want to happen, Scott.
Here's what the FBI and the Justice Department, and I think it's very courageous of Holder and Obama to have called for this.
And, by the way, you know where they could have this trial where there's zero security issue in New York City?
Governor's Island.
Okay, Governor's Island is in New York Harbor.
There's a federal facility there.
They could have the trial on Governor's Island.
They could restrict access.
I mean, they could have public access.
I mean, people who want to be in the gallery could be screened for security reasons and weapons and everything else, so there would be zero threat to New York City's security if they have it on Governor's Island.
That's in New York County.
That's completely legal, and they could do it.
Now, here's why Andy McCarthy is the world's ultimate hypocrite, who made his career on the Day of Terror case, which he tried in Manhattan, why Andy is the ultimate hypocrite, because they don't want the defense.
Obama's going to defend Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
They don't want the defense to put the government on trial, which is the right of the defense.
That's what the defense, that's basically, if you've been caught dead to rights or something, the only defense you really have is to try and try the government, okay?
And they don't want that to happen, and I'll tell you how I know that for certain.
When Andy McCarthy, on the Day of Terror plot in 1994, they're getting ready, and Fitzgerald was the second seat.
Andy McCarthy is the lead prosecutor.
He's an ex-U.S. marshal.
Went to Columbia Law School.
To his credit, very bright guy.
Andy McCarthy, they get, there's a guy named Roger Stavis, who is the defense lawyer for El-Sayed Nasser, the guy who killed Khamenei, who was also indicted in this plot, okay?
And Roger Stavis, I interviewed, and he issued a subpoena.
He wanted Ali Mohammed to testify.
Why did he want Ali Mohammed?
Because he was going to argue what I'll call the Scott Horton blowback defense, okay?
He was going to argue that Ali Mohammed was a product of our war in Afghanistan.
He was trained by the military, and this is a, you know.
Now, whether or not the jury would have bought that is problematic.
It doesn't matter.
Yeah, for the record, that's not a defense for killing civilians.
No, it's not.
I never said it was.
No, I'm not trying to, I'm not embracing, I'm not trying to say that you're that.
I know, I know.
I just want to make myself clear here.
Yeah, it's not a defense.
Of course it's not a defense, but it's like the way, you know, how did John DeLorean get off his initial trial?
He put the government on trial initially.
You know what I'm trying to say?
It's like you do whatever the hell you can.
If you don't, as I said in my book as judge, when I went to Fordham Law School, Judge McLaughlin, who, Dean McLaughlin, who later became a federal judge, told us in evidence, the first day of evidence class, he said, if you don't have it on the law, pound on the facts.
If you don't have it on the facts, pound on the law.
And if you don't have it on the law or the facts, pound on the table.
So, anyway, so Roger Stavis is trying to find Ali.
Here's what happens.
Andy McCarthy, somehow, Ali is in Africa.
He's protecting the embassy bombing plot.
And Andy McCarthy gets word to him.
Ali Muhammad flies back.
I got this from an FBI agent named Jack Clunan, who later, you know, interrogated Ali after his arrest.
And Ali is called to California.
And Andy flies to California.
And Ali says to him, you know, I'm running a scuba diving business, okay?
Now, does Andy discourage him from testifying?
I don't know, but Andy certainly knows where he is.
And yet, Ali is never called at the trial.
And Andy later, during the trial, he encourages, I think what's called a missing witness admonition to the judge, where they ask the judge to point out that Ali Muhammad didn't show up, you know, which suggests things to the jury.
So, what I'm getting at is the last thing the old guard says, and that includes Patrick Fitzgerald, because it was during his tenure in the Southern District that a lot of these mistakes were made.
I prove in this book that in 1997, listen to this, they're in Kenya investigating the home of Wadi el-Haj, who was one of the principal plotters with Ali Muhammad in the embassy plot, okay?
Bombing plot.
So, Dan Coleman, who I mentioned, was one of these, they called him the professor.
He was the liaison to the CIA Bin Laden unit, Alex Station.
And he was in Kenya.
And he goes and he searches Wadi el-Haj's house.
So, what does he find, Scott?
He finds links to Ali Muhammad, who's then living in Sacramento, California.
Oh, my God.
Ali Muhammad, an FBI informant.
Oh, my God, okay?
So, Patrick Fitzgerald himself flies with Jack Clunan and Harlan Bell to Sacramento and meets Ali Muhammad at a restaurant, and tries naively to get Ali Muhammad to turn, like, you know, be a friend to the Fed.
Now, this Ali Muhammad, by the way, at that point is sworn allegiance to America.
He's a naturalized citizen.
And he's sworn an oath to America twice, because he was an honorably discharged sergeant in the U.S. Army.
So, he's sworn two oaths to America.
What was Patrick Fitzgerald and Andy McCarthy's theory in the blind sheikh's conviction?
Seditious conspiracy.
They reached out and they found this law from the Civil War era, and they got the sheikh in company.
By the way, Peter, you've got to wrap up this point real quick, because we've got 15 minutes, and we've got the fact that 20 al-Qaeda in the country leading up to 9-11, and I think this is why all Americans should have been at least partial truthers starting that day.
How can you have 20 al-Qaeda in America and not have the FBI know about these guys and stop them from killing 3,000 people like this?
Well, look, I'm going to wrap up what I'm saying with even more information.
Apropos of that, listen to this.
Patrick Fitzgerald, who was the general in the war on terror at this point in 1997, is leading the bin Laden unit.
He's either the head or the co-head of organized crime and terrorism in the southern district.
He meets Ali Mohammed, and Ali Mohammed says to him, I love bin Laden, I don't need a fatwa to attack America, and I have X number of sleepers who I can make operational at any time.
Now this is Ali Mohammed telling Patrick Fitzgerald he's got people in America partial to the al-Qaeda cause that he can snap his fingers and these guys will go operational, and they'll start to do damage on the homeland, right?
Patrick Fitzgerald had, in my opinion, I've got a law degree from Fordham, class of 78, I'm not a practicing attorney, but I think Patrick Fitzgerald at that point had probable cause to arrest him on the same charge as the Sheikh, seditious conspiracy, because what he's saying is we'd already gotten an indictment against bin Laden at that point.
The U.S. was effectively at war with al-Qaeda, and he is saying I love bin Laden, and he's putting bin Laden ahead of his loyalty to the United States.
So at least they could have detained him as a material witness, right?
At least.
So what happens is this.
He leaves the restaurant, thumbs his nose at Fitzgerald, and Fitzgerald turns to Jack Clinton and says, that is the most dangerous man I've ever met, we cannot leave him on the street.
This is Patrick Fitzgerald to this agent, and yet that's what he does.
For ten more months until the bombs go off in Africa, they then arrest Ali, they wait a month to arrest him.
They get him in New York, and then there's another Keystone Cops episode.
Clunin tells me when they go to his hotel room, instead of grabbing the guy, putting the bracelets on him and searching him right away, which is like Skarsgård and Hutch 101, they let him go to the bathroom where he plushes shit down the toilet relating to Dr. Al-Zawahiri.
You'll later tell Clunin that.
And then they arrest him, and they put him in a John Doe warrant in the MCC Federal Jail in Lower Manhattan.
He negotiates, he's got him over a barrel, Scott, you understand?
He knows that they don't want the world to know about him, because he's such an embarrassment, right?
Yeah, well he's only infiltrated three agencies, the Army, Special Forces, the CIA and the FBI, I don't know why they'd want to cover that up.
Here's what they do, they cut a deal with Ali Mohammed to spare his life, and he doesn't get the death penalty, and he's now in some kind of custodial witness protection, he's in a jail somewhere, and he's got seals upon seals upon seals on his case.
Now here's the point.
Number one, if they claim that Patrick Fitzgerald and Andy McCarthy in his book Willful Blindness, where he attacked me in 20 al-Hamidim arguments in his book, who cares, you know?
And Andy McCarthy met him and he talks about Ali Mohammed.
Why haven't they wrapped up any of the sleepers?
If Ali Mohammed gave up totally, in other words, in return for not getting the death penalty, why didn't Ali Mohammed give up the sleepers?
None of them have been arrested.
You know the FBI would have made a big deal out of those guys getting wrapped up.
And here's the other huge question.
Why didn't he give up the 9-11 plot?
Because Ali Mohammed, I proved in my book that that plot commenced in 1994-95, okay?
Ali Mohammed in 1994, you know where he was?
He was training bin Laden's personal bodyguard in his house in Khartoum.
He was living with bin Laden in 1994.
Ali Mohammed was the stone al-Qaeda spy.
He had to know the 9-11 plot.
There's just no way he didn't know this plot, okay?
And yet they apparently failed to get this plot out of him.
And Jack Clunan told me, the night after 9-11, he gets back to New York, I think within a couple of days after 9-11, and they bring, Ali was in Florida.
They bring him up to New York.
They put him in the MCC, federal jail.
Clunan rushes in from wherever he is.
He somehow is able to fly, gets from the airport, goes right to the MCC at 11 o'clock at night, pulls Ali out, and he says, how did they do it?
And in Clunan's words, he told me how they did the whole plot.
Now, he never says to me, and he refuses to say because he knows the significance of it, that Ali knew the actual plot was going to happen.
But he said he told me how he trained guys to sit in first class, how to take cockpits, how to smuggle, you know, box cutters on board.
All the details of the 9-11 plot, Ali Mohammed spilled to this guy within days of 9-11.
So it's inconceivable that al-Qaeda's master spy would not have known.
So why didn't Patrick Fitzgerald get that plot out of him if he cut a deal with him?
Why didn't he wrap up these 30 sleepers if he cut a deal with him?
Now, here's the final question.
Ali Mohammed could be the star witness against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed at this trial in New York if Ali Mohammed really did give up al-Qaeda to the government in cutting his deal.
But I don't believe he ever has.
I believe Ali Mohammed remains loyal to bin Laden to this day.
And if Ali Mohammed ever escaped, he'd be on the next plane and blowing up something tomorrow because he is loyal to the cause, okay?
And so they spared this guy the death penalty.
And yet when Patrick Fitzgerald had the U.S. v. bin Laden, the African Embassy trial, which made his career in February of 2001, right, and months before 9-11, did he call Ali Mohammed as a star witness?
Remember when Sammy de Blas Gravano cut a deal with Ghadi and he killed 19 people and they only sentenced him to five years?
Why?
Because Sammy de Blas Gravano became the government's star witness in all the trials against Ghadi and the mob.
Why didn't they use Ali Mohammed?
I'll tell you why they didn't use him.
It's like the line from A Few Good Men.
You can't handle the truth, dude.
They didn't want Ali Mohammed on the stand then.
They used Jamal al-Fadl, a second-tier witness, who ultimately was successful and they got the conviction.
So Ali Mohammed, imagine, if Ali Mohammed truly has turned and is loyal to America now, what a witness against Khalid Sheikh Mohammed he could be?
Holy cow, all right?
But they don't want that because that will open the door.
Instead of Peter Lance writing his books every couple of years and being on programs like you, it'll be front page New York Times, 60 Minutes.
The mainstream media will be forced to confront the FBI's failures.
But they don't want that.
The Justice Department is terrified of that.
All right, but so now talk to me about, you know, we've got ten minutes still to talk about Mohammed Atta and Marwan al-Sheihy and their buddies who hijacked and crashed these planes.
Fifteen muscle guys brought in from Saudi Arabia, I guess, are a little bit less important.
But how could it be that the CIA, the FBI, the NSA didn't care enough, weren't doing their jobs well enough?
Or is it possible they turned a blind eye and said, you know what, we'd like to invade Eurasia and it wouldn't be bad to have an excuse.
I mean, after all, I kind of started this thing off attacking the truthers.
And I want to be fair, I mean, it ain't beyond plausible anymore.
All right, listen, look, let's just try and put brackets around some of these issues, because they're all very, very important.
There's a difference between knowing that something terrible is going to happen to this country and allowing it to happen and actually causing it to happen, right?
There's not a huge difference because, you know, like if you kill somebody with a gun, or you hit them with a car while you're drunk and you're criminally negligent, they're still dead, right?
Well, and there's a difference between being blind and deliberately closing your eyes, too.
Yeah, but I believe, look, I believe the evidence, and my area of expertise is the FBI and the Justice Department, okay?
So I want to speak to what I know.
I would be reckless if I just, you know, tried to round up all five of the big five agencies and put them in the same boat as to what intent was.
I do believe it's clear from what we now know, the Bush administration, that they were gung-ho.
They wanted to invade Iraq.
They were looking for an excuse.
There's no doubt about that, okay?
And this attack on America allowed for that.
And there's so many unanswered questions about the day of 9-11, all the war games that were going on, the confusion, the Bushes' performance in the school.
I mean, read cover-up.
Read my second book.
The second half of the book is devoted to the fact.
I mean, there were two F-16s doing bombing sorties over the Pinelands in southern New Jersey that could have been there in a minute and a half, and they were never notified.
And they brought a NORAD.
They got guys from a decommissioned NORAD Air National Guard base in Cape Cod, a hundred and some miles away, and they were told to vector off of Brooklyn, and they didn't go at supersonic speed, et cetera, et cetera.
There are all kinds of questions about how they performed the day of and everything.
That suggests negligence to the point of almost criminal negligence in allowing this attack, in not stopping the attack, and certainly not mitigating the depth of the attack when it was going on, okay?
But let's get away from that level of conjecture for a minute and get back to something that I found that is extraordinary, okay?
I'm going to refer you back to the timeline, and there's a thing called Sphinx Trading, okay?
And go to page four of the timeline at the bottom.
This is PeterLance.com, my website, P-E-T-E-R-L-A-N-C.
In the upper right corner, there's the timeline you can download.
You'll see at the bottom of page four that El-Sayed Nasser, in 1990, the FBI knew that the killer of Rabbi Meir Kahani had a mailbox at this store in Jersey City, and the mailbox is in the same building as the Blind Sheikh's Mosque that Fitzgerald and McCarthy called the Jersey Jihad office during the Day of Terror case.
It was a hotbed of Al-Qaeda activity, okay?
So dot number one is 1990.
They know about this, you know, that a terrorist who killed a world leader like Meir Kahani has a mailbox in this store.
Dot number two, there's a list in my book on page 606 and 607 of the 172 unindicted co-conspirators in the Day of Terror case.
This is Fitzgerald and McCarthy now in 1994.
I'm giving you the second dot.
I'm going to give you a three-dot chart here.
On this list, number 90, number 86 is Mohammed Khalifa, the brother-in-law I told you about, 95, Osama bin Laden.
Ali Mohammed is 109 on the list, 130 on the list.
Waleed A. Noor, Waleed Al Noor.
So I went back and I looked at the Certificate of Incorporation on Sphinx Trading.
Waleed Al Noor is one of the co-incorporators of Sphinx Trading.
So Patrick Fitzgerald in 1994 and McCarthy thought of this guy being as important enough to put him on a list with Osama bin Laden and Ali Mohammed, a co-founder of a little mailbox store in Jersey City.
Now, his co-founder was a guy named Mohammed al-Attras.
Now, go look at my timeline.
Okay, top of page 31, okay?
There's a picture of Mohammed al-Attras.
Two of the hijackers, Khalid al-Midar and Salim al-Hazmi, two of the muscle hijackers who flew AA-77 into the Pentagon, got their fake IDs in July of 2001 at Sphinx Trading from Mohammed al-Attras.
That's dot number three.
Now, that's July.
That's like within days of the Phoenix Memo saying that we should be monitoring flight schools, Condi Rice, the confluence of, you know, the hair is on fire of George Tenet, Richard Clarke is canceling travel, any unnecessary travel of his staff.
There's all this confluence of intelligence that summer that something big is going to happen, okay?
Now, here's my point.
Patrick Fitzgerald is running terrorism and organized crime in the Southern District.
For seven years, they had a stakeout of John Gotti's Ravenite Social Club in Little Italy.
Twenty-four hours a day, every Italian-American that came in and left that place was photographed.
They bugged the place.
They finally, after three attempts by Gotti where he walked, they finally got him because they put a spike mic in the apartment of a mafia widow upstairs where he, Gotti, would conspire with Sammy the Bull, and they got the Teflon dot.
They spent tens of millions of dollars to bring down John Gotti, okay?
Now, why couldn't Patrick Fitzgerald, who's head of organized crime and terrorism, have staked out Sphinx Trading, put a surveillance across the street from the place he called the Jersey Jihad office in 1994?
Why couldn't he have done that?
And if he had, he would have seen those hijackers walking into that place in July of 2001, okay?
Well, plus you got the guys in San Diego were living with an FBI informant.
What's going on there?
Well, those are the same two guys.
The guys that came straight from Malaysia, right?
Yeah, that FBI informant, Abusada Sheikh, those were the two guys.
It was Al-Madar and Al-Hazmi, the same guys, who later went to the mosque in Virginia with Hani Hanjour, and that's where Anwar al-Awlaki comes into this story, another massive FBI screw-up, because al-Awlaki was an American-born cleric, radical cleric, who dealt with those guys in San Diego.
Then he moves to Virginia.
They go to his mosque in Virginia, and we now know that the FBI interrogated him multiple times in 2002, al-Awlaki, who was absolutely connected to al-Qaeda.
They let him go, Scott.
The FBI let this guy go in 2002.
He goes to Yemen, and we now know that months before the Fort Hood massacre, he's in touch with Major Hassan, and we now know that he's also in touch with the Christmas bomber, Mutallab, before that event happened.
And is now the precedent for the so-called authority of the President of the United States to order the murder of an American citizen overseas.
Yeah, now let me tell you something that you're going to disagree with me on, but I'm going to say something that has the praise that comes out of Texas, so be careful before what you say here.
They have an expression in Texas, you needed killing, all right?
That's an expression, whether you agree with it or not, there's some people that need killing.
And I'm not going to make a moral determination.
If Anwar al-Awlaki was somehow flipped on a banana peel and broke his neck, I would not mourn, okay?
Because I think he represents a true threat to U.S. security.
No, the only thing is the next time you go overseas, you're on the list, pal.
You're a bigger problem to them than he is, that's all I'm saying.
You're not letting me finish.
You're not letting me finish.
Let me make my point.
My point is that this guy is a serious threat to U.S. security, okay?
But here's the real reason he should not be killed by a predator drone, and they tried to kill him on Christmas Eve, which I believe is what inspired him to get this kid, rush this kid onto the plane when the kid wasn't fully trained, and that's what happened.
That's my theory.
He did it in retaliation within hours of them trying to kill him with a predator drone.
But here's the reason we need to capture this guy and render him back and try him in a U.S. court, as opposed to sending him to Egypt and having him waterboarded or killed.
The reason is, again, what intelligence this guy can produce about how many things he knew over the years and what the FBI did wrong on the road to 9-11.
Do you understand what I'm saying?
His value to America, and if you look at al-Qaeda as a true threat to us, which it is, and why we need to protect ourselves, which we do, okay?
His value is much greater alive and being questioned, like the way Murad talked to Colonel Mendoza freely, ultimately, after being waterboarded, but openly motivated to talk as opposed to being killed.
Do you see what I'm trying to say?
It's the same issue as Ali Mohammed.
It's the reason Ali Mohammed needs to be brought out of that cell and interrogated openly in a Senate hearing to tell what he knows, if he can be compelled to talk.
Do you know what I'm saying?
He shouldn't be, given the fact that they kept him from a death sentence.
So what I'm getting at is here, even if you feel like you're a subscriber to that Texas dictum of he needed killing, the man's threat to America's security is, and I agree with you.
I do agree that if we begin to have essentially a 007 branch of the CIA, where we give presidential authority to the assassination of anybody, frankly, overseas, it will be the old story of what Castro said about Kennedy.
The chickens have come home, or Malcolm X said it.
The chickens have come home to roost.
It's like when you do that kind of thing, when you approve that kind of kill authority on anyone, that's when you get into the slippery slope.
So I am in agreement with you.
That's why I just wanted to finish my point.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm sorry for interrupting you there.
Of course, I know better than thinking that you don't know better than being for assassination of American citizens, of course.
Well, listen, we're all out of time.
There's so much more here.
I couldn't recommend anything higher than just looking through the timeline, everybody, to get the beginnings of getting your head wrapped around this story.
We didn't get to talk at all about the mobster that got all the information in jail or about a lot of these things.
But, again, you can go to PeterLance.com.
The website itself is a treasure trove of information.
Take up your whole weekend.
And then some of the books are A Thousand Years for Revenge, Cover Up, Behind the 9-11 Commission Report, and Triple Cross.
And is this now Al Qaeda spies its own separate book now?
Is that right?
No, it's just a paperback version, which Patrick Fitzgerald spent 20 months trying to kill.
I sent four letters to Harper Collins.
That book is now a longer version.
But you can get it.
That's a whole other two-hour interview right there.
So have me on again, and I'll do it any time, brother.
Okay, great.
Well, I look forward to that.
All right, man.
And when we get closer to this article coming out in June, I just got an email from the editor right now of the magazine.
I can talk about it.
Then we'll get back.
And when Ahmed decides he wants to go public, it's up to him.
I'll certainly put you on the list.
But I want to tell him about that important moment in your life that he affected.
Yeah, well, I mean, it's a very important story.
This is kind of really the major thing to me underlying all of what we've talked about here today, which is the ability of the government to fail in such a spectacular fashion and get away with it.
Like you say, it is criminal negligence, 3,000 dead ultimately, and now hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands more overseas in the consequences from the successful attack here in this country.
And, you know, they can just go right on as though it's perfectly fine.
They can have a 9-11 commission and announce on the first day that the whole purpose of this commission is to recommend a Department of Homeland Security at the end, not that we're looking for the truth or anything, and try to put Henry Kissinger in charge of it, of all people.
I mean, that's what's really going on here is there's that whole idea that the grown-ups will do the right thing eventually is not really at play here.
Failure continues on and on and on for a generation, you know, and people are dying because of it.
Yeah, you know, I was, very briefly, I happened to watch, I think it was Clear and Present Danger the other night, one of the clancy books that was put on film with Harrison Ford, and I think it's the one about the drug cartel, you know, down in Columbia, right?
And at the end, and there's a whole sequence there where the President of the United States is kind of like supposed to be Reagan, you know, approves the killing of Jack Ryan because he, you know, he got in the wrong place at the wrong time, right?
And he basically, Harrison Ford walks in to the Oval Office and the President says, don't worry, you're going to file this away, it's going to be good for your record, you're not going to say a word, it's going to advance your career, and Harrison basically says, no, Mr. President, and he leaves.
And the movie ends with a Congressional hearing, okay?
Now, how many years ago, somebody can Google Clear and Present Danger, the movie, how many years ago they would end a movie with the triumph of a Congressional investigation, right?
It's now going to finally get at the truth, right?
Do you remember?
And now it's a joke.
Yeah, right, so we're going to have another Congressional hearing.
And how far we've come, Scott, to the point when I was an investigative reporter at ABC News in the 80s, and you'd have a hearing and it would be meaningful, you know?
There'd actually be debate between the parties and people of conscience, even Republican or Democrat, if they believed something was in the interest of the country that would be good for America, they would vote their conscience.
Now it's just, oh my God, it's so sad and so polarized.
The Republican Party, and I'm not going to be a defender of the Democratic Party, they blew so many opportunities I can't even begin to say, but the Republicans stand for nothing more than to defeat the Democrats.
They don't stand for anything.
They stand, well, they stand to defend Wall Street and the corporate interest, but they don't stand for anything.
They haven't proposed anything meaningful other than using this outrageous fur-buster rule that should have been thrown out years ago.
When I was a kid, democracy was 51 votes, right?
Isn't that how the presidential elections get decided, you know, except in 2000?
I mean, the point is, 50% of the vote is a majority, and that's what rules.
Now it's 60%.
And all they have to do is get that locked, and they made this big deal out of this brown guy getting elected to Massachusetts, and now they can paralyze the government.
Yeah, well, and here's the thing, too, is that, and this has got to be the last point, we're over time, and I'm sure you've got to go as well as I do, but it's got to be said that while the FBI has spent the last decade entrapping and convicting innocent people from the Detroit Five to the Miami Seven and the poor kid out in Lodi, California, and 100 people in between, they are still leaving us open to attack, and the next time that there's a September 11th-sized attack on this country, that'll be the end of our Bill of Rights forever.
Then they won't even pretend that we have a rule of law at all anymore.
I guess they'll still have the statues to themselves in D.C., but the institutions that supposedly were to protect liberty will be over.
This is what General Tommy Frank said.
The next time we had an attack like that, we will have a military form of government in this country.
And that is the kind of thing that these FBI guys are screwing around with, is the future of this entire society.
On that scale, that is the risk that they're playing with.
I could not agree with you more.
I am absolutely in 100% agreement.
And so many of those busts were absolute bull—just total— they get a disgruntled guy in a mosque, and they then give him the weapon, like the thing in New York with the Stinger missiles.
These are not helping our security.
They're just headlines for the Bureau.
Derek Sharif in Chicago, or Patrick Fitzgerald, gets 35 years.
That guy was so broke he had to pawn a radio to get the money to buy the grenades that the undercover agents were inciting him to set off in a mall.
But there is a true risk from al-Qaeda that we have to focus on, and you're right, I couldn't agree with you more.
So we'll end on that note.
All right, well, great, and I look forward to talking with you again, and thanks again for your time on the show today, Peter.
All right, Scott, anytime.
All right, everybody, that is Peter Lance, investigative reporter, novelist, and screenwriter.
You can find his website at PeterLance.com.
The books are A Thousand Years for Revenge, Cover Up Behind the 9-11 Commission Report, and Triple Cross.