Wow! If this is true, it is certainly scary and compelling proof that things were set in motion long before 9/11 to destroy America and it's people by the Islamofascists. A excerpt of the interview follows. Click on the title to read the entire interview.
FP: Mr. Lance, welcome to Frontpage InterviewLance: Great to be talking with you.FP: What motivated you to write this book?
Lance: Cover Up began as an effort to answer the two big unanswered questions left after I had finished 1000 Years of Revenge. To get an overview of my findings in that book, your readers can sample the 32 page illustrated Timeline from 1000 YEARS at my website under “Terrorism.”
Like the book, the Timeline goes back 12 years to 1989 and traces al Qaeda's treacherous development of the 9/11 plot, focusing primarily on the how the New York office of the FBI (NYO) the Osama bin Laden "office of origin," failed repeatedly to interdict the plot.The two big questions, which I sought to answer at the end of that book were:1) Why did the U.S. Justice Department ignore probative evidence from the Philippines National Police (PNP) in 1995 that Ramzi Yousef, the original World Trade Center bomber, had conspired with his uncle Khalid Shaikh Mohammed (KSM) as early as 1994 to set in motion the plot that culminated on 9/11? In the spring of 1995, Col. Rodolfo B. Mendoza, a leading PNP investigator who had interrogated Yousef's lifelong friend and co-conspirator, Abdul Hakim Murad, gave the U.S. Embassy in Manila evidence that Yousef and KSM already had chosen had six targets: the WTC, The Pentagon, CIA HQ at Langley, VA, The Sears Tower in Chicago, the Transamerica Tower in San Francisco and an unnamed nuclear facility. Col. Mendoza also had evidence that up to 10 Islamic radicals were then training in U.S. flight schools. This was 1995.I found FBI NO/FORN memos from that year proving that the Bureau had this intelligence, but they dropped the ball. I wanted to find out why. It should be noted that the detailed intelligence from Col. Mendoza was for a plot involving the hijacking of airliners that was completely distinct from the Bojinka plot in which Yousef, KSM, Murad and a 4th conspirator, Wali Kahn Amin Shah, planned to plant Casio watch powered-nitroglycerine bomb triggers aboard up to a dozens U.S. jumbo jets exiting Asia with U.S. tourists.That plot went way beyond the initial plane to hijack a small plane and fly it, laden with explosives, into CIA Headquarters, an early scenario which Murad had discussed with Col. Mendoza in the early days of his 67 day interrogation. Yousef had even undertaken a "west test" bombing of a Casio Nitro device which he planted under a seat in the 26th row of Philippine Airlines Flight #434 on the morning of December 11, 1994.Planted on the first leg of a two-leg flights, Yousef got on board, pieced together the apparently innocuous components of the bomb and exited the flight after hiding it in the life jacket pouch below seat 26K. He mistakenly believed that the center wing fuel tank of the 747-100 began at the 26th row.In fact that tank runs below the 17th to 25th rows. So Yousef was a few feet two short.Nonetheless, after he exiting, while PAL #434 was heading toward Japan, his device exploded with such force that it blew a hole in the passenger floor and killed Haruki Ikegami, a 24 year old Japanese national in seat 26 K.The heroic pilot was able to get the plane on the ground. But now Yousef knew that if he and his cohorts merely moved the devices FORWARD a few rows, the downward blast would ignite the fuel tanks, turning the jumbo jets into flying bombs. They intended to do this on up to 12 flights when they had a fire in their Manila bomb factory on the night of January 6th, 1995 and the Bojinka plot was foiled.However, at the same time that they plotted Bojinka (and a third plot to kill the Pope who was to arrive in Manila in early January 1995) Yousef and KSM had well in motion the hijack-airliners-fly-them-into-buildings scenario that culminated on 9/11.Col. Mendoza, who was the Richard Clarke of The Philippines, when it came to his knowledge of Islamic radicalism, was very clear with the U.S. government and warned our officials in in the spring of 1995 of that PRECISE plot which unfolded six years later.The Justice Department seemingly failed to pursued this extraordinary warning and I wanted to know why.2) The second question left unanswered, when I had finished my first book, was why did the FBI and Justice Dept. treat the hunt for KSM so differently than the public hunt for his nephew -- which had successfully brought Yousef to ground? Yousef was arrested in early February, 1995 in a bin Laden controlled guesthouse in Islamabad, Pakistan after a tip to the U.S. State Department from an informant that Yousef had recruited. This young South African (Istaique Parker) wanted the $2 million reward being offered under a program called Rewards for Justice that was the brainchild of the late Diplomatic Security Service (DSS) agent Bradley Smith.During the two years since Yousef had fled New York on the night of the first WTC attack (February 26th, 1993) he had been the object of a worldwide public manhunt. Newsweek ran stories with banner headlines like The World’s Most Wanted and the State Dept. even printed posters touting the $2 million reward on matchbook covers that they circulated by the thousands through the middle east.Parker finally gave up Yousef, but the day he was arrested by DSS and DEA agents on February 7, 1995, I recounted in my first book, how an FBI agent got to the 20 room guesthouse late and blew a chance to grab Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was staying in a ground floor room. In fact, KSM was so audacious that he gave an interview to Time magazine on the Yousef takedown using his own name "Khalid Shaikh." But by the time FBI agent Brad Garrett got there KSM was gone.This didn't stop Garrett from participating in a 60 Minutes II story in the fall of 2001 in which he took false credit for the Yousef takedown.Meanwhile, back in 1995, rather than doing a Wild West style worldwide search using the same rewards posters that had brought Yousef down, the Justice Dept. changed tack. For unknown reasons they indicted KSM along with Yousef in 1996 but kept the indictment sealed and his name from the press.
Thursday, January 27, 2005
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