Why Lance's work represents a key to the 9/11 truth movement

by Michael Richardson
Reading Room attendant

Most theories about the crimes of September 11, 2001, rely upon rather simple premises that place blame in two slices on a pie chart. The mainstream theory of blame is something like an 80-20 division, and sadly, most Americans are inclined to write off what they perceive as the Bush administration's portion with the benefit of the doubt. There are, conversely, many within the 911 truth movement who believe firmly that bin Laden has always been a deep-cover CIA asset, and that 9/11 was engineered from the darkest chambers of the Agency, which seems to discount the notion that people in the Islamic world would have the wherewithal or the motive to commit such crimes. Amidst these extremes, explanations are usually simplistic and avoid inconvenient unknowns.

We are very fortunate that Peter Lance, an Emmy-award winning journalist, and a veteran to the terrorist context of 9/11, is awake to complex possibilities.Cover Up begins with a sort of trust-walk into one of Lance's odd investigative veins: the deep south of the 1960s, where mafiosi Greg Scarpa Sr. has been hired by the FBI to beat the tar out of a few KKK members, to force their knowledge about the murders of three civil rights workers. The reader is wonders what possible relevance this could have to 9/11? But it doesn't take very long before we begin to see why Lance has committed himself to this digression: the crimes of 9/11— foreign and domestic — have deep, wide, and multifarious roots that must be understood if anyone is to move forward with any real investigation.

Let me cut to the chase and boil down a few of Lances most astonishing discoveries:

1. With the backing of documents that Lance acquired from FBI sources, it is now seems clear that Ramzi Yousef (who, you will recall, masterminded the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993), from his maximum-security jail cell, may have orchestrated the bombing — yes, the bombing — of TWA Flight 800 in 1996, with a Casio watch-driven time bomb. As is clear from the FBI documents, this would have been an effort to drive his trial over a cliff by tainting the jury with confusion of facts relevant and facts irrelevant to the case.

2. The FBI, using Greg Scarpa Jr. (the son of Greg Scarpa Sr. who was in jail on racketeering charges) as an informant-conduit, was monitoring all of Ramzi Yousef's communications to the outside world being allowed by the FBI through Scarpa.

3. To accept Scarpa as a credible witness, regarding Yousef and his connection to Flight 800, it might also have been necessary to accept Scarpa as a credible witness regarding years of corruption by top FBI officials who had been parties to murder along with Scarpa's father.

3. The FBI investigation of the crash of Flight 800 turned very quickly from pursuing a clear likelihood of terrorist involvement, to an attempt to prove without hard evidence that a short circuit in the 747's wiring had ignited the fuel tank. The presence of (non-missile) explosives in the mid-section of the airplane, directly over the fuel tanks, was explained by the notion that an explosives canine trainer had accidentally leaked test-explosive material on the plane. Yet the explosion—its position, chemicals, and timing—bore all the signatures of Ramzi Yousef.

4. Jamie Gorelick was one of two principal Clinton Justice Department officials who convinced FBI chief investigator Kallstrom to, overnight, switch his position and declare that the plane was not downed by a terrorist act.

Other 9/11 Commission staff, who were prosecutors in the Ramzi Yousef case, had known very well that the September 11 plot — a plot to use suicide pilots in commercial airlines — had originated well before 1998, the "official" date set forth by the Commission.

Lance shows why the crimes of 9/11 are so inconvenient to those who politicize blame, and why we face such a monumental stalemate in our Congress. If it is the case that, under the watch of a Democratic administration, the investigation of the mass-murder of hundreds of Americans, on Flight 800, was smothered and rendered an outright lie, the Democratic Party, as an institution, would have been left in an incredibly compromised position. It seems that the 9/11 Commission may have been the exchange floor of a monumental quid pro quo between our two parties — a dance of mutual blackmail in which the two fighters have agreed not to fight with knives, but with padded gloves, so that it could leave no permanant or visible wounds

Such compromises are the essence of corruption as a spreading social affliction. One man's misdemeanor can be used to silence him as a witness to murder, a silence that is itself greater crime to be manipulated, the perpetual shape of a gun in a pocket. Sadly, it seems that the silence of our congress, and our media, is a silence bred by such manipulations, exchanges of silence, and fear.

It is a tremendous and hopeful development that the office of the New York's attorney general, Elliot Spitzer, has agreed to review a complaint brought to him recently (as of October, 2004), by a 9/11 truth coalition. Let us hope that Spitzer, even as he seems to pursue the office of governor of New York as a Democrat, has the nerve to shine the light of his investigation wherever it needs to go, even if it means rupturing the bond that he has with his party. It is an edgy moment, for if Spitzer investigates while reluctant to ask the Democrats to turn out their pockets — even as the crimes committed by members of the two parties may be proportioned as a raisin next to a watermelon — the result could be the double containment of 9/11, and the drawing of Spitzer into the familiar chorus of equivocation.

Lance asserts clearly that the investigation into the causes of 9/11 has to be depoliticized. Any effective 9/11 investigation, he implies, will have to be led by professionals who have no political ambitions, and who have never been involved in certain, old tangled webs of American "law enforcement." As a primer to this process, and as a solid introduction to the historical can of worms that is 9/11, Cover Up should be essential reading especially for Mr. Spitzer.