By Peter Lance
Regan Books, an imprint of Harper-Collins; 2004

reviewed by Kyle F. Hence, Co-founder of 9/11 CitizensWatch.

A dark cloud of suspicions hang over the attacks of 9/11 and the failure to fully and independently investigate the murder of nearly 3000. There are some who believe in the simplistic broad-brush notion that all cases of documented government negligence or even brazen FBI corruption are simply ‘cover’ for complicity of the government in the attacks. On the other hand, there are others who despite, as one case in point, a compellingly clear pattern of the FBI spiking promising field investigations who are reluctant to raise the specter that there were accomplices or facilitators on the inside; at least in print or publicly. The author of this new 9/11 expose falls into the second camp even as he advances evidence that could lead to a long over-due criminal inquiry and a real investigation. As an aside, it should be said that negligence, incompetence, corruption and conscious insider complicity can all conceivably unfold concurrently or independently in a crime especially in this case given the mammoth size of the U.S. government bureaucracy and the complexity of the 9/11 plot.

If you suspect the worst, as growing numbers do both in the U.S. and abroad (witness polls in NY, Canada and Germany), and are looking for irrefutable evidence of complicity of elements within the U.S. government, you won't find it here. However, if you are intrigued with the notion of a penetrating expose that challenges the official accounts and goes about as far as you can go without directly charging high ranking FBI officers, DoJ officials, and Commissioners and their staff with treason or cover-up, then this new book on 9/11 will keep you turning pages and perhaps demanding a new investigation by New York’s Attorney General Elliot Spitzer.

In Cover-Up, the Emmy award-winning investigative journalist Peter Lance thoroughly documents a revealing and shocking slice of the FBIs NY office and Justice Departments incompetence, missteps, cover-up and perhaps even criminal negligence surrounding 9/11 related cases in New York and the Philippines beginning just before the first WTC bombing in 1993 and leading up to the release of the 9/11 Report. He does so convincingly having scoured thousands of pages of court transcripts, gained access to copies of internal FBI records pertaining to the investigation of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s cousin and the convicted Bojinka conspirator, Ramzi Yousef and having directly confronted a senior staff member of the 9/11 Commission.

In several stirring and disturbing accounts, Lance documents how whistleblowers, competent field agents hot on the trail or even a mob informant are undermined or otherwise railroaded by the FBI and the Judicial system while those complicit in the corruption or grossly negligent are rewarded. In one case confirming grave doubts about the 9/11 Commission’s integrity, the former Deputy AG in New York Attorney General Spitzer’s office, Dietrich Snell, who joined the 9/11 Commission staff as a ‘team leader’, investigates what Lance exposes as one of the big unanswered questions surrounding the attacks—why was the indictment (under Snell’s own ’96 prosecution) and ‘hunt’ for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the alleged 9/11 mastermind (now in CIA custody), kept secret for over eighteen months? When Lance was interviewed by Snell in New York on March 15th Lance asked the conflicted 9/11 Commission staffer this simple question. Not surprisingly, he was rebuffed as Snell calmly cited national security and continued with his interview.

What Lance leaves to readers to ponder largely on their own is whether or not such actions are merely isolated instances of higher ups simply covering up or whether their efforts are part of a wider pattern of top level officials consistently foiling competent field investigations that could have exposed and foiled the 9/11 mass murders. While it could certainly be the former; given the number of such disturbing examples, the latter question begs to be asked and framed in a credible fashion.

One thing is clear in Lance’s case and that is it should lead an Attorney General to probe into whether or not even the former is grounds for criminal prosecution and the need for convening a Grand Jury to evaluate these old cases in a new and incriminating context. Such a step by a duly empowered investigative authority that doesn’t begin its investigation with clearly concluded and limiting presumptions of guilt could open a Pandora’s Box of unanswered questions and lines of inquiry never properly answered or followed, that, if addressed, could get us, finally, to the truth.

The AG might begin by reading Lance’s accounts of the undermining and isolation of FBI agent Nancy Floyd, NY Detective Joseph Simone, and Fire Marshall Ronnie Bucca all of whom were hot on the trails of apparent 9/11 conspirators when they were effectively ‘taken out’ by superiors and in the cases of Simone and Floyd their careers ruined and reputations maligned. One thing is for sure, Lance’s account should elevate them to the ranks of celebrated whistleblowers Colleen Rowley, Robert Wright and Sibel Edmonds, among others.

Part I of Cover-Up presents new evidence that strongly suggests that Flight 800 was a Bojinka-like Al-Qeada bombing plot coordinated from the jail cell of Ramzi Yousef, with the aid of an FBI placed mob informant on the inside and perhaps with the support of the Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. Such a conclusion runs smack into hundreds of eyewitnesses to the crash, including a Coast Guard helicopter pilot, who insist they saw a missile destroy the airliner; but exploring this conflict falls outside of the scope of this review.

Lance traces the apparent Yousef/KSM/Flight 800 link to a meeting at the White House attended by then Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick (who was later to become a 9/11 Commissioner) and a strategic but ultimately deadly choice he speculates made at the time to bury this new evidence linking Yousef and KSM to Flight 800 in order to not expose the FBI’s NY office to major scandal surrounding an entirely separate set of mob-related cases and one very corrupt mob-tied FBI agent. Labyrinthine to be sure. But while Lance navigates deftly through the maze and makes the case that "evidence linking Ramzi Yousef to 9/11 has been systematically excluded from the Commission’s carefully censored account of the attacks" he fails to even explore the possible implications of this cover-up. That is that those covering up are, in effect, accomplices to the crime in the practical sense that they by their actions obstructed the search for the truth and thus potentially protected a wider circle of co-conspirators.

Part II of Cover-Up dissembles key findings in the 9/11 Commission’s seventeen ‘Staff Statements.’ Here Lance goes farther than most established journalists have in challenging the Commission’s findings and while he merely echoes many of the unanswered questions raised by the 9/11 Family Steering Committee, Unansweredquestions.org and others, he does succeed in raising probative new questions that all Americans deserve to have fully answered and he brings them to a wider audience through Harper-Collins.

For example, Cover-up, along with The Terror Timeline by Paul Thompson, are the first books released to point out the major discrepancy between Richard Clarke’s account in Against All Enemies of the critical thirty-odd minutes between the second and third attacks and the findings of the 9/11 Commission. Clarke’s account has both General Richard Myers and Secretary Rumsfeld participating in a White House initiated video conference that begins just minutes after the strike of the second plane at 9:03 AM which differs markedly from not only the Commission’s ultimate finding but from the sworn testimony offered by Rumsfeld before the Commission and the account offered by Myers to the press and Congress.

These questions surrounding the nation’s top Executive and Military leadership raised first by Gail Sheehy in her Mother Jones article, "Who’s in Charge Here?" are echoed here in Lance’s Cover-Up even as many await to review the evidence laid out by former LAPD narcotics officer turned investigative reporter, Mike Ruppert in his first book, Crossing the Rubicon which focuses in part on Vice-President Cheney and the 9/11 war games, a largely neglected area of public inquiry that Lance examines briefly without probative depth.

Given that there has not been a legitimate criminal investigation of the murder of nearly 3000 it is imperative that questions raised about the attacks and the investigation by the 9/11 Commission be framed in the light of evidence there may have be a broader conspiracy. Most investigations, including Lance’s, have begun with a presupposition that Osama Bin Laden,19 Arab men and alleged captured co-conspirators were solely responsible. Beginning with this presumption of guilt unfortunately not only might blind the investigator to facts that suggest a wider circle of complicity, perhaps within our own government, but also only bolsters the currently widely held view that 9/11 was a merely a tragic example of a bloated compartmentalized government’s missteps, negligence or incompetence. Then there is the related concern over no accountability whatsoever, a strong point that Lance drives home repeatedly and effectively with strong supportive comments from the "Jersey Moms" and other members of the Family Steering Committee.

While it is obviously not Lance’s role to bring criminal charges, given the extent of his extensive documentation of a NY slice of 9/11 related corruption and cover-up reaching from the mid 90s to this summer’s Commission Report itself it is more than reasonable to at least raise the prospect of criminal and/or treasonous acts having been committed by officials within Justice Department or FBI relative to the events of September 11th. The pattern of spiked investigations from O’Neill to Bucca to Rowley and the scope of the failures should lead any investigator worth his salt to at least consider the possibility that the attacks may have been facilitated by well-placed individuals within the FBI, Justice Department, NORAD or elsewhere. As the recent Zogby poll commissioned by 911truth.org and 9/11 CitizensWatch confirmed, there is a widespread but reasonable belief by the public, presumably based on this sort of circumstantial evidence, that certain government officials let the attacks happen.

Sounds like a conspiracy ­ yes, conspiracy to commit murder, accessory to murder, and obstruction of justice in deliberate attempts to cover-up. But given the absence of an acknowledged and confirmed smoking gun however, we are not there yet.

Regardless, we must ask rhetorically where Lance is apparently reluctant: hasn’t the body of credible evidence crossed the threshold in which we must openly contemplate, discuss and most importantly follow the threads that might lead to smoking guns and wholly different conclusions about who and why behind the attacks of September 11th? Perhaps we can hope that Lance will make it a trilogy by writing a third book to follow A Thousand Years for Revenge and Cover-Up that turns even more stones to answer the questions he raises and forces the issue with those who can take this investigation farther than any of us are able—for surely this mass homicide case was not closed with the release of the 9/11 Commission’s whitewash of a report, a case Lance documents well and makes compelling in Cover-up.