PETER LANCE: Ali Mohammed as you rightfully point out was their leader. But Ali Mohammed was actually a triple agent. He was working for the U.S. special warfare for school at Fort Bragg, he was essentially an ex-Egyptian army officer who got into America despite a presence on a watch-list, married an American woman, became a naturalized citizen, joined the U.S. Army and in 1989 while he was serving with the Green Berets at Fort Bragg, as an active duty sergeant in the U.S. Army he was going up to these Para military training sessions and training these men who would terrorize our country.
Nine years later, as you point out Richard, rightfully, he's the guy that actually did the surveillance of African embassies that had killed 234. He actually took the pictures that Bin Laden pointed to and said, "here's where we place the bomb".
RICHARD MINITER: You should probably add that Ali Mohammed got his Visa, even though he was on a watch-list, from a CIA official in Cairo. He was essentially let into the United States by the CIA.
PETER LANCE: I have a timeline in the middle of my book which cites almost 150 either lost opportunities or mismanaged intelligence. By the time 2001 came around, the number of dots were thundering, the drums were pounding so loud... Attorney General Ashcroft, during the summer of 2001, was told that because of the level of threat that the intelligence agencies then knew was facing America not to take commercial air travel
RICHARD MINITER: I don't think any thoughtful person disagrees that Mueller is a political hack in over his head.
PETER LANCE: There's blood on the hands of people in the New York office of the FBI. No one has ever been held accountable. The only person that who's ever been punished in the result to stop Yusef in 1992 was special agent Nancy Floyd, who was the object of a five and a half year internal affairs investigation OPR, and she was suspended for two weeks. Instead of getting a corner office in the Hoover building, for recruiting Amad Selem, arguably the greatest effort they've had on the war on terror. She got set up and treated as the scapegoat. Where's the Bush administration today, openly cooperating with the 9/11 commission to get to the bottom of the greatest unsolved mass murder in U.S. history.
DICK CHENEY [whispering into Miniter's ear]: 9/11, the roots of it, going back to the '93, World Trade Center bombing can be found in Iraq.
RICHARD MINITER: We found the equivalent of canceled checks in Iraqi archives after the war.
