Mr.

Fitzgerald, In Your Threat to Sue for

Libel, Please, Either Put Up or Shut Up
By Peter Lance July 15th, 2009.

Seven weeks ago Patrick Fitzgerald, the most intimidating Federal

prosecutor in America, sent my publisher (HarperCollins) and me a letter
threatening to sue us for libel if Triple Cross, a book I wrote, critical of his
anti-terrorism track record, was published.

Yesterday marked the four-week anniversary of the book's pub date and
although it's been out for a month, we're still waiting for his summons and
complaint. It was the fourth threat letter that Fitzgerald had sent since October
2007 and the man who'd succeeded in getting New York Times reporter Judith
Miller jailed for 85 days in the CIA leak probe was growing impatient.

"To put it plain and simple," Fitzgerald wrote, "if in fact you publish the
book this month and it defames me or casts me in a false light,
HarperCollins will be sued." You could almost hear Fitzgerald holding his
breath and stamping his feet, astonished that we had not rolled over after
he issued the following demand in his first letter 20 months earlier:

I write to demand that Harper Collins cease publication, distribution and

sale of the current version of the book... issue and publish a clear and
unequivocal statement acknowledging that the book contains false
statements about me; refrain from publication of any updated version
(and) take no steps to transfer the rights to any other person or entity to
publish the book in any form.

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In this initial letter, Fitzgerald included an attachment requesting that
HarperCollins "preserve" twelve separate categories of records including all
"book drafts," correspondence between me and the publisher, even
"records of any and all projected sales" of the book "including any and all
records of profits attributable to Triple Cross."

There was even the hint of a personal vendetta. Apparently, Judith Regan,
my former publisher, who'd left HarperCollins in 2006 after the scandal
over the O.J. Simpson book If I Did It had discussed a $1 million book deal
with Fitzgerald for his memoirs.

So in that first threat letter, the U.S. Attorney demanded:

...any documents reflecting Harper Collins estimate of the market value of

my personal reputation, including, but not limited to, any documents
relating to an unsolicited letter from Judith Regan, on behalf of Harper
Collins, to me offering me a "seven figure" sum for the rights.
Two weeks later, on November 2nd, 2007, Mark Jackson, then attorney for
HarperCollins, rejected Fitzgerald's libel claim and called Triple Cross "an
important work of investigative journalism."
But the man The Washington Post once called a "relentless" prosecutor
was undaunted. On November 16th, Fitzgerald send a second letter; this
one amounting to 16 pages. And, as if to remind us who we were dealing
with, each page bore a time stamp showing that it was faxed from the office
of the "U.S. Attorney Chicago."

In the June 8th edition of Newsweek, when Michael Isikoff, broke the story
of Fitzgerald's campaign to kill the book, he quoted the Chicago U.S.
attorney as saying that he was "not aware" that the time stamp would be
visible. But that's a difficult story to swallow from the man Vanity Fair
described as having a "mainframe-computer brain," in their fawning 2006
tribute, "Mr. Fitz Goes to Washington."

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32 Pages of Threat Letters

If you go to my website http://peterlance.com and download the 32 pages

of threat letters, they chronicle an almost obsessive effort by Fitzgerald to
pulp the book.

In his third letter, sent on September 22nd, 2008 Fitzgerald actually used
the word "demand" twice in the same sentence: "I write to demand
immediate compliance with my demands of October, 2007."

In his fourth letter, sent June 2nd, 2009, Fitzgerald described the entire
book as "a deliberate lie masquerading as the truth."

Consider the recklessness of that statement in the context of the libel

standard that all journalists live by: the rule set forth in the landmark
Supreme Court case, New York Times vs. Sullivan.

In order to mount a successful defamation claim "Times vs. Sullivan"

requires a public official like Fitzgerald to demonstrate "a reckless
disregard for the truth," or "actual malice."

Fitzgerald would be hard pressed to clear that hurdle, since the hardcover
edition of Triple Cross ran 604 pages, with 1,420 end notes and 32 pages of
documentary appendices including a series of FBI 302 memos and a 1999
affirmation sworn to by Fitzgerald himself.

If you have any doubts about the depth of my research, termed

"meticulous" in a recent piece for Forbes.com, you can download a pdf of
the illustrated Timeline from the middle of the book, along with those
appendices, which include some heretofore classified documents. Yet in his
20-month campaign to kill the book, Fitzgerald crossed the threshold of
libel himself. In a June 8th interview with the Associated Press, he falsely
claimed that I blamed him in Triple Cross for the mass casualties on 9/11
and the African Embassy bombings:

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"The book lied about the facts and alleged that I deliberately misled the
courts and the public in ways that in part caused the deaths in the 1998
embassy bombing attacks and in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001." Fitzgerald
said the lives lost in those attacks were personal for him and he decided to
stand up for himself because "it is outrageous to falsely accuse me of
causing those deaths corruptly."

A simple reading of Triple Cross in its hardcover edition will offer proof
positive that I never even came close to making such a claim. But that
comment, along with Fitzgerald's "lie masquerading as the truth" line,
suggested the same reckless disregard for the truth that I was accused of by
the Chicago U.S. Attorney.

A Justice Dept. Complaint Vs. Fitzgerald

So, on June 15th, I filed a complaint against Fitzgerald with the Justice
Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, asking acting counsel
Mary Patrice Brown to open what amounts to an internal affairs
investigation of the U.S. Attorney and his drive to pulp my book.

An examination of Fitzgerald's 32 pages of threat letters suggests that if he

actually wrote them himself he must have spent days, perhaps even weeks,
trying to bury Triple Cross. If he used one of the 161 lawyers in the Chicago
federal prosecutor's office, that raises even more serious questions.

Since word of the Fitzgerald censorship scandal broke I've had the support
of a number of First Amendment and anti-censorship advocates. including
The Reporter's Committee for Freedom of the Press, Nat Hentoff, the
éminence gris of The Village Voice, who wrote his last column in January,
and Jan Schlichtmann, the gusty tort lawyer celebrated in Jonathan Harr's
1995 best seller A Civil Action.

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"What Patrick Fitzgerald, tried to do, in attempting to shut down this book,
was repugnant," says Schlitchtmann. "It represented a virtually
unprecedented attempt by a sitting U.S. official to kill a book critical of his
performance in office. Fitzgerald had to know he didn't have a libel claim,
yet for months and months he tried to force HarperCollins and Peter Lance
to knuckle under to his demands -- something they refused to do."

So far, online columnists on the right and the left, who might otherwise
have cut each other's throats, have been universal in their support for
Triple Cross's publication.

See columns from Newsmax, WorldNetDaily, Accuracy in Media and The

New American on the right to The Daily Kos, rawstory.com and
thepublicrecord.com on the left. Rory O'Connor's piece for The Huffington
Post was entitled: Patrick Fitzgerald's Private Jihad.

The Chilling Effect

In an article I wrote for playboy.com, published June 16th, I detailed the

kind of '''Chilling Effect," Fitzgerald sought to achieve with HarperCollins.
In the piece I presented evidence that in discrediting a treasure trove of al
Qaeda-related intelligence in 1996 (underscored by his June 25th, 1999
sworn affirmation) Fitzgerald himself might have been guilty of the very
same perjury and obstruction charges he used to convict Scooter Libby in
"Plamegate."

That Playboy piece also detailed another central finding in Triple Cross
that Fitzgerald may have found embarrassing: the story of Sphinx Trading.
Sphinx was a mailbox-check cashing store located in the same building that
housed the al-Salam Mosque of blind Shiekh Omar Abdel Rahman. That
mosque location was dubbed "the Jersey Jihad office" during the "Day of
Terror" trial co-prosecuted by Fitzgerald and Assistant U.S. Attorney Andy
McCarthy in 1995.

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Prior to that trial, Fitzgerald and McCarthy compiled a list of 172 un-
indicted co-conspirators, which included bin Laden and his brother-in-law
Mohammed Jamal Khalifa.

In a November 17th, 2006 piece for The Huffington Post, I made the case
that if the Feds, under Fitzgerald (then head of the Organized Crime and
Terrorism Unit in the SDNY), had applied just a portion of the energy
monitoring Sphinx that they had used on their around-the-clock
surveillance of John Gotti's social club in Little Italy, the Towers might still
be standing in Lower Manhattan.

Why? Because al-Midhar and al-Hazmi, two of the muscle hijackers who
flew AA #77 into the Pentagon on 9/11, not only had mailboxes at Sphinx
but they got the fake IDs they used to board that flight from Mohammed
El-Attriss, Sphinx's co-founder and partner in Sphinx with Waleed al Noor.

In that list of unindicted co-conspirators drawn up by McCarthy and

Fitzgerald during the Day of Terror trial, Waleed A. Noor was No. 130. That
means Fitzgerald considered him important enough to associate with Ali
Mohamed and Osama bin Laden himself. The Feds had been onto Sphinx
Trading since 1990 when the killer of Rabbi Meier Kahane (El Sayyid
Nosair) was found to have kept a mailbox there.

By 2001, Fitzgerald was the effective "general" directing the Justice

Department's "war on terror." By simply connecting those three dots: from
Nosiar to al Noor to El Attriss, the Feds could have been into the "planes
operation" executed on 9/11 in July -- two months earlier.

Al Qaeda's Master Spy

But perhaps the revelation in Triple Cross most embarrassing to Patrick

Fitzgerald related to another name on that list of 172, No. 109: Ali A.
Mohamed, the al Qaeda master spy who became the central focus of my book.

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Not only did the ex-Egyptian army major succeed in scamming the CIA in
Hamburg in 1984, but he slipped past a Watch List, seduced a U.S. woman
on a TWA flight from Athens to JFK in 1985, married her at a drive-
through wedding chapel in Reno, Nevada, then set up a sleeper cell at her
home in Silicon Valley.

Months later he enlisted in the U.S. Army where -- astonishingly -- he

succeeded in getting himself posted to the JFK Special Warfare School at
Fort Bragg, the highly secure facility where elite Green Beret and Delta
Force Officers trained.

20 years ago this week, Ali, known to his radical Islamic bothers as "Ali
Amiriki," ("Ali the American") was driving up to New York City, where he
trained the al Qaeda cell members later convicted in the 1993 WTC
bombing, the Kahane murder, and the "Day of Terror" plot (prosecuted by
Fitzgerald and McCarthy) whose cell members intended to blow up the
bridges and tunnels into Manhattan.

All of those Mohamed trainees were photographed, on four successive

weekends in July -- almost 20 years ago -- by the FBI's elite Special
Operations Group (SOG), the same black bag unit that "Got Gotti"

From January 1996, as I document in Triple Cross, Fitzgerald was

effectively directing Squad 1-49 (the bin Laden Squad) in the FBI's NYO --
seeking to get an indictment of Osama bin Laden. One of the lead agents
was Jack Cloonan, whose job it was to go back and discover who Ali
Mohamed really was.

As Cloonan started peeling back the layers of Mohamed's triple sting of the
CIA, DIA (at Bragg), and the FBI (where he'd become an informant from
1992 on), his jaw began to drop at Ali's cold-blooded boldness and success.

And, as I documented in the book, two of the principal Feds that "Ali
Amiriki" snookered were Andy McCarthy and Patrick Fitzgerald himself.

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In 1994, prepping for the "Day of Terror" trial, McCarthy actually flew to
California and met Ali face to face, withdrawing back to New York after Mohamed
lied and told him that he was running a scuba diving business in Kenya.

The truth was that, by then, Mohamed was a principal player in the
emerging plot to blow up the U.S. Embassies in Nairobi and Dar Es
Salaam. In fact Mohamed had commenced the plot in 1993 by taking the
very surveillance picture bin Laden would use to locate the bombs that
would detonate years later in 1998.

In an interview for the book, Cloonan admitted that Ali was actually angry
at the Feds for not paying his airfare from Africa to California for the meet
with McCarthy.

But the al Qaeda spy's most audacious act would play out three years later
in the fall of 1997 in front of Patrick Fitzgerald himself. After another
Squad I-49 agent discovered evidence linking Ali to one of the plot's top co-
conspirator's in Nairobi, Fitzgerald actually flew across country to confront
Ali in a face to face meeting. It took place in a Sacramento restaurant
across from the California state house.

After the Feds made their pitch to get Mohamed to turn, the hardened
terrorist declared that he "loved" bin Laden and didn't need a fatwa to
attack America.

Further, he admitted that he had a number of effective "sleepers" hiding in

the U.S. homeland whom he could activate at any time.

Leaving Mohamed "On the Street"

Then, thumbing his nose as the man Vanity Fair called "the bin Laden
Brain," Mohamed left -- at which point Fitzgerald turned to Cloonan and
called Ali "the most dangerous man I have every met." More importantly,
he declared, "we cannot let this man out on the street."

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But that's exactly what happened. Mysteriously, Fitzgerald allowed this al
Qaeda master spy to stay loose for another ten months until a month after
the simultaneous truck bombings in Kenya and Tanzania that killed more
than 200 and injured thousands.

Only then did Fitzgerald pull Ali "over," arresting him and stashing him in
the M.C.C. (federal jail in Lower Manhattan) under a John Doe warrant --
ultimately cutting a deal with Mohamed to avoid the death penalty.

By any definition a deal is a contract -- a promise for a promise -- and

previous "rats" like Sammy "the Bull" Gravano, earned their way to an
early release by becoming star witnesses at a host of Federal trials.

But when Patrick Fitzgerald commenced U.S. vs. bin Laden, the embassy
bombing trial in early 2001 (the case that made his career), Ali "The
American" was curiously missing from the stand.

The Greatest Enigma

In effect, the Feds had bought his silence with that deal. Today, Mohamed
is hidden away in some kind of custodial witness protection -- perhaps the
greatest enigma in the "war on terror."

This ex-al Qaeda spy is a one man 9/11 Commission who could stand
witness to the failures and screw ups of the FBI and Southern District Feds
on the road to September 11th, but there are seals upon seals on his case.
He'd been virtually forgotten by the public, until I happened to tell his
story with such detail in Triple Cross.

That's the book that Patrick Fitzgerald didn't want you to read.

The new trade paperback edition is now in stores -- updated and 26 pages
longer so that I could air Fitzgerald's charges and give him his due.

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As to my key findings on his anti-terrorism track record, the paperback is
virtually identical to the hardcover edition he tried to kill.

Time for Fitzgerald to "Put Up or Shut Up"

So now, on the day after Bastille Day, I'm writing this piece to say "Bring it,
Pat." Put your summons and complaint for libel where your mouth was all
those months. If you think you have a viable defamation case against me
and HarperCollins mount it now -- or admit that you never should have
abused the power of your office by using the civil libel laws to try and chill a
journalist and publisher.

While no one invites litigation I, for one, would welcome a chance to sit
across a legal conference table where you would be compelled to testify at a
deposition under oath. Maybe then you'd tell the full truth about how it
was that the best and the brightest in the FBI and SDNY were so
outgunned for so long by al Qaeda and its master spy.

If you don't have what it takes to file that threatened lawsuit, Mr. Fitz, then
at least have the honesty to withdraw your specious claim and support my
call for Ali Mohamed to testify before a committee of Congress. As Justice
Brandeis said, "sunlight is the best disinfectant," and it's time for the
Justice Department and the FBI to shine a light into the dark recesses of
Ali Mohamed's secret life.

Copyright © 2009 by Peter Lance

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