Now, in Part 2, Peter talks about his experience testifying in front of the 9/11 Commission, the evidence that was hidden from the public and why no one was held accountable in the aftermath of 9/11.
One of the strange things about the 9/11 aftermath is that no one really got blamed and no one got fired
as a result of the biggest terrorist act committed on American soil. Why is that, do you think?
The fact that the 9/11 Commission held no one accountable is the subject of my second book Cover Up. Half of the Commission staff was made up of alumni of the very agencies who were supposed to protect America. A key player in the whitewash that became the 9/11 Commission Report was Dietrich
Snell, the ex-Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York (who worked under Patrick Fitzgerald).
I demonstrated probative evidence in Triple Cross that Snell and his co-prosecutor in the 1996 Bojinka case, Mike Garcia, received the evidence from
the Philippines National Police (PNP) in 1995 detailing Ramzi Yousef's "planes as missiles" plot -- ultimately carried out by his uncle Khalid Shaikh
Mohammed (KSM) on 9/11.
Snell took my testimony before the Commission in a windowless conference room at 26 Federal Plaza, the building that houses the FBI's New York
Office.
As I detail in the piece I just wrote for Playboy "The Chilling Effect," Snell
then flushed all the evidence that I provided that the plot
originated with Yousef and KSM in Manila in 1994 and pushed the origin of the plot ahead 2 years to 1996 to a time after Yousef had been captured
(thus removing him from the plot).
Snell then reduced all of my testimony to a single end note and he cited as the sole authority on the 1996 date, KSM himself, who we now know
was waterboarded more than 183 times. As noted in Triple Cross, relying on the word of KSM for such an important date is like taking the word
for David Berkowitz for when he committed the first Son of Sam Murder. KSM's tortured testimony was completely unreliable.
In the Playboy piece I also cited a recent study by Robert Windrem, formerly of NBC News, who went back and discovered the shocking fact
that 25% of
the supporting end notes were derived from the testimony of "detainees" who were subject to enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding
and other coercive methods -- in short the testimony was wholly unreliable.
And this is the M.O. of the last official body to investigate the biggest unsolved mass murder in U.S. history.
To answer your question, no one got blamed because those charged with assessing blame (who failed to do so) would have had to blame themselves.
The 9/11 Commission was the ultimate example of the foxes guarding the chicken coop.
*****
You can follow Peter on Twitter at Twitter.com/triplecross. Triple Cross is an absolutely fascinating read and is available at Amazon.com.
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