Able Danger - Lancing the Boil - More of the story unfolds

Journalist Peter Lance who has been investigating 9/11 since before anyone thought of investigating it, was on Lou Dobbs tonight talking about the Yousef/Scarpa connection in reference to Able Danger. For those not familiar with the story, Mobster Gergory Scarpa Jr. was serving a thirty- year hitch at Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) where WTC-1 suspect Ramzi Yousef was housed awaiting trial in '96. Seems Yousef couldn't contain himself and was yapping his head off and bragging to Scarpa about all the dirty deeds he had done and sins yet to come.

Frontpage Magazine interviewed Lance in 2005 and here is what he had to say about the Yousef/Scarpa connection in what became known about the "FBI #302" memos:

"In the weeks prior to the downing of TWA 800 the FBI was alerted by Colombo crime family member Gregory Scarpa Jr. that Ramzi Yousef -- who was in a cell next to Scarpa Jr. at New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) -- was arranging to have his al Qaeda cohorts plant a bomb aboard a U.S. airliner. The reason? To provoke a mistrial in the Bojinka case, the first of two federal trials facing Yousef.

Yousef even shared with Scarpa the intricate details of his schematic of the same Casio-nitro bomb trigger device, he had placed aboard PAL #434 in December 1994.

Keep in mind that had the Bojinka plot been fufilled, up to a dozen U.S. jumbo jets would have had their center wing fuel tanks blown apart by Casio watch-nitroglycerine bomb triggers placed in the life jacket pouches of seats located over the tanks.

Yousef's only mistake with PAL #434 was in bomb placement, not bomb design.

Now, in the spring of 1996, weeks prior to Yousef’s trial for the Bojinka plot, the bomb maker began sending elaborate notes and bomb schematics to inmate Scarpa—who -- unknown to Yousef -- had begun working as an informant for the FBI, and passed them on to his Bureau contacts.

His original motivation was to get some downward release time on his sentence if convicted in the RICO trial he was facing.

Over the next 11 months from March, 1996 to February, 1997, Scarpa Jr. delivered dozens of copies or photographs of Yousef's notes which the FBI then summarized in their own internal #302 memos."

Peter has a website and you can click on the FBI#302 links on the top of the page to read the FBI memos for yourself.

As soon as a transcript of tonight's show is available I will post on it.

UPDATE: Here is the transcript - short but sweet.




iraq Politics News murtha Able Danger Curt Weldon bush war on terror spying patriot act nsa CIA

January 30, 2006

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