Reply #35: re: someone correct me if I'm wrong, but can't anyone write a review on Amazon?

[rschop]

No you have to have purchased the book, and I would assume have read it.

Since we had a phone contestation about the book after his review, it was clear Mark H. Gaffney had not only read the book but had extensively gone through it to re-verify every detail, details which are foot noted to the exact document, the exact page numbers where this information is found in the various reports. In many cases this information is spread over several documents, it looks like intentionally to obfuscate what really had taken place prior to the attacks on 8/11 that had allowed these attacks to take place.

For example:

The account of FBI Agent Ali Soufan by Lawrence Wright says that Soufan had asked FBI Director Louis Freeh in November 2000, if Freeh would make an "official request" to the CIA and George Tenet for any information the CIA had on Walid Bin Attash and any meeting in Kuala Lumpur. He was told that the CIA had none of this information.

But according to page 238-239 of the DOJ IG report, Freeh was given this information by the NSA in December 1999, and according to page 181 of the 9/11 Commission report, this same information was given to Freeh in January 2000 by the CIA and this information appeared in Freeh’s daily briefing papers on January 4, 2000.

Notice that to put this together, since each report left out critical details of this account, you had to use at least three different documents, Lawrence Wright's account of Soufan, the DOJ IG report, and the 9/11 Commission report to get the complete account on just this one single detail on 9/11. The account of Soufan is approximately 20 pages, the 9/11 Commission report about 550 pages, and the DOJ IG report about 380 pages. But to put just one fact together you had to go through literally thousands and thousands of pages, and then build detail time lines of the information and then see which facts were consistent with the facts already established.

Also notice that if you read just the 9/11 Commission report you would never know that Soufan had made this request to FBI Director Louis Freeh, and if you read just the DOJ IG report you also would never know about Soufan’s request. It was only after you combined these three reports would you start to have a even a semi-reasonably accurate account of just this one fact, the request by Soufan to Freeh in November 2000 and his out and out criminal obstruction of the FBI’s own investigation of the Cole bombing and the horrific murder of 17 US sailors.

The 9/11 Commission had access to all of the interviews from the DOJ IG investigators, and it is impossible to believe that the DOJ IG investigators and DOJ Inspector General did not know who Soufan was or did not know that Soufan was the lead FBI investigator on the Cole bombing. It was this criminal obstruction of Soufan’s investigation that basically had allowed the attacks on 9/11 to take place.

Why did the 9/11 Commission report or the DOJ IG report not conclude that Freeh had criminally obstructed Soufan’s investigation of the Cole bombing and it was this obstruction that allowed the attacks on 9/11 to occur. This clearly shows that in order to hide the crimes committed by Freeh, and the CIA, in just this one case, Soufan's request to Freeh had to be kept secret by the 9/11 Commission and even the DOJ Inspector General.

But by covering up these crimes by the CIA and FBI Director Freeh, both the 9/11 Commission and the DOJ Inspector General had also committed serious crimes. Notice to uncover these crimes took a huge effort to put all of these reports back together and then to reconcile this information between literally thousands of pages of US official documents. The crimes of the CIA, FBI Director Louis Freeh, the 9/11 Commission and the DOJ IOG were well hidden and it took a huge effort over several years to finally uncover these crimes, crimes that had allowed almost 3000 people to be murdered on 9/11 or had covered up these very crimes.