The 9/11 Conspiracy of Incompetence

What if I told you that a member of Osama bin Laden's inner circle operated with impunity within the United States for years before Sept. 11? That despite being an ardent and avowed jihadi, he managed to become a naturalized citizen, join the U.S. Army, get posted to the Special Warfare Center where Green Berets and Delta Force train, and work with both the CIA and the FBI? And all the while, he was a top al Qaeda operative, hosting the organization's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, when he traveled to the United States in the 1990s to raise money, and training both bin Laden's personal bodyguard and radical Muslims who would go on to assassinate Jewish militant Meir Kahane and detonate a truck bomb at the World Trade Center?

Would you take it as evidence that our so-called intelligence community was abjectly incompetent and dysfunctional in the months and years before 9/11? Or would you see it as further proof that the powers-that-be were the powers behind 9/11, either "making it happen on purpose?" Or alternately: "letting it happen on purpose?"

With time running out on the lame duck Bush administration (now well on its way to becoming a "comma," as the president might phrase it), our chances of getting to the bottom of the signal event of the Bush years -- the unsolved murder of nearly 3,000 people, the worst terror attacks ever on U.S. soil, the "day that changed everything," the iconic 9/11 -- are also rapidly fading.

Even as the misnamed "war on terror" continues to heat up, the crime that precipitated it has somehow become a cold case. The only federal prosecution directly associated with the attacks -- that of Zacarias Moussaoui -- ended in a plea bargain and with an FBI agent accusing his superiors of "criminal negligence." Meanwhile, in the absence of a truly unfettered investigation, amidst calls from victims' families for a reopened, nonpartisan inquiry, and with many major questions still unanswered more than five years after the fact, it is unsurprising that faith-based theories continue to pour into the information vacuum and assume, at least for some, an aura of truth.

Numerous polls indicate that few Americans now believe they have been told the truth about 9/11. According to one poll conducted recently for the New York Times and CBS News, more than 80 percent think the administration is either "mostly lying" or at least "hiding something." Before it becomes too late, and the case too cold, is it still possible to determine what happened on 9/11 -- and why?

Did some version of the MIHOP or LIHOP conspiracy theories actually take place? Or were our leaders and their minions in the intelligence community simply so incompetent that they missed dozens, if not hundreds, of pre-attack "threat assessments," warnings, signs and indications that, as the notorious PDB of Aug. 6, 2001, bluntly informed the president, Osama Bin Laden was "Determined to Strike in U.S.?" If so, did they then conspire to cover up their "criminally negligent" incompetence?

Count author Peter Lance, an Emmy-winning former reporter and producer for ABC News, among those who believe in the "9/11 Incompetence Conspiracy Theory." Lance's new book, "Triple Cross," tells the amazing story of an al Qaeda superspy named Ali Mohamed. As Lance writes, "In the annals of espionage, few men have moved in and out of the deep black world between the hunters and the hunted with as much audacity as Ali Mohamed."

Mohamed's fundamentalist proclivities were no secret to U.S. intelligence. As early as 1989, he turned up in FBI surveillance photos, conducting weapons training of followers of the Omar Abdel Rahman, the "blind sheikh" now imprisoned for his role in a plot to blow up the United Nations and several bridges and tunnels into Manhattan. The sheikh's followers would later be involved in the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993, but Ali Mohamed not only avoided arrest but managed to become an FBI informant, even while smuggling bin Laden in and out of Afghanistan, writing much of the al Qaeda terrorist manual and helping to plan attacks on American troops in Somalia and U.S. embassies in Africa.