National Geographic Channel - Cog in the Scare Machine

This channel has been airing a lot of "inside" specials, like Inside 9/11, Inside the US Secret Service, Inside the Pentagon, and the most ominous Triple Cross: bin Laden's Spy in America.

Add this to CNN's special whose name I forgot and don't care to look up, where they blast a picture of bin Laden on the screen with the words "KNOW YOUR ENEMY." They even go so far as to kind of slowly zoom in on the pic.

Now, if that's not propaganda, I don't know what is. I mean, it's about as close to Emmanuel Goldstein that you can get. Know your enemy, indeed. The Brotherhood, The Base, what's the difference?

So when people come forward to explain that what you see on the TV screen isn't the whole truth or may even be quite fabricated, you're not surprised. And if you are surprised, then, well, you deserve pity.

TRIPLE CROSS: Nat Geo Channel's Whitewash of the Ali Mohamed Story

Over Christmas I wrote a 12 page ten-act treatment outlining the two key parts of the Ali Mohammed story...

That part of my research was presented in the Nat Geo documentary that aired on Monday.

But that was only half of my story. The other half was the astonishing saga of how the two bin Laden "offices of origin" -- the FBI's New York Office (NYO) and the Office of the U.S. Attorney for the SDNY, allowed Mohamed to operate with impunity for years. How key special agents in the bin Laden Squad (I-49) like Jack Cloonan desperately played catch-up as Mohamed planned the Embassy bombings. How John Zent, Ali's west coast control agent was totally outgunned by him, getting caught up as a material witness in a grisly triple homicide in Fresno in 1992 when he should have been riding herd over the al Qaeda sleeper. How it was Zent who vouched for Ali and got him released from Canadian custody in 1993 - allowing him the freedom to help plan the Blackhawk Down operation and the Embassy bombing plot.

My most astonishing, findings involved Patrick Fitzgerald, the former head of Organized Crime and Terrorism in the SDNY, who had allowed Ali to remain free as early as 1994 even though he named him as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Day of Terror case. Another of my key findings was that Fitzgerald buried probative evidence of an al Qaeda New York cell in 1996.

So they didn't want to make it seem like this Ali Mohamed (can't these people come up with some more names?) was connected with our government, or that people in our government knew that he was a double agent, if you can even call him that. That would get people mistrusting the government and maybe folks will start asking all the wrong questions.

But really, why should I believe any part of this show or any part of this column by a man who says they left all the juicy stuff out?

Tell me, what should I believe and why.