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A journalist who has uncovered evidence of al-Qaeda involvement in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800 has been threatened with a lawsuit by powerful U.S. Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald.

Government officials blamed the crash of TWA Flight 800, which killed 230 people, on a mysterious mechanical malfunction, while the Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168, was quickly labeled the work of domestic "right-wing" terrorists.

Accuracy in Media has long maintained that Clinton Administration officials concealed the truth about both incidents.

But at a news conference at the National Press Club, investigative reporter Peter Lance said that "the greatest mass murder in U.S. history," the attack on 9/11 which occurred during the administration of President George W. Bush that killed nearly 3,000 Americans, has still not been thoroughly investigated.

A five-time Emmy Award winner formerly with ABC News, Lance is one of the few journalists with mainstream press credentials still raising the hard questions about how al-Qaeda agents were able to prepare terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, even while some of them were under surveillance here and abroad by various U.S. government agencies.

Rather than fire anybody over this massive intelligence failure, President Bush gave George Tenet, CIA director at the time of 9/11, a presidential Medal of Freedom, we noted in a 2006 column (web site) that praised the work of Lance and others for continuing to raise questions about the attack.

The 9/11 attack was foreseeable and preventable, Lance said at the Tuesday press conference, and there has been a spectacular "failure of accountability" for those who could and should have stopped them. Lance said the 9/11 commission, officially known as the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, was a whitewash and that commission members had political agendas designed to protect people and agencies from scrutiny.

The Lance book, Triple Cross, originally published in 2006 and now issued in paperback, includes a timeline, also on his website, tracing the history of some of the perpetrators of these terrorist acts going back to 1981. His book goes into substantial detail about the TWA 800 and Oklahoma City bombing cases and how government officials covered up the nature of these crimes.

Offering support to Lance at the press club event was Lt. Colonel Anthony Shaffer, a member of the Able Danger military intelligence unit that identified al-Qaeda terrorist cells in America before the 9/11 attack. This project used a process known as "data mining" to develop information on potential terrorists and establish a data base for government use. Shaffer blew the whistle on the fact that the information wasn't shared with other agencies or used effectively.

Also appearing in support of Lance was Jan Schlichtmann, the attorney whose lawsuit over polluted and poisoned water was the subject of the film "A Civil Action," starring John Travolta. He said Lance had a "right to write" and that Fitzgerald's attempt to control "what we say and write about his conduct in office" should not stand.

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