The Cook Report was prompted to make the programme by Dr Jim Swire, whose 23-year-old daughter Flora was amongst 270 victims when a terrorist bomb brought down Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie in December 1988. Dr Swire subsequently became a spokesman for all the bereaved British relatives. He had run a small-scale test, successfully smuggling a dummy replica of the Lockerbie bomb through the airport security systems in London and New York - and suggested that the Cook Report could do it on a much larger scale with a correspondingly larger public impact.
The programme’s first test involved sending a suitcase containing a mock Semtex bomb from Ancona in Italy, via Rome, to Gatwick. The suitcase was checked in at Ancona without any problems and then its ‘owner ‘got off the plane in Rome, leaving a theoretically lethal package to continue undetected and unaccompanied on its way to Gatwick. It was ludicrously easy, and the same dummy bomb got through X-ray and security procedures at no fewer than nine different airports on both sides of the Atlantic. Worst was Logan in Boston, which Mohamed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 terrorists, later chose as his departure point prior to hijacking the aircraft that demolished the Twin Towers.
Research for the programme also took it to Manila, where the police had discovered details of an extraordinary plot to blow up the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. The evidence was discovered on a laptop computer left behind by a terrorist fleeing an unintended explosion in a bomb factory in a local apartment block. The programme was later able to reveal previously unknown links that led all the way from that bomb maker to Osama bin Laden. Manila’s Police Chief, Hermogenes J. Ebdane Junior - a retired general and future national security adviser - gave the Cook Report exclusive access to the computer’s files because he said the US Authorities, including the FBI and the CIA, simply weren’t interested. That was five years before 9/11 and had that evidence been followed up, then the lives of 2,973 people might not have been lost.
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Roger Cook Reports
This is an independent, not for profit channel celebrating the pioneering investigative work of The Cook Report, its presenter Roger Cook and the team behind him. Nothing like his series was made before or has been made since.
Unfortunately, the entire Cook Report archive was destroyed in a fire at a London data storage facility in 2006, and we would therefore like your help
We have acquired most of these episodes unofficially by reaching out to the Great British public. So some of what we’ve found is not the best technical quality and we don’t have the copyright, which belongs to ITV. Do you have any old Cook Report programmes in your VHS collection? If so, we would appreciate it if you would allow us to digitise and share them on the channel. Thanks in advance! Email: rogercookreports@gmail.com
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