The 9⧸11 Files： The CIA’s Secret Mission Gone Wrong ｜ Ep 1
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For 24 years now, politicians, the media, intel agencies in this country and abroad
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have all demanded that you believe the official story about 9-11. And here's what it is.
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They tell you a group of Al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists, many of whom were known to U.S.
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intel services, somehow managed to evade capture for years as they planned the most significant and
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elaborate terror attack in human history. We're told that despite repeated encounters with the
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FBI, the CIA, local law enforcement, airport security, foreign intel organizations, the right
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information somehow never made it to the right people. The government failed because it just
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didn't have the intelligence it needed. That's the story. That story is a lie. Nearly 25 years later,
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the families of 3,000 civilians are still mourning the murder of their loved ones.
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Anyone who doubts the official narrative is cast as a kook, a criminal, a fringe conspiracy theorist,
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and punished. They've been blacklisted and censored and banned. Even as the leaders who failed to
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protect our country on 9-11 use these attacks as a pretense to expand their own powers and permanently
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transform the United States. None of this is speculation. All of it is true. Over the course
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of this series, you will hear accounts from people who lived it. CIA officers and analysts who were
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there, FBI agents from the bin Laden unit, family members of the victims. None of these people are
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kooks. All of them have firsthand information. What they'll tell you is that what you have been told
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about September 11th is not true. Why are we doing this? Our purpose is in part to make the strongest
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possible case for a real investigation into 9-11 25 years later. A new 9-11 commission. One that is
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honest. One that is not guided by partisan political interests. One that is not serving foreign powers.
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To do this investigation, we spent many months looking into what actually happened and speaking to people
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who saw it. We poured over thousands of pages of documents, mostly primary sources, but also
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contemporaneous news reports and declassified government documents. Over the course of this
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investigation, we made numerous findings that shocked us, not least of which the apparent role
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that former CIA director John Brennan played in helping bring the 9-11 hijackers to the United States
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and the remarkable lengths the CIA went to to protect the 9-11 hijackers from the FBI and from domestic
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law enforcement. Telling the full story requires starting before the attacks, going back to something
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called Alec Station. That was the CIA's bin Laden unit in 1999. My name is Mark Rossini. I'm a former FBI agent.
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So from January 1999 to May of 2003, I was the FBI New York Joint Terrorism Task Force representative
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to Alec Station at CIA headquarters. Before 9-11, there were no sources in al-Qaeda. None.
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There was a group of Pashtun caretakers, okay? They called them the Trodpines. Trodpines were these
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Pashtun people that were bin Laden's t-boys and t-gals, right? And they were the great source
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of the Pakistani intel service that was feeding information from the Trodpines to the ISI
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to the CIA about what was going on in al-Qaeda. They had all the electronic communication satellite
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shit in the world, imagery. I remember looking at images of bin Laden, you know, in his courtyard.
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Fine. But what's in his head? What's he saying? What's he doing? These people are 10,000 miles
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away. They don't give a shit about American law. They don't care about going to jail. They want to
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die. How are you going to get a source inside there? Before September 11th, U.S. intel services
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got most of their intelligence on bin Laden from what was called the Hada Home switchboard in Sanae,
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Yemen. That was a communications hub that bin Laden and his associates used to communicate with each
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other. They were, at the time, living in Yemen. The FBI gained access to this after the 1998
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embassy bombings in East Africa. How did we officially get the Hada Home in Sanae, Yemen
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on the books, on the radar, if you will? Okay. Nairobi, 1998, August 7th. John Antiseff,
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Special Agent John Antiseff, greatest FBI agent ever in the FBI, even better than me.
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John flies over to Nairobi. And one of the survivors, one of the perpetrators who chickened out and ran
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and lived, Daoud Rashid al-Awali, Saudi, he gets captured by the Kenyan police. John flies over from
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New York, and already there have been two FBI agents interviewing Daoud. They were getting someplace, but they
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really weren't getting that far, right? John walks in. And first thing he does, says, you need some water? You want a drink?
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Did you, did you eat today? Did you pray? Are you okay? Yeah, I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine. He said, just, just relax.
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Just, just, just, just, just, let's have a chat. He didn't beat him with a phone book. He didn't fucking
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waterboard him. He didn't pull his fingernails out. He wasn't Mr. Tough Guy, like all these fucking
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assholes like Dick Cheney want to believe, right? All pieces of shit. He talked to him like a human
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being. Take me through the day. Talk to me. Well, I went to the hotel and I got my stuff ready. And did you,
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did you call anybody? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I called this number. And he wrote it down. And he gave John
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the number of the Hadahoum in Sana'a Yemen, which was the Al-Qaeda switchboard that we in the FBI had no
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fucking clue existed up until that point. CIA and NSA did, because remember, they had been listening to
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the Nairobi cell and their activity since 1996. We in the FBI didn't know about that number.
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The Hadahoum wasn't just a communications hub for Al-Qaeda. It was the physical home of the father-in-law
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of Khalid al-Medhar, one of the future 9-11 hijackers. At the end of 1999, listening to that phone
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is when the CIA learns and the NSA learns that Khalid al-Medhar is going to be traveling
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from there to Dubai, and then from Dubai onward to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to meet the summit.
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The summit was a meeting of an operational cadre of Al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists from around the
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world. He was scheduled to travel on or about January 5th, 2000. The NSA,
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has the ability, did and probably still has, to get any plane, airplane reservation at once
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in the world and know about it, right? We knew his passport number, we had the phone, we
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have everything. So we knew his travel information, we knew what flights he was taking, who was
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seen he was going to sit in. The CIA arranges for when he gets to Dubai to be secondary, okay?
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Not fully questioned, but, you know, talk to him a little bit. And then he goes to his hotel
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room, and they arrange to search his room and go in. And when they go in, his passport is there,
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and they take pictures of it, a photocopy it. And they send back the imagery. And lo and behold,
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in his passport is a visa to go to the United States of America, issued out of the American
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According to one recently released court filings, quote, the visas were issued to facilitate an
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operation run by the Saudis and the CIA spying operation. The station chief in Riyadh at the time
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was future CIA director John Brennan. The CIA continued tracking Al-Mudhar to Kuala Lumpur,
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where he met up with other al-Qaeda associates, including Nawaf al-Hazmi, a second future 9-11 hijacker.
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He lands in Kuala Lumpur. They entrust the Malaysia Special Branch, police, to surveil this
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terror summit in this park in Kuala Lumpur. And so much so to tail them and to surveil them,
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et cetera. And that information ends up in a communication from Kuala Lumpur Station CIA
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to CIA headquarters, through Alex Station, to the computer screen of me and Special Agent
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Doug Miller of Washington Field Office FBI. You have this cable that lays out the meeting
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Kuala Lumpur, the photocopying of his passport in Dubai, and the learning of the visa to go to
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the United States of America. Doug Miller gets up from his cubicle of power, comes over to my
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cubicle of power, and says, hey, we've got to tell the FBI about this. I said, Doug, you're damn
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right. He goes, I'll write up the CIR. What is a CIR? A CIR is what is a central intelligence report.
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Doug writes it. He sends it to me. I approve it. And it goes to the desk of Michael Ann Casey,
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the CIA officer, analyst. And it sits in her queue, her electronic queue, and it doesn't move for like
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a day or two. It should move in a fucking few hours. I'll never forget, like it was yesterday.
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I'll never forget. I'm standing over her. I said, hey, Doug's CIR. He's got to go to the FBI.
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He said, no, it's not. I said, well, why not? He said, because it's not FBI, not an FBI matter.
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It's not FBI matter. He said, it's a CIA matter. And when and if we want the FBI to know,
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we will tell them. And you are not to say anything. I said, but yeah, but they got a visa to come to the
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U.S. Like, she said, no, we're handling it. And when we want to tell the FBI, we will.
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And I looked at her. And you remember, she got up, but she put her hands on her hip,
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I believed her. And I have to live with that every day of my life that I believed her.
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As the CIA was blocking the FBI detail from informing the Bureau, the hijackers were moving.
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On January 8th, 2000, CIA surveillance teams reported that Al-Midhar had boarded a flight
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to Bangkok, Thailand. He was accompanied by a man they identified as Al-Hazmi. According to the
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official account, this is where the trail went cold. The CIA placed their names on a watch list and
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asked that Thai authorities track their movements. Three months later, the Thai government reported
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back. Al-Hazmi had boarded a United Airlines flight to Los Angeles. Al-Midhar was with him.
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The two hijackers had arrived in the United States.
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But here's my problem with this whole fucking thing and the whole subsequent investigation of 9-11.
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You have the CIA then following one man and then two men all over the planet and then eventually
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even to America, right? Landing in Los Angeles, California, and you don't tell the FBI.
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But why would the CIA want to hide the highly relevant and potentially dangerous fact that two
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known Al-Qaeda terrorists had just landed in California? According to a recently released court
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filing, former White House counterterrorisms, our Richard Clark, told government investigators
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that the, quote, CIA was running a false flag operation to recruit the hijackers.
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When Kofra Black became the head of the counterterrorism center at CIA,
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he was aghast that they had no sources in Al-Qaeda. So he told me, I'm going to try to get sources in Al-Qaeda.
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I can understand them possibly saying, we need to develop sources inside Al-Qaeda.
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When we do that, we can't tell anybody about it.
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After Clark made that claim publicly, he received an angry call from former director of the CIA,
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George Tenet, who did not deny the allegations made by Mr. Clark, end quote.
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But when we reached out to Tenet, his spokesperson denied that the CIA was recruiting hijackers,
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calling it false rumors and saying, quote, that's categorically not true.
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He also recalled that the executive director of the 9-11 commission, Philip Zelikow,
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blocked the commission's investigation into the matter at the behest of Condoleezza Rice.
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CIA had this delusional grand plan. So the CIA, with their information that they had from,
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this is the Hada House, and their own psychological analysis of everybody in that team,
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they figured the best way is maybe to recruit somebody who came over from Malaysia.
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We kept the FBI at bay because we told Mark Rossini and Doug Miller to shut the fuck up.
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So let's just try to get inside there. And that's what went wrong.
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That was the grand lie, the grand risk, the grand delusion.
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You had a duty to protect Americans, and you failed because of your fucking fantastical delusion
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that you could recruit somebody inside the cell.
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The official 9-11 report does not address the CIA's plan to recruit the hijackers.
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It's not even mentioned. It's possible this is because the CIA blocked 9-11 commission investigators
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from talking to the agents who participated in the plot.
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Amazingly, the CIA's director of operations kept the CIA operative attempting to recruit the hijackers,
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referred to as VVV in the documents, away from the commission's investigators.
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The consequence of this? The commission's explanation for this story is that the CIA made an honest mistake.
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The actual language in the report says the CIA played, quote,
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zone defense, and the FBI had a man-to-man approach to counterterrorism.
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The difference in strategies is why the CIA didn't tell the FBI that terrorists had arrived on American soil.
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Well, incredibly, the commission investigators didn't ask the CIA director at the time, George Tenet,
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about the summit in Kuala Lumpur, or why the CIA had blocked the FBI from being warned.
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And that is the crutch of the matter, and that is the truth, and no one has ever answered those questions.
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No one has the balls to because they're afraid, because the House will come tumbling down.
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So how exactly did the CIA try to recruit the 9-11 hijackers?
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Well, one amazing thing about their arrival is that they didn't try to hide.
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The hijackers used their real names while in the United States.
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Al-Hazmi and Al-Midhar lived in San Diego for more than a year before the attacks.
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In fact, they were so open that Hazmi's name, address, and a home phone number were listed in the San Diego phone book.
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When they arrived, the hijackers encountered a Saudi intel operative called Omar al-Bayoumi.
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They met at a restaurant outside of Los Angeles.
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The CIA utilized the Saudis in the form of Omar al-Bayoumi to spy for them and to gather intelligence.
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Before 9-11, the CIA was forbidden from engaging in domestic spying.
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They used the Saudi intelligence as a workaround.
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We'll rely upon the Saudi G.I.D., General Intelligence Directorate, their version of the CIA, via Prince Bandar, via their man, Omar al-Bayoumi,
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to keep us informed as to the activity of these terrorists.
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Bayoumi's notebook, which was uncovered when British law enforcement raided his home in the U.K.,
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contained a drawing of an airplane and mathematical calculations related to flying it.
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The 9-11 Commission investigators never saw this.
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At the time, al-Bayoumi had a no-show job at a Saudi aviation contractor called Avco.
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The company's employees say he was one of roughly 50 ghost employees working there at the time,
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According to declassified government documents, an investigator from the 9-11 Commission said al-Bayoumi was receiving
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substantial sums of money from the Saudi embassy in Washington prior to the 9-11 attacks,
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that the money was being funneled from accounts at Riggs Bank in Georgetown,
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belonging to Haifa bin Faisal, the wife of the Saudi ambassador to the United States.
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By using the Saudis as a proxy to recruit the 9-11 hijackers, the CIA gave itself cover.
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If things went wrong, they could push a narrative that blamed the Saudi government for the attacks, which is what they did.
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For all intents and purposes, Omar al-Bayoumi was an employee of the Saudi Arabian embassy in Washington, D.C.,
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Al-Bayoumi convinced the hijackers to move to San Diego.
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He served as a co-signer on the lease to that apartment.
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He introduced them to many other radical Muslims in the area, including the cleric Anwar al-Awlaki.
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Khalil al-Midhar leaves America for his daughter's birth, right?
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He goes back to Jeddah and gets another passport.
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And by this time, even prior, as I understand it now, the Saudis had identified the terrorists,
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the hijackers, as potential threats to the kingdom and had put chips in their passports,
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Al-Midhar comes back to the United States, I believe it was on July 4th, 2001.
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So here's a guy that the CIA knew came to America, had been at this terror summit meeting
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Midhar was able to exit and enter the country at will because he was issued a multi-visit
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According to a summary of an interview with an FBI agent from Alex Station, quote,
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Al-Hamsi and Al-Midhar obtained their visas to enter the United States at the American consulate
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All told, the vast majority of the 19 9-11 hijackers had their visas issued at that consulate
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At the time, John Brennan was running the CIA station there.
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Just a few days before Al-Midhar re-entered the country at JFK Airport in New York,
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the FBI and the CIA held a joint meeting in New York City to discuss the bombing of the
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An FBI agent was shown a photograph of Al-Midhar taken at the summit in Kuala Lumpur.
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The agent asked the CIA who this man was, but the CIA once again refused to tell them.
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It wasn't until August of 2001 that the CIA finally alerted the FBI.
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It's not just Mark Rossini who testifies to this.
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Another anonymous FBI agent told investigators that, quote,
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This is the failure of the 9-11 Commission and every other fucking commission that ever existed
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But if the CIA was grooming the hijackers as sources, the FBI failed too.
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When Al-Hazmi and Al-Midhar were in California, they lived for a period in the home of an FBI
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And yet somehow, the FBI never learned about this.
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Then, less than a month before the terror attacks, the FBI began an investigation into a French
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He had just moved to Minneapolis from Oklahoma, where he resumed aviation training.
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After raising suspicions during training, he was arrested on August 16th and charged with
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But agents were denied permission to search his laptop and the room where he was staying.
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His exact connection to the hijacking remains unclear even now.
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But he did receive wire transfers from Ramzi bin al-Shib, who was also sending money to the
00:22:46.920
In July 2001, an FBI agent stationed in the Phoenix field office sent a memo to headquarters
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A coordinated effort by Osama bin Laden to send individuals to the United States to receive
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For some reason, this memo was never received by headquarters,
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Possibly because, as late as 2003, the FBI didn't have a functioning internal email system.
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And employees did not have access to the internet.
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By September 2001, the Bureau's computers were so out of date, it took 12 commands simply
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And in the aftermath of the attack, the FBI distributed photographs of the suspected hijackers
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The Bush administration worked hard for us not to know any of this.
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Many of these details were discovered during the congressional joint inquiry into 9-11.
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But when Congress released its report, the 28 pages dealing with the hijackers' time in
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When a man called Philip Zellicoe took over as the commission's executive director, he reached
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a secret agreement with the White House to block his investigators from accessing records
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related to the hijackers until the White House had already screened them.
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Government documents show that the commission investigator assigned to this topic complained
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that, quote, Zellicoe limited the number of witnesses that commission investigators could
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And just days before the report was released, Dieter Snell, senior counsel to the commission,
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attempted to remove most of the details of the Saudi collaboration with the hijackers.
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Some of the findings were included in the end, but they were buried in the footnotes.
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The truth is, the official 9-11 commission report, sold to the American public and the
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world for decades as the definitive account of what happened that day, is a lie.
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But how did the Bush administration manage to hijack what was sold as an independent commission?
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We'll reveal what we found in the next episode.