Deep Politics Forum

Was the Now-Forgotten Murder of One Man on September 9, 2001 a Crucial Pre-condition for 9/11?
By
Peter Dale Scott and Aaron Good
-
December 9, 2020
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[url=https://covertactionmagazine.com/2020/12/09/was-the-now-forgotten-murder-of-one-man-on-september-9-2001-a-crucial-pre-condition-for-9-11/#]
Ahmed Shah Massoud’s supporters pay tribute to him a month after his assassination on September 9, 2001. [Source: thenationalnews.com]
Peter Dale Scott, with assistance from Aaron Good, breaks new ground with this exclusive investigation into the two-decades-old assassination of Ahmed Shah Massoud and may identify his murder as the green light—not only for Osama bin Laden’s attack on the World Trade Center—but also for the Bush/Cheney team’s long-planned invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. 
[The following complex argument is organized around five salient historical developments preceding September 11, 2001: (1) the incremental penetration of American military, political, and economic power into Central Asia following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, (2) the drafting in New York and London of the letter of introduction used by assassins to kill anti-Taliban leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, on September 9, 2001, (3) U.S. Government knowledge of the letter, (4) Massoud’s opposition to a U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, and (5) White House planning for military involvement in Afghanistan on September 10, the day after Massoud’s murder and one day before 9/11.]
Underlying the complex U.S. covert intrigues in Asia, in the decade before 9/11, are two major uncontested facts. The first is that Central Asia was then of great interest to America because of suspected massive but unproven oil reserves in the region. The second fact is that U.S. approaches to the region were “stove-piped”—an assessment of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, later endorsed by the 9/11 Commission.[1] This is to say that different agencies of the government had different policies, based on compartmentalized intelligence which they refused to share.
Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leading anti-Taliban resistance leader. His assassination by Arab terrorists on September 9, 2001 was a key event preceding the 9/11 attacks. [Source: en.qantara.de]
This stove-piping led to conflicting U.S. attitudes toward Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leading anti-Taliban resistance leader. Massoud was the chief of the Northern Alliance in the part of Afghanistan north of the Hindu Kush. A Tajik known as “the lion of Panjshir” for his skill as a guerrilla fighter, he received support from the CIA beginning in the 1980s when he fought against the Soviet occupation.[2] His assassination by Arab terrorists on September 9, 2001 was a key event preceding the 9/11 attacks and an important precondition for the U.S.-NATO invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001.
Much of what I will have to conjecture about that scenario will remain unproven, unless and until key pieces of evidence are declassified. First among these would be the documentary history of National Security Presidential Directive (NSPD) 9, the record of Clinton and Bush planning for operations in Afghanistan.
These were originally plans—including a “Pol[itical]-Mil[itary] Plan”—against bin Laden and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. But when finally released to the American public on October 25, 2001, NSPD-9 bore the global title “Defeating the Terrorist Threat to the United States.”
Counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke. [source: wikipedia.org]
In January 2001, the holdover Clinton counterterrorism czar, Richard Clarke, discussed these plans with the new National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and her Deputy, Stephen Hadley. Yet despite Clarke’s pleas for urgency, nothing was approved until September 4, 2001, when a White House meeting approved an NSPD-9 plan in principle.
A second meeting was held on September 10, which focused on the details of political and military plans in Afghanistan. This latter meeting, of course, occurred one day before 9/11. More importantly, it occurred one day after Massoud’s murder, an essential prerequisite to the military actions which the George W. Bush administration subsequently adopted.
The U.S. Invasion Depended on Massoud’s Murder
U.S. plans to invade landlocked Afghanistan, dating from as early as July, depended on using as their base Massoud’s territory in the impenetrable Panjshir Valley, the only Afghan region never overrun by the Taliban. They also depended on using the territory of America’s regional ally Pakistan. Massoud and Pakistan, however, were implacable enemies. More importantly, though Massoud welcomed U.S. military support, he was bitterly opposed to the idea of a U.S. invasion.
Massoud opposed the Unocal pipeline project through Afghanistan. [Source: iakalwordpress.com]
In addition, Massoud had opposed a pipe52line project promoted by the Union Oil Company of California (Unocal) that would have bypassed U.S. adversaries, Russia and Iran. Rebuffing the U.S., Massoud had signed an agreement with Unocal’s Argentine rival for $1 million.[3]
According to journalist Steve Coll, CIA officials sought to expand covert support for Massoud, who had been receiving as much as $200,000 from the agency per month. Instead, the CIA was steamrolled by the State Department and executive branch officials who felt they could forge normal diplomatic relations with the Taliban and did not want to alienate the Pakistani government.[4]
Within the bureaucratic turf battles, Richard Clarke was one who wanted the U.S. to ally with Massoud.[5] Even after 9/11, the CIA delivered a suitcase with $5 million on September 26 to the Northern Alliance headquarters of Massoud’s successor Mohammed Fahim. Located in the remote Panjshir valley of Northeast Afghanistan amidst steep mountain terrain which made it almost invulnerable to attack, this base became the initial point of entry for American troops when they first invaded Afghanistan in October 2001.
But only $1.7 million of the $5 million delivered to the late Massoud’s HQ were to support Massoud’s successor Fahim, as Clarke had originally intended. The rest was now used, not to strengthen the Alliance, but rather to break it up. The U.S. intention was no longer to support a coalition, but to take command of operations.
Massoud (front row, second from left) signing a peace agreement with warlord Gulbuddin Hikmatyar in the presence of Pakistanis. [Source: rawa.org]
With Massoud gone, the funds were parceled out by separate CIA teams to the separate warlords in the alliance, including the CIA’s preferred allies, such as the Uzbek warlord Abdul Rashid Dostum, a client of Uzbekistan who became notorious for suffocating Taliban prisoners in a container, and the Saudi’s favorite Abdul Rasul Sayyaf, a radical Islamist who, ironically, had first invited Osama bin Laden to take refuge in Afghanistan.[6]
Abdul Rasul Sayyaf emerged as a CIA favorite after Massoud’s death. [Source: wikipedia.org]
The break-up ensured that, instead of Americans supporting an indigenous military campaign against the Taliban, the separate warlords—each with a very checkered background—would now be assisting an American campaign.[7] According to the 9/11 Commission Report, President George W. Bush had supported the introduction of ground troops into Afghanistan from the time he first took office, telling Condoleezza Rice that he was “tired of swatting at flies” and “playing defense,” wanting instead to “play offense [and] take the fight to the terrorists.”[8]
This scenario could never have been implemented in Afghanistan when Massoud was alive. For while Massoud was always eager for U.S. cash and military materiel, according to three Westerners who interviewed him, including former U.S. Ambassador Peter Tomsen, the fierce nationalist Massoud was totally opposed to the introduction onto Afghan soil of significant numbers of U.S. troops.[9]
In light of Massoud’s opposition to the introduction of U.S. soldiers, we need to know: Was a U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan already approved by the NSPD-9 planning meetings on September 4 and September 10? The records of these meetings are still classified, and reports about them are in conflict.
America and the Preparations to Murder Massoud
Another important question to ask is whether Massoud’s killing was in any way related to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. If the answer is in the affirmative, then a New York postal worker named Ahmed Abdel Sattar is a key figure tied to the larger conspiracy.[10] Sattar has no Wikipedia entry, but deserves one. Together with Yassir al-Sirri, an Egyptian terrorist and refugee in London, he drafted by telephone the letter of introduction used by Massoud’s assassins, masquerading as journalists, to gain access to Massoud’s heavily guarded headquarters in the Panjshir.
Yassir al-Sirri, an Egyptian terrorist and refugee in London. [Source: bbc.co.uk]
Al-Sirri was a prominent international terrorist, already sentenced to death by Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak for an assassination attempt back in 1994 which killed a schoolgirl. Sattar, in contrast, was a low profile U.S. postal worker, but he functioned as the important go-between linking the global Islamic terrorist movement and a key leader of the international terror network, the Egyptian “blind sheikh” Omar Abdel-Rahman.
Beginning in 1987, Abdel-Rahman had been issued visas for the U.S., at least one of which was issued by an undercover CIA officer working in the U.S. embassy in Sudan. Presumably, the CIA assisted Abdel-Rahman because of his involvement with recruiting Mujahideen—this despite his leadership of a terrorist group in Egypt.[11]
Said one FBI field agent and counterterrorism expert, “It was no accident that the sheikh got a visa and that he’s still in the country. […] He’s here under the banner of national security, the State Department, the NSA, and the CIA.” The FBI agent pointed out that Abdel-Rahman had received a tourist visa, and eventually a green card, despite his being on a State Department terrorist watch-list which should have barred his entry into the U.S. The agent concluded that the “blind sheik” Abdel-Rahman was an untouchable. In reference to the bureau’s failure to investigate Abdel-Rahman’s involvement in the 1990 murder of the racist rabbi Meir Kahane, the agent said, “I haven’t seen the lone-gunman theory advocated [so forcefully] since John F. Kennedy.”[12]
In 1987, Abdel-Rahman, the leader of the Egyptian militant Islamist group Al-Jama’a al-Islamiyya, flew to Afghanistan and joined the Makhtab-al-Khidimat (the Office of Services), the Pakistan-based organization that Osama bin Laden helped finance and lead and that would later become al Qaeda. He came to New York City in 1990 and became the spiritual leader of a Makhtab field office there, the al-Kifah Center in Brooklyn. There, he helped oversee the recruiting, training, and assisting of jihadis for deployment to Afghanistan, where the CIA was covertly supporting the Mujahideen.[13]
Soon after, Bosnia became a chief focus of the al-Kifah Center. By 1993, al-Kifah had set up a satellite office in Zagreb, Croatia, which was funded and directed from the Brooklyn office. Fliers for jihad in Bosnia were distributed in Boston by an al-Kifah branch in that city.[14] Court testimony from al-Kifah’s Clement Rodney Hampton-El suggested that the center’s Bosnian jihad operations were being jointly supported by Saudi Arabia and elements of the U.S. national security state.[15] The jihadists were sent to fight on behalf of the Islamist regime of Aliza Izetbegović, whom the U.S. supported against the Serbs led by Slobodan Milošević who wanted to keep the old socialist Yugoslav federation intact.[16]
In 1995, Abdel-Rahman was convicted of a slew of conspiracy charges growing out of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. In 2001, the blind sheikh was serving a life sentence in a U.S. federal prison for his involvement in the New York City landmark terror plots. From this prison, via calls on Sattar’s telephone, he continued to give orders, including a fatwa (religious ruling) that it was lawful to rob banks and kill Jews. The FBI listened attentively to these calls, learning details about terrorists abroad, especially in Egypt, that it could then forward to the Egyptian and other interested governments.[17]
The “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel-Rahman, obtained a visa to the U.S. with CIA assistance and was a leading recruiter for the Afghan Mujahideen in the 1980s. He continued to lead a terror network from prison after being convicted of multiple terrorism charges, including those pertaining to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing in New York. [Source: reuters.com]
Did elements in the U.S. Government hear plans to assassinate Massoud, and do nothing about them? The answer is not clear from the public record. According to the New York Times:
 
In one such conversation last summer, another defendant, Yassir al-Sirri, an Egyptian based in London, was overheard [on government wiretaps] talking with Mr. Sattar about the drafting of a letter of introduction to serve as a cover story for two men, for possible use in Afghanistan, the official said. The two men were heard talking about a letter of general introduction, and not one that specified Mr. Massoud by name. It was clear from the context though, that the letter would be needed by someone for a secret mission, most likely in Afghanistan, the official added. Mr. Massoud was killed by two men posing as journalists about two months after the conversation between Mr. Sattar and Mr. Sirri.[18]
The Times story leads the reader to believe that the U.S. government did not know who in Afghanistan was the target of the letter. I find this unlikely. It knew that in late 2000 al-Qaeda and the Taliban (both with links to Pakistani intelligence, the ISI) had reached an agreement to eliminate Massoud, Pakistan’s chief enemy.[19] By this time Massoud—“thought to be Afghanistan’s greatest guerrilla fighter”—was the only resistance leader “left to fight on against the Taliban militia.”[20] Thus there was really no other target in Afghanistan of similar importance. Note that, according to the Times, the date of the phone call producing the letter was “about two months” before 9/11, i.e., mid-July. Later, The New Republic reported for the first time that NSPD-9 “had an annex going back to July—contingency plans [to] attack the Taliban.”[21]
British and U.S. legal responses to the letter of introduction, though different, attest to the importance they paid to it. In October 2001, the British arrested al-Sirri in connection with Massoud’s murder, but “Inexplicably, a British judge later cleared al-Sirri of all charges and released him, labeling him ‘an innocent fall guy.’”[22] Meanwhile, on April 9, 2002, one month before the Times news story about him, the United States indicted both al-Sirri and Sattar, along with Lynne Stewart, the Brooklyn attorney who represented the blind sheikh and allegedly passed messages for him. But the U.S. indictment said nothing about the lethal letter of introduction, which was never mentioned again in the U.S. press. Instead, the defendants were accused, and eventually convicted, of conspiring “to knowingly provide material support and resources” to the Egyptian terrorist Islamic Group. For their crimes, Stewart was sentenced to 28 months in prison, Sattar to 28 years.[23]
Bin Laden, rather than the “blind sheikh,” has sometimes been named as the instigator of the Massoud assassination. This conclusion is based on a trove of files, allegedly from an al-Qaeda computer, bought by a Wall Street Journal reporter in Kabul later in 2001.[24] There are reasons to be skeptical of this rich find of supporting justification for America’s new War on Terror. It seems suspiciously reminiscent of the discovery of the World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Ahmed Yousef’s laptop computer six years earlier, containing evidence of “Operation Bojinka,” his alleged plan to blow up eleven U.S. airliners.[25]
More significantly, there are notable unresolved contradictions in the al-Sirri letter saga. To wit, the December 2001 Wall Street Journal story about the computer files maintains that the letter of introduction was drafted by “Mohammed Zawahri,” but falsely credited to al-Sirri.[26] This is contradicted by the New York Times article of May 2002—the story which revealed that there were wiretapped conversations between al-Sirri and Sattar [the “blind sheik”’s go-between] discussing “the drafting of a letter of introduction to serve as a cover story for two men, for possible use in Afghanistan.”[27]
Alternatively, a 2016 UK Independent story states flatly that bin Laden ordered Massoud’s assassination—an assertion presumably based on the files from the Kabul computer allegedly bought by the Wall Street Journal in 2001. However, the Independent article also states that al-Sirri himself admitted that he provided the Massoud assassins’ letter of introduction.[28] The 2016 Independent story makes no mention of Sattar or the “blind sheik”—actors whose roles in the introduction letter saga were reported in the 2002 New York Times story but never followed up on.
Massoud’s Wikipedia entry goes even further, omitting not only the “blind sheik,” but also failing to mention al-Sirri at all.[29] Does the silence of the government and media regarding al-Sirri and the “blind sheik” along with their connection or potential connection to U.S. intelligence agencies, represent some sort of negative template that can help us understand the Massoud assassination, 9/11, and the Afghanistan War—now the longest war in U.S. history?
To put it another way: If higher powers have taken steps to suppress the guilty involvement of Abdel-Rahman, Sattar, and al-Sirri in the assassination, is that not a strong indication that these same higher powers are themselves complicit in that assassination?
The Doubleness, and Stove-Piping, of U.S. Policy
Massoud’s fate was at the center of important policy differences inside the U.S. Government, going back for some years. Bill Clinton entrusted his policies for Central Asia to his Deputy Secretary of State, Strobe Talbott, a personal friend from his Oxford days. In an important speech of July 1997,

Quote:Talbott outlined four dimensions of U.S. support to the countries of the Caucasus and Central Asia: 1) The promotion of democracy; 2) The creation of free market economies; 3) The sponsorship of peace and cooperation, within and among the countries of the region: and, 4) integration into the larger international community.… Inveighing against what he considers an outdated conception of competition in the Caucasus and Central Asia, Mr. Talbott admonished any who would consider the “Great Game” as a model on which to base current views of the region. He proposed, instead, an arrangement where everyone cooperates and everyone wins.[30]

Strobe Talbott [Source: wikipedia.org]
Meanwhile, behind this verbal debate, the CIA and Pentagon, through NATO, were developing a “forward strategy” in the area that was antithetical to Talbott’s vision. Under the umbrella of NATO’s Partnership for Peace (PFP) Program, the Pentagon in 1997 began military training exercises with Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, as “the embryo of a NATO-led military force in the region.”[31] These CENTRAZBAT exercises had in mind the possible future deployment of U.S. combat forces. A deputy assistant secretary of defense, Catherine Kelleher, cited “the presence of enormous energy resources” as a justification for American military involvement.[32] Uzbekistan, which Brzezinski in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard singled out for its geopolitical importance,[33] became the linchpin of U.S. training exercises.
Zbigniew Brzezinski’s book The Grand Chessboard lent rationalization to more aggressive policies to access Central Asian and Middle-Eastern oil. [Source: americanfreepress.net]
The CIA had collaborated closely with the Pentagon and the Uzbek army and secret services since 1997, providing training, equipment, and mentoring in the hope of using Uzbek Special Forces to snatch Osama bin Laden from Afghanistan.[34] In 1999, Cofer Black and Richard Blee of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center (CTC) flew together into Tashkent and negotiated a new liaison agreement with Uzbekistan.Soon thereafter, according to the Washington Post, the United States and Uzbekistan “quietly conducted joint covert operations aimed at countering Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban regime and its terrorist allies.”[35] Note that the CIA was no longer targeting just bin Laden, but the entire Taliban Afghan government.
Richard Blee [Source: historycommons.org]
Cofer Black [Source: wikipedia.org]
Eventually, the U.S.-Uzbek alliance expanded to include the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. In October of 1999, Blee met with Massoud and agreed to lobby Washington for increased U.S. support for the Northern Alliance.[36] U.S. special forces had begun working more directly with the Uzbek military by 2000.[37] In the wake of the bin-laden orchestrated USS Cole bombing in October, Blee pressed to expand the Uzbek military mission into a joint attack force with the Northern Alliance, but Clinton objected.[38] 
Within the next administration in Washington, Bush deputies revived the plans of Blee and Black, supported by counter-terrorism director Richard Clarke.[39] Meanwhile, throughout 2001, officials from the U.S. and other countries were meeting with the Taliban. One attendee of these meetings was Niaz Naik, the former Pakistani Minister for Foreign Affairs. At a July meeting in Berlin, the talks focused on the creation of a unity government in Afghanistan. Said Naik, “If the Taliban had accepted this coalition, they would have immediately received international economic aid … And the pipelines from Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan would have come.”[40]
Niaz Naik [Source: wikipedia.org]
According to Naik, a U.S. representative, Tom Simons, made open threats to the Taliban and Pakistan: “Simons said, ‘either the Taliban behave as they ought to, or Pakistan convinces them to do so, or we will use another option.’ The words Simons used were ‘a military operation.’ ”[41] The pipelines referenced by Naik would have included, first and foremost, Unocal’s aforementioned Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline. 
Naik later provided more details about the negotiations with the Taliban, talks in which the U.S. was represented by Simons, the U.S. ambassador to Pakistan from 1996-1998, former assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs Karl “Rick” Inderfurth, and former State Department official in charge of Afghanistan Lee Coldren. Said Naik, “We asked them [the American delegates], when do you think you will attack Afghanistan? […] And they said, before the snow falls in Kabul. That means September, October, something like that.”[42]
Tom Simons [Source: historycommons.org]
In the time preceding the 9/11 terror attacks, Uzbekistan was the key node in the CIA-Pentagon strategy for Central Asia, despite having the worst human rights record in the region. In 1999—the same year in which Black and Blee forged that new liaison agreement with Uzbekistan—President Bill Clinton, in accordance with the humane objectives expounded by Strobe Talbott, signed Executive Order 13126. This order listed commodities unacceptable for U.S. import because they were the products of forced or indentured child labor. Among the products listed was cotton from Uzbekistan. 
If human rights concerns could not prevent the CIA-Pentagon line from prevailing in Uzbekistan before 9/11, they were not going to carry the day afterward. In 2002 it was revealed that the Uzbek regime tortured political prisoners, up to and including boiling victims alive.[43] That was a year in which the country received more than $200 million in military and security aid from the U.S. The U.S. did eventually renew its human rights criticism of Uzbekistan in 2005, but only after its president expelled the Open Society Institute from the country and ordered the U.S. to close its military base in Uzbekistan.[44]
U.S. President Bill Clinton meets Uzbek leader Islam Karimov in the Oval Office on June 25, 1996. [Source: ibtimes.co.uk]
Deep State Pressure for a U.S. Military Presence in Central Asia
The interest of the Pentagon and CIA in Central Asia reflected that of the U.S. oil industry, persuaded at that time that the world’s largest unproven oil interests lay in Central Asia. Perhaps the leading spokesman of this interest was Richard Cheney, CEO of the oil field service giant Halliburton. Halliburton had been active since 1997 or earlier in developing the petroleum reserves of Central Asia, along with Chevron and Mobil. Cheney said in a speech to oil industrialists in 1998, “I cannot think of a time when we have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian.”[45]
At the time Cheney, along with Donald Rumsfeld, was a member of the neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC), whose September 2000 report, Rebuilding America’s Defenses, had much to say about Gulf oil and the importance of retaining and strengthening “forward-based forces in the region.”[46] The PNAC report made little mention of Central Asia, but the region’s importance to the neoconservatives is illustrated by Cheney’s statement (above) to oil industrialists regarding the strategic significance of the Caspian basin. 
Indeed, an early foothold in the region was established in Azerbaijan in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union’s dissolution. The country experienced a series of murky intrigues involving some combination of U.S. intelligence operatives, oil companies, the Saudis, Pakistan’s ISI, mujahideen fighters, and heroin trafficking. It all culminated in a 1993 coup which overthrew Azerbaijan’s elected president Abulfaz Elchibey and installed a leader, Heydar Aliyev, who shifted the country away from Russia and towards the West.[47] In 1995, the United States-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce was established “to facilitate business and cooperation between the United States and Azerbaijan.”[48] 
Bill Clinton meets in 1994 with Azeri leader Heydar Aliyev, who was installed with the support of the CIA and helped U.S. oil companies access Central Asian oil. [Source: azer.com]
Azerbaijan International, a print magazine founded in 1993 with offices in Baku and Los Angeles,[49] published an announcement from the U.S.-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce stating that, “The Chamber extends deep appreciation to the following companies which have contributed to its establishment: Amoco, BP America, Chevron, Exxon, Mobil, Occidental, Panalpina, and Unocal.”[50] Serving on the council were a number of establishment “realist” and neoconservative luminaries—including James Baker III, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft, John Sununu, Dick Cheney, and Richard Armitage.[51]
Azerbaijan in the mid-1990s served as a beachhead for U.S. penetration into Central Asia. The U.S.-Uzbekistan alliance, established soon after, represented a furtherance of the general thrust. By the end of 2001, in the wake of 9/11 and the launching of the Global War on Terror, the United States had also established new bases in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It was thus better positioned to influence the behavior of the newly liberated governments in the huge oil and gas region east of the Caspian, and to defend the new Chevron and ExxonMobil oil investments in Kazakhstan.
As for Afghanistan, in 1997, the UK Telegraph reported that the Taliban were “about to sign a £2 billion contract with an American oil company [California-based Unocal] to build a pipeline across the war-torn country.”[52] 
Brzezinski even included an illustration of the proposed Unocal pipeline in his 1997 geopolitical manifesto, The Grand Chessboard.[53] Recall that Massoud, and thus the Northern Alliance, opposed this deal and instead signed a deal with an Argentine company. The U.S.-Unocal TAPI pipeline deal with the Taliban never came to pass, the aforementioned negotiations coming to a close in August of 2001. In 2018, after years of war, the pipeline project was revived under the direction of Turkmengaz, Galkynysh – TAPI Pipeline Company, with support from the Asian Development Bank.[54]
With talks of a unity government stalled, Bush’s cabinet on September 4, 2001, authorized the drafting of NSPD-9, a new presidential directive authorizing a large covert action program with the Northern Alliance along the lines advocated by Blee and Black. Significantly, the proposal for a joint attack force including U.S. ground troops and Massoud’s Northern Alliance was resisted by Massoud himself.[55] The problem of Massoud’s resistance to an American troop presence vanished when he was assassinated on September 9, 2001, two days before 9/11.
U.S. Special Forces officers riding on a horse near the Hindu Kush mountains in October 2001. The U.S. war in Afghanistan was enabled by Massoud’s assassination. [Source: sofrep.com]

The Massoud Assassination and 9/11: September 2001 as Historical Black Hole
As a result of actions undertaken by powerful actors—including the CIA, the Pentagon, and U.S. oil companies—the stage was set for the historically fateful month of September 2001. Still incompletely understood and shrouded in secrecy, key historical events of that month include official U.S. planning on 9/4 and 9/10 for military action in Afghanistan, the 9/9 assassination of Ahmed Shah Massoud, and the terror attacks of 9/11. 
In short, these events cemented an historical trajectory in which America strove to become precisely what Strobe Talbott had counseled against becoming—a dominant player in the Great Game for Central Asia. America’s military presence in greater Western/Central Asia was further consolidated by its invasion of Iraq in 2003, an option already raised before 9/11 and raised again in the hours immediately following it.
Almost two decades have passed since 9/11. The hubristic Cheney-Rumsfeld initiatives in Afghanistan and Iraq are now being wound down as failures. These failures may be a sign that decades of a so-called Pax Americana, with oil-related aggressions against states from Afghanistan to Libya, are winding down as well.

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[1] The 9/11 Report: The National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States (New York: St. Martin’s, 2004), 403.
[2] See Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin Books, 2004).
[3] Coll, Ghost Wars, 329, 377.
[4] Coll, Ghost Wars; Steve Coll, “Ahmad Shah Massoud links with CIA: ‘The CIA had pumped cash stipends as high as $200,000 a month to Massoud and his Islamic guerrilla organization,’” Washington Post, February 23, 2004.
[5] Coll, Ghost Wars, 360.
[6] Peter Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan: Messianic Terrorism, Tribal Conflicts, and the Failure of Great Powers (New York: Public Affairs, 2013), 597-98. Gary Schroen, First In: An Insider’s Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War in Afghanistan (San Francisco: Presidio Press, 2006), 125, 207. Later in October Tenet reported to the principals on a CIA “meeting with leaders in the north without Fahim Khan’s approval” (Bob Woodward, Bush at War. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003, 260).
[7] James Mann reports that the decision to help both “the Northern Alliance and Uzbek opponents of the Taliban regime” [i.e., Dostum] had already been reached at the September 4 meeting (James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet [New York: Penguin, 2004], 292-93; cf. Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror [New York: Random House, 2002], 345-46); and CIA Chief George Tenet on September 23 indicated, at a meeting in Washington, the CIA’s disapproval of the Northern Alliance as a base for U.S. operations in Afghanistan.
[8] The 9/11 Report, 291, 292.
[9] Former U.S. Ambassador Peter Tomsen, the American who knew Massoud best, later wrote that Massoud would“have expressed opposition to the deployment of large numbers of American troops to Afghanistan” (Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan, 597-98. Cf. Schroen, First In, 125, 207). Tomsen added in a footnote that “According to a Massood adviser who wished to remain anonymous, in 2000 and 2001 Massood refused requests by the American and French governments to insert foreign troops into Northern Alliance-controlled areas” (Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan, 796 n25).
[10] He is not to be confused with the Dahmane Abd al-Sattar, the Brussels-based Tunisian terrorist who was identified by Belgian police as one of Massoud’s two assassins masquerading as journalists (Dan Bilefsky, “Belgian Authorities Identify Terror Cell Responsible for Massoud’s Assassination,” Wall Street Journal, December 10, 2001, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB1007934514705826480).
[11] Peter Bergen, Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden (New York: Free Press, 2001), 66-67.
[12] Robert I. Friedman, “The CIA and the Sheik,” The Village Voice, March 30, 1993, http://www.textfiles.com/conspiracy/wtcbomb1.txt.
[13] Peter Dale Scott, The Road to 9/11: Wealth, Empire, and the Future of America. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 145-146.
[14] Scott, The Road to 9/11, 149.
[15] Scott, The Road to 9/11, 149-150.
[16] See John Y. Schindler, Unholy Terror: Bosnia, Al Qaida and the Rise of Global Jihad (London: Zenith Press, 2007).
[17] The U.S. Government had been listening to phone calls between Sattar and al-Sirri from at least April 1999 (Library Information and Research Service, “The Middle East,” 2008, 741).
[18] Robert F. Worth, “New Yorker Is Suspected of Aiding Killers of Anti-Taliban Leader,” New York Times, May 14, 2002, https://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/14/world...eader.html.
[19] “Bin Laden… had decided to work with the Taliban and in doing so they placed themselves firmly against Massoud” (Hashmat Moslih, “Afghanistan in the shadow of Ahmad Shah Massoud,” Al Jazeera, September 9, 2014, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2014/...h-massoud/).
[20] Barry Bearak, “Afghan ‘Lion’ Fights Taliban With Rifle and Fax Machine,” New York Times, November 9, 1999, https://www.nytimes.com/1999/11/09/world...chine.html.
[21] “According to an accidentally discovered note by Pentagon PR aide Eric Ruff, Ruff suggested to Rumsfeld in a discussion of the controversy that he say ‘NSPD[-9] had an annex going back to July–contingency plans to attack Taliban.’ ” (Spencer Ackerman, “Why Pentagon officials should thank the aide who left notes in Starbucks,” TNR Online, April 1, 2004, http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=express&s=ackerman040104).
[22] Erick Stakelbeck, The Terrorist Next Door: How the Government Is Deceiving You about the Islamist Threat (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2011), 138. Cf. Alan Cowell, “British Court Frees a Muslim Arrested After 9/11.” New York Times, August 11, 2002, https://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/10/world...-9-11.html: “In May, however, a British judge said that Mr. Sirri was ‘an innocent fall guy’ and set him free, despite an indictment in the United States on charges of disseminating terrorist messages.”
[23]  Stewart was re-sentenced and received ten years but received “compassionate release” and, therefore, did not serve the full sentence.
[24] “What looked like proof positive [that bin Laden ordered the assassination] finally surfaced at the end of 2001, when computer files in Kabul belonging to bin Laden’s organization Al-Qaida (“The Base”) were found by Western journalists to contain the list of questions presented to Massoud” (William Maley, The Afghanistan Wars [London: Red Globe Press, 2020], 251, citing Alan Cullison and Andrew Higgins, “Forgotten Computer Reveals Thinking Behind Four Years of al Qaeda Doings,” Wall Street Journal, December 1, 2001).
[25] Paul J. Smith, “Transnational Terrorism and the al Qaeda Model: Confronting New Realities,” Parameters, Summer 2002, 33. It also brings to mind the disputed computer which was used to convict the British extremist Omar Saeed Sheikh of the January 2002 murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl—dubious evidence which a Pakistani court gave as a reason for overturning Sheikh’s murder conviction in 2020 (see: Saeed Shah, “Pakistani Court Overturns Murder Conviction in Killing of Wall Street Journal Reporter Daniel Pearl,” Wall Street Journal, April 2, 2020, https://www.wsj.com/articles/pakistani-c...1585805394.)
[26] Cullison and Higgins, “Forgotten Computer Reveals Thinking Behind Four Years of al Qaeda Doings.”
[27] Robert F. Worth, “New Yorker Is Suspected of Aiding Killers of Anti-Taliban Leader,” New York Times, May 14, 2002, https://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/14/world...eader.html.
[28] Kim Sengupta, “The British connection: Jihadi chain traces European terror back to 9/11,” April 20, 2016, The Independent, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/cr...92021.html.
[29] “Ahmad Shah Massoud,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahmad_Shah_Massoud, accessed on November 25, 2020. (While Wikipedia is a problematic source for scholarly purposes, it is relevant here in that, on controversial matters, its anonymous editors typically present the prevailing conventional and/or official versions of actors and events.)
[30] James MacDougall, “A New Stage in U.S.-Caspian Sea Basin Relations,” Central Asia, 5 (11), 1997; quoting from Ariel Cohen, “U.S. Policy in the Caucasus and Central Asia: Building A New ‘Silk Road’ to Economic Prosperity,” Heritage Foundation, July 24, 1997. In October 1997 Sen. Sam Brownback introduced a bill, the Silk Road Strategy Act of 1997 (S. 1344), providing incentives for the new Central Asian states to cooperate with the United States, rather than with Russia or Iran.
[31] Ariel Cohen, Eurasia In Balance: The US and the Regional Power Shift (UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2005), 107.
[32] Michael Klare, Blood and Oil (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt, 2004), 135-36; citing R. Jeffrey Smith, “U.S. Leads Peacekeeping Drill in Kazakhstan,” Washington Post, September 15, 1997. Cf. Kenley Butler, “U.S. Military Cooperation with the Central Asian States,” September 17, 2001, http://cns.miis.edu/archive/wtc01/uscamil.htm.
[33] Zbigniew Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 121.
[34] Ahmed Rashid, Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (New York: Viking, 2008), 70, 69; citing Ahmed Rashid, “US Builds Alliances in Central Asia,” Far Eastern Economic Review, May 1, 2000. Cf. Steve Coll, Ghost Wars, 457; “A team of CIA operators from the agency’s Counterterrorist Center flew to Dushanbe, Tajikistan, in October 1999. Code-named JAWBREAKER-5, the group was led by the chief of the center’s Osama bin Laden unit, known to his colleagues as Rich [Richard Blee], a veteran of CIA postings in Algiers and elsewhere in the developing world.” [See: Steve Coll, “Flawed Ally Was Hunt’s Best Hope,” Washington Post, February 23, 2004, A01, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ar...Feb22.html].
[35] Thomas E. Ricks and Susan B. Glasser, “U.S., Uzbekistan confirm covert effort,” Washington Post, October 14, 2001, http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn...-2001Oct13; Cf. Times of India, October 14, 2001; Vanity Fair, November 2004, http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/featu...-11-200411: “Black and Rich’s solution to going after bin Laden was … to initiate a series of covert operations with Islam Karimov, the brutal, autocratic president of Uzbekistan, and Ahmed Shah Massoud, the leader of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan.”
[36] Coll, Ghost Wars, 467-69.
[37] Ricks and Glasser, “U.S., Uzbekistan confirm covert effort.” [See: https://www.chron.com/news/article/U-S-U...021728.php].
[38] Coll, Ghost Wars, 539-541.
[39] Coll, Ghost Wars, 560-561.
[40] Julio Godoy, “U.S. Policy towards Taliban Influenced by Oil,” Inter Press Service, November 15, 2001, In August 2009, Naik was tortured and murdered in his house in Islamabad in an unsolved case. Whether this had anything to do with his disclosure of Simon’s threats remains uncertain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niaz_Naik
[41] Godoy, “US Policy towards Taliban Influenced by Oil;” Damien Cave, “The Conspiracy Theory That Wouldn’t Die,” Salon, August 16, 2002, https://www.salon.com/2002/08/16/forbidden_truth/.
[42] Cave, “The Conspiracy Theory that Wouldn’t Die.”
[43] Farangis Najibullah, “Uzbekistan’s ‘House Of Torture,’ ” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, August 5, 2012, https://www.rferl.org/a/uzbekistans-hous...67200.html.
[44] Craig Murray, “Why the US won’t admit it was jilted,” The Guardian, August 2, 2005, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/200...cy.comment.
[45] “The Great Gas Game,” Christian Science Monitor, October 25, 2001, https://www.csmonitor.com/2001/1025/p8s1-comv.html.
[46] “Were 1998 Memos a Blueprint for War?” ABC News, January 6, 2006, https://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/story?id=128491&page=1.
[47] Scott, The Road to 9/11, 163-165; Alexis Rowell, “U.S. Mercenaries Fight in Azerbaijan,” CovertAction Quarterly, Spring 1994.
[48] “About Us,” United States-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce, https://usacc.org/content.php?type=page&...hi=4&par=3, September 2, 2007 webpage accessed through the Internet Archive: Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20071009145010/https://usacc.org/content.php?type=page&id=97&chi=4&par=3.
[49] Azerbaijan International, https://azer.com/aiweb/categories/aboutai/aboutai.html.
[50] “Announcing: The US-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce,” Azerbaijan International, Spring 1996, 86, https://www.azer.com/aiweb/categories/ma...merce.html.
[51] “Profile: Officers,” United States-Azerbaijan Chamber of Commerce, http://www.usacc.org/content.php?type=pa...hi=5&par=3, September 2, 2007 webpage accessed through the Internet Archive: Wayback Machine, https://web.archive.org/web/20071009145228/http://www.usacc.org/content.php?type=page&id=2&chi=5&par=3.
[52] Caroline Lees, “Oil barons court Taliban in Texas,” The Telegraph, December 14, 1997, reprinted at https://mapcruzin.com/news/war111901a.htm.
[53] Brzezinski, The Grand Chessboard, 146.
[54] Turkmenistan announced in September 2020 that it intends to begin construction on a gas pipeline from the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan border to the Herat offtake point in Afghanistan, a fundamental part of the TAPI project.  “Rumblings that TAPI Will Commence in 2021,” September 22, 2020, https://www.pipeline-journal.net/news/ru...mence-2021
[55] Tomsen, The Wars of Afghanistan, 597-98, 796 n25.

The censorship of Spike Lee’s NYC Epicenters is a tragically fitting end to the last 20 years
Ted Walter September 11, 2021 PRINT
Even the respected and dauntless filmmaker Spike Lee could not overcome the awesome wrath of the mainstream media that comes down upon any person of influence who dares challenge the official story of 9/11.
In a span of three days, from August 23rd to 26th, Lee went from staunchly defending his decision to include so-called “9/11 conspiracy theorists” in his eight-hour HBO docuseries, NYC Epicenters 9/11 → 2021½, to removing the entire 30 minutes he had devoted to questioning how the Twin Towers and Building 7 fell. The half-hour was part of the final two-hour episode set to air on the night of the 20th anniversary of 9/11.
Unbeknownst to most people — because only members of the media got to view the episode and declare it unfit for the public to see — the 30 minutes of excised material included far more than just interviews with so-called “fringe architects.” (Actually, there were upwards of 10 architects and engineers, ranging from a San Francisco high-rise architect to a fellow of the Society of Fire Protection Engineers.) There were also interviews with 9/11 family members who believe they have not been told the truth about the murder of their loved ones and with first responders and survivors who witnessed explosions. Along with all those interviews was a wealth of archival footage and radio dispatches from that morning, in which rescuer after rescuer can be heard reporting explosions. (Full disclosure: I was also interviewed for the film.)
Instead of painting a full and accurate picture of the now-excised section, the media seized upon the inclusion of “conspiracy group” Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth and our founder Richard Gage — who, in the words of Slate editor Jeremy Stahl, “is responsible for peddling some of the most pernicious and long-running lies about the 9/11 attacks.”
Stahl’s choice of words was clearly intended to imply, falsely, that Gage does not actually believe the view he is presenting but is, rather, knowingly perpetuating a lie for some nefarious purpose. Any person practicing real journalism who has interviewed Gage “multiple times” could not plausibly claim that Gage is lying. What Stahl was practicing was propaganda, the express goal of which was to stop millions of viewers from seeing the half-hour of documentary film that Lee made.
The death blow to Lee’s attempt to shine a light on the Twin Towers’ and Building 7’s controlled demolition appears to have been Stahl’s reporting of statements that Gage made in the past year in which he called the coronavirus pandemic a “hoax” and aired other related views about vaccines and Bill Gates. Stahl also loosely accused Gage of being anti-Semitic — or of condoning anti-Semitism — for having tolerated suggestions, made by an audience member in 2012 and by a podcast host more recently, that Israel’s Mossad was involved in the 9/11 attacks.
Less than 24 hours after Stahl’s Slate article was published, news broke that Lee was “back in the editing room” reexamining the final chapter of the series. One day later, HBO announced that the entire half-hour had been cut.
If Lee had any say in the decision, I suspect he did what he did because he felt he could not defend keeping Gage, nor did he care to, and he didn’t have time for the massive edit that would have been required to remove Gage, who was central to the section. It may be that all of the other attacks did not faze him at all. However, the current narrative is that Lee capitulated to the totality of the media’s condemnation over featuring so-called “conspiracy theorists.”
At the height of the controversy and since, countless articles have been published referring to the controlled demolition theory as “debunked.” These articles either have no links to any sources, or they have links to Popular Mechanics articles from 10 years ago or more, or they have links to the very reports and FAQs issued by the National Institute of Standards and Technology that are disputed by thousands of architects, engineers, and scientists. (By the way, Lee and others make the point that fire isn’t hot enough to melt steel because there was molten metal at Ground Zero, not because the steel needed to melt for the buildings to collapse. This fact, as with all of the evidence of controlled demolition, has not been debunked.)
A journalist friend at a serious investigative news outlet recently told me that on any other issue, relying on the articles of a pop-science magazine like Popular Mechanics to claim that a particular argument had been “debunked,” without doing one’s own research, would not pass as legitimate journalism. But when it comes to mainstream reporting of challenges to the official story of 9/11, we are not talking about journalism but propaganda.
Indeed, for the past 20 years, the mainstream media have revealed themselves — at least those who have done the writing and editing about this issue — to be nothing more than a cult of denialists and propagandists when it comes to addressing what really happened on 9/11. The dictionary definition of a cult is “a group or sect bound together by veneration of the same thing, person, or ideal, etc.” In this case, that thing is the official story of 9/11.
Thus, the media’s response to Lee’s positive portrayal of controlled demolition proponents was especially swift and ferocious because it represented a profound threat to the object of their veneration.
Not only was the half-hour too compelling, thanks to Lee’s “extraordinary directorial panache” and his inclusion of sympathetic figures like Bob McIlvaine, who believes an explosion killed his son while he was entering the North Tower, but Lee himself is about the most terrifying messenger the media could have imagined.
Here is a man who is generally beloved by a wide cross section of the American public, from film buffs to sports fans to the Black community to progressives and beyond. He recently returned from being president of the Cannes Film Festival jury. He has produced and directed dozens of films, many of them highly acclaimed. And now he has just created seven-and-a-half hours of “exuberant,” “brilliant,” “poignant” documentary storytelling about Covid-19 and 9/11.
How could it be that Lee believes so strongly the Twin Towers and Building 7 were brought down with explosives that he wanted to dedicate essentially the final 30 minutes of his HBO docuseries to exploring, if not advocating, that view?
Unable to even imagine the possibility of Lee and his guests being right, the media was forced to rationalize that Lee simply went off the deep end for a moment, “fraternizing with the truthers” on a “pet project” and almost committing a “career-defining offense,” in the words of The New Yorker’s Doreen St. Félix.
Controlled demolition denialism is so engrained in the culture of the media that an entire generation of young writers like St. Félix, who was eight years old in 2001, simply take at face value, without any curiosity or questions or serious research, the notion that the controlled demolition theory has been debunked. Somehow, they manage to look at the collapse of Building 7 and harbor no doubt whatsoever that fire brought it down. Such is the power of 20 years of propaganda that otherwise intelligent people like St. Félix end up doing the bidding — I will assume unwittingly — of whoever perpetrated the 9/11 attacks.
In the face of this relentless and dehumanizing propaganda machine, Lee’s intention to give voice to advocates of the controlled demolition theory on the 20th anniversary of 9/11 should be seen as a testament to the millions of hours of hard work put in by tens of thousands of activists over the past two decades (including those at Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth). Lee was ever-so-close to elevating their message to unseen heights and possibly creating a turning point in the now two-decades-long fight for truth and justice.
But it was almost too good to be true, at least right now. The censorship of Spike Lee’s documentary about 9/11 on the 20th anniversary of that day — when a conspicuous 90 minutes will air on HBO instead of two hours — is a tragically fitting end to the last 20 years of perpetual war, cover-up, and propaganda that have led to an unprecedented level of distrust of public institutions.
Let us hope and do everything we can to ensure that the next 20 years will be different. There is little doubt in the minds of most people that the current trajectory of our society is unsustainable. Exposing the truth about 9/11 is essential to changing that trajectory.

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Ted Walter is the director of strategy and development for Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth. He is also the author of several publications and writings on behalf of the organization, including the 2020 request for correction to NIST's final report on the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7, which is now the subject of an ongoing lawsuit against NIST.

Politics
FBI Makes Midnight Release of Shocking New Information on Saudi-9/11 Complicity
Russ Baker
09/12/21
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[url=https://whowhatwhy.org/politics/saudi-9-11-role-still-hidden-by-us-government/#shared-counts-email]
UPDATE, September 12, 2021: Late Saturday night — a timeslot usually reserved for announcements designed to be buried — the FBI released a previously classified report related to its extraordinarily sensitive investigation of possible Saudi government complicity with the September 11 attackers. 
The report on “Operation Encore” contains critical admissions that move forward, to some extent, understanding of the relationship between the Saudi government and the perpetrators of the greatest attack ever committed on American soil. 
The release was in compliance with an executive order from President Joe Biden.
However, significant information was redacted, continuing a long pattern of the government withholding crucial material. 
Among the assertions from the April 4, 2016, “review and analysis” report was an admission that Saudi officials had met with hijackers — but while the meetings were termed “accidental,” that was contradicted by an eyewitness who said it appeared pre-arranged.  The report also shows that one Saudi official had actually lived with a high-ranking al-Qaeda operative in the United States.
As readers will see from the WhoWhatWhy article below, published less than 24 hours before the new release, the involvement of Saudi officials with the hijackers could in no way be construed as limited and accidental, as they included writing checks to and finding housing for the hijackers. 
Despite the continued withholding of information, particularly the names of sources interviewed by the Bureau, the report was welcomed by families of 9/11 victims suing the Saudis. 
“With this first release of documents, 20 years of Saudi Arabia counting on the U.S. government to cover up its role in 9/11 comes to an end,” said New York attorney James Kreindler, who represents the families. “The findings and conclusions in this FBI investigation validate the arguments we have made in the litigation regarding the Saudi government’s responsibility for the 9/11 attacks. This document, together with the public evidence gathered to date, provides a blueprint for how al Qaeda operated inside the US with the active, knowing support of the Saudi government.”
Kreindler highlighted several areas of the 16-page report that seem particularly significant. They include: 

• A Saudi embassy official with diplomatic immunity actually lived in the US with al-Qaeda’s chief procurement officer in 2000, the year before the attack. That man, Mutaeb al-Sudairy, bought communications equipment for Osama bin Laden. He also spoke repeatedly with Omar al-Bayoumi, another Saudi official, who was busy helping the hijackers get settled in San Diego; Bayoumi, according to witnesses, was quite open in speaking about the need for jihad, or the struggle against the enemies of Islam.  
  

• Saudi diplomat Fahad al-Thumairy, who provided hijackers with lodging and other help in Los Angeles, had contacts with other al-Qaeda operatives involved in separate plots — including Ahmed Ressam, the so-called “millennium bomber” who planned an earlier attack, for January 1, 2000, on Los Angeles International Airport. 
  

One unanswered question is: Why would the Saudi officials act in this sort of a transparent manner, given the stakes? We will provide updates and original reporting.

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September 11, 2021: When it comes to traumatic events that permanently alter the psychic landscape, some things are just too big, too unsettling, and too dangerous to the stability of our systems. And that’s certainly the case with the September 11 attacks. 
And that helps explain why, 20 years after the fact, we are left with a sad state of affairs: The “war to end terrorism” has spawned endless terrorism, and we today understand virtually nothing about how and why an odd gaggle of young men, mostly Saudis, most of them anything but sophisticated, could pull off the crime of the century against the most sophisticated machine the world has ever created.
Over the years, a trickle of facts has emerged to suggest something very disturbing about the Saudi royal family in relation to the hijackers. Somehow, though, this has never been permitted to evolve into a rational explanation of the 2001 cataclysm.
This may be why: 
The Saudi royals, like all corrupt, brutal despots, are always one step from the grave. If the Saudi people rise up, with or without help from others in the region, the elites are done for. So they need constant US backing for their vast repression apparatus. 
For almost a century, ever since oil was discovered beneath the shifting sands, the family of former bedouins has been assured that the world’s great consumers of oil will protect them. 

President Donald Trump had cosy relations with the Saudi Royal family as shown here in this swordsmen ritual at Murabba Palace, hosted by King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud of Saudi Arabia, May 20, 2017, in Riyadh. Photo credit:
Trump White House Archived / Flickr
Now, with oil production diffused, fossil fuel demand on the decline, the goose’s golden egg is more fragile than ever. 
What else could compel the West to direct its military might at propping up this family of billionaires in their lavish lifestyles amid a society with medieval practices? 
A problem as great as the need for oil: the need to remain safe. 
The Saudis can and do present themselves as, like Israel, a bulwark against terror. Their business cards might as well say: “The Last Line of Defense.” After all, they allow the US to have five military bases on their soil in a region typically hostile to hosting American forces.
Terrorism, in one form or another, has perhaps always existed, but the 9/11 attacks seared the threat into the global consciousness like nothing else. They changed life for Americans and non-Americans alike — perhaps forever. 
And they virtually guaranteed the Saudis a “Get Out of Jail Free” card.  
Paradoxically, the 9/11 attacks boxed the US in. The US should have investigated the role of the Saudi royal family but, for a variety of reasons, covered it up instead, and so, despite the heinousness of the crime, Washington has had to actually get closer to the oil-rich regime. 
That’s why the US couldn’t do anything about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a small-scale act of shocking savagery for which there has also been no accountability. 
As I noted in an article we published at the time of Khashoggi’s grisly death, “Most everyone, it seems, recently awoke to the fact that the rulers of Saudi Arabia are not exactly the kindest, gentlest of folks.” 

Saudi journalist, Global Opinions columnist for the Washington Post, and former editor-in-chief of Al-Arab News Channel Jamal Khashoggi offers remarks during POMED’s “Mohammed bin Salman’s Saudi Arabia: A Deeper Look” in Washington, DC, on March 21, 2018. Photo credit: POMED / Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
It took the murder and dismemberment of a Washington Post columnist to get people (and the media) focused on a government that, by most standards, does not deserve the kind of diplomatic favor it has long enjoyed with democratic Western powers.
One might say the same about other countries, but Saudi Arabia is truly extraordinary, by many measures. Its years-long bombing campaign in neighboring Yemen has produced what the UN called “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis” — with millions on the verge of starvation and an ongoing cholera outbreak seen as the worst in recorded history.
“Criminals” in Saudi Arabia — including those who challenge the regime, such as activists and journalists — are routinely flogged in public, beheaded, and even crucified. And while Western journalists lauded the government’s 2018 decision to allow women to drive, women’s rights are still severely restricted.
The royal family itself is a massive kleptocracy, living in unimaginable splendor and binging on luxuries worldwide like drunken sailors.
Of course, the basis for their special treatment comes largely from the nation’s massive oil reserves, which have bought it astonishing impunity — even, it seems, when the lives of thousands of Americans are involved. 
One issue that always remains in the background but is never addressed: the little-understood, though well-documented, relationship between the Saudi royal family and 9/11.

A large number of Saudi citizens flew home from the US almost immediately after 9/11. Photo credit: JT Occhialini / Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)
On the surface, the simple fact that 15 of the 19 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia should give one pause. Plus, a congressional report declassified in 2016 found that some of the hijackers “were in contact with, and received support or assistance from, individuals who may be connected to the Saudi Government.”
But we’re still not getting the whole story. Former Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL), who co-chaired the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence when the 9/11 attacks occurred, and led efforts to investigate, said in a 2018 interview:
The mystery is, over three administrations, why has there been this reticence to release information? … So we’ve gone for three presidencies, [with] no assertive effort from the White House to let the American people share the information that the government has, and form opinions as to who has responsibility for 9/11.
It certainly begs for further scrutiny by the major media outlets. Instead, the public’s attention — focused in 2001 on Afghanistan, the Taliban, Osama bin Laden, Iraq, Saddam Hussein, WMDs, and anthrax — has never been directed toward the Saudi royal family connection.
In the wake of the global war on terrorism, Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi was taken out, and a “civil war” was fomented by the US and Western allies in partnership with Gulf State countries — including Saudi Arabia — to overthrow the government of Syria by arming “moderate rebels” (in a CIA operation code-named Timber Sycamore).
It all sounds vaguely like the secret plan that Gen. Wesley Clark warned us about. Clark claimed that, right after 9/11, he was privy to information contained in a classified memo. In it were US plans to use the attacks on Washington and New York to justify America’s own project to remove governments in seven countries over five years: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Iran.
Most, if not all, of these nations were seen as hostile to American (particularly corporate) interests and, just as significantly, to Saudi interests.
To take this further, we need to remind ourselves of the clarion call within the neocon movement for a “New American Century,” where the US could move around the world, make and break governments, and virtually seize mineral deposits at will. In a seminal report, the then-influential Project for a New American Century (PNAC) warned that a reduction in military spending threatened “the loss of a global security order that is uniquely friendly to American principles and prosperity.” 
PNAC stated that “the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event — like a new Pearl Harbor.”

All of this contributes to the shared understanding that nobody wants to “go there” — and of course there is the fact that the panic around the dramatically heightened terror threat after 9/11 created new reasons for heavy Western support of another security-conscious regime that has been quietly rather close with the Saudis — the Israelis, a key ally of the neocon coalition. More needs to be discovered about what the very capable and active Israeli intelligence service knew about the Saudi network, and of course what the American CIA, NSA, etc., knew. 

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While the government and the media may be reluctant to call out the Saudi kingdom for its links to 9/11, the families of victims certainly have not forgotten. Following the passage of a law in 2016 allowing families to sue Saudi Arabia, a class-action lawsuit was brought claiming Saudi involvement; it has recently collected depositions of former Saudi officials.
Some years back, WhoWhatWhy conducted its own inquiry into the Saudi royal family-9/11 connection. We built on work conducted by another news nonprofit, Florida Bulldog, and were able to connect the hijackers almost directly to the Saudi royal family. You can read more about that here.
The Florida angle we helped develop is important. But there’s a lot more. Here are just a few disturbing examples from among many that one could cite: 
In court filings seeking to stave off a media Freedom of Information request some years back, the FBI stated that releasing documents relating to this issue would harm “national security.” As proof of the sensitivity of the matter, the FBI gave the judge a document dated April 4, 2002, in which the FBI states that its own inquiries “revealed many connections” between a well-connected Saudi family with a house in south Florida and “individuals associated with the terrorist attacks on 9/11/2001.”
Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the person who may know the most about all of this — and appears to have been one of the sponsors of the 9/11 attacks — has consistently refused to be questioned by lawyers representing thousands of 9/11 survivors and relatives of the dead who are suing Saudi Arabia.

President George W. Bush chats with family friend Prince Bandar bin Sultan in 2002. According to an FBI document, the former Saudi ambassador to the US sent at least one check for $15,000 to a Saudi national linked to the 9/11 attacks on America. Photo credit: White House / Wikimedia
You may remember Bandar as a close friend of former President George W. Bush. For 22 years he was Saudi Arabia’s most powerful influencer in Washington, dealing with five presidents, 10 secretaries of state, 11 national security advisors, and 16 sessions of Congress. He was also a former intelligence chief in his own country.  
Bandar’s own ties to the hijackers are fairly astonishing. As toted up by Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, journalists and authors who investigated the Saudi connection extensively, 
Bandar had a very personal reason to be sensitive to the Inquiry’s work. The unclassified version of the Inquiry Report, and press leaks of the content of 28 then still classified pages, implicated Prince Bandar himself, and his wife, in payments made to Osama Basnan, a U.S.-based Saudi suspected of being part of the hijackers’ support system.
Basnan in turn was close with Omar al-Bayoumi, who befriended 9/11 hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi on their arrival in the US in early 2000. Bayoumi, according to FBI files, rendered substantial assistance to the duo — helping them move to San Diego and get settled, and even co-signing their lease. The topper: He threw them a welcome party. 
And Bayoumi was in constant contact with people at the Saudi embassy in Washington. And he had a no-show job with the Saudi Civil Aviation Authority. FBI agents searching Basnan’s home found 31 canceled checks totaling more than $70,000, made out to Basnan’s wife and drawn on the account of Prince Bandar’s wife Princess Haifa. And Basnan and his wife each received at least one check from Ambassador Bandar himself. 
Over the intervening years, I and other reporters were told of efforts — at high levels of government — to block the legitimate inquiries of investigators, including FBI agents trying to get at the truth. 
Flash forward to 2021, and the continuing lawsuit by the families of 9/11 victims alleging Saudi complicity in the 9/11 attacks. After years of successful stonewalling, the Saudis finally produced some former officials for questioning. But, in the words of the Associated Press, “Those depositions remain under seal and the U.S. has withheld a trove of other documents as too sensitive for disclosure.” 
President Biden this month issued an executive order to review and release information sought by the families, declaring that “the American people deserve to have a fuller picture of what their Government knows about those attacks.” He said, “Information should not remain classified when the public interest in disclosure outweighs any damage to the national security that might reasonably be expected from disclosure.” There was a caveat, of course: “Except when the strongest possible reasons counsel otherwise.” 
As we remember the dead, let’s also honor them, not just with words, but by insisting that our government level with us on what it knows. If the problem is that certain relationships are too important for the truth to be told, then that itself is perhaps an even bigger problem, and one that a democracy has to address.

The Twenty Year Shadow of 9/11 (Part 2): Why Did Key U.S. Officials Protect the Alleged 9/11 Plotters?
By
Aaron Good, Ben Howard and Peter Dale Scott
-
September 13, 2021
https://covertactionmagazine.com/2021/09...s/#respond
[/url]

https://covertactionmagazine.com/2021/09...-plotters/



[Source: [url=https://www.theguardian.com/world/2012/mar/27/us-intelligence-failure-911-fbi-cia]theguardian.com]
This failure resulted from previous FBI, CIA, and NSA protection for al-Qaeda members connected with the plot.
This is Part II of a startling new three part examination of 9/11 by Ben Howard, Aaron Good and Peter Dale Scott. Part I can be found here.
Before examining the details of the 9/11 plot, it is worth noting the extent to which the CIA, FBI, and NSA have acted to protect members of al Qaeda in the past. The most relevant recent history begins with the 1987 founding of al-Kifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn, a hub for U.S.-based mujahideen to travel to Afghanistan, and later Bosnia.[1]
Al-Kifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn which shared the same building as the Al-Farooq Mosque. [Source: apjjf.org]
It originated as an office of Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK), an organization financed by Osama bin Laden and founded by Mustafa Shalabi, an Egyptian who would later help bin Laden move to Sudan in 1991.[2]

• Mustafa Shalabi in 1991. [Source: alchetron.com]
  
• Osama bin Laden in the late 1980s. [Source: Aljazeera.com]
  

The Center chiefly supported Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s jihadi organization, Hezb-I-Islami.[3] The Egyptian “blind sheik” Omar Abdel-Rahman was one of the key MAK figures.
Eventually convicted for his role in the 1993 landmarks plot, Abdel-Rahman had previously been granted several visas by CIA officers who were serving as consular officials (presumably under official cover) in U.S. embassies in Sudan and Egypt.[4]
There is much to say about the Al-Kifah Center and its support for American foreign policy goals in Afghanistan and Bosnia. For now, we shall focus on the role that MAK figures played in domestic terror attacks and the protection they received from the U.S. government.
Three of Abdel-Rahman’s followers who were affiliated with the center, including El Sayyid Nosair, conspired to kill Jewish Defense League leader Meir Kahane in Brooklyn on November 5, 1990.[5]

• Omar Abdel-Rahman [Source: washingtonpost.com]
  
• El Sayyid Nosair [Source: historica.fandom.com]
  

This was, according to the Pentagon’s DHRA, “the first al-Qaida-related terrorist attack in the United States.”[6]
Nosair alone was accused of the murder by NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph R Borelli.[7]
However, it quickly became clear that Nosair was part of a broader cell. A search of his home led the NYPD to a trove of U.S. Army training manuals, as well as video footage of talks delivered by one Ali Mohamed at the JFK Special Warfare Center at Fort Bragg.[8]
Ali Mohamed was an Egyptian with many connections to both the CIA and FBI. After a short stint in the early 1980s as a CIA contract agent ended poorly, he was put on a State Department watch list, preventing him from entering the U.S. Despite this, he entered the U.S. on a CIA-sponsored visa program “designed to shield valuable assets or those who have performed important services for the country.”[9]
[Source: peterlance.com]
While stationed at Fort Bragg, he made trips to Afghanistan (including at least one in 1988) and spent his weekends in the New York City metro area training MAK members, including Nosair.[10]
Despite Ali Mohamed’s ties to Nosair, which would have been easy to deduce from the materials found in Nosair’s home, or from the fact that the FBI observed him training Nosair to shoot in 1989,[11] Ali Mohamed was never arrested.
Instead, he continued to live peacefully in California where he had moved.[12]
This was chiefly because the FBI withheld materials found in the Nosair home from the NYPD’s chief investigating officer, Edward Norris, as well as Manhattan DA Robert Morgenthau. The withholding of these materials was not uncovered until after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.[13]
Mohammed Salameh [Source: nydailynews.com]
Though Nosair was acquitted of the Kahane murder in a 1991 trial,[14] he was convicted of assault, coercion, and possession of a gun.[15] He later admitted to his role in the killing and, in 2005, named the convicted 1993 World Trade Center bomber Mohammed Salameh as one of his co-conspirators.[16]
Despite the clear links between Ali Mohamed and the murder of Meir Kahane, he was left alone by the American security services and was able to use his leverage to evade capture by foreign governments as well. In 1993, not long before the bombing of the World Trade Center, he was briefly detained by Canadian authorities when he traveled from his home in California to Vancouver airport to fetch Essam Hafez Marzouk. [17]
Essam Marzouk [Source: historycommons.org]
Marzouk, a close ally of Ayman al-Zawahari and Osama bin Laden, had been detained at Customs for carrying two forged passports. When Mohamed inquired about Marzouk at the Customs office, he too was detained.[18] After interrogation by the RCMP, he finally convinced them to call his contact at the FBI, John Zent. After Zent vouched for him, Mohamed was released.[19]
The protection Mohamed received in 1990 and in 1993 would have grave repercussions. For one, Mohamed trained several members of the cell responsible for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and he had been in communication with them leading up to the attack.[20]
Wreckage from 1993 World Trade Center bombing. [Source: wikipedia.org]
But perhaps even more disturbing was the presence of an FBI informant, Emad Salem, within the cell responsible for the bombing.[21] In fact, Salem was not only an informant—he appears to have been a key element of the plot.
Emad Salem with the Blind Sheikh. [Source: peterlance.com]
And according to The New York Times he was in a position to “thwart the plotters by secretly substituting harmless powder for the explosives.” Instead, the plan to neutralize the bombs “was called off by an F.B.I. supervisor.” The bombing took place, killing six, injuring over 1,000, and causing more than half a billion dollars in damage.[22]
The protection provided to Ali Mohamed again had further devastating consequences, as he played a central role in the August 7, 1998, bombing of the U.S. embassy in Kenya. He was responsible for establishing an al-Qaeda cell in Kenya, and surveilled the U.S. embassy, showing photographs he had taken to bin Laden who then “pointed to where a truck could go as a suicide bomber.”[23] Mohamed was in contact with the FBI leading right up until the bombing, telling an FBI agent in 1997 that “he loved bin Laden and believed in him.”[24]
1998 bombing of U.S. embassy in Kenya. [Source: cnn.com]
On top of this, the NSA was intercepting calls from one of the bombers, Mohamed al-Owhali, who called a key Yemen al-Qaeda operations hub on August 5, 6, and 7—just before the attack.[25]
Mohamed al-Owhali [Source: historycommons.org]
The NSA should have recognized the importance of al-Owhali’s Nairobi safehouse given the number of calls between it and the Yemen hub, a known al-Qaeda operations center. By that point, the agency had been monitoring the Yemen hub for two years. They must have been aware of the calls, and yet said nothing to the FBI or CIA. Nor did the NSA alert the direct target of the plot, the U.S. State Department.
After the bombings, when al-Owhali accidentally survived and was scrambling to escape Kenya, he made a number of calls to the Yemen hub, which in turn made a number of calls to bin Laden himself on August 10th and 11th. These calls clearly indicated the presence of an al-Qaeda agent still in-country, and yet the NSA never informed the FBI or anyone else.[26] The information about these calls only emerged during the embassy bombing trial in early 2001.[27]
It is prudent to wonder at this stage if this information was blocked by the NSA’s “Chop Chain,” a group within the NSA consisting of the director’s top staff and other high-ranking personnel within the NSA.
According to former NSA communications director Tom Drake, the NSA’s Counter-Terror (CT) Shop, a group of about a dozen young analysts, was “issuing reports” about al-Qaeda, one of their areas of responsibility, but “no one was reading them.” These reports presumably included those on al-Owhali’s phone calls detailed above.
Tom Drake [Source: wikipedia.org]
The NSA’s Chop Chain of senior leaders was responsible for reading these reports, and deciding what could be disseminated to the FBI, CIA, or other agencies.[28] In this case, they failed to disseminate highly relevant and time-sensitive reports, which might have prevented the bombing, to any other agency.
Contrary to Drake’s assessment, it seems implausible that the NSA’s senior leadership would not have been aware of CT Shop reports on phone calls coming to al-Qaeda’s Yemen hub from a country where al-Qaeda had just directed a major terrorist attack at U.S. personnel. It would appear, therefore, that the NSA, as well as the FBI, was protecting the al-Qaeda network from exposure and prosecution.
Blee and Black and Tenet
Tom Wilshire [Source: roryoconnor.xyz]
During the 2002 congressional investigation into pre-9/11 intelligence failures, Representative Richard Burr asked Tom Wilshire, CIA Bin Laden Issue Station Deputy Chief, why the CIA failed to inform the FBI about key activities of the alleged 9/11 hijackers in the 18 months leading up to the attack. Wilshire replied that “something apparently was dropped somewhere, and we don’t know where that was.”[29]
In the early weeks of what would become a decades-long coverup, Wilshire was attempting to protect himself and his colleagues by asserting that incompetence, not protection of a joint CIA-Saudi operation, was responsible for the CIA’s failures.
We shall see, however, that Wilshire was not being honest with his reply. In fact, over the past decade, a number of researchers have identified a pattern of deception and obfuscation which implicates not only Wilshire, but also his boss, Richard Blee—the man at the top of the Bin Laden Issue (or Alec) Station.
Richard Blee as a boy. Few known photos exist of him. [Source: historycommons.org]
While Blee has been the subject of scrutiny for at least the past decade from researchers like Kevin Fenton, John Duffy, and Ray Nowosielski, CIA Director Tenet himself has come under suspicion in recent months for his role in protecting at least one person involved in the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole.
Tenet’s actions to promote and protect Richard Blee should be seen in a new light given a) the story of these recently leaked phone calls; and b) prior revelations about Alec Station’s role in protecting USS Cole bombing suspects.
George Tenet [Source: wikipedia.org]
To assess the degree to which the CIA was complicit in the 9/11 attacks, we must place Tenet’s actions in the context of Richard Blee’s behavior.

Blee’s Origin Story
To begin unraveling the details of the CIA’s actions in the months and years leading up to the 9/11 attacks, it is worth delving into Richard Blee’s past. Though there is very little publicly known, he seems to have joined the Agency as something of a legacy admission. Mark Rossini, an FBI agent who worked in Alec Station while Blee was its chief, described Blee as someone who “came from a legacy family in the Agency, and clearly he carried that gravitas.”[30]
David Blee [Source: stanfordmag.org]
His father, David Blee, was a legendary officer within the agency. Along with CIA Director William Colby, Blee the elder was responsible for the ouster of the storied and wildly paranoid counterintelligence chief James Angleton in 1974. Also among Blee’s successes was the defection of Joseph Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva while Blee was New Delhi Chief of Station. In 1971, he was promoted to Soviet Bureau chief. By the time David Blee retired in 1985, he had Angleton’s old job as the head of counterintelligence.[31]
Richard Blee’s early activities in the agency are largely absent from the public record. We know that, by the time he was 26, he was active in the Central African Republic before being posted to Niger, and later to Algeria. By the mid-1990s, Blee was assigned to a task force that was working to destabilize the government of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.[32]
Richard Blee center with Ahmad Shah Massoud and CIA agent David Tyson in the Panjshir Valley in October 1999. [Source: twitter.com]
Immediately prior to becoming Alec Station chief in 1999, Blee was a “fast-track executive assistant from the seventh floor,” a position which Steve Coll describes as “a traditional breeding ground of CIA leadership.”[33] According to John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski, George Tenet brought Blee with him to the seventh floor when he was appointed CIA Director.[34]
7th floor in CIA’s Langley headquarters. [Source: sott.net]
Tenet apparently continued to find Blee useful. By mid-1999, he had appointed Blee to head Alec Station, formally known as the Bin Laden Issue Station, the agency’s hub for everything related to al-Qaeda.[35] While at Alec Station, Blee and Tenet continued to have a close relationship; FBI agent Mark Rossini described Blee as “a guy who clearly had direct communication to George.”[36]
Blee and Black at Alec Station
By the time of his appointment to Alec Station in 1999, Blee had begun to take an interest in Central Asia. As U.S. firms invested billions in Central Asian hydrocarbons, U.S. military and intelligence penetration of the region continued apace.
George Tenet had appointed Cofer Black to run the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center at around the time that Blee was appointed to run its Alec Station component.[37] Together, Blee and Black worked to create secret liaison agreements between the government of Uzbekistan and the CIA.[38]
Cofer Black [Source: wikipedia.org]
These were later expanded to include the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan.[39] Blee seems to have been quite keen on expanding the relationship between the CIA and the Northern Alliance, led by Ahmed Shah Massoud. In October of 1999, Blee lobbied for an expanded CIA-Northern Alliance partnership,[40] and he revisited the issue after the USS Cole bombing in October 2000.[41] As Peter Dale Scott and Aaron Good have noted, Massoud’s own opposition to a U.S. invasion may have resulted in his murder two days before the 9/11 attacks.[42]
Ahmed Shah Massoud with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar after signing a peace agreement in late 1990s. [Source: rawa.org]
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, expanded U.S. involvement in Central Asia seemed all but a given. Blee himself seems to have been rewarded for his efforts in advocating for increased CIA activity in the region, becoming Kabul Chief of Station.[43] But before returning to his Central Asia focus, Blee took a detour that would implicate him in efforts by many in the CIA and other agencies which, collectively, served to “allow the [9/11] attacks to go forward.”[44]
Who Knew What When?
Detailing the suspicious actions taken by Richard Blee and his subordinates before the 9/11 attacks would fill a book, and in fact Kevin Fenton has written that book. Most notably, Fenton documents an explosive series of events which demonstrates Blee’s role in preventing the activities of key 9/11 plotters from being discovered by the FBI or by senior members of the Clinton and Bush administrations. In particular, Blee’s statements to Condoleezza Rice and Richard Clarke are so out of step with what he knew about the activities of certain key al Qaeda members at the time that, clearly, the most plausible conclusion is that Blee intended to mislead them.
The story begins in January 2000 with Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi in Dubai. Later to become infamous for their alleged role in flying American 77 into the Pentagon, the two were transiting on their way to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, for a summit with other al-Qaeda members. Following a tip received from the NSA, the CIA discovered al-Mihdhar’s passport had a U.S. visa which was set to expire in just a few months, and which he had not yet used.[45]

• Khalid al-Mihdhar [Source: wikipedia.org]
  
• Nawaf al-Hazmi [Source: wikipedia.org]
  

When this information was passed to Alec Station, Doug Miller, an FBI agent assigned to the unit, understood its importance. He drafted a cable to be sent to the Bureau, warning them that al-Mihdhar may soon be visiting the U.S.
This cable was blocked by Blee’s deputy, Tom Wilshire. As Fenton notes, had the FBI been aware that al-Mihdhar planned to enter the U.S. soon, they would have been able to surveil him, not least because he began living with an FBI informant named Abdussattar Shaikh in May of 2000.[46]
Abdussattar Shaikh [Source: historycommons.org]
On March 5, 2000, the Bangkok CIA station, responding to an inquiry from the Malaysia station about al-Mihdhar’s travels, sent a cable which indicated that al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar had traveled to the U.S.[47] Despite claims to the contrary from CIA Director Tenet, this memo was read widely within the agency, including by Blee’s deputy Tom Wilshire on May 15, 2001.[48]
In May 2001, Blee began briefing key members of the Bush administration’s national security team, including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke, and others. In a meeting on June 28, 2001, Blee told Rice and others that “Osama bin Laden will launch a significant terrorist attack against the U.S. and/or Israeli interests in the coming weeks.”[49]

• Richard Clarke [Source: salon.com]
  
• Condi Rice [Source: wikipedia.org]
  

On July 10, Blee delivered the line he is perhaps most famous for, saying to Rice and Tenet, “there will be significant terrorist attacks against the United States in the coming weeks or months. The attacks will be spectacular.”[50]
Then, beginning on July 5, 2001, Wilshire sent several cables which Richard Blee, among others, received. In a July 23 cable, Wilshire explained that “Khalid Midhar [sic] should be [of] very high interest anyway, given his connection to the [redacted].” At this stage, Wilshire certainly was aware that al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi were likely already in the U.S.
He had blocked one cable which included this information in January 2000, and in May 2001 he read the March 5, 2000, Bangkok cable detailing al-Hazmi’s and al-Mihdhar’s travel to the U.S.[51] Still, he asked managers at the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center, Blee among them, for permission to pass this and related information to the FBI. Wilshire did not receive this permission, and he did not pass any information on to anyone in a position to surveil or detain either of the men.[52]
When Blee received this information detailing a known al-Qaeda suspect whom Blee’s own subordinates already knew to be inside the U.S., he did not take any steps to relay it to Rice, the FBI, or anyone else in a position to apprehend or surveil al-Mihdhar. At some point in late July, Blee met with CIA Director Tenet and other deputies, relaying to them that, “They’re coming here.”[53] If he did say this, he concealed what he knew very well—that “they” were, in fact, already here.

What Happens When the FBI Does Attempt to Foil the Plot?
Having detailed the lengths Blee and his subordinates at Alec Station went to prevent certain key facts from becoming known to the FBI, it is worth delving into what happened when the FBI did become aware of an element of the unfolding terror plot. The case of Zacarias Moussaoui is illustrative.
Zacarias Moussaoui in the late 1990s. [Source: taipeitimes.com]
Moussaoui was a known entity to British and French intelligence by the late 1990s. He had been surveilled by MI5 via an informant and was investigated by the French government because of his possible connections to the assassination of consular officials in Algeria. He was placed on the French terror watch list in 1999.[54]
Despite this, Moussaoui had no problems entering the United States. He took flying lessons between February and May 2001,[55] and began lessons in July in Minnesota. This was financed by Ramzi Binalshibh,[56] an al-Qaeda operative who served as an intermediary between Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the operatives in the U.S.[57]

• Ramzi Binalshibh [Source: humanrightsfirst.org]
  
• Khalid Sheikh Mohammed [Source: newyorker.com]
  

On August 15, 2001, the FBI began an investigation into Moussaoui[58] based on a tip from the flight school.[59] The FBI agents investigating Moussaoui became concerned he was an imminent threat,[60] and so on August 16 he was arrested by the INS for overstaying his visa.[61]
On August 24, FBI agents investigating Moussaoui were provided information from the French intelligence service which indicated that Moussaoui was a recruiter for Ibn al-Khattab, a mujahideen leader in Chechnya who was described by one FBI agent as a “close buddy with Bin Ladin.”[62]
Ibn al-Khattab [Source: alchetron.com]
At this stage, in the words of FBI agent and whistleblower Coleen Rowley, the FBI agents on the case were “desperate to search the computer lap-top that had been taken from Moussaoui.”[63]
Moussaoui’s laptop. [Source: historycommons.org]
However, the FBI’s National Security Law Unit never even submitted an application for a FISA intelligence warrant to search the contents of the laptop. The 9/11 Commission Report characterized this failure to submit the application as a consequence of a “spirited debate been the Minneapolis Field Office, FBI headquarters, and the CIA.” Following said “spirited debate,” FBI headquarters determined that Moussaoui’s connection to al-Khattab, as indicated in the French intelligence report, was not sufficient grounds for a FISA warrant because al-Khattab was not sufficiently connected to a known terrorist organization. This was despite the fact that the FBI was certainly aware of al-Khattab’s connection to Al-Qaeda, as indicated by an April 2001 memo entitled “Bin Laden/Ibn Khattab Threat Reporting.”[64]
However, subsequent events indicate that this “spirited debate” was a pretext and distraction which allowed staff at FBI HQ to block Minneapolis field agents from applying for a search warrant. This is borne out by the fact that the criminal search warrant for Moussaoui’s laptop, which was signed by a judge following the events of 9/11, did not even reference the French intelligence information.
FBI Minneapolis office. [Source: flickr.com]
What FBI HQ staff wanted for probable cause, the purported lack of evidence that Moussaoui was a threat, was evidently provided in the form of the 9/11 attacks.[65]
As evidenced by their use of an INS overstay as a pretext for what was effectively a preventive arrest, the FBI agents on the ground appreciated the potential threat posed by Moussaoui, and believed they had sufficient probable cause. One of the agents in Minneapolis said that he “was trying to keep Moussaoui from crashing an airplane into the World Trade Center.”[66]
FBI HQ staff, on the other hand, purported to not appreciate this threat, with Michael Maltbie telling Minneapolis FBI agents, “you have a guy interested in this type of aircraft. That is it.”[67]
Rita Flack, another HQ staffer, approved of Maltbie’s efforts to block the warrant, despite the fact that she had read the so-called Phoenix Memo, in which the Phoenix FBI told FBI HQ that al-Qaeda was already using flight schools to obtain flight training for terrorist purposes.[68]
Having read this memo, she was certainly aware that Moussaoui posed a threat, and yet she continued to assist in blocking Minneapolis FBI agents from investigating Moussaoui. The coordinated efforts to block the investigation were so egregious to FBI agents in Minneapolis that, according to Rowley, “jokes were actually made that the key FBIHQ personnel had to be spies or moles … who were actually working for Osama Bin Laden to have so undercut Minneapolis’ effort.”[69]
Coleen Rowley [Source: huffpost.com]
Fenton has documented how Tom Wilshire—noted previously for his role in protecting al-Qaeda associates—was also highly involved in the Moussaoui case.[70] On August 24, Wilshire sent a cable to Dave Frasca, Michael Maltbie, and Rita Flack—the three FBI HQ staffers handling the case. He asked the agents if they had yet obtained biographical information about Moussaoui, if they had yet obtained photos, and if the CIA could get these photos to provide them to agency assets in the field.[71]
This indicates he was aware of the HQ staff’s ongoing efforts to get further information about Moussaoui, and that he played a role in facilitating the transfer of information from the FBI to the CIA in this case.
In his cable to FBI HQ staff, Wilshire referred to the Moussaoui case by asking Dave Frasca “where we are re the Minneapolis Airplane IV crowd.” It is unclear whether he was referring to Moussaoui himself or to the FBI field office in Minneapolis. [72] What is clear is that, while Minneapolis field agents “were trying to keep Moussaoui from crashing an airplane into the World Trade Center”[73] and a CIA agent detailed to FBI HQ was concerned that Moussaoui “will be talking to a control tower while aiming a 747 at the White House,” [74] Wilshire was downplaying the threat by making a joke about the 1980 parody disaster film “Airplane!”
Fenton explains that Tom Wilshire was “part of the group of staff at FBI headquarters who shackled the case … he was a senior member of this group, and … he was either the originator of the obstructionism or endorsed and strengthened it, undermining the FBI’s investigation.”[75]
Though we only have the one cable from Wilshire to FBI HQ staff, there are certainly others. Declassification and release of these other cables would shed light on the dynamic between Wilshire and other FBI HQ staff members.
As Kevin Fenton notes, if the Moussaoui investigation had not been stymied from above, the FBI and CIA would likely have identified at least 11 of the 19 hijackers. This is because, as discussed earlier, Moussaoui was financed by Binalshibh. Binalshibh was closely connected to three of the alleged hijackers—Mohamed Atta, Ziad Jarrah, and Marwan al-Shehhi.
Mohamed Atta, Ziad Jarrah and Marwan al-Shehhi. [Source: pbs.org]
When Moussaoui was arrested, he was in possession of a letter from Yazid Sufaat, host of the aforementioned January 2000 summit in Malaysia. Furthermore, the CIA had also observed Sufaat in the company of Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi.[76]
Yazid Sufaat [Source: historica.fandom.com]
For his part, George Tenet was also aware of the Moussaoui case. He was briefed on August 23, with a document entitled “Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly.”[77]
Yet, he told no one about the case—including the President. Tenet was in contact with President Bush between August 31 and September 10,[78] and in an interview with Tim Russert claimed that he “held nothing back from the president” during that period.[79]
However, during this time of high threat reporting when Tenet knew an attack on U.S. soil was likely, he never relayed to President Bush, or anyone else, that he knew an “Islamic fundamentalist” had traveled to the U.S. to learn to fly 747s.[80] He alleges that, at the time, he had no idea the case was connected to al-Qaeda; he assumed the FBI was handling it, and therefore he didn’t discuss it with anyone.[81]
At the time of the attack, however, Tenet understood very well Moussaoui’s importance—so much so that the news of the 9/11 attacks triggered him to wonder if Moussaoui had anything to do with it.
On the morning of September 11, while enjoying breakfast at the St. Regis Hotel with former Oklahoma Senator David Boren, he received a call informing him of the attack on the World Trade Center. Boren later claimed that as Tenet left breakfast, he asked himself, “I wonder if this has something to do with the guy who trained for a pilot’s license?”[82] Thus, despite his claims to the contrary, it seems that Tenet did in fact hold something back from the President.
David Boren [Source: wikipedia.org]
Tenet’s Golden Boy?
As discussed earlier in this article, Richard Blee seems to have been CIA Director George Tenet’s golden boy, or at least one of them. With Tenet’s assistance, he became head of Alec Station at age 41, five years younger than his legendary father had made station chief.[83]
Following Alec Station’s apparent disastrous failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks, Blee was assigned to Kabul as Chief of Station—arguably a promotion. Given that the agency was massively expanding its activities in the region following 9/11, this was certainly a plum position for a man with long-standing interest in Central Asia.[84]
When researchers began to uncover Blee’s identity and his role in the disastrous actions taken by Alec Station leadership in advance of the attacks, Tenet attempted to protect him. In 2011, John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski were working on a documentary podcast about the CIA’s actions with respect to al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi. They had interviewed the former National Coordinator for Counterterror, Richard Clarke, who made statements that implicated Blee in a plot to conceal information from both the FBI and Clarke himself (some of which is detailed earlier in this article).
Ray Nowosielski [Source: owltail.com]
Duffy and Nowosielski sent a video of the interview to Tenet, who responded to them with a joint statement issued along with Cofer Black and Richard Blee. They attempted to exonerate themselves, stating “[w]e testified under oath about what we did, what we knew and what we didn’t know. We stand by that testimony.”[85]
Unfortunately for Tenet, that testimony included a number of statements that we now know to be false. One particularly intriguing false statement concerns that crucial March 5, 2000, Bangkok station cable which detailed that al-Hazmi and a companion (al-Mihdhar) had traveled to the U.S.[86]
Tenet testified to the congressional inquiry that “I know that nobody read that cable.” He repeated that “nobody read that cable in the March timeframe,” and when pressed by Senator Levin, he again stated that “nobody read that information only cable.”
Tenet receiving a medal from George W. Bush. [Source: apjjf.org]
Yet, the CIA inspector general’s report indicates that “in the period January through March 2000, some 50 to 60 individuals read one or more of six Agency cables containing travel information related to these terrorists.” [87]
For Tenet to insist that “nobody read that cable,” when we know that Wilshire read it on May 15, 2001, suggests that he may have been part of Black’s and Blee’s CIA efforts to block FBI inquiry into certain al-Qaeda operations. More clearly, Tenet was part of a subsequent effort to conceal the whole fiasco from a congressional inquiry.

Why Was Wilshire So Concerned? The Case for GID Surveillance of the Alleged 9/11 Hijackers
When analyzing Tom Wilshire’s behavior, the cables he sent between July 5 and July 23 are rather curious. As noted, Wilshire had prevented FBI agent Doug Miller from passing to the FBI information about Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi’s travel to the U.S. in January 2000.
He then continued to sit on this information, not informing the FBI, even after he was reminded of it again on May 15, 2001, upon reading a March 5, 2000, cable from the Bangkok station detailing al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi’s travel to the U.S. Why then, in July 2001, did Wilshire send three cables to Blee and others within the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center explicitly naming al-Mihdhar as a threat to American national security?
Al Mihdhar photo ID card. [Source: defenseone.com]
As detailed above, Blee was certain of an upcoming al-Qaeda attack on American soil. Tenet told the 9/11 Commission that during the summer of 2001, “the system was blinking red” in anticipation.[88] Kevin Fenton has argued that Wilshire, aware of this threat, may have been attempting to alert Blee to the fact that al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi—the soon-to-be alleged hijackers they had been protecting—were likely to be involved in this upcoming attack.[89]
If this is the case, then the curious coincidence of Wilshire’s cable on July 5 and al-Mihdhar’s re-entry into the United States on July 4 takes on new significance. If Wilshire was aware that al-Mihdhar had re-entered the U.S. on July 4, it may have prompted him to attempt to warn Blee of impending danger.
Wilshire and Blee had been protecting al-Mihdhar for 18 months at this point, and if he was involved in an upcoming attack, any investigation into what the CIA knew would, as it ultimately did, discover this fact. Wilshire may have been acting to protect himself and Blee, or just himself.
While nothing in the CIA’s publicly available records indicates that the agency was surveilling al-Mihdhar, strong circumstantial evidence suggests that elements within the Saudi Arabian government may have relayed this information to elements within the CIA.
In 2007, Prince Bandar, Saudi ambassador to the U.S., commented that “Saudi security had been actively following the movements of most of the terrorists with precision” in advance of the 9/11 attacks.[90]
George W. Bush with Prince Bandar at his Texas ranch in August 2002 [Source: newyorker.com].
Pat D’Amuro [Source: concordia.net]
Of course, the 2016 release of the long-classified “28 pages” of the Joint Congressional Inquiry provided indications that Bandar knew more than he let on. These classified pages drew in part from an FBI investigation led by manager Pat D’Amuro’s team in the weeks after 9/11.
The FBI’s investigation chiefly focused on two men, Omar al-Bayoumi and Osama Basnan. Though accounts differ as to how Bayoumi met al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, what is clear is that he quickly became close with the pair. [91]

• Omar al-Bayoumi [Source: sandiegoreader.com]
  
• Osama Basnan [Source: historycommons.org]
  

He secured them a San Diego apartment next to his, served as a guarantor on their lease, and even provided them with more than $1500 for two months of rent. More significantly, he helped arrange classes at flight school for the pair.[92]
Apartments where hijackers lived, which have since been converted into condominiums. [Source: sandiegoreader.com]
Bayoumi was employed at Dallah Avco,[93] a Saudi aviation services company ultimately owned by the now disgraced and presumably imprisoned[94] Saudi billionaire Saleh Abdullah Kamel.[95]
Saleh Abdullah Kamel [Source: arabnews.com]
When Bayoumi began his employment, he was paid a small stipend of under $500 a month. When al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar arrived in San Diego, his pay increased to $3,700 a month.[96] This, despite the fact that a source told the FBI that Bayoumi was a “ghost employee” of Dallah Avco who was “being paid for doing nothing.”[97]
Bayoumi was also receiving large sums of money, totaling in the tens of thousands of dollars, from none other than Haifa bint Faisal, Prince Bandar’s wife.[98] On one occasion, Bayoumi received a check from Prince Bandar’s account directly.[99]
Haifa bint Faisal [Source: alchetron.com]
Bayoumi left the U.S. in July 2001,[100] but not long after, his good friend Osama Basnan moved into his apartment building, which as noted also housed al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar. The FBI felt this “could indicate [Basnan] succeeded Omar al Bayoumi and may be undertaking activities on behalf of the Government of Saudi Arabia.”[101]
Certainly Basnan seemed to sympathize with the alleged hijackers: After 9/11, Basnan reportedly “celebrated the heroes of September 11” and talked about “what a wonderful, glorious day it had been.”[102]
The FBI’s investigation revealed that Basnan had received more than $74,000 in cashier’s checks from Bandar’s wife between February 1999 and May 2002. On one occasion, Basnan received $15,000 directly from Prince Bandar.[103]
In April 2002, Basnan met with an unknown “high Saudi prince who has responsibilities for intelligence matters”[104] and who was part of a Saudi royal entourage which had arrived in Texas to conduct meetings with Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. This prince provided Basnan with “a significant amount of cash.”[105] These connections strongly suggest that Basnan was an agent of Saudi intelligence.
Dick Cheney meeting Saudi King Abdullah and Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud. [Source: theatlantic.com]
Collectively, these links between Saudi (GID) intelligence agents, Prince Bandar, and the alleged 9/11 hijackers are strongly suggestive of a GID role in the handling of the hijackers, and they lend credence to Bandar’s claim that the GID was closely following the hijackers’ movements.
Given all this, it is worth uncovering any details about the information that Bandar or other Saudi intelligence officials may have provided Tenet. As James Risen has reported, Bandar and Tenet were close, with Tenet visiting Bandar’s McLean, Virginia, estate monthly. Tenet and Bandar would frequently exchange information, but Tenet would not reveal this information to other officials at the CIA—the broader agency only discovered what had been discussed through Saudi sources, typically long after the fact. [106]
Prince Bandar’s estate in McLean Virginia. [Source: virtualglobetrotting.com]
Tenet’s relationship with the Saudis was held so close to the vest that in the 1990s, Tenet appointed one of his top aides as station chief in Riyadh. This station chief would frequently communicate with Tenet directly, bypassing the chain of command and thereby “[driving] the barons of the [Near East Division] and [Counterterrorism Center] crazy because they were not in the loop.”
Indeed, according to Risen’s source, “top CIA managers were intent on making sure that the CIA did not produce politically inconvenient intelligence that could cause headaches at the White House.”[107] Tenet’s appointment of a top aide to a sensitive position in Riyadh mirrors Tenet’s appointment of Blee to a sensitive position at Alec Station.
This close relationship between Tenet and Saudi intelligence, which kept the Near East Division and Counterterrorism Center out of the loop, follows the long-standing and alarming post-Watergate pattern of bypassing the CIA bureaucracy to enable covert operations and avoid accountability in the face of “congressional interference.”
The Safari Club network, of which this Tenet/Saudi relationship seems a piece, was created specifically to link CIA leadership with the leaders of Saudi and other intelligence agencies for the purpose of avoiding accountability and keeping intelligence operations covert and unimpeded by congressional fetters.
Safari Club luxury resort in Mt. Kenya owned by Saudi arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi from which the CIA-led alliance got its name. [Source: wikipedia.org]
In this context, Tenet’s close relationship with Bandar and others in the Saudi intelligence community is concerning, as it indicates his desire for secrecy even from high CIA officials, not mention Congressional bodies tasked with providing intelligence oversight.
Another likely venue for GID-CIA collaboration was the 1997 Saudi-U.S. “joint intelligence committee” established by Saudi Defense Minister Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz and presumably his counterparts in U.S. defense and intelligence. This committee was established “to share information on terrorism in general and on bin Laden (and al-Qaeda) in particular.”[108]
Prince Sultan bin Abdulaziz [Source: wikipedia.org]
Peter Dale Scott has written that this committee was part of a liaison agreement between the CIA and GID. The nature of these liaison arrangements, as Scott explains, means that it “would probably have required special access clearances for those privy to the arrangement and sharing the liaison information.”
Such could help explain some serious anomalies.
First, there is the extensive protection provided to al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar by Wilshire and others of the CIA’s Alec Station. Second, there is the evidence suggesting transmission of information between elements of the GID monitoring al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar’s movements and Wilshire.
Michael Scheuer, the head of the CIA’s Alec Station. [Source: globetrotter.berkeley.edu]
Third, there is the fact that certain other members of Alec Station, like Doug Miller, were deliberately kept out of the loop.[109]
A heretofore secret liaison arrangement which provided for al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar’s safe passage into the United States would seem to be the most sensible explanation for all of this.
The pattern of facts presented here is circumstantial, but highly supportive of the conclusion that certain elements within the CIA, including Wilshire and Blee, were not only aware of al-Hazmi’s and al-Mihdhar’s movements, but were actively protecting operations of some kind under the terms of a joint CIA-GID liaison agreement.
Such an explanation takes into account a number of factors, namely: the GID’s role in handling al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, Prince Bandar’s personal role in financing their handlers Bayoumi and Basnan, Bandar’s close and secretive relationship with Tenet, and Tenet’s direct personal relationship with Blee. In this context, the timing of Wilshire’s July 5 cable expressing alarm at al-Mihdhar’s probable role in an upcoming terrorist attack and al-Mihdhar’s re-entry into the U.S. on July 4 should not be dismissed as mere coincidence.
Tenet’s Involvement in the Pre-Coverup
Ali Abdullah Saleh [Source: Britannica.com]
In recent months, Tenet has come under further scrutiny for his role in protecting key al Qaeda personnel. As detailed by Alex Rubinstein, leaked phone calls between Tenet and then-Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, published by the Houthi government of Yemen, indicate that Tenet was pressuring Saleh to release a prisoner who was being held by the Yemeni government in connection with the USS Cole bombing.[110]
At this time, the suspects of the Cole bombing were top priority for Alec Station. In fact, Tom Wilshire’s July 23, 2001, cable (discussed above) was a reply to a July 13 cable he had sent.
In this cable, Wilshire discussed Walid Mohammed bin Attash as a key player in the USS Cole bombing, and asked the CIA Counterterrorism Center leadership, Blee among them, if the FBI could be informed. To reiterate, permission for this was not forthcoming.[111]
Walid Mohammed bin Attash [Source: nytimes.com]
Khalid al-Mihdhar, who had been protected by Blee, Wilshire, and others in Alec Station on numerous occasions, was also a key suspect in the bombing. The Yemeni Prime Minister at the time, Abd al-Karim al-Iryani, declared that al-Mihdhar “was one of the Cole perpetrators, involved in preparations.”[112]
It seems that Tenet himself was committed to ensuring the FBI was not fully informed about al-Qaeda and the Cole bombings. When President Saleh informed Tenet that the FBI was on the ground in Yemen investigating the bombing, and asked if they could come to retrieve the prisoner in question, Tenet was insistent that “this is my person, this is my problem, this is my issue.”
Saleh and Tenet then discussed the details, whereby an officer from the CIA station in Yemen would come and retrieve the prisoner, instead of the FBI.[113]
Major General Abdul Qadir al-Shami, the deputy head of the Yemeni Security and Intelligence Service, told Houthi media that the identity of this prisoner was none other than Anwar al-Awlaki.
[Source: greatgameindia.com]
Al-Awlaki had already been under investigation by the FBI in 1999 and 2000 over his possible role as a procurement agent for Osama bin Laden.[114]
Anwar al-Awlaki [Source: thedailybeast.com]
His possible role as a CIA asset of some kind is particularly intriguing in light of his relationships with the alleged hijackers al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar—the men whose activities were being concealed by Blee and others at Alec Station.
As the 9/11 Commission Report notes, al-Awlaki admitted to meeting al-Hazmi when he was an imam at the Rabat mosque in San Diego.[115] In fact, many FBI agents suspected that al-Awlaki may in fact have secured al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar housing when they moved to Alexandria, Virginia, a suspicion that the Commissioners shared.[116]
As documents obtained by Judicial Watch through a 2013 FOIA request revealed, by September 27, 2001, the FBI was aware that al-Awlaki had purchased plane tickets in July and August of 2001 for alleged hijackers Atta, Suqami, and al-Sheri.[117]
Al-Awlaki’s subsequent presence at a February 5, 2002, Pentagon dinner as an “up and coming” “moderate Muslim” seems incongruous with his assistance to the alleged 9/11 hijackers.[118] In fact, an FBI surveillance team followed al-Awlaki to the dinner, likely because just the day before they had identified him as a “terrorist organization member.”[119]
But while he may have been just a surveillance target for the FBI in February 2002, his repeated arrests and releases from U.S. custody, including in October 2002, November 2006, and July 2007, paint the picture of an FBI asset.[120]
An October 22, 2002, FBI memo, with the subject line “Anwar Nasser Aulaqi” and the heading “Synopsis: Asset Reporting,” seems to confirm this,[121] as does the fact that just 12 days before this memo was written, he was being held at JFK Airport under a warrant for passport fraud, but was released at the direction of an FBI agent.[122]
Al-Awlaki’s apparent status as an FBI asset following 9/11 is concerning given his relationship to Bayoumi, a handler of al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar in San Diego.
A 2011 Atlantic article described al-Awlaki as one of Bayoumi’s frequent “discussion partners.” In February 2000, soon after al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar arrived in San Diego, they used Bayoumi’s phone to call al-Awlaki on four occasions.[123]
Given that al-Awlaki served the same role in securing housing for al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar in Alexandria as Bayoumi did in San Diego, and that he had a close relationship with GID asset Bayoumi, it seems likely he was a subject of the GID-CIA liaison agreement that pertained to al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, and was certainly under GID surveillance (via Bayoumi) at the very least.
In either case, elements of the CIA who were privy to the GID-CIA liaison agreement would have been aware of al-Awlaki and his actions, just as they were aware of al-Hazmi’s and al-Mihdhar’s movements.
Assuming Major General al-Shami was correct and that the prisoner Tenet freed was al-Awlaki, it is worth exploring the implications of this fact. As discussed earlier, Tenet’s relationship with Bandar and the GID-CIA liaison agreement means that he would likely have been aware of al-Awlaki’s relationship with al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar in San Diego, just as Wilshire at Alec Station was.
If Tenet had not secured al-Awlaki’s release, and FBI agents had been able to interview him, they would have found themselves in front of a man who had already been investigated by the Bureau in 1999 and 2000.[124]
Investigation of al-Awlaki’s activities in San Diego might have uncovered his connection to his frequent discussion partner and GID asset Bayoumi, certainly an inviting target for the Bureau within their counterintelligence responsibilities if nothing else.
While the outcomes of any counterfactual FBI investigation are speculative, had al-Awlaki been in federal custody it certainly would have meant that he would not have been in Alexandria to secure housing for al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar in advance of the 9/11 attacks.
That al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen, was killed by a drone strike on September 30, 2011, less than six months after Rep. Peter King (R-NY) opened a new investigation into his connections to the alleged hijackers, has potentially grave implications.[125]
Al-Awlaki was killed in a drone strike less than six months after Rep. Peter King, featured above, opened a new investigation into his connection to the alleged 9/11 hijackers. [Source: nytimes.com]
The FBI actively concealed al-Awlaki from the 9/11 Commission, “refus[ing] to set up interviews between the Commission and al-Aulaqi [sic].”
They continued to obstruct, even after an official at the FBI Academy received an October 23, 2003, email from al-Awlaki in which he said he was “around and available” for interview by the Commission, who were on the ground in Yemen searching for him at that time.
Ultimately, he was never interviewed by the Commission, and whatever he knew about Bayoumi, al-Hazmi, or al-Mihdhar was made finally inaccessible on his death.[126]