Tucker Carlson’s All the Truth About 9/11 series, featuring disgraced ex-FBI agent Mark Rossini (linked to Pelicano’s corruption and a 2008 felony plea), recycles debunked claims—like CIA false-flag recruitment of hijackers via Saudi operatives—that rely on a 2021 declaration by Donald Canestraro, a Guantanamo defense investigator. The hosts dismiss it as performative, lacking new evidence or context, and argue Tucker’s framing—portraying the government as flawed but not malicious—misses his audience’s appetite for demonic or anti-state conspiracy theories. Instead, it feels like an abrupt pivot, disconnected from current relevance, risking irrelevance amid 9/11’s lasting impact. [Automatically generated summary]
I mentioned a while back that Tucker was putting out a five-part series explaining what really happened on 9-11, which I likened to him trying to wear Alex's skin and steal his spirit.
It may seem kind of trivial now, and there's a low social cost to being a conspiracy theorist, but in the early 2000s, people hated 9-11 conspiracy theorists.
The U.S. had suffered a giant terrorist attack.
A city was grieving, and the armed forces of the country were being called up to fight in multiple foreign wars, presumably in response to that attack.
The country wasn't fully united, but you could say that there were two main sides, and neither really liked conspiracy theories around 9-11 that much.
There was the America right or wrong crowd who saw Bush as a wartime president who had responded to the attack, and it was every American's duty to go along and support him in getting this mission done.
For them, it was unpatriotic to question the leadership, and they demanded that we all support the troops.
On the other side, you had the anti-war crowd, who were generally college kids and old hippies, mostly from the left and libertarian circles.
And for the most part, they weren't that into 9-11 conspiracies either.
They had a solid argument against the wars, and their conviction that Bush lied to make those wars happen didn't rely on really dubious arguments that these conspiracy theorists make about the attack itself.
Incorporating flimsy accusations about Bush doing 9-11 into their arguments weakened them.
So for the most part, they stayed away from this kind of game.
You'll often hear Alex complain that when he criticized Bush, the right-wing accused him of being a commie, and the whole 9-11 period has a lot to do with that.
Prior to this point, he'd had very little national significance, but he'd made a career that was almost fully catering to a right-wing audience.
He was a John Birch Society acolyte who worked on Pat Buchanan's campaigns for president, and pretty much all of his positions would be categorized as strongly conservative.
I do hate to be too praising of Alex, but in his coverage of 9-11, what he did was a bold move, and it's one that could have easily backfired.
The population he'd regularly drawn his audience from was in a very patriotic phase, and a lot of the Republican types of they might punch you for saying that you thought that 9-11 was an inside job.
It was alienating to what was obviously his core demographic.
But Alex on some level understood that this was his ticket.
There wasn't going to be another publicly traumatic event on this scale in the United States for a long time.
And if he could attach himself to it by demanding people accept his alternative version of the story, he could make his mark in this very wet cement.
It truly was a different time.
And although I'm certain there were crass financial considerations and Alex didn't believe most of this shit, it's important to keep in mind how hard it was to be a person like that in 2002.
The country was trying to come together and heal, and Alex made it his business to try to keep these wounds open, insisting that if you let them heal, you'll never find the true culprit, the globalists.
I say all this not to pump Alex up, because he's still a liar and a fraud and even was back then, but instead I say this to disrespect Tucker Carlson and the idea that he would make a 9-11 conspiracy documentary 24 years later and act like he's breaking new ground.
When it would have been an interesting position to have, Tucker was wearing bow ties on crossfire and arguing in favor of Bush's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He was trying to be a mouthpiece for the state, so he hated the idea that people had conspiracies about 9-11.
He said as much to Alex in one of their interviews, that he deeply disliked Alex because he thought the conspiracies about 9-11 were disgusting.
But now the calculus has changed entirely, and there is no cost to being a 9-11 theorist.
And it comes to Tucker to try to steal Alex's crown by making this five-part 9-11 conspiracy series.
There are no ifs, ands, or buts about one thing, I think, and that is that Alex Jones is the 9-11 guy.
He's wrong about pretty much everything, and he doesn't even remember all the fake things he's proven over the years, but he was the guy who took on the risk of being the face of a deeply unpopular thing when the country wanted no part of it.
If you're Tucker, who is supposedly Alex's friend, you can't make a 9-11 series and not have it mostly be about Alex's work, because whatever you're going to put into that documentary, he's probably already covered.
If you're Tucker, you should just plug loose change and move on.
I say all this, and I am interested in this move on Tucker's part because I believe that it's part of a concerted effort to replace Alex as a meaningful figure in the Trump media ecosystem.
For 24 years now, politicians, the media, intel agencies in this country and abroad have all demanded that you believe the official story about 9-11.
And here's what it is.
They tell you a group of al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists, many of whom were known to U.S. Intel services, somehow managed to evade capture for years as they planned the most significant and elaborate terror attack in human history.
We're told that despite repeated encounters with the FBI, the CIA, local law enforcement, airport security, foreign intel organizations, the right information somehow never made it to the right people.
The government failed because it just didn't have the intelligence it needed.
That's the story.
That story is a lie.
Nearly 25 years later, the families of 3,000 civilians are still mourning the murder of their loved ones.
Anyone who doubts the official narrative is cast as a kook, a criminal, a fringe conspiracy theorist, and punished.
They've been blacklisted and censored and banned, even as the leaders who failed to protect our country on 9-11 use these attacks as a pretense to expand their own powers and permanently transform the United States.
I don't think people particularly care what anyone thinks about 9-11 conspiracies now.
People who are old enough to drink weren't even born when it happened, so there isn't a lot of heightened emotions around the subject anymore.
Pete Davidson's dad was killed in the attack, and he just performed at the Riyadh Comedy Festival.
So I think that speaks to the lowered temperature that people have about this.
Maybe in the few years after the attack, people would call you a conspiracy theorist if you question things, but that was back in a time when Tucker was calling people a conspiracy theorist if they questioned things.
That's a real problem with this documentary right from the outset.
Tucker himself was literally the problem he's now complaining about.
Alex was the guy taking lumps for putting out 9-11 conspiracy documentaries.
And in that stretch where Tucker is talking about how you'd get punished for questioning things, he doesn't even flash up a picture of Alex as homage, as like this was the crusader.
Tucker Carlson making this documentary is inappropriate because he was part of the original story.
And unless this documentary includes an exploration of how he behaved during the Iraq war, then it's worthless.
He can't start his show grandstanding about the poor conspiracy theorists who are stigmatized by the media when he was part of the media that specifically stigmatized those conspiracy theorists.
Because unless he clears that shit up, all of the attacks that he's going to make on the media should probably apply to him too.
I feel like you're in sketchy territory when you have to start out your documentary series assuring people that the guests you're going to interview aren't kooks.
It makes it a little too clear that the kind of media you make often involves talking to kooks and that maybe you're defensive about it.
Our purpose is in part to make the strongest possible case for a real investigation into 9-11 25 years later.
A new 9-11 commission.
One that is honest, one that is not guided by partisan political interests, one that is not serving foreign powers.
To do this investigation, we spent many months looking into what actually happened and speaking to people who saw it.
We poured over thousands of pages of documents, mostly primary sources, but also contemporaneous news reports and declassified government documents.
Over the course of this investigation, we made numerous findings that shocked us, not least of which the apparent role that former CIA Director John Brennan played in helping bring the 9-11 hijackers to the United States.
So right out of the gate, this feels like less like a sincere fact-finding exercise and more like an attempt to come up with justifications for Trump to arrest Brennan.
But I'll wait until he lays out some more evidence to make up his mind.
Sure.
This is all just kind of a blow-hard preamble that he's doing.
I do appreciate this because this is something that is still true.
Not as much as it was back then, but still true.
The only thing that is not really talked about within 9-11 is that maybe it's just an expected and understood consequence of the fact that America went over to a bunch of different places and killed all those people.
And if you keep doing that, you should expect it to happen more.
That's the only thing people won't just be like, oh, well, then I guess we're done.
So this is not the first time that Mark Rossini has been interviewed about his time at Alec Station.
So let's just establish that nothing that he's saying in this interview is new.
At the risk of being accused of shooting the messenger, I feel like I should tell you a few things about Mark Rossini before he starts his story, because I think they might help you better assess his credibility.
In the 90s and early 2000s, Anthony Pelicano became a big name in terms of private investigator business.
He worked with politicians like Bill Clinton and celebrities like Michael Jackson, digging up dirt on people who accused them of wrongdoing.
Over the years, the private investigation business started to drift into being more of a fixer kind of thing, where Pelicano would wiretap celebrities and powerful agents in Hollywood in order to gather compromising information about them.
He worked with a couple of lawyers, and he didn't mind doing illegal things in order to help his clients.
He'd been considered very slimy for most of his career, and one of the best examples of that is in relation to Michael Jackson.
Pelicano famously produced an audio tape alleged to be the father of one of the child victims, expressing that he just wanted to extort Jackson, which played a big role in hurting the credibility of accusations that were being levied against him.
The father in question denied this tape's authenticity, but that smear had been born and it was in everyone's head.
Later, Pelicano would try to remove himself from the case, claiming that he'd uncovered horrible information and that Jackson, quote, did something far worse to those young boys than molest them.
So the depths of Pelicano's shithead awfulness could take up a whole episode.
So just suffice it to say that he's a big old asshole.
Where he intersects with our story is that in 2008, when Mark Rossini pled guilty to five charges of illegally accessing FBI databases, he was doing it to feed information to Anthony Pelicano.
To be clear, by this point where Rossini was interacting with him, there was zero mystery about Pelicano being a shady character.
In November 2002, Pelicano had been arrested for possessing grenades and C4 after a reporter found her car vandalized with a message that just said stop.
That reporter was working on a story that involved one of Pelicano's clients, Steven Seagal, and you could put the rest of the pieces together yourself.
I. Listen, maybe I don't understand the thread too well, but I feel like munition storage is the number one problem that all of the guys like these guys face in terms of like how their inevitable end comes about.
So Mark Rossini was an FBI agent assigned to the bin Laden unit, and he was so comically corrupt that he broke the law to access information to give to Anthony Pelicano.
His actions could have compromised the case against Pelicano, but Rossini didn't seem to care.
Fun little fact about this story, Rossini was dating actress Linda Fiorentino at some point, who had previously dated Pelicano.
Some might suggest that she was dating Rossini in order to get access to his FBI files on Pelicano's behalf, but this is just pure speculation, not proven either way.
It's alleged that through some back channels, Velutini and Mark Rossini, working in some kind of an advisory role, reached out to Vasquez-Garced and offered to fund her campaign if she would replace the head of the Office of the Commissioner of Financial Institutions with someone chosen by Velutini when she was elected.
So someone who was more friendly to his interests.
I mean, okay, so when you're using a witness, like whenever I'm, let's say, we're in a courtroom and somebody's brought up a witness and I'm cross-examining this witness and it's the state's witness and this guy is really, really good.
But then I find out that he spent his entire life lying to people, specifically people in courtrooms.
No, but depriving an audience of like this important piece of assessing the credibility of a witness that you're talking to is dirty in terms of making a documentary.
Generally, here's what I would say: if you have been paid many times for the specific act of lying, then you are a professional liar, and so I no longer can trust you, right?
It's entirely possible that they could have presented it as like he was fired as payback for spilling the beans about something about bin Laden or whatever.
Trodpints were these Pashtun people that were bin Laden's T-Boys and T-gals, right?
And they were the great source of the Pakistani intel service that was feeding information from the Troadpints to the ISI to the CIA about what was going on in Al-Qaeda.
They had all the electronic communication satellite shit in the world, imagery.
I remember looking at images of bin Laden, you know, in his courtyard.
So this clip begins to lay out the argument that Rossini is here to make, which is that before 9-11, there were no sources inside Al-Qaeda.
So the CIA under John Brennan allowed the eventual terrorists to enter the United States and impeded the FBI's attempts to arrest them because the CIA wanted to flip them to become sources.
This is an interesting jump-off point because normally the villains in conspiracy stories will have plainly evil motivations.
In this version, they have a misguided but legitimate reason for their actions.
They let the 9-11 hijackers come into the country and stop their arrests, but it wasn't because they wanted 9-11 to happen.
In a perfect world where everything went according to plan for the bad guys here, 9-11 wouldn't have happened, which presumably means the Patriot Act doesn't pass, and we probably don't go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The guys like Rumsfeld and Cheney just wanted inside intel on what bin Laden was up to.
They weren't trying to orchestrate a giant false flag to seize power.
This is weird.
I don't, I, this seems incompatible with what Tucker.
So in one situation, right, let's say we've got a conspiracy wherein there are globalists and outside extragovernmental organizations secretly in control of all of these things that organizes a false flag in order to get the people of the United States on board with blah, blah, blah, blah.
Right.
So our course of action there, deal with those globalists, right?
The CIA maybe worked outside of its brief too hard?
Well, the guy who wrote Legacy of Ashes, Tim Weiner, I think, he also wrote a follow-up book.
It's all about the past 40 years of the CIA or whatever.
And yeah, I would say in general, it's not so much conspiracies between them that need to be worked out or like problems with secret people controlling the government as it is like, if you give a lot of people unlimited amount of money and no consequences for their behavior, shit's going to get weird.
So he discusses how there was, you know, there's no sources.
And then after the 93 attack, they get a guy who has a phone number and they have the HADA home switchboard, which they're able to trace al-Qaeda agents from.
How did we officially get the HADA home in Sana Yemen on the books, on the radar, if you will?
Okay.
Nairobi, 1998, August 7th.
John Antasef, Special Agent John Antasev, greatest FBI agent ever in the FBI.
Even better than me.
John flies over to Nairobi.
And one of the survivors, one of the perpetrators who chickened out and ran and lived, Dawood Rashid Alawali, Saudi, he gets captured by the Kenyan police.
John flies over from New York, and already there have been two FBI agents interviewing Dawood.
They were getting someplace, but they really weren't getting that far.
John walks in.
And first thing he does says, you need some water?
You want a drink?
Did you eat today?
Did you pray?
Are you okay?
Yeah, I'm fine.
I'm fine.
He said, just relax.
Let's have a chat.
He didn't beat him with a phone book.
He didn't fucking waterboard room.
He didn't pull his fingernails out.
He wasn't Mr. Tough Guy like all these fucking assholes like Dick Cheney want to believe, right?
I mean, it's always nice to hear a solid go fuck yourself or, you know, like, fuck that guy in a documentary because you're like, whoa, that's not where this is supposed to be.
But why would the CIA want to hide the highly relevant and potentially dangerous fact that two known al-Qaeda terrorists had just landed in California?
According to a recently released court filing, former White House counterterrorism star Richard Clark told government investigators that the quote CIA was running a false flag operation to recruit the hijackers.
unidentified
When Kofer Black became the head of the counterterrorism center at CIA, he was aghast that they had no sources in Al-Qaeda.
So he told me, I'm going to try to get sources in Al-Qaeda.
I can understand them possibly saying we need to develop sources inside Al-Qaeda.
After Clark made that claim publicly, he received an angry call from former director of the CIA George Tennant, who did not deny the allegations made by Mr. Clark.
End quote.
But we reached out to Tennant, his spokesperson denied that the CIA was recruiting hijackers, calling it false rumors and saying, quote, that's categorically not true.
So it's important to pay attention to the way that information is used by people like Tucker and notice the little tweaks that they make in order to push their narratives.
In this case, Tucker is setting up his clip of Richard Clark, and he says that Clark revealed that the CIA was engaged in a false flag to recruit these hijackers.
Yeah, one of the conspiracy theorists' main tricks is equating proving that something is possible with proving that it's true.
Richard Clark saying that it's possible that the CIA was trying to recruit the hijackers as informants is not the same thing as him saying that is what happened.
But Tucker knows that to his audience, it is the same.
So Mark Rossini, his, like, his piece of this that is like where he personally intersects with the story is that while he was working at the Alex station, he and another FBI agent, they filed a report to a CIA analyst that had to do with these two hijackers that went to Malaysia, that went to Thailand, and then came to the United States.
Right.
And he was told by the CIA analyst, this isn't FBI matter.
She's told, like, this isn't, we're not dealing with this.
So the CIA, with their information that they had for the Hotta House and their own psychological analysis of everybody in that team, they figured the best way is maybe to recruit somebody who came over from Malaysia.
The official 9-11 report does not address the CIA's plan to recruit the hijackers.
It's not even mentioned.
It's possible this is because the CIA blocked 9-11 Commission investigators from talking to the agents who participated in the plot.
Amazingly, the CIA's director of operations kept the CIA operative attempting to recruit the hijackers, referred to as VVV in the documents, away from the commission's investigators.
The consequence of this?
The commission's explanation for this story is that the CIA made an honest mistake.
The actual language in the report says the CIA played, quote, zone defense, and the FBI had a man-to-man approach to counterterrorism.
So none of this is new information, and it also doesn't prove anything.
Yeah, Mark Rossini can aggressively assert all this stuff, but he can't prove that the CIA was trying to recruit the hijackers, which is why the FBI and CIA were bad at sharing information before 9-11.
He can make a compelling argument that it's possible that this happened, but none of this actually proves anything concrete.
Tucker and Rossini are now just treating the theory that the CIA was trying to recruit the hijackers as a proven thing, and the fact that the 9-11 report didn't cover it is proof of a cover-up.
They weren't allowed to talk to the person who was doing the recruitment, which definitively shows that there was a recruitment plan.
If there was somebody at the CIA named VVV who was involved in recruiting the hijackers, VVV the recruiter, then this is done.
The name VVV comes from a 2021 declaration made by a guy named Donald C. Canestraro, an investigator with the Military Commission's defense organization.
This declaration was not a work product of the military, but it's more like a brief that was filed in the case of an accused 9-11 plotter who was going to go on trial named Amar al-Baluchi.
Al-Baluchi was arrested after 9-11 and sent to Guantanamo Bay, where he's been tortured and held for a long time.
And as part of his defense strategy, his lawyers are arguing that he shouldn't be executed because there was Saudi government involvement in the plotting of 9-11 that has gone unpunished.
The argument that this declaration makes is that the CIA was seeking to get sources within al-Qaeda and knew that the FBI wouldn't cooperate.
Because the CIA isn't allowed to operate in actions inside the United States, they recruited Saudi government agents, specifically one man named Omar al-Bayoumi, to collaborate on trying to flip the two hijackers that Mark Rossini mentions going to Malaysia.
Things went bad.
The recruitment didn't work, and then the cover-up was on.
That's the argument that's largely put forth in this declaration that was used by the defense lawyers for an alleged 9-11 plotter.
The code name VVV is used in the declaration to describe a character who's brought up by one of the confidential sources that Canestraro spoke to when compiling this report.
The source is named CS3, and it's very clearly Mark Rossini.
The source tells the exact same story that Mark is telling in this video with Tucker down to him and another FBI agent.
CS3 brings up a CIA analyst who the report decides to call VVV who tells CS3 not to distribute the report that he and his colleague at the FBI had written up.
In this interview with Tucker, Mark has already revealed this story.
He's told this story and revealed who VVV is.
It's someone named Michael Ann Casey, who was a CIA analyst who told him to shut down.
it's a little strange oh almost uh almost like i mean if if i was one of the people consuming this documentary and i had just been privy to that information i would think why These people are covering something up.
So the evidence that shows that the CIA kept Casey or VVV from testifying to the 9-11 Commission comes from that declaration, from words that are attributed to CS3, who is Mark Rossini.
So Tucker, when he says that VVV was kept away from the 9-11 Commission, it is just him citing a document that is citing the guy he's interviewing.
So quote, CS3 stated that he or she overheard one senior CIA official, Director of Operations James Pavitt, telling CIA Director George Tenet that he was glad we kept CIA analyst VVV from 9-11 Commission investigators.
So it's something that Mark, under the guise of CSV or CS3, had told the guy making this declaration.
It's like an escalated Fox News, you know, like in the morning we're reporting on this, and then the evening is like, people are saying all kinds of shit.
So when you trace back this thing to the bottom, you find that the documents that Tucker is using to strengthen Mark's story are actually just other people publishing things Mark said, but as an anonymous source.
Tucker likely doesn't point this out that he's pulling all of this stuff from the Canestraro Declaration because if he did, he wouldn't be able to play these fun games with the VVV stuff.
You know, he should have a really first-hand kind of information about this, considering this is the exact type of shit they did to justify moving into Iraq.
We'll rely upon the Saudi GID, General Intelligence Directorate, their version of the CIA, via Prince Bandar, via their man, Omar Abayoumi, to keep us informed as to the activity of these terrorists.
Bayoumi's notebook, which was uncovered when British law enforcement raided his home in the UK, contained a drawing of an airplane and mathematical calculations related to flying it.
The 9-11 Commission investigators never saw this.
At the time, al-Bayoumi had a no-show job at a Saudi aviation contractor called Avco.
The company's employees say he was one of roughly 50 ghost employees working there at the time, taking the paycheck, but never coming to work.
According to the classified government documents, an investigator from the 9-11 Commission said Al-Bayoumi was receiving substantial sums of money from the Saudi embassy in Washington prior to the 9-11 attacks.
That the money was being funneled from accounts at Riggs Bank in Georgetown belonging to Haifa bin Faisal, the wife of the Saudi ambassador to the United States.
By using the Saudis as a proxy to recruit the 9-11 hijackers, the CIA gave itself cover.
If things went wrong, they could push a narrative that blamed the Saudi government for the attacks, which is what they did.
So most of this stuff is coming from that same declaration.
The no-show jobs at IRCON and Avco, the Riggs Bank stuff, that's all in this declaration.
Sure.
Tucker's basically just covering that declaration and not attributing it properly while using one of the confidential sources from that report as a guest on this show.
This is not good work.
It's sloppy all over the place.
Also, the U.S. government did not end up blaming Saudi Arabia for the attack.
I don't like whenever so much is built on just on like rules that are only occasionally enforced.
Like, especially in the central, in like the circular logic that they exist with, and here's why the CIA can't do that because they can't work on U.S. soil.
That kind of before you ask, I'm providing this information is cutting off me asking for something and then asking another question about the information you've given me.
You know, it's when there's a ball rolling of questions that you're trying to cut off.
The over-reliance on stuff from this declaration, the not explaining that this is something that was made as a like a something to be put into the defense for one of the 9-11 terrorists, alleged plotters, as it were.
The not disclosing that the guest you have is one of the confidential sources for that declaration.
A lot of the information that you're reporting as truth comes from unfounded, unproven things that he has said.
The truth is, the official 9-11 Commission report sold to the American public and the world for decades as the definitive account of what happened that day is a lie.
Like, in some form or fashion, and I think that was probably true of more people than anybody wanted to admit, is that after 9-11, in some form or fashion, everybody was like, well, they're not telling us the full truth.
Somebody might just be hiding the fact that they were kind of an asshole or kind of an idiot or covering up that they fucked up or profited in some way that they feel guilty about.
And I think that beyond just how many people in Tucker's audience aren't the choir being preached to, that's one element of it.
And then the other is like the audience that he's been trying to attract with this religious fundamentalism and demons and anti-Semitism and all this shit.
Are they going to care at all unless you say it was the Jews?
Now we're in a time where the people that Truck Tucker wants, or Tucker's audience, Tucker wants them to trust the government as opposed to distrust the government as a whole.
So are we actually talking about Tucker not just not trying to remove and wear Alex's skin, but to suck out every meaningful bit of it and turn it into 9-11 conspiracy theories are actually about how the government is trying really hard and the people in the past were bad guys.
Yeah, maybe, yeah, man, it definitely, you know, I don't, I don't know, but it is an interesting thought, you know, like that this is coming from a place of like far more belief in the state than the conspiracy theories of 2010.
Yeah, I do think that, you know, without going into all the other episodes, this does seem to be launching off in a direction that is more like, you know what, 9-11 happened because of big mistakes.
I would say that probably if you were ever going to find the linchpin of our era, it would be 9-11.
And it's so, what has happened due to it, the sequence of events is so irreparable and mind-boggling that it's like if in the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones was just run over by that ball and then the movie ended.