Tucker Carlson examines how the CIA’s pre-9/11 tracking of hijackers—like Khalid al-Midhar, monitored via Yemen’s Hadahom switchboard—was deliberately suppressed by agents like Michael Ann Casey, despite warnings from FBI’s Mark Rossini. The agency allegedly used Saudi operative Omar al-Bayoumi to embed hijackers in the U.S., while the 9/11 Commission, led by Philip Zelico, buried critical evidence—including 28 redacted pages on Saudi ties—under White House pressure. The episode frames 9/11 as a manufactured crisis, where intelligence failures were orchestrated to justify expanded surveillance and war. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
None of this is speculation.
All of it is true.
Over the course of this series, you will hear accounts from people who lived it.
CIA officers and analysts who were there, FBI agents from the bin Laden unit, family members of the victims.
None of these people are kooks.
All of them have first-hand information.
What they'll tell you is that what you have been told about September 11th is not true.
Why are we doing this?
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 and the remarkable lengths the CIA went to to protect the 9-11 hijackers from the FBI and from domestic law enforcement.
Telling the full story requires starting before the attacks, going back to something called ALEC Station, that was the CIA's bin Laden unit in 1999.
So from January 1999 to May of 2003, I was the FBI New York Joint Terrorism Task Force representative to Alex Station at CIA headquarters.
Before 9-11, there were no sources in Al-Qaeda.
None.
There was a group of Pashtun caretakers, okay?
They called them the Trodpints.
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 communications satellite shit in the world, imagery, pin.
I remember looking at images of bin Laden, you know, in his courtyard.
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 Antisef, Special Agent John Antisef, 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, he says, you need some water?
You want to drink?
Did you eat today?
Did you pray?
Are you okay?
Yeah, I'm fine.
I'm fine.
I'm fine.
He said.
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?
They're all pieces of shit.
He talked to him like a human being.
Take me through the day.
Talk to me.
So I went to the hotel and I got my stuff ready.
And did you call anybody?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I called this number.
And he wrote it down.
And he gave John the number of the Hadahom in Sana Yemen, which was the Al-Qaeda switchboard that we in the FBI had no fucking clue existed up until that point.
CIA and NSA did, because remember, they had been listening to the Nairobi cell and their activity since 1996.
At the end of 1999, listening to that phone is when the CIA learns and the NSA learns that Khalil Ahmed Har is going to be traveling from there to Dubai and then from Dubai onward to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to meet the summit.
According to one recently released court filings, quote, the visas were issued to facilitate an operation run by the Saudis and the CIA spying operation.
The station chief in Riyadh at the time was future CIA director John Brennan.
The CIA continued tracking Al Medhar to Kuala Lumpur, where he met up with other al-Qaeda associates, including Nawaf al-Hazmi, a second future 9-11 hijacker.
They entrust the Malaysia Special Branch, police, to surveil this terror summit in this park in Kuala Lumpur.
And so much so to tail them and to surveil them, etc.
And that information ends up in a communication from Kuala Lumpur Station, CIA, to CIA headquarters, to Alex Station, to the computer screen of me and Special Agent Doug Miller of Washington Field Office FBI.
You have this cable that lays out the meeting Kuala Lumpur, the photocopying of his passport in Dubai, and the learning of the visa to go to the United States of America.
Doug Miller gets up from his cubicle of power, comes over to my cubicle of power and says, hey, we got to tell the FBI about this.
I said, Doug, you're damn right.
He goes, I'll write up the CIR.
What is a CIR?
A CIR is what is a central intelligence report.
Doug writes it.
He sends it to me.
I approve it.
And it goes to the desk of Michael Ann Casey, CIA officer, analyst.
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.
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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.
He also recalled that the executive director of the 9-11 Commission, Philip Zelico, blocked the commission's investigation into the matter at the behest of Condoleezza Rice.
So the CIA, with their information that they had from this is 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.
The difference in strategies is why the CIA didn't tell the FBI that terrorists had arrived on American soil.
Incredibly, the Commission investigators didn't ask the CIA director at the time, George Tennant, about the summit in Kuala Lumpur or why the CIA had blocked the FBI from being warned.
We'll rely upon the Saudi GID, General Intelligence Directorate, their version of the CIA, via Prince Bandar, via their man, Omar al-Bayoumi, 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.
For all intents and purposes, Omar al-Bayoumi was an employee of the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Washington, D.C. in their consulate in Los Angeles, California.
Khalid al-Midhar leaves America for his daughter's birth, right?
And in that time, he loses his passport.
He claims he went to Afghanistan.
He goes back to Jeddah and gets another passport.
And by this time, even prior, as I understand it now, The Saudis had identified the terrorists, the hijackers, as potential threats to the kingdom and had put chips in their passports identifying them as a threat.
Alminhar comes back to the United States, I believe it was on July 4th, 2001.
He's allowed back in, not stopped, not questions.
So here's a guy that the CIA knew came to America, had been at a terrorist summit meeting in Malaysia in January 2000.
Midhar was able to exit and enter the country at will because he was issued a multi-visit U.S. visa.
According to a summary of an interview with an FBI agent from Alex Station, quote, Alhamzi and Albed Har obtained their visas to enter the United States at the American consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
All told, the vast majority of the 19 9-11 hijackers had their visas issued at that consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.
At the time, John Brennan was running the CIA station there.
Just a few days before Almed Har re-entered the country at JFK Airport in New York, the FBI and the CIA held a joint meeting in New York City to discuss the bombing of the USS Cole, which Almed Har was involved in.
An FBI agent was shown a photograph of Almed Har taken at the summit in Kuala Lumpur.
The agent asked the CIA who this man was, but the CIA once again refused to tell them.
It wasn't until August of 2001 that the CIA finally alerted the FBI.
And of course, by then, it was too late.
It's not just Mark Rossini who testifies to this.
Another anonymous FBI agent told investigators that, quote, he, she believed the CIA's operation may have spun out of control and that they, the CIA, came to the FBI with limited information in an attempt to locate the hijackers without revealing the true nature or extent of their operation against al-Qaeda, end quote.
But if the CIA was grooming the hijackers as sources, the FBI failed too.
When Al-Hazmi and Al-Med Har were in California, they lived for a period in the home of an FBI informant called Abdu Sattar.
And yet somehow, the FBI never learned about this.
Then, less than a month before the terror attacks, the FBI began an investigation into a French Moroccan national called Zacharias Massawi.
He had just moved to Minneapolis from Oklahoma, where he resumed aviation training.
After raising suspicions during training, he was arrested on August 16th and charged with immigration violations.
But agents were denied permission to search his laptop and the room where he was staying.
His exact connection to the hijacking remains unclear even now, but he did receive wire transfers from Ramzi bin al-Shib, who was also sending money to the hijackers.
In July 2001, an FBI agent stationed in the Phoenix Field Office sent a memo to headquarters theorizing that there could be, quote, a coordinated effort by Osama bin Laden to send individuals to the United States to receive aviation training.
For some reason, this memo was never received by headquarters, not until after 9-11.
Why?
Possibly because as late as 2003, the FBI didn't have a functioning internal email system.
Most case files were not digitized.
They weren't searchable.
And employees did not have access to the internet.
That's true.
By September 2001, the Bureau's computers were so out of date, it took 12 commands simply to save a document.
And in the aftermath of the attack, the FBI distributed photographs to the suspected hijackers via express mail.
They didn't have scanners.
The Bush administration worked hard for us not to know any of this.
They hid it.
Many of these details were discovered during the congressional joint inquiry into 9-11.
But when Congress released its report, the 28 pages dealing with the hijackers' time in Southern California were hidden.
They were redacted.
When a man called Philip Zelico took over as the commission's executive director, he reached a secret agreement with the White House to block his investigators from accessing records related to the hijackers until the White House had already screened them.
Government documents show that the commission investigator assigned to this topic complained that, quote, Zeliko limited the number of witnesses that commission investigators could interview.
And just days before the report was released, Dieter Snell, senior counsel to the commission, attempted to remove most of the details of the Saudi collaboration with the hijackers.
Some of the findings were included in the end, but they were buried in the footnotes.
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.
But how did the Bush administration manage to hijack what was sold as an independent commission?
And what exactly were they trying to hide?
We'll reveal what we found in the next episode.
Thank you for watching the 9-11 files.
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