Last night I came across a link to this article about the CIA - Saudi connection to 9/11, and the coverup of the FBI being told to stand down on investigating two of the hijackers. While I was still working up till 2006, I had no experience in the counter terrorism (CT) field, so I don’t have any real value to add to this account. Since it’s based on court filings and interviews with former FBI agents who were involved, it seems safe to go this far. Most readers will have heard about these matters in a general sort of way, but the information contained in the court filing (linked below) provides more detail. Of course, it also raises more questions about what exactly the CIA was up to. While this may appear to be a long excerpt, I can assure you that there’s much more detail that follows this excerpt:
Bombshell filing: 9/11 hijackers were CIA recruits
At least two 9/11 hijackers had been recruited into a joint CIA-Saudi intelligence operation that was covered up at the highest level, according to an explosive new court filing.
A newly-released court filing raises grave questions about the relationship between Alec Station, a CIA unit set up to track Al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden and his associates, and two 9/11 hijackers leading up to the attacks, which was subject to a coverup at the highest levels of the FBI.
Obtained by SpyTalk, the filing is a 21-page declaration by Don Canestraro, a lead investigator for the Office of Military Commissions, the legal body overseeing the cases of 9/11 defendants. It summarizes classified government discovery disclosures, and private interviews he conducted with anonymous high-ranking CIA and FBI officials. Many agents who spoke to Canestraro headed up Operation Encore, the Bureau’s aborted, long-running probe into Saudi government connections to the 9/11 attack.
Despite conducting multiple lengthy interviews with a range of witnesses, producing hundreds of pages of evidence, formally investigating several Saudi officials, and launching a grand jury to probe a Riyadh-run US-based support network for the hijackers, Encore was abruptly terminated in 2016. This was purportedly due to a byzantine intra-FBI bust-up over investigative methods.
When originally released in 2021 on the Office’s public court docket, every part of the document was redacted except an “unclassified” marking. Given its explosive contents, it is not difficult to see why: as Canestraro’s investigation concluded, at least two 9/11 hijackers had been recruited either knowingly or unknowingly into a joint CIA-Saudi intelligence operation which may have gone awry.
‘A 50/50 chance’ of Saudi involvement
In 1996, Alec Station was created under the watch of the CIA. The initiative was supposed to comprise a joint investigative effort with the FBI. However, FBI operatives assigned to the unit soon found they were prohibited from passing any information to the Bureau’s head office without the CIA’s authorization, and faced harsh penalties for doing so. Efforts to share information with the FBI’s equivalent unit – the I-49 squad based in New York – were repeatedly blocked.
In late 1999, with “the system blinking red” about an imminent large-scale Al Qaeda terror attack inside the US, the CIA and NSA were closely monitoring an “operational cadre” within an Al Qaeda cell that included the Saudi nationals Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar. The pair would purportedly go on to hijack American Airlines Flight 77, which crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11.
Al-Hazmi and al-Midhar had attended an Al Qaeda summit that took place between January 5th and 8th 2000, in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The meeting was secretly photographed and videotaped by local authorities at Alec Station’s request although, apparently, no audio was captured. En route, Mihdhar transited through Dubai, where CIA operatives broke into his hotel room and photocopied his passport. It showed that he possessed a multi-entry visa to the US.
A contemporaneous internal CIA cable stated this information was immediately passed to the FBI “for further investigation.” In reality, Alec Station not only failed to inform the Bureau of Mihdhar’s US visa, but also expressly forbade two FBI agents assigned to the unit from doing so.
“[I said] ‘we’ve got to tell the Bureau about this. These guys clearly are bad…we’ve got to tell the FBI.’ And then [the CIA] said to me, ‘no, it’s not the FBI’s case, not the FBI’s jurisdiction’,” Mark Rossini, one of the FBI agents in question, has alleged. “If we had picked up the phone and called the Bureau, I would’ve been violating the law. I…would’ve been removed from the building that day. I would’ve had my clearances suspended, and I would be gone.”
On January 15th, Hazmi and Mihdhar entered the US through Los Angeles International Airport, just weeks after the foiled Millennium plot. Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi government “ghost employee” immediately met them at an airport restaurant. After a brief conversation, Bayoumi helped them find an apartment near his own in San Diego, co-signed their lease, set them up bank accounts, and gifted $1,500 towards their rent. The three would have multiple contacts moving forward.
In interviews with Operation Encore investigators years later, Bayoumi alleged his run-in with the two would-be hijackers was mere happenstance. His extraordinary practical and financial support was, he claimed, simply charitable, motivated by sympathy for the pair, who could barely speak English and were unfamiliar with Western culture.
The Bureau disagreed, concluding Bayoumi was a Saudi spy, who handled a number of Al Qaeda operatives in the US. They also considered there to be a “50/50 chance” he – and by extension Riyadh – had detailed advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks.
That remarkable finding wasn’t known publicly until two decades later, when a tranche of Operation Encore documents were declassified upon the Biden administration’s orders, and it was completely ignored by the mainstream media. Don Canestraro’s declaration now reveals FBI investigators went even further in their assessments.
A Bureau special agent, dubbed “CS-3” in the document, stated Bayoumi’s contact with the hijackers and support thereafter “was done at the behest of the CIA through the Saudi intelligence service.” Alec Station’s explicit purpose was to “recruit Al-Hazmi and Al-Mihdhar via a liaison relationship”, with the assistance of Riyadh’s General Intelligence Directorate.
OK, a 50/50 chance is still a coin toss, but it’s a disturbingly high possibility when all the dangerous implications are taken into account. OTOH—and this is somewhat speculative—the last paragraph above suggests what I’m sure many have guessed at—that the CIA thought that they and the Saudis were penetrating al Queda. That makes sense, but it also rests upon a relationship of trust with the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate. Lots of questions are raised about prudential investigative considerations.
The very obvious bottom line is that … mistakes were made! Those mistakes not only led to the 9/11 attack’s success, they also led to the Global War On Terror (GWOT) with all the complications and expenditures of blood and treasure that has involved. Think about that for a bit. You can probably lay the blame for the massive dislocations of refugee populations, the massive expenditures, the fact that the US military has probably fallen behind other competitors because of its disproportionate focus on more or less third world or irregular warfare, at the failure of the investigations leading up to 9/11. While the need for secrecy in intel operations is understandable, the failure of a public accounting that would explain the last two decades of global warfare is still difficult to justify. The secrecy requirement ultimately rests on a relationship of trust between the American people and the intel agencies, mediated through our elected representatives. It’s hard to impossible to argue that that has broken down. The breakdown probably happened shortly after WW2, but any hope of remedying that breakdown was probably put to rest with 9/11 and the legal measures put in place through the Patriot Act that placed domestic security on steroids and have led to the transformation of the American Republic into a National Security or National Surveillance State. And make no mistake—this was very much a bipartisan effort that led to that transformation. The ramifications really extend even further, to the entire tenor of American life.
If any of the above sparked your interest, I urge you to follow the link and read about the intel community’s efforts to conceal everything behind the 9/11 attack.
Also last night, Larry Johnson posted a guest essay at his blog. The essay is a very fine speculative analysis of what the author surmises went into the planning for Russia’s SMO. In his analysis he makes fundamental points that I’ve tried to stress, and especially that the Russians would certainly have had excellent intelligence regarding NATO/Ukraine preparations—over an 8 year period—for war with Russia. It is extremely doubtful—despite what some Russian and many Western analysts claim—that Russia has been taken by surprise by almost anything that has happened.
However, beyond such general considerations, the author speculates—in my view, fairly convincingly—as to the manner in which the Russians pre-empted the NATO/Ukraine grand plan. Briefly, the author argues that recovery of Crimea was always the main goal of NATO/Ukraine. In support of that argument, I would argue that this is clear from the degree of intensity of US/UK naval activity in the Black Sea. Crimea gives the possessor control of the Black Sea and control of the Black Sea is a dagger in the heart of Russia—the aim of Western Grand Strategery. The NATO/Ukraine goal, therefore, was to suck Russia into committing its resources into a Donbass slog, in which the Russia would need overwhelming numerical superiority to overcome lesser numbers of Ukrainian defenders. Ukraine would have its larger force in reserve in order to make a dash for Crimea once Russia committed the bulk of its forces to Donbass—the point of the constant Ukrainian shelling of civilians in Donbass was to ensure that the Russians did, indeed, commit to Donbass.
Instead, the Russians feinted toward Kiev and then made move to establish a buffer zone in Southern Ukraine to defend Crimea, as well as to establish a “land bridge” from Donbass to Crimea. That’s what the battle of Mariupol was largely about. Only once that operation was completed did the Russians turn their attention to Donbass, but instead of attempting a breakthrough of the massive Ukrainian fortifications—built up with NATO help over 8 years—the Russians have opted for a grinding war of attrition, while at the same time gearing up for a much larger war. That has included placing their own fortifications in order to block any Ukrainian offensive toward Crimea while also inflicting enormous losses of men and material on NATO/Ukraine.
Read it all. It’s very well done:
THE PLANNING OF THE UKRAINE INVASION FROM THE RUSSIAN POINT OF VIEW (MAYBE)
We keep hearing about a Rules Based Order based on “Western Values”. H/T Tom Luongo, Martin Armstrong and others remind us today what those “values” actually are:
Those who think the war on Christianity is simply hyperbole must look closer. Adoption agencies are now preventing some Christians from adopting children due to their “extreme” views. Oregon’s Department of Human Services has begun giving hopeful adopters an ideological litmus test to ensure children are only placed in families with woke ideologies.
“Extreme”, of course, is defined by The State. And the Left has taken steps to ensure that they will be making such definitions in perpetuity. And the goal is to be able to defy even the SCOTUS when push comes to shove. These are “Western Values”. They amount to handing a blank, endorsed check to a stranger—and, yes, I chose that word deliberately. Because those “values” keep getting redefined by the State—just look at the history of America since WW2. On the slippery slope.
Speaking of extreme and strange:
Jason Rantz on KTTH Radio
@jasonrantz
NEW: Under a new radical bill, a child can run away from home to receive gender-affirming care without parental consent. The state is prohibited from informing parents where their son or daughter is living. This is evil and dangerous.
A new way to gut parental rights?
Framed by Washington State Sen. Marko Liias as protection for transgender children, the law drives a wedge between vulnerable youth and those who love them the most
More Western values:
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/un-globalists-seek-decriminalise-sex-minors
Why did WTC 7 fall down too?