Friday Night Watch Party – History of Al Qaeda | LIVESTREAM BEGINS AT 8:30 EST

➡ Ron Bartain, the host of the Unsolved Nation channel, is planning to share a documentary about the history of al Qaeda by James Corbett. He discusses his recent travels and checks that his live stream is working properly. The documentary discusses the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and terrorism, focusing on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, and how they have been influenced by Western powers, particularly the British Empire, since the mid-18th century. The documentary also highlights how the British Empire used the strategy of divide and rule in India, exploiting religious divisions to maintain control.
➡ The British Empire played a big role in shaping the modern Muslim world, especially in the creation of Saudi Arabia. British officials, like Captain William Shakespeare and Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence, helped Ibn Saud, the founder of Saudi Arabia, rise to power by steering him away from the Ottoman Empire and towards a treaty with the British. After World War One, the British and French divided up the Ottoman Empire’s territory, creating new national borders that have caused conflict for a century. The British also supported and manipulated other leaders and groups in the region to maintain their control, but their influence started to fade as the United States became a new world superpower.
➡ A group of men, including a US Army trainer and an FBI informant, were involved in a plot to commit terrorist acts in the US. Despite being watched by the FBI, they were able to carry out their plans due to internal issues within the FBI. The group was connected to a larger network of terrorists, including a man who was possibly linked to the CIA. This led to the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993.
➡ Two men from Afghanistan flew to the U.S. without the right papers, helped by Pakistani officials. They were caught at the airport with fake passports and bomb-making guides. One of them, pretending to be a refugee, was released due to lack of space in jail. He then started planning to bomb the World Trade Center, which happened in 1993, killing six people and injuring over a thousand. Despite warnings and evidence, the FBI failed to stop the attack.
➡ The article discusses the government’s mishandling of various terror-related incidents, including the World Trade Center bombing. It suggests that the government’s mistakes, such as allowing dangerous individuals into the country and not properly investigating potential threats, contributed to these incidents. Despite these errors, the same agencies were given more resources and authority. The article also mentions some individuals who believe these weren’t just mistakes, but rather intentional actions by the government.
➡ In the 1990s, Osama bin Laden and his group, al Qaeda, were already on the U.S. government’s radar. Despite early warnings and evidence, the U.S. didn’t act on this information. Bin Laden was under surveillance and even offered to the U.S. by Sudan, but the U.S. rejected the offer due to lack of evidence for a trial. This allowed bin Laden to continue his activities, leading to several terror attacks, including the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, which brought al Qaeda into the public eye.
➡ Ahmed, a German, carried out a major bomb attack on the American embassy in Dar es Salaam, marking the first major attack by the terror group al Qaeda. This attack led to the death of 11 people and injured 85 others. The planning for this attack started as early as 1993, with Osama bin Laden and his team scouting potential targets. Despite multiple opportunities to prevent the attack, intelligence agencies like the CIA and FBI failed to act, leading to the successful execution of the attack.
➡ Mohammed, a former US sergeant and FBI asset, admitted to his role in al Qaeda but was never sentenced and disappeared from public view. Despite warnings, a US naval ship was attacked in Yemen, killing 17 servicemen and injuring 39 more. This attack was one of many missed opportunities to prevent al Qaeda’s terror attacks. The 9/11 attacks were blamed on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, but the official story has been questioned due to inconsistencies and the alleged hijackers’ un-Islamic behavior.
➡ This article talks about a flight school in Florida where some of the 9/11 hijackers trained. The school was linked to drug trafficking and had connections to high-level politics. Despite the hijackers being poor students and not very good pilots, they were able to fly complex commercial jets with precision, which raised questions. The article suggests that U.S. intelligence agencies had information about these men and their plans but did not act on it.
➡ The article talks about how different intelligence agencies, including the FBI and the Pentagon, had information about a possible terrorist attack but failed to act on it. It mentions a program called Able Danger that identified potential terrorists but was shut down and its data destroyed. The NSA also had information about the attack but didn’t act on it. The article suggests that there was a cover-up to hide these failures and that many intelligence agencies around the world also knew about the potential attack but didn’t prevent it.
➡ The CIA knew about the 9/11 hijackers and their plans but didn’t share this information with other intelligence agencies, including the FBI and the National Security Council, for over a year and a half. This was not a simple mistake, but a deliberate action. Even when they found out that these men were in the US, they didn’t tell anyone. This has led some people to believe that the CIA was running a secret operation involving these hijackers that they didn’t want anyone to find out about.
➡ This text suggests that the 9/11 attacks were not just allowed to happen, but were deliberately planned. It questions the official story, arguing that the accused terrorists were not capable of such a complex operation. The text also hints at a cover-up by high-ranking intelligence officials and suggests that the attacks were used as an excuse for foreign aggression. It ends with the speaker expressing surprise and admiration for the information presented, and promising to share more in the future.
➡ The article talks about the shift in power from the British Empire to the United States in the Middle East. It highlights key events like the meeting between the US and Saudi Arabia, the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company by Iran, and the Suez Crisis in Egypt. These events led to the US becoming the main foreign power in the region, using tactics like alliances, double dealings, and secret operations to maintain their influence. The US also made deals with countries like Saudi Arabia to secure their financial and military power.
➡ In 1979, a lot of important events happened in the Muslim world. The Iranian revolution took place, where the western-backed Shah was overthrown and the Islamic Republic of Iran was created. The Grand Mosque in Mecca was seized by Islamic hardliners, and Egypt’s president signed a peace treaty with Israel. Also, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, which eventually led to the creation of al Qaeda. This invasion was not a spontaneous act of aggression, but a result of a series of events that threatened to cause chaos in Afghanistan and the surrounding region. The Afghan government had been trying to modernize the country with the help of the USSR, but this led to a communist coup and a series of reforms that were violently opposed. The Soviet Union was reluctant to get involved in Afghanistan, but eventually did so and assassinated the Afghan president. The US covertly assisted the resistance forces in Afghanistan, hoping to draw the Soviets into a conflict. This led to the rise of the Taliban and the spread of jihad, with people like Osama bin Laden getting involved in the cause.
➡ Mohammed bin Laden, a hardworking construction worker, built a successful construction company in Saudi Arabia, earning the respect of King Saud. His company, later known as the Saudi bin Laden group, built many important structures in the kingdom. His son, Osama bin Laden, inherited a large fortune and was expected to join the family business. However, Osama was influenced by Abdullah Azzam’s ideas of jihad, leading him to Afghanistan where he became a key fundraiser for the Afghan cause and co-founded Maktab al Khidemat, a precursor to al Qaeda.
➡ The 9/11 commission report says that the U.S. gave aid to Afghan fighters through Pakistan, not directly to Afghan Arabs like Osama bin Laden. Some people claim that the U.S. did have direct contact with bin Laden, but there’s not much proof. Bin Laden didn’t need money, but protection, which he got as officials ignored his group’s movements. Bin Laden started planning a global jihad group, al Qaeda, as the Afghan war was ending. Al Qaeda started small, but got help and protection that let it grow into a major terror group.
➡ From 1987 to 1989, J. Michael Springman, a visa officer at the US consulate in Jeddah, was often overruled by CIA officers when he tried to deny visas to unqualified applicants. These applicants were part of Osama bin Laden’s mujahideen in Afghanistan, and the CIA was helping them get into the U.S. for training before sending them to Afghanistan. This included Sheikh Abdel Rahman, a notorious Islamic radical, who despite being on a U.S. terrorist watch list, was able to enter the U.S. multiple times with the help of the CIA. This connection between U.S. intelligence and al Qaeda was also seen in the case of Ali Mohammed, an Egyptian army major who was recruited by the CIA and later joined al Qaeda.
➡ A man named Mohammed, with the help of the CIA, entered the U.S. in 1985 through a special visa program. He married a woman he met on his flight, joined the U.S. army, and quickly climbed the ranks. Despite breaking army rules and suspicions of his radical beliefs, he was never punished and even received an honorable discharge. His story continued with him becoming an FBI informant while also training terrorist cells linked to major attacks in the 1990s.
➡ In the 1950s, Israel set up a secret group in Egypt to carry out bombings and blame them on others, hoping to destabilize the Egyptian government. This plan, called Operation Susannah, failed and the group members were caught and punished. The Israeli government didn’t admit to this until 2005. This event showed that governments could use terrorism to achieve political goals, a tactic that some believe was used in the 9/11 attacks in the United States.
➡ The official story of 9/11, which says that the plot was planned by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and led by Osama bin Laden, is being questioned. Some people believe that the idea of al Qaeda as a structured organization is a myth created by the FBI. They argue that al Qaeda was more of a funding group for independent terrorists, rather than a top-down organization. This view suggests that the terrorists were actually working under the control of intelligence agencies, which raises questions about the true nature of the 9/11 attacks.

Welcome, everybody, to the unsolved nation channel. My name is Ron Bartain, and tonight I’m gonna be the Friday night watch party. So I didn’t get to do this last week because I was in Arizona and driving back. So anyway, coming back, coming back. So now I get to. I need to come back and do it again. Follow up. Can’t even talk today. Ah. Where’s my brain? I’m a little under the weather.

I don’t know if I sound a little nasally or whatnot. But anyway, I’m good. I just. But anyway, not playing with a full deck, of course. What’s new, right? Anyway, this is the. I was looking for something to play and I was like, what am I going to find? What am I going to find? And I came across this document that was done by James Corbett about the history of al Qaeda, and I was like, whoa, that looks interesting.

So we get to watch it together. That’s actually two parts or it’s actually three parts, but I’m gonna play parts one and two tonight. And then next Friday I’m gonna finish up with the either I’ll do it next Friday or I’ll do it tomorrow. One of the two. So I’ll let you guys in the chat, decide on what, what you’d like to have happen there. So let me make sure that this is actually working and then everything is live and functioning properly.

Let’s see here. Yes, everything is working. Hunky dory. All right, guys. Well, no time like the present. I wanted to start this at five, so it’s a little bit late, later than I wanted to, so I’m going to go ahead and just start it. So how you doing? Avery good to see you. So here we go. Kandahar province, Afghanistan May 1998. John Miller, an ABC News correspondent who would go on to become the FBIS chief spokesman, ends an eleven day journey through the wilds of the Afghanistan Pakistan border.

The first thing he notices is the rumbling of the generators providing the camp with power and the smell of gasoline. The second thing he notices is a hail of bullets. Bin Laden’s convoy is arriving. Osama bin Laden is flanked by seven bodyguards who, as Miller immediately recognizes, are simply there to put on a show. Their eyes darted in every direction for any attacker, he later recounted. This was either merely theatrical or entirely pointless, because with hundreds of rounds being fired into the air, it would have been impossible to pinpoint an assassin.

Following the security detail into the hut there, Miller became one of the handful of western journalists to interview the elusive Osama bin Laden. We believe that the biggest thieves in the world are Americans and the biggest terrorists on earth are the Americans. The only way for us to fend off these assaults is by using civilization. We do not differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians. They’re all targets in this fatwa.

Miller has traveled halfway around the world to interview bin Laden, the reclusive terrorist leader who has just issued a religious fatwa requiring Muslims to kill Americans. But this interview, too, is just for show. Forced to submit his questions in writing ahead of time, Miller is informed that the answers will not be translated. For him, there will be no follow up questions. It is spectacle, theater, and little else.

As such, it is a fitting introduction to the man who would become the boogeyman of the 21st century. The interview was followed in short order by a more explosive drama. What are your future plans? You’ll see them and hear about them in the media, God willing. Car bombs exploded outside the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam on the morning of August 7, 1998. US Navy officials in Bahrain today said suspected suicide bombers badly damaged in a terrorist attack in Yemen.

American sailors were killed, injured, missing. Around the world, a frightened and confused public received their introduction to the age of terror on the morning of September 11, 2001, through the media, it was there, in the flickering images of their tv screens, that the masses began to learn about the world of islamic terrorism and of the cave dwelling saudi exile in Afghanistan who was bringing that terror to their doorstep.

Tell us a bit about Osama bin Laden. What sort of resources in manpower and money he’s got and what he’s trying to achieve. What is Osama bin Laden? Is he a politician? Is he a warrior? Is he a preacher? A little of all. A little of all, I think, sir, he’s a millionaire saudi businessman believed to be living in exile in Afghanistan. He controls and finances al Qaeda, an umbrella network of islamic militants.

He is a very soft spoken man, a man who is prepared to use overwhelming force in pursuit of his objectives. He is the face that has been put on this by almost everyone. A man of eloquence. He has declared all us citizens legitimate targets of attack. Well, when I was in Afghanistan just a couple of days ago, I heard that he had operations in at least 55 countries, including last year’s bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, the mastermind behind the bombings of two us embassies in Africa in the last attack on the World Trade center eight years ago.

Bernard Lewis has called him almost a poetic speaker of Arabic. Meanwhile, Osama bin Laden is a name that we have been hearing all day long as an individual who may, and we emphasize may, be responsible for these terrorist acts. It is a name which we have heard before as well. We all know the story of bin Laden and al Qaeda, the story that was repeated ad nauseam in the days, weeks, and months after the catastrophic catalyzing events of 911.

So often was that story repeated that the hypnotized public forgot that it was, at base just that, a story in the ahistorical fable of tv soundbites. Terrorism is a modern invention created out of whole cloth by Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. And at the same time, islamic fundamentalism is a force of nature, something that has always existed in the Middle east, the product, perhaps, of some sandstorm on the arabian peninsula in the distant past.

But this is a lie. In truth, the rise of islamic fundamentalism in the modern era and the rise of terrorism as a political tool cannot be understood without confronting some very well documented but long repressed history. Ever since the mid 18th century, when the British East India Company gained dominion over the indian subcontinent, the history of Islam as a political and cultural force has been intimately tied to the fortunes of empire and the aims of the western powers.

The British Empire, in particular, did much to shape the map of the modern day Middle east and to influence the course of its religious and political forces. This influence can be seen throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Britains gradual takeover of the indian subcontinent led to the British Empire becoming, in the estimation of Winston Churchill, the greatest mohammedan power in the world. The 19th century great game between Victorian England and tsarist Russia for control of Central Asia saw the British propping up unpopular islamic rulers throughout the region as a buffer between Russia and the crown jewel of the British Empire, India.

Britains desire to maintain its access to India led to the british conquest of Egypt in 1882, resulting in 40 years of british rule and a military presence in the country that was not removed until the Suez crisis of 1956. From Khartoum to Constantinople, Jerusalem to Jakarta, no part of the muslim world could escape the influence of the british crown. Sometimes that influence was used to strengthen the rule of islamic hardliners.

Sometimes, as with the modest rebellion in Sudan, that influence was used to put down islamic uprisings. But in each case, the british empire’s goal was to use whatever means at its disposal to undermine movements and governments unfavorable to its rule and to inspect. Guys, is it just me, or is the. Or is it, like, really choppy? Like, it’s not smooth? Are you guys experiencing the video to not be smooth.

Like, it’s like. Like, sticky. Tell me. Let me know in the chat, because I’m seeing it as really sticky on my side. Okay, well, I’ll go ahead and just keep on playing it then. I just. If it starts to get, like. I don’t know when I mean sticky, it’s like, it’s just. It’s not playing smooth and fluid. Okay. All right. I will let her continue, then stall and encourage those forces that were willing to cooperate with the crown.

This was evident in India, where George Francis Hamilton, secretary of state for India, wrote in 1886 of the british strategy of using muslim and hindu divisions in the country to their advantage, along the lines of the old roman imperial strategy of divide and rule. I think the real danger to our rule, not now, but say, 50 years hence, is the gradual adoption and extension of western ideas of agitation, organization.

And if we could break educated Indians into two sections holding widely different views, we should, by such a division, strengthen our position against the subtle and continuous attack which the spread of education must make upon our system of government. We should so plan educational textbooks that the differences between community and community are further strengthened. But perhaps no clearer example of the british empires role in shaping the modern muslim world can be found than the story of the ascendance of the House of Saud and the formation of the modern day kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Once again, british fingerprints can be found on every aspect of the story. When Britain began contemplating a shift from its centuries long policy of supporting the Ottoman Empire in the Middle east, it was Captain William Shakespeare, a british civil servant and explorer, who made the first official contact with Ibn Saud, the progenitor of the saudi dynasty, who would go on to found the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In addition to taking the first photographs of the future saudi king, Shakespeare became Ibn Saud’s friend and military advisor, helping to steer the rising arab leader away from alliance with the Ottomans and into a treaty with the British.

Shakespeare died on the battlefield at Jerub in 1915, where the british backed Ibn Saud was battling his turkish backed rival, Ibn Rashid. After Shakespeare’s death, another british agent, Colonel Thomas Edward Lawrence, gained international fame as Lawrence of Arabia for his role in the arab revolt against ottoman rule in the Middle east. Although his own self serving autobiography and the Hollywoodization of his story cemented in the popular imagination the idea that Lawrence was motivated solely by his concern for the Arabs and their independence.

We do not work this thing for Faisal. No, for the Englishmen, for the Arabs. The Arabs. The documented history of Lawrence’s actions and motivations tells a very different story. A memo on the politics of Mecca, penned by Lawrence for his intelligence handlers in 1916, reveals a more duplicitous british calculus for supporting certain factions of the arab revolt. The Arabs are even less stable than the Turks. If properly handled, they would remain in a state of political mosaic, a tissue of small, jealous principalities, incapable of cohesion and yet always ready to combine against an outside force.

The alternative to this seems to be control and colonization by a european power other than ourselves, which would inevitably come into conflict with the interests we already possess in the Near east. Later, in a report on the reconstruction of Arabia Lawrence penned for the british cabinet at the end of the war, he was even more explicit about the cynical divide and rural tactics at play in british support for the arab revolt.

When war broke out, an urgent need to divide Islam was added, and we became reconciled to seek for allies rather than subjects we hoped, by the creation of a ring of client states themselves, insisting on our patronage to turn the present and future flank of any foreign powers with designs on the three rivers. Lawrence. Or is it Major Lawrence, sir? Huh? Hi. Well, general, I will leave you, Major Lawrence.

Douglas has reports to make about my people and their weakness and the need to keep them weak in the british interest. Lawrence and the military and diplomatic personnel of the British Empire were indeed busy in the wake of World War one. In many ways, the aftermath of the war represented the zenith of that empire and the culmination of centuries of british manipulation in the Middle east. Driven by a mixture of political necessity and imperial hubris, the imperial planners had entered into secret agreements that redrew the map of the Middle east and once again affirmed the centuries old accusation that perfidious Albion was not to be trusted.

In 1916, the British and French entered into a pact to divide up the territory of the Ottoman Empire between themselves should they win the war. This treaty, known as the Sykes Pico Agreement, after the diplomats who negotiated the document, was a direct negation of the web of promises that the British had already made on the land, including the territorial promises they had made to Ali ibn Hussein, the sharif of Mecca, who led the arab revolt against the Turks the Treaty of Darren that had promised ibn Saud a british protection for his conquests in the arabian peninsula in return for his support in the war and the Balfour declaration promising the Zionists a jewish homeland in Palestine.

Although the revelation of the secret Sykes pico agreement by the Bolsheviks in 1917 proved a considerable embarrassment for the British and French, it did little to hinder their plans. The agreement provided a basis for the ultimate partitioning of the Ottoman Empire after the war, and the national borders that it helped to create have gone on to shape a century of strife and political conflict in the region. But it was not enough merely to draw the lines on the maps that would define the post war Middle east.

The British had to shape the development of the region in its own interest, creating entire nations in the process. In the arabian peninsula, they came to pin their hopes on Ibn Saud, whose sole focus on the conquest of Arabia, they calculated, would counteract the rise of a broader pan islamic movement that could challenge Britains supremacy in the region. As historian Mark Curtis writes in his book, secret Britains collusion with radical Islam, the british government of India had feared british sponsorship of an arab caliph who would lead the entire muslim world and the effects this might have on Muslims in India, and had therefore favored Ibn Saud, whose pretensions were limited to Arabia.

The subsidy from the British, upon which Ibn Saud relied in his quest to unite the peninsula, which stood at 5000 pounds a month at the end of the war, was raised to 100,000 pounds a year in 1922 by then colonial secretary Winston Churchill. Churchill recognized that Saud’s fighters, the ikwan, or brotherhood of hardliners, and adherents to the strict Wahhabi sect of Islam, were austere, intolerant, well armed, and bloodthirsty, and hold it as an article of duty as well as of faith to kill all who do not share their opinions and to make slaves of their wives and children.

So why, then, did the British support Saud and his men? My admiration for Ibn Saud was deep, Churchill later confessed, because of his unfailing loyalty to us, that loyalty paid off well. The British were the first to formally recognize Ibn Saud’s sovereignty over his newly conquered territory on the peninsula, and in return, Ibn Saud signed a treaty agreeing to stop his forces from attacking Britain’s neighboring protectorates. In 1932, Ibn Saud became king Saud of the newly formed Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

But even the nation’s new name was british. It was George Rendell, head of the British Foreign Office’s eastern department, who suggested it. The British played similar games throughout the region, arming, funding, and encouraging those who would work with them, including violent islamic radicals, and undermining any potential challengers to british dominance in Palestine. The British pardoned Amin al Husseini, who had been sentenced to ten years in prison for his involvement in the 1920 Jerusalem riots, and appointed him the Grand Mufti of Palestine, a title invented by the British on condition that he cooperate with the british authorities in Egypt, which became a british protectorate after World War one.

The rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, an islamist mass movement founded by Hassan al Bana, was at times an explicit threat to the british military presence in the country. Nevertheless, its position as an alternative to both secular nationalism and communism, which Britain regarded as growing threats to its influence in the region, meant that the British were prepared to work with the Brotherhood against their common enemies, even covertly financing the group.

In 1942 in Iraq, the British, concerned at unrest in their mesopotamian mandate, aided Prince Feysul in becoming Faisal I, King of Iraq. Faisal, recommended by Te Lawrence, guided at his own request by british advisors and travelling at british expense, won a british backed plebiscite to become the iraqi king in 1921. The extent of british influence over the region during the post war period was, in retrospect staggering. But the number of machinations, manipulations and shifting alliances that were required to keep this system of mandates, protectorates and puppet governments going was a sign that the British were not all powerful.

On the contrary, their influence and indeed their empire itself was waning, soon to be replaced by the new rising world superpower, the United States. The US did not even wait until the end of the second World War and the dawn of Pax Americana to begin its own diplomacy with the Muslims in the region. An american destroyer comes alongside a cruiser in Great Bitter Lake on the Suez Canal in Egypt.

It brings Ibn Saud, king of the 5 million people of Saudi Arabia, to a conference with President Roosevelt. Stopping off here on his return from the Crimea conference, the destroyer has been decked out with rare carpets. For the monarchy. This 800 miles trip marks the first time that King ibn Saud has ever left his native land. President Franklin Roosevelt’s meeting with King ibn Saud aboard the USS Quincy on Egypt’s great Bitter Lake in February 1940 819 45 was no ordinary exchange of diplomatic pleasantries.

King Saud’s first foreign trip involved a number of unusual requests and special arrangements. The Saudis insisted on bringing a contingent of 48 men, even though the Americans had said they could accommodate only ten. They insisted on sleeping in tents pitched on the ship’s deck rather than in the cabins provided. They insisted on bringing their own sheep as the king believed that good Muslims eat only freshly slaughtered animals.

But irregularities aside, the meeting was momentous. Firstly, it demonstrated the importance of the saudi US relationship at a time when much of the world knew little and cared less about the happenings on the arabian peninsula. Secondly, it established the terms of that relationship, namely a us guarantee of military defense of Saudi Arabia, including Roosevelt’s promise to do nothing to assist the Jews against the Arabs in return for saudi concessions, including allowance for us airfields and flyover routes across the kingdom and access to Darhan, where the California Arabian Standard Oil Corporation, which later became Aramco, had drilled the first commercially viable oil well in the country just seven years earlier.

And thirdly, it signaled the dawn of a new era. No longer was the british empire the primary foreign power driving events in the region. From now on, one of the key foreign policy considerations of the muslim world was the US and its enormous military and financial resources. This changeover in world order was not instantaneous. For some time after the end of World War two, the US and British collaborated on operations that furthered their mutual interests in the region.

These interests included opposing the rising threat of secular nationalist governments that, unlike the House of Saud and other western backed monarchies in the Middle east, were less pliable to bribes and more interested in nationalizing their countrys resources. In March 1951, the iranian parliament voted to nationalize the Anglo iranian oil company, the british oil giant that struck oil near the Persian Gulf in 1908 and offered the premiership of the government to Mohammad Mosaddegh, an outspoken secular nationalist.

Immediately after taking office, Mossadegh effected the nationalization, stating, our long years of negotiations with foreign countries have yielded no results thus far. With the oil revenues we could meet our entire budget and combat poverty, disease and backwardness among our people. Another important consideration is that by the elimination of the power of the british company, we would also eliminate corruption and intrigue by means of which the internal affairs of our country have been influenced.

Once this tutelage has ceased, Iran will have achieved its economic and political independence. The nationalization put Tehran on a collision course with London, but Britain knew that a military intervention was not possible without american approval and despite harsh economic sanctions on the country and a boycott of the newly nationalized oil industry that was joined by much of the western world, they could not overthrow the iranian government themselves.

Instead, they had to turn to the US. Although the Truman administration was initially hesitant to become involved, that changed with the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower in the installation of the Dulles brothers, Allen and John Foster as director of Central Intelligence and Secretary of State respectively. By June of 1953, the CIA was already adapting the british coup proposal into their own covert operation. Dubbed Operation TP Ajax, an open secret in the world of intelligence.

The Ciami six role in the overthrow of Mosaddegh was officially denied by the US government for over half a century and is still unacknowledged by the british government to this day. Nevertheless, the CIA’s own internal history of the operation, first revealed to the public in the year 2000, confirms the extent of the american and british role in the coup. They convinced the Shah of Iran to agree to the plan.

They handpicked General Fislollah Zahedi as Mosaddegh’s successor. They rolled out a propaganda campaign to portray Mossadegh, a devout adherent to democratic nationalism who rigorously excluded the nation’s communist party from his government, as a communist sympathizer who would steer Iran into the arms of the Soviets. They spent hundreds of thousands of dollars bribing journalists, clerics and even iranian parliament members themselves to go along with the plot. And they used a network of agents and suitcases full of money to incite riots and protests across the country.

In the end, the operation was a success. Mosaddegh was driven from power. General Zahedi took his place. The western backed Shah ruled the country with the iron fist of his feared secret police for the next 25 years and a new agreement on sales of iranian oil was reached. This time, though, the anglo iranian oil company, now rebranded as british petroleum, would not have a monopoly on the country’s lucrative oil reserves.

An international consortium was put together to share in the profits with american companies. Chevron and standard Oil cut into the deal. But the eclipse of the old British Empire by the new american superpower became most obvious in Egypt during the Suez crisis of 1956. Lying on the key spice and trade routes linking Europe and Asia. The importance of Egypt to the British Empire went back centuries. It was the british navy under Nelson and the british army under General Ralph Abercrombie that drove Napoleon out of the country during the french campaign there at the turn of the 19th century.

But it was the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 that cemented Egypt’s geopolitical importance for the British Empire. The Suez Canal, linking the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea and drastically reducing sailing distances from Asia to Europe was technically the property of the Egyptians. But the project had been spearheaded by the French and the concessionary company that operated the canal had been largely financed by french shareholders.

An economic crisis in 1875, however, forced the egyptian governor to sell his own shares to the British. As parliament was not in session at the time of the sale, british Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli had to turn to his close personal friend Lionel de Rothschild for the 4 million pounds required to purchase the shares after the british conquest. Of Egypt. In 1882, an international agreement was signed declaring the canal a neutral zone under the protection of the British, whose troops were now installed in the country.

This precarious balance of power lasted in various permutations for over 70 years. First under Britains so called veiled protectorate of Egypt in the decades leading up to World War one, then in a formal british occupation of the country during World War one in its aftermath, and then under Britain’s unilateral declaration of egyptian independence in 1922, which stipulated that the British would retain power over Egypt’s defense and foreign policy.

Britains de facto control over the country was one of the grievances that gave rise to the free officers movement, a cadre of egyptian nationalists in the ranks of the egyptian armed forces who toppled King Farouk and took over the government in the egyptian revolution of 1952. One of the movements leaders, Gamal Abdel Nasser Hussain, became president of Egypt in 1954 and began to implement a series of nationalist anti imperialist measures that, like Mosaddegh, put him at odds with the british forces in his country.

These measures culminated with Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal on July 26, 1956. The Suez crisis led to a joint british french israeli invasion of the country. But in this case, the US, under Eisenhower, declined to back the invasion. Instead, Eisenhower, still believing that diplomacy and pressure could turn Nasser from the soviet orbit and help America leverage its influence over the arab world, joined the USSR in forcing an end to the invasion.

The crisis marked a definitive turning point. The age of the british empire was over. The age of the american superpower had begun. From now on, american military and financial power would be the determining factor in the muslim world and indeed the world in general. But the Americans had learned well from their british predecessors the same tactics of strategic and shifting alliances, double dealings and covert operations that the British had used to maintain their influence for centuries would now be deployed by the Americans to leverage their own power.

They applied these lessons in Iran, where they supported the shah’s brutal dictatorship even as they maintained a secret communication channel with exiled religious leader Ayatollah Khomeini. They applied these lessons in Indonesia, where the US at various times supported the islamic factions in their rebellion against the Sukarno government, the Sukarno government itself and eventually Suharto, who slaughtered over half a million people on his US backed rise to power.

They applied these lessons in the Sinai peninsula where, as declassified documents now show, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger helped engineer the Yom Kippur war so that the Arabs would conclude the only way to peace was through us. And the Israelis would conclude that they had to depend on us to win and couldn’t win if we were too recalcitrant. And they applied these lessons in Saudi Arabia, where Treasury Secretary William Simon helped enshrine the US dollars central role in global geopolitics and saved the US from the 1973 oil crisis by negotiating the petrodollar system, a covert deal with the House of Saud to purchase saudi oil and sell them weapons and equipment in return for a saudi pledge to finance american debt by investing their oil revenue in us treasuries.

This era of american led intrigue and double dealing would culminate in one of the most important years for the muslim world in the modern era. 1979. That was the era of the iranian revolution, when the american and british overthrow of Mosaddegh in 1953 would come home to roost in the overthrow of the western backed Shah and the first major victory for the forces of political Islam in the creation of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

That was the year of the seizure of the grand mosque in Mecca, when islamic hardliners shocked the muslim world by storming the holiest mosque in Islam. And during a dramatic two week standoff calling for the overthrow of the house of Saud and the end of its attempts at westernization. That was the year egyptian president Anwar Sadat signed a peace treaty with Israel, normalizing relations between the two countries and leading to Sadats assassination by members of egyptian Islamic Jihad just two years later.

And that was also the year that developments in Afghanistan put in motion a chain of events that would lead to the creation of the group we now know as al Qaeda. Soviet troops fought pitch battles in the streets of Kabul. Some say that soviet forces now are in complete control of all major towns and highways. By all accounts, the soviet takeover was meticulously planned and skillfully executed. On Christmas eve 1979, soviet troops began an invasion of Afghanistan.

Initially, this was portrayed to the american public as a spontaneous act of aggression, the opening salvo in a new campaign by the Russians to conquer the region and upset the world order. 50,000 heavily armed soviet troops have crossed the border and are now dispersed throughout Afghanistan, attempting to conquer the fiercely independent muslim people of that country. If the Soviets are encouraged in this invasion by eventual success, and if they maintain their dominance over Afghanistan and then extend their control to adjacent countries, the stable strategic and peaceful balance of the entire world will be changed.

As historians with access to USSR document archives now know, the soviet leadership was extremely reluctant to become entangled in Afghanistan. Well aware of the country’s reputation as a graveyard of empires. Soviet politicians and military leaders knew that any attempt to bring Afghanistan under military and political control would be extremely difficult. Instead, the invasion was the end result of a series of events that threatened to plunge Afghanistan and the surrounding region into chaos.

Starting in the wake of world War two, the urban, cosmopolitan political elite of the rural and agrarian nation of Afghanistan began a series of reforms and development projects that they hoped would bring their country into the modern era. Seeking assistance in this task, these leaders turned to the USSR, who, in addition to providing $100 million in low interest credit to finance the projects, also welcomed members of the country’s political and military elite for training at soviet institutions.

In turn, these young afghan elites brought communism back to their country. The afghan communists supported a bloodless coup in Kabul in 1973, overthrowing the king and instituting a one party state whose government included representation by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan, a pro soviet marxist leninist party that boasted ties to the Afghan National army. But the PDPA, frustrated by a perceived lack of progress toward communist goals on the part of this new government, precipitated another coup.

In 1978, this new communist government, led by Nur Muhammad Turaki, presided over a period of dramatic reform. Land reform sought to limit how much land a family could own. Social reforms abolished sharia law, began education of women, and sought to end forced marriages and other traditional practices. And political dissidents were rounded up and resistant villagers massacred. Violently opposed both by the islamic fundamentalists and conservatives in the country, as well as opposing factions within his own party.

Taraki was overthrown in September of 1979 and killed the following month. Tarakis successor and one time protege, Hafazullah Amin, led an even shorter and more turbulent government, taking over the presidency in September. Amin, who the Russians feared was seeking to improve Afghanistans relations with the United States, was deposed when soviet forces entered the country and assassinated him on December 27, 1979. The official history written by the CIA, echoed by the US State Department and propounded in Hollywood productions, maintains that the US response to the events in Afghanistan, a response that would go on to include billions of dollars in arms, funds, and training for the islamic resistance to the soviet forces, began after the soviet invasion in 1979.

The defeat and breakup of the soviet empire, culminating in the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, is one of the great events of world history. There were many heroes in this battle, but to Charlie Wilson must go this special recognition. Just 13 years ago, the soviet army appeared to be invincible. But Charlie, undeterred, engineered a lethal body blow that weakened the communist empire. Without Charlie, history would be hugely and sadly different.

And so, for the first time, a civilian is being given our highest recognition, that of honored colleague. Ladies and gentlemen of the clandestine services, Congressman Charles Wilson. But this, too, is a lie. In reality, the covert operation to aid the mujahideen freedom fighters did not begin after the Soviets invaded. And it was not the work of Charlie Wilson. As former CIA director Robert Gates revealed in his 1996 autobiography, assistance to the afghan mujahideen did not start after the soviet invasion, but six months before, in July 1979, with President Jimmy Carter signing off on a covert operation to assist and fund the resistance forces in Afghanistan.

This was done in the full knowledge that these forces might antagonize and draw the Soviets into the country, which is precisely what a certain faction of the Carter White House, known as the bleeders for their propensity to bleed the Soviet Union through an engaged guerrilla conflict like the US had experienced in Vietnam, wanted to achieve. This was confirmed two years later by Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security advisor, in a 1998 interview.

According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the mujahideen began during 1980, that is to say, after the soviet army invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. But the reality, closely guarded until now, is completely otherwise. Indeed, it was July 3, 1979, that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that, in my opinion, this aid was going to induce a soviet military intervention.

The program that Carter signed off on, dubbed Operation Cyclone, and billed as the largest covert operation in history, continued and expanded throughout the 1980s, leading to the rise of the Taliban and the encouragement of what Brzezinski called. In that same interview, some agitated Muslims. Us national security advisor Brzezinski flew to Pakistan to set about rallying resistance. He wanted to arm the mujahideen without revealing America’s role. On the afghan border near the Khyber pass, he urged the soldiers of God to redouble their efforts.

We know of their deep belief in God. We are confident that their struggle will succeed. That land over there is yours. You’ll go back to it one day because your fight will prevail, and you’ll have your homes and your mosques back again because your cause is right and God is on your side. The purpose of coordinating with the Pakistanis would be to make the Soviets bleed for as much and as long as possible.

News of the struggle began to spread throughout the arab world. And soon the stories of the brave mujahideen fighting the communist infidels became a rallying cry for jihad. The afghan resistance had made Peshawar just over the border in Pakistan, their headquarters. And it was there that visitors from around the muslim world heard firsthand the tales from the battles against the Soviets and saw for themselves the squalor of the refugees who had been forced from their homes by the russian invaders.

One such visitor was Abdullah Azzam, a passionate young Palestinian whose militant activism had cost him his job as a lecturer at King Abdulaziz University in Jeddah and had prompted him to take a position in Islamabad so he could be closer to the afghan jihad. But this was still not close enough, and he resigned his position to dedicate himself full time to the afghan cause. He spent time in the refugee camps and mujahideen base at Peshawar, issued a fatwa arguing that Muslims had a duty to wage jihad in Afghanistan, and made frequent trips to Jeddah, where he recruited young Muslims for the cause.

While in Jeddah, he stayed at the guest flat of a rich young Saudi named Osama bin Laden. Osama bin Laden was the 17th of 54 children of Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, an itinerant laborer from Yemen who had worked his way up in the saudi construction business to become one of the wealthiest non royals in the saudi kingdom. Mohammed bin Laden’s business, today known as the bin Laden Group Global Holding Company and comprising a sprawling, multi billion dollar multinational conglomerate involved in some of the largest construction projects in the world, started from humble beginnings.

After arriving in Jeddah from his native Yemen in 1930, Mohammed bin Laden took a job as a dock worker, then as a bricklayer for Aramco during the country’s first oil boom. When Aramco sought to subcontract some of the construction work it had undertaken for the saudi government, bin Laden used the opportunity to grow his own construction firm. His exacting building standards, combined with his energy, his honesty and his willingness to work shoulder to shoulder with his men, earned Mohammed bin Laden a reputation as a craftsman and a teacher, and brought him to the attention of King ibn Saud’s finance minister.

The aging king Saud, by now largely confined to a wheelchair, gave bin Laden a chance to renovate his palace in Jeddah so that his car could be driven by ramp directly to his second floor bedroom. Impressed with bin Ladens work and bin Laden’s gesture of personally driving the king’s car up the newly installed ramp to make sure it would hold the weight, the king awarded him with a number of increasingly important projects and even appointed him as an honorary minister of public works.

Bin Ladens business, later rebranded as the Saudi bin Laden group, would go on to construct most of the kingdom’s roads, renovate the prophet’s mosque at Medina, and even renovate the grand mosque in Mecca itself. Although Mohammed bin Ladens fortune was split between dozens of heirs, and although Osama’s father divorced his mother shortly after he was born, the younger bin Laden was still born into a life of luxury that few in the kingdom outside the royal family would ever know.

Osama bin Laden’s share of the family fortune has been estimated at $30 million, and it was expected that he would, like many of his brothers, take up the family business. He studied economics and Business administration at King Abdulaziz University, where he met and was influenced by Abdullah Azzam, who was by then already known for his credo, jihad and the rifle alone. No negotiations, no conferences and no dialogues.

Accounts of when and how Osama bin Laden first ended up in Afghanistan differ, according to Osama himself. Speaking to Robert Fisk in his first interview for the western press in 1993, when the invasion of Afghanistan started, I was enraged and went there at once. I arrived within days before the end of 1979. Others contend that Osama had never heard of Afghanistan before the soviet invasion and that he didn’t set foot in the country itself until 1984.

Whatever the case, by the mid 1980s, bin Laden was well known as one of the key fundraisers for the afghan cause in the arab world, using his family connections to gather donations from rich Saudis and delivering them to Pakistan to assist the fighters in the field. In 1984, Osama and Azam co founded Maktab al Khidemat, or the office of Services, which the US government would later identify as the precursor organization to al Qaeda.

The group aimed to recruit the foreign fighters that were taking up Azam’s call to join the jihad in Afghanistan, with bin Laden providing money through his fundraising connections and with direct contributions, initially little more than a guesthouse in Peshawur, where foreign recruits for the afghan war could stop on their way to the front. The operation quickly expanded as money poured in and more fighters began to arrive. Soon, it caught the attention of other figures in the afghan war, including Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a brutal afghan warlord supported by the US to the tune of $600 million, who was known for killing more Afghans than Soviets.

And doctor Ayman al Zawahiri, the head of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, who would go on to become Osama bin Laden’s right hand man. The New Yorker has called Zawahiri the man behind bin Laden. Saeed Salim Shahzad, a pakistani journalist with access to senior al Qaeda commanders, has argued it was Zawahiri, not the figurehead bin Laden, who formulated the organization’s ideological line and devised operational plans. Born in a suburb of Cairo in 1951 to a distinguished middle class family, Zawahiri went on to study medicine at Cairo University, eventually earning a master’s degree in surgery and serving three years as a surgeon in the egyptian army before establishing his own clinic.

He wore western dress, avoided the radical islamist activism sweeping campus in his university days, and, according to one westerner who met him in the mid 1970s, didn’t talk or act like a traditional muslim. But we are asked to believe this was all a front. In fact, according to the authors of the officially sanctioned history of al Qaeda, Zawahiri was a lifelong radical who had joined the Muslim Brotherhood in 1965 at the tender young age of 14 and was set on his path toward violent jihad the next year after the execution of the Brotherhood’s then leader, said Qutb.

Qutb was famous for his role in inspiring a generation of radical Muslims, including Islam, Osama and Zawahiri, to take up violent jihad against the west and the forces of modernity in the creation of a new caliphate. Less remembered is Qutb’s assertion that during the 1960s, when saudi king Faisal was openly conspiring with CIA and Aramco to stir up anti socialist muslim groups and undermine pan Arabism and arab nationalism, America made Islam.

The then 15 year old Zawahiri, we are told, responded to Qutb’s execution by helping to form an underground militant cell dedicated to replacing the secular egyptian government with an islamic one. By the late 1970s, a number of these cells had merged into a larger militant organization, Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which, incensed by President Anwar sadats signing of a peace treaty with Israel, assassinated him during a military parade on October 6, 1981.

Zawahiri was one of over 300 militants rounded up in the wake of the assassination and, having the best command of English among the defendants, became their spokesman for the international press. For the whole world, this is our world by doctor Aymar Tawahiri. Now we want to speak to the whole world. Who are we? Who are we? Why did they bring us here? And what we want to say about the first question.

We are Muslims. We are Muslims who believed in their religion in its broad feeling as both an ideology and practice. We believed in our religion both as an ideology and practice and hence, we tried our best to establish this islamic state and islamic society. Before being arrested, Zawahiri had already spent time in Peshawar, seeing firsthand the squalor of the refugee camps and even crossing the border into Afghanistan to witness the fighting itself.

After his release from prison in Egypt in 1984, Zawahiri made his way to Jeddah and then back to Peshawar. Thus, by the mid 1980s, all of the main characters that were associated with the rise of modern islamic terror and the founding of al Qaeda, Azam, Osama, Zawahiri and their early associates were now directly involved in the war in Afghanistan. They were not a single cohesive group. Azam and Zawahiri were rivals for Osama’s funds and attention, with Zawahiri even spreading rumors among the mujahideen that Azam worked for the Americans.

But together, they formed the backbone of what would come to be called the Afghan Arabs. An inaccurate term for all of the foreign jihadis who came to fight in Afghanistan. Both Arab, including Saudis, recruited by Osama and egyptian members of Zawahiri’s Islamic Jihad group, and non Arab Turks, Malays, and others from across the muslim world. The Afghan Arabs were not the main fighting force in Afghanistan. In fact, some argue they were almost totally irrelevant to the fight, making up only a small percentage of the total mujahideen.

They often got into quarrels with the afghan fighters and were responsible for almost no significant victories in the struggle against the Soviets. But the story of these holy warriors who had answered the call of jihad spread throughout the muslim world, helped in no small part by their own propensity for self promotion. Azam launched al jihad magazine to help publicize the Afghan Arabs exploits and with Osamas funding behind him, was able to make it an international concern.

Distributed in America by the Islamic center in Tucson, Arizona, the magazine sold thousands of copies per month in the US alone. But for some time, there has been debate about the nature of the US role in fostering and funding the Afghan Arabs. While historians, scholars and journalists agree that CIA funding for the afghan jihadists, estimated to be well over $3 billion, did find its way to the arab fighters, it has long been debated whether there was any direct contact between american intelligence and Osama bin Laden in the officially sanctioned history of the afghan soviet war.

The Americans were aiding the people of Afghanistan, brave freedom fighters who were engaged in a heroic struggle against the evil soviet empire. The fact that freedom is the strongest force in the world is daily demonstrated by the people of Afghan. Accordingly, I am dedicating on behalf of the american people. The March 22 launch of the Columbia to the people of Afghanistan, the support that the United States has been providing the resistance will be strengthened rather than diminished so that it can continue to fight effectively for freedom.

A just struggle against foreign tyranny can count upon worldwide support, both political and material. On behalf of the american people, I salute chairman Kalis, his delegation, and the people of Afghanistan themselves. You are a nation of heroes. Hard to believe, John. What’s that, sir? I hate to admit it, but the truth is I think we’re getting soft. Maybe just a little, sir. Just a little. This is the story propounded by the final report of the 911 commission, which holds that the COVID aid supplied for the operation by the United States went to Pakistan, who then distributed the funds and supplies directly to the afghan fighters, not the Afghan Arabs.

Saudi Arabia and the United States supplied billions of dollars worth of secret assistance to rebel groups in Afghanistan fighting the soviet occupation, the 911 commission explained in the section of its report dedicated to the rise of bin Laden and al Qaeda. This assistance was funneled through Pakistan. The Pakistani Military Intelligence Service Inter Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISID, helped train the rebels and distribute the arms. But bin Laden and his comrades had their own sources of support and training, and they received little or no assistance from the United States.

Here, the 911 commission is in agreement with Zawahiri himself, who insisted in his 2001 book nights under the prophets banner that the United States did not give one penny in aid to the mujahideen. After all, he adds, if the Arab Afghans are the mercenaries of the United States who have now rebelled against it, why is the United States unable to buy them back now? Zawahiri’s rhetorical question has not always been answered in the way he intended it.

In fact, numerous sources over the years have pointed to just such direct contact between the US and the Afghan Arabs, and even between the CIA and Osama bin Laden himself. There was Ted Gunderson, for example, a 27 year veteran of the FBI who claimed to have met bin Laden at the Hilton Hotel in Sherman Oaks, California in 1986. Osama, Gunderson says, was introduced under the name Tim Osman and was in the midst of a us tour with a State Department handler looking to procure weapons and support for the afghan jihad.

The only document that ever emerged to back this story up, however, was a crude, self typed, single page memo of unknown origin that only serves to throw an already dubious story into even further doubt. Or there was journalist Joseph Trento’s claim in his 2006 book, Prelude to Terror, the Rogue CIA and the Legacy of America’s private intelligence network. That CIA money was actually funneled to Mak since it was recruiting young muslim men to come join the jihad in Afghanistan.

That claim, however, comes from a former CIA officer who couldn’t be identified because at the time of the writing of this book, he was back in Afghanistan as a private contractor. Or there was Simon Reeve, who wrote the new jackals, the first book on al Qaeda, in 1998. In it, he states that us agents armed bin Laden’s men by letting him pay rock bottom prices for basic weapons.

This claim, too sources to an anonymous former CIA official. In 2000, the Guardian reported on bin Laden, the question facing the next us president stating flatly, in 1986, the CIA even helped bin Laden build an underground camp at coast where he was to train recruits from across the islamic world in the business of guerrilla warfare. No source is provided for the claim, however. In 2003, MSNBC senior correspondent Michael Moran wrote that bin Laden, along with a small group of islamic militants from Egypt, Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria and palestinian refugee camps all over the Middle east, became the reliable partners of the CIA in its war against Moscow.

However, he conceded that it should be pointed out that the evidence of bin Ladens connection to these activities is mostly classified. Supporters of the official story, however, make a valid point. Of all the things that the multimillionaire heir to the bin Laden family fortune needed on his rise to international infamy, money was not one of them. No, what bin Laden needed for his burgeoning terror group to thrive was not more money.

It was protection. As he turned from anti soviet warrior to international terror mastermind, bin Laden needed officials to look the other way as his people moved across borders. He needed routine security procedures to be abandoned at key moments. He needed intelligence agencies to disconnect the dots and fail to act on information at their disposal. When members of his organization got caught, he needed strings to be pulled so his associates could continue their operation.

And as we shall see, this is precisely the type of protection that Osama bin Laden and his associates were to receive time and again in the coming decades, regardless of direct western intelligence involvement in the arming, funding, or training of makhtab al Khidemat. The question soon became a moot point as the afghan war was drawing to its inevitable conclusion and the Soviets prepared to march back to Moscow.

Osama bin Laden was already planning a new group to consolidate his international network of Mujahideen and to take the jihad global. According to documents obtained from a March 2002 raid of the Sarajevo offices of Benevolence International Foundation, a not for profit humanitarian relief organization that was declared a financier of terrorism in the wake of 911. The original idea for the founding of al Qaeda was discussed in a meeting on August 11, 1988.

In attendance at the meeting, Osama bin Laden Mohammed Atef, an egyptian engineer and member of Zawahiri’s egyptian Islamic Jihad who would go on to become al Qaeda’s military commander Jamal al Fadl, a sudanese militant recruited for the afghan war from the Mak’s US headquarters in Brooklyn, and a dozen others. There are conflicting stories about the origin of the name al Qaeda, which means the base in Arabic. Bin Laden claims that al Qaeda was simply the name used for the mujahideen training camps, and the name stayed.

Others attribute it to Abdullah Azzam, who published a brief article in al Jihad magazine in April 1988 entitled al Qaeda al Suba, or the solid base, in which he wrote, for every invention there must be a vanguard to carry it forward, and, while forcing its way into society, endure enormous expenses and costly sacrifices. There is no ideology, neither earthly nor heavenly, that does not require such a vanguard, that gives everything it possesses in order to achieve victory.

For this ideology, it carries the flag all along the sheer, endless and difficult path until it reaches its destination in the reality of life. Since Allah has destined that it should make it and manifest itself, this vanguard constitutes the solid base. Al Qaeda al Suba for the expected society in 2005, former british foreign secretary Robin Cook claimed that al Qaeda was literally the database that is the computer file of the thousands of mujahideen who were recruited and trained with help from the CIA, to defeat the Russians.

He did not, however, provide proof for this claim, evidence of the existence of such a database itself, or an explanation of how he knew this information. The founding document itself mentions al Qaeda, al Askariah, the military base, explaining that the mentioned al Qaeda is basically an organized islamic faction. Its goal will be to lift the word of God, to make his religion victorious. It lists the requirements to enter al Qaeda members of the open duration, listening and obedient good manners referred from a trusted side, obeying statutes and instructions of al Qaeda.

These are from the rules of the work it gives the pledge for new members. The pledge of God and his covenant is upon me to listen and obey the superiors who are doing this work in energy, early rising difficulty and easiness, and for his superiority upon us, so that the word of God will be the highest and his religion victorious. And it ends by noting that there were 30 brothers in al Qaeda meeting the requirements and thank God the meeting was noted by no one.

In the larger scheme of things, it meant nothing. A ragtag band of 30 fighters, even if that ragtag band was led and financed by a saudi millionaire, could accomplish very little on their own. And in the wake of the seismic forces taking place in Afghanistan at the time, it did not even register as a blip on the radar of anyone in the region. But the assistance and protection that would help steward this group of jihadi miscreants into a brand name for international terror was already in effect.

The early glimmers of this protection could be seen in Maktab al Khidimat’s efforts to recruit and train mujahideen for the afghan jihad in the US. Starting in Tucson, Arizona, Mak would go on to open 30 branches in cities across the US, including their most important location, the Alkifa refugee Center, based out of Brooklyns Farouk mosque. The CIAS role in aiding Mak and al Kifah in their recruitment efforts has been an acknowledged fact for decades.

In 2001, Newsweek called the center a dreary inner city building that doubled as a recruiting post for the CIA seeking to steer fresh troops to the mujahideen. In 1995, New York magazine. The highlight for the center’s regulars were the inspirational Jihad lecture series featuring CIA sponsored speakers. One week on Atlantic Avenue, it might be a CIA trained afghan rebel traveling on a CIA issued visa. The next, it might be a clean cut, Arabic speaking Green Beret who would lecture about the importance of being part of the mujahideen.

J. Michael Springman, a visa officer at the US consulate in Jeddah from 1987 to 1989, testified how his decisions to deny visas to enter the United States to clearly unqualified applicants were routinely overridden by CIA officers at the consulate as part of their effort to help Osama bin Laden’s mujahideen in Afghanistan. I was being pressured by the consul general, J. Phil Freires, by a consular officer, I’m sorry, not a consular officer, a commercial officer, and various other people throughout the consulate.

We need a visa for this guy. It wasn’t a visa for my friend. It wasn’t a visa for a prospective business contact. It was for somebody like the two Pakistanis who were going to a trade show in the United States. They couldn’t name the trade show, they couldn’t name the city in which it was being held. But a CIA case officer concealed in the commercial section demanded a visa for these people within the hour of my refusing them.

And I said, no, they can’t tell me where they’re going. They can’t tell me why they’re going. The law is very clear. These are intending immigrants, unless and until they can prove otherwise and they haven’t done it. Do you have some information that was not available to me when they applied? He said, no. I said, they’re not going. He went to Justice Stevens, the chief of the consular section, and got a visa for these guys.

And it wasn’t until I was out of the foreign service, when my appointment had been terminated for unspecified reasons, that I learned from three good Joe Trento, the journalist, a fellow attached to a university in Washington, DC, and a guy with expert knowledge on the Middle east who had worked for a government agency. They said, it’s very simple. The CIA and its asset Osama bin Laden were recruiting terrorists for the afghan war.

They were sending them to the United States for training, for rewards for whatever purpose, and then sending them on to Afghanistan. And most likely the problems they had with the liquor at the consulate, large amounts of it disappearing, it being sold at very high markups and so forth, was being used to fund this. In a 1994 debriefing of his experience at Jeddah, Springman cited Sheikh Abdel Rahman as one of the CIA operatives with terrorist ties who were being aided by this program.

Omar Abdel Rahman, better known as the blind Sheikh, was born in Egypt in 1938 and lost his eyesight at just ten months old. Studying a braille version of the Quran, Rahman was sent to an islamic boarding school and, inspired by the writings of said Qutb, earned a doctorate in quranic interpretation from al Ajar University in Cairo. He made a name for himself among islamic fundamentalists for his forceful denunciations of the secular government of Nasser, who imprisoned Rachman without charges for several months.

It was Rahman who issued the fatwa that was used to justify the assassination of Sadat, and it was in prison, on trial for his part in the assassination, that Rachman met Zawahiri. After his release from prison, the blind sheikh made his way to join the jihad in Afghanistan, where, as even mainstream sources note, he is said to have established links with the central intelligence agency. The CIA, it was later reported, had paid for Rahman to travel to Peshawar and preach to the Afghans about the necessity of unity to overthrow the Kabul regime.

These CIA links served the blind sheikh well. As one of the most notorious islamic radicals in the Middle east, the blind sheikh was on a US State Department terrorist watch list that should have barred him entry to America. Nevertheless, in May 1990, he obtained a tourist visa to enter the United States from a consul in the US embassy in Khartoum. When the visa was first reported to the public in December of that year, a spokesperson for the State Department insisted that the consul had made a mistake, explaining that they didn’t follow the procedures and failed to check Rockman’s name against the State Department watch list.

It wasnt until July of 1993, five months after the bombing of the World Trade center, directed by Rachman and aided by an FBI informant, that the truth was revealed. Central Intelligence Agency officers reviewed all seven applications made by Sheikh Omar Abdelrahman to enter the United States between 1986 and 1990 and only once turned him down because of his connections to terrorism, reported the New York Times, adding that while the practice is somewhat sensitive and not widely known, it is not unusual for a low level CIA officer to be assigned a post as a consular official, as they had been in each of the seven cases.

It was later reported that the visas had been a reward for Rachmans services to the CIA in Afghanistan. Incredibly, this was not the end of the string of lucky breaks that allowed Rachman, the leader of the first islamic terror cell to operate on us soil, to continue his operations unmolested. In November of 1990, his CIA approved tourist visa was revoked. But because of a procedural error, immigration officials were not aware that he was in the country and had to begin an investigation before he could be deported.

Despite all of this, Rockman was still able to obtain a green card for permanent residence in the United States in April of 1991. After leaving the country and returning in August of that year, immigration officials identified that he was on a watch list and began proceedings to rescind his residency status. But they allowed him to re enter the United States anyway. His green card was revoked in March of 1992, but he was still allowed to remain in the country while he applied for political asylum and plotted the World Trade center bombing.

Out of the MaK founded CIA connected al Qaeda stronghold in Brooklyn, the Alquifa refugee center. But as remarkable as the blind Sheikh’s story is, it is not unique. Rachman was not the only person associated with al Qaeda’s Alqifa center who proved able to freely enter the US despite being on a watch list. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Ayman al Zawahiri, the future leader of al Qaeda, made at least three visits to the United States.

Despite having been imprisoned in Egypt for three years after the assassination of Sadat and despite his known role as the leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, Zawahiri was able to enter the US and using an alias and posing as a representative of the Kuwaiti Red Crescent society engage in fundraising for his terror group. His trip was made possible by one of his most important operatives, Ali Mohammed, who had arranged the trip and provided him with the fake passport he used to enter the country.

It is in the story of Ali Muhammad, dubbed al Qaeda’s triple agent, that the incredible ties between us intelligence and al Qaeda are revealed. Indeed, the tale of Mohammed’s unlikely career, described as the most tantalizing and complex story in the history of al Qaeda’s war against America, is so utterly unbelievable that a Hollywood scriptwriter would reject it for being too implausible. The son of a career soldier in the egyptian army, Muhammad attended the Cairo Military Academy and obtained two bachelor’s degrees and a master’s degree in psychology from the University of Alexandria.

Muhammad followed in his father’s footsteps, joining the egyptian army and quickly rising to the rank of major. An intelligence officer in the egyptian special forces, Mohammed was a member of the same unit that carried out the assassination of Sadat in 1981. But he was not in Egypt when it happened. He was training with the US Green Berets at Fort Bragg on a foreign officer exchange program. The FBI would later allege that it was during this training course that Mohammed was first approached by the CIA, who sought to recruit him as a foreign asset.

That same year, Muhammad joined Zawahiri’s egyptian Islamic Jihad and raised the suspicions of the egyptian army, not just for his ties to the Sadat assassination unit, but his conspicuous acts of islamic fundamentalism, including taking time for the five daily prayers and loudly proclaiming his islamic beliefs to anyone who would listen. Discharged from the egyptian army in 1984, Muhammad, at the behest of Zawahiri, landed a job as a counter terrorism security advisor for Egypt.

Heir impressed by Muhammads abilities, Zawahiri tasked him with a seemingly impossible infiltrate an intelligence service of the US government. Remarkably, according to the official history of al Qaeda, propounded by the very intelligence services Mohammed was tasked with infiltrating, that was exactly what he did, according to that official story. In 1984, Mohammed turned up at the CIA station in Cairo offering his services. The CIA took him up on the offer, sending him to Hamburg, Germany to infiltrate a Hezbollah linked mosque there.

Upon arriving in Hamburg, Mohammed immediately announced that he had been sent by the CIA. The agency, learning of the betrayal, officially cut their ties with him, putting Mohammed on a State Department watch list that should have prevented him from entering the US. But as government sources later told the Boston Globe, he was able to enter the country in 1985 anyway. With the help of clandestine CIA sponsorship. According to the report, Mohammed benefited from a little known visa waiver program that allows the CIA and other security agencies to bring valuable agents into the country, bypassing the usual immigration formalities.

What happened next defies all credulity. On his flight from Athens to New York, Mohammed sat next to Linda Lee Sanchez, a single medical technician from Santa Clara, California, ten years his senior. After spending the flight in conversation, the two agreed to meet again, and six weeks later they were married at the chapel of the bells in Reno, Nevada. Now applying for us citizenship, Mohammed enlisted in the US army in August 1986, completing basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and receiving an army achievement Medal for his exemplary performance, completing jump school, and qualifying as an expert marksman on the m 16.

Mohammed quickly reached the rank of e four and was then inexplicably posted to the Special Operations command at Fort Bragg, where he had earlier trained as a foreign exchange officer. Working as a supply sergeant for a Green Beret unit, he was soon lecturing on the Middle east to students at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare center, the training center for us special forces. Islam cannot survive in an area without political domination.

Islam itself, as a religion, cannot. So if I live in one area, we have to establish an islamic state, because Islam without political domination cannot survive. Even his commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Anderson, was stunned by the incredibly unlikely rise through the ranks of this watch listed muslim radical. I think you or I would have a better chance of winning the Powerball lottery than an egyptian major in the unit that assassinated Sadat would have of getting a visa, getting to California, getting into the army, and getting assigned to a special forces unit, Anderson later told the San Francisco Chronicle.

That just doesn’t happen. But it did. And the unbelievable story of Ali Muhammad did not stop there. In fact, it was only just beginning. In 1987, Mustafa Shalabi, the emir of the al Qaeda linked al Kifa refugee center in Brooklyn, transmitted a request from the mujahideen in Afghanistan for Ali Muhammad to come and train rebel troops in the camps there. Mohammed requested a 30 day leave from the army and made his preparations to travel to Paris and from there on to Afghanistan.

Using forged documents provided to him by mujahideen agents, Mohammed made no attempt to hide his plan. And Lieutenant Colonel Steve Neely, the JFK special Warfare center instructor who hired Mohammed as a lecturer, was so upset at the idea, a us soldier heading to a war zone to engage in training and, inevitably, combat without the permission of the army, that he sent a report up the chain of command, informing his superior officers about Mohammed’s plan.

But he never heard back. Ali Muhammad went to Afghanistan, where he not only provided training to the mujahideen, but, according to his own story, even fought and killed two soviet special forces officers. When he returned to his duties at Fort Bragg after his 30 day leave, he even presented one of his mementos, a belt from one of the soviet soldiers he had killed to his commanding officer a month after he left for Afghanistan.

Ali Muhammad returns here 11 kg lighter and brandishing a war trophy. Then he came back and gave us a debriefing with maps and even bought back this russian special forces belt. He said that he killed the russian special forces soldier. Colonel Anderson says he sent two separate reports to his superiors criticizing Ali Muhammad for his afghan adventure, but he received no response. And Anderson says he did not have enough evidence to bring charges against Mohammed.

So outrageous was Muhammad’s behavior that his commanding officer came to believe that he was being sponsored by a us intelligence agency. I assumed the CIA, he told the San Francisco Chronicle. Anderson was not alone in this belief. Back in California, Mohammed’s friends also assumed his CIA ties. Everyone in the community knew he was working as a liaison between the CIA and the afghan cause, Ali Zaki, a San Jose obstetrician who was close to Mohammed, told the Washington Post.

CIA sponsorship would explain Mohammed’s incredible ability to break army regulations at will with complete impunity. While serving in the US armed forces, Mohammed spent his weekends traveling from Fort Bragg to Brooklyn, where he lectured at the al Kifah Refugee center and began providing military training and stolen us special forces documents to a cell of islamic militants based there. Despite all of this, Mohammed received an honorable discharge from active duty in November 1989.

Among the commendations he received, one for patriotism, valor, fidelity, and professional excellence. He remained a member of the US army reserve as he returned to his wife in California and began the next leg of his career. As we shall see, this increasingly implausible story involved Mohammed becoming an FBI informant while simultaneously training and steering the terror cells that would be linked to the World Trade center bombing, the US embassy bombings, and the other spectacular attacks in the 1990s that would make al Qaeda synonymous with international terrorism, evading the justice system for years and then disappearing off the face of the planet.

By the time Mohammed left active duty at the end of 1989, the world order was beginning to shift. The Soviets had retreated from Afghanistan, and within two short years, the Soviet Union itself had ceased to exist. The cold war was over, and the public was promised a new world of peace and tranquility. We stand tonight before a new world of hope and possibilities for our children, a world we could not have contemplated a few years ago.

The challenge for us now is to engage these new states in sustaining the peace and building a more prosperous future. But this promised new world of hope never arrived. Instead, the world was about to be thrust into a new age of terror and the public face of that terror. A young saudi millionaire who was still being touted as an anti soviet warrior, had just cobbled together his band of islamic militants, his al Qaeda base, in the training camps of Afghanistan.

And as we will see, as the world plunged into this new era of violence, the planners of the american empire, like the planners of the british empire before them, were more than willing to aid, protect, and use these radical Muslims to attain their own ends, groups affiliated with Osama bin Laden to target the United States. There are four people confirmed. We call this the terror at the tower.

Next time on the Corbett report. We think a bomb caused this explosion. Know that the bomb start to be built. By who? By your confidential informant. These guys had money flowing out their ass, and they had massive security supplies and cocaine. There was a high level decision in the CIA ordering people not to share that information. We just saw on live television as a second plane flew into the second tower of the World Trade center.

The world will not be the same from today on. False. The secret History of al Qaeda part 2911 coming soon to corbettreport. com. Previously on the Corbett Report. We all know the story of bin Laden and al Qaeda, the story that was repeated ad nauseam in the days, weeks, and months after the catastrophic catalyzing events of 911. But this is a lie. Some say that soviet forces now are in complete control of all major towns and highways.

We have to establish an islamic state because Islam, without political domination, cannot survive. The world was about to be thrust into a new age of terror and the public face of that terror. A young saudi millionaire who was still being touted as an anti soviet warrior, had just cobbled together his band of islamic militants, his al Qaeda base in the training camps of Afghanistan, groups affiliated with Usama bin Laden.

Pineapple. Alexandria, Egypt. July 23, 1954. It’s Revolution Day in Egypt, and the streets of Alexandria are teeming with revelers. Two men, Victor Levy and Philip Nadenson, pick their way through the crowd on their way to the cinema quarter, each nervously clutching a device in their pocket. Eyeing the fire trucks parked at the intersections, Philip leans over to Victor and whispers, they’re expecting us. They reach the steps of the Rio cinema just as the audience from the afternoon showing begin pouring out of the entrance.

They fight their way through the stream of people and into the foyer and immediately see a man in the usual garb of an egyptian plainclothes detective waiting for them. Philip turns to run away, but instantly a wave of heat begins to sear his thigh. He tries to tell Victor to run, but no words come out. Instead, a white hot flame leaps from his trousers. He squeezes his thigh with all his strength in a vain attempt to stop the flame before the bomb can ignite.

But its too late. There’s an explosion. Philip lies on the ground, his arms and legs burnt black from the bomb. Victor is nowhere to be seen. Soon a police sergeant arrives along with the plainclothes detective. Someone in the crowd shouts, take care, he may have another bomb. But the sergeant moves in all the same. Don’t worry, we were waiting for them. The police had been expecting them. Victor and Philip were egyptian Jews, members of a sleeper cell established by israeli military intelligence in 1951.

The Israelis had watched in dismay as the military coup in Egypt in 1952 led to the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was not only hostile to Israel, but who, as a perceived anti communist, was securing military and financial aid from the Americans and even the British. With Britain already staging talks to withdraw from their Suez military base, Israel decided to act. In 1954, they activated their military intelligence sleeper cell in the country for an audacious mission codenamed Operation Susanna.

Their plan was to stage an increasingly spectacular series of bombings in Cairo and Alexandria. The first bombing, an explosion at the Alexandria central post office on July 2, had gone off without a hitch. The second, a simultaneous attack on the american libraries in Cairo and Alexandria, was similarly successful. It was their third attack, an ambitious attempt to bomb two cinemas in Cairo, two in Alexandria and the Cairo railway station, that failed, derailing the operation.

Ten members of the cell were rounded up. Of the ten, two committed suicide in the course of their interrogations by the egyptian police. Two more were executed and six were sentenced to prison, eventually making their way to Israel after their release. After decades of internal israeli investigations, finger pointing, political scandal and high profile resignations, the full truth of Operation Susannah remains shrouded in official secrecy. The israeli government did not even formally acknowledge the incident until 2005, a full half century after the affair, when nine of the agents were officially commanded for their service.

But the reasoning behind the operation was revealed during one of the commissions of inquiry that was established to examine the affair. According to one officer who was given oral instructions directly from Israel’s military intelligence chief, Benyamin Ghibli. Our goal is to break the West’s confidence in the existing egyptian regime. The action should cause arrests, demonstrations and expressions of revenge. The israeli origin should be totally covered while attention should be shifted to any other possible factor.

The purpose is to prevent economic and military aid from the west to Egypt. In short, the Israelis had attempted a false flag operation, hoping to blame their own spectacular acts of violence on the Muslim Brotherhood or the communists in order to destabilize Nasser’s government, undermined western confidence in its egyptian ally, and persuade the british military to remain at their Suez base. The operation was a failure in every sense.

The cell was discovered and its members imprisoned. Their actions did not destabilize the Nasser government, nor did they influence the relationship between Egypt and the west. And the British did leave their base in 1956 after an abortive israeli british french invasion of the region was brought to an end by the US and the Soviets. But it did implant an idea in the minds of the western military planners that acts of terrorism could be staged and blamed on muslim scapegoats to further their own political goals.

As we shall see, it was not long before America’s military brass were forwarding their own operational plans, making use of this tactic, plans that would culminate in the most spectacular terrorist attack the world had yet seen. Tuesday, September 11, 2001 dawned temperate and nearly cloudless in the eastern United States. Miles and miles of sunshine. Miles Davis. We’re going to put miles out there today, nice as it could be, across the northeast, rough seas still from the chop from that hurricane, but other than that, it’s kind of quiet around the country.

We like quiet. It’s quiet. It’s too quiet. In a matter of moments, however, the quiet of that Tuesday morning transformed into the turbulence of 911, and the world seemed to turn upside down. As the events of that day played out like a Hollywood movie on tv screens around the world, the meaning of those events was still far from clear. Who was behind this attack? Why were they attacking? What did the perpetrators hope to gain from it? And yet it was there in the initial hours of those chaotic events, years before the congressional inquiries and presidential commissions presumed to answer those questions, that all of the essential pieces of the official story of 911 were laid out on the tv screens of the american public.

We want to tell you what we know as we know it. We just got a report in that there’s been some sort of explosion at the World Trade center in New York City, one report said, and we can’t confirm any of this, that a plane may have hit one of the two towers of the World Trade center. But again, you’re seeing the live pictures here. There was a pilot who flew.

There was another one. We just saw, we just saw another one. We just saw another one apparently go. Another plane just flew into the second tower. This raises, this has to be deliberate, folks. Well, that would begin to say that we just saw on live television as a second plane flew into the second tower of the World Trade center. Now, given what has been going on around the world, some of the, some of the key suspects come to mind.

Osama bin Laden, who knows? Who knows what? I was watching with my roommate. It was approximately several minutes after the first plane had hit. I saw this plane come out of nowhere and just ream right into the side of the twin tower, exploding through the other side. And then I witnessed both towers collapse, one first and then the second, mostly due to structural failure because the fire was just too intense.

I am sure the highest degree of probability associated with this tack, which had remarkable coordination and logistical sophistication, would be Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda group. One senior us intelligence official says now that the US is 90% certain that bin Laden was responsible for today’s attack. He, an engineer and an architect, speculates here that the heat above the crash, the heat above the crash site on the twin trade towers may have indeed caused the building above to melt, just simply collapsing in itself and putting enormous weight on the rest of the building below, which could not possibly stand it.

And the steel columns which go up through the building, built to code at best, would only be able, he believes, to have been able to stand an hour and an hour and a half of intense fire like this, pressing down on the rest of the building until it finally was able to give way. Remarkably, these initial off the cuff speculations turned out to be, according to the various inquiries and investigations that followed, accurate in all their main respects.

Osama bin Laden, the mastermind of the al Qaeda terrorist organization, had planned and directed this attack. The twin towers had collapsed due to structural failure because the fire was just too intense. These assertions, drilled into the minds of a susceptible audience still reeling in shock from the horror of the events they had just witnessed, became the core tenets of what would become enshrined in the final report of the 911 commission as the official story of 911.

In this official story, Osama bin Laden, once the anti soviet warrior on the road to peace, was now an international terror kingpin radicalized by the arrival of us military forces in the arabian peninsula. In the Gulf war, he issued a fatwa against the United States and began a series of strikes on us targets, first bombing the US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998, and then bombing the USS coal while it was harbored in Aden in October of 2000.

According to this version of events, the 911 plot was hatched by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a highly educated pakistani militant who presented the planes operation. As the 911 commission asserts, it was originally known to Osama bin Laden and his chief of operations, Mohammed Atef, in 1996. It was bin Laden, we are told, who greenlighted the operation. Sometime in late 1998 or early 1999, the three of them developed a list of buildings to be the White House, the US Capitol, the Pentagon, and the World Trade center.

And bin Laden himself handpicked the men he wanted to carry out the operation, carefully moving their operatives into place. Over the course of the next two years, this crack terror squad, devoted muslim radicals willing to die for their beliefs, succeeded through a combination of skill and the colossal failure of the american intelligence complex, hindered by bureaucracy and hampered by a lack of political will to recognize the growing threat of islamic terror.

No individual was to blame for this failure, the official story of 911 concludes. But the remedy to the problems presented by the 911 attack was obvious. To erect a new homeland security complex, tear down the walls between foreign intelligence and domestic policing, implement warrantless surveillance and other legally dubious means of disrupting potential terror threats on the home front, and launch a war on terror abroad to bring the battle to the terrorists.

But this narrative, now enshrined as the official history of 911, that the 911 plot was hatched by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in 1996, that it was directed by terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, and that it was executed by al Qaeda so flawlessly that the intelligence agencies could not have even envisioned it, let alone prevented it. Nobody in our government, at least, and I don’t think the prior government that could envision flying airplanes into buildings, is now contested in every respect, even by defenders of that official history.

As even mainstream authors like Jason Burke were forced to admit. The popular conception of al Qaeda, that of a top down organization with a single leader overseeing its operations, was a convenient fiction created by the FBI so they could prosecute bin Laden in absentia for the 1998 bombings of two us embassies in East Africa. In order to prosecute bin Laden, they have to show that al Qaeda coordinates the activities of its global membership, and that bin Laden, as the leader of the group, bears the responsibility for any actions attributed to the organization.

The idea, which is critical to the FBI’s prosecution that bin Laden ran a coherent organization with operatives themselves, all around the world, of which you could be a member, is a myth. There is no al Qaeda organization. There is no international network with Alida, with carders who will unquestionably obey orders with tentacles that stretch out to sleeper cells in America, in Africa, in Europe. That idea of a coherent, structured terrorist network with an organized capability simply does not exist.

Even the 911 commission’s final report had to admit that al Qaeda was less of a mafia like organization with a capo served by his faithful lieutenants and more of a funding organization for terrorist entrepreneurs. Al Qaeda’s worldwide terrorist operations, the report conceded, relied heavily on the ideas and work of enterprising and strong willed field commanders who enjoyed considerable autonomy. As we saw in part one of this exploration origin story, these terrorist entrepreneurs included among their ranks renowned international islamic radicals like the blind Sheikh Omar Abdelrahman and lesser known but incredibly prolific terror cell leaders like Ali Muhammad, whose remarkable abilities to evade State Department watch lists and foment and direct spectacular terror attacks directly under the nose of the intelligence agencies, defies explanation, unless one assumes, as their closest associates did, that they were working under the purview of those intelligence agencies.

In order to better understand this aspect of the story, we have to return to 1990, the year that the specter of islamic terror appeared on the shores of the United States. Abdullah Azzam, Osama bin Laden’s mentor and co founder with bin Laden of the Maktab al Khidamat, or the office of Services, which provided funding, training and an international support network to the Afghan Arabs during the soviet afghan war.

Is dead killed in a car bombing in Peshawar, Pakistan. It is never determined who committed the assassination. But Azam’s death resolves a dispute about the future of the jihad movement. Azam had favored continuing the fight in Afghanistan, pressing for the formation of an islamic regime in Kabul. Bin Laden had other ideas. And now, as the undisputed leader of the old Mak network, he is free to pursue those ideas under the al Qaeda banner.

But al Qaeda at this point barely even exists as a propaganda construct. Despite grandiose visions of creating a unified global jihad movement, the withdrawal of the Soviets from Afghanistan and the end of the war leaves the groups future in doubt. Bin Laden returns to Saudi Arabia looking for ways to leverage his familys wealth and power to make a name for himself in the muslim world. Meanwhile, in New York, the era of islamic terror in the United States is about to begin.

We have a rabbi shot in a midtown hotel. And the guy was running down the street, and the guy shot at the post office man, and it hit him in the arm for an hour. Later, at Bellevue hospital, Mayor Kahana was pronounced dead from that gunshot wound. Manhattan, New York. November 5, 1990. Mayor Kohane, an orthodox jewish rabbi and a convicted terrorist whose anti arab views were considered so extreme he was banned from the Israeli Knesset, has just finished delivering a speech in the Morgan bee room of the New York Marriott Eastside hotel.

Leaving the podium, Kohane has begun mingling with the crowd. Suddenly, one man said, no. Sayyir draws a. 357 Magnum and fires, hitting Kohane twice, once in the neck. No say air flees, shooting one of Kohane’s supporters in the leg. In his rush out the door. His accomplice, Mahmoud Abu Halima, is supposed to be waiting at the front door in a taxi to drive him away. But the doorman had waved Abu Huleema away moments earlier.

So no Sayyir jumps in the wrong cab by mistake. When he realizes his error, he brandishes the. 357, ordering the cabbie to start driving. Instead, the driver scrambles out of the taxi and runs away. No Sayir is forced to flee on foot, racing down Lexington Avenue with his gun still in hand. Carlos Acosta, a us postal inspector, tries to stop him, drawing his weapon. But it’s too late.

Nausayer fires to first, hitting Acosta in the shoulder. Undeterred, Acosta drops to his knee, steadies himself and shoots back, hitting no Sayyir in the neck. Both nausear and Kahane are rushed to Bellevue Hospital’s trauma unit. No Sayyir survives his emergency operation. Kahane does not. The dramatic events of that November night would culminate in an even more surprising verdict 13 months later. Not only was Nauseyr treated as a lone gunman, acting of his own accord, but he was not even convicted of Kohane’s murder.

Despite such a brazen assassination, perpetrated in a crowded room and followed by a spectacular chase. No. Sayyir was acquitted of murder, convicted instead on four lesser counts, including gun possession, assault, and coercion. He was sentenced to just 22 years. So what went wrong? The jurors contend that they had reasonable doubt of nosairs guilt because the prosecution did not offer a witness during the five week trial who saw the defendant fire the fatal shots.

And since Kihanis family had opposed an autopsy, the fatal bullet could not be matched to Nausayers weapon. But in reality, the fix was in from the start, as even the congressional joint inquiry into the 911 attacks conceded in a staff statement. A decade after the trial. According to FBI officials who were interviewed, the NYPD and the district attorney’s office resisted attempts to label the Kohane assassination a conspiracy, despite the apparent links to a broader network of radicals.

Instead, these organizations reportedly wanted the appearance of speedy justice and a quick resolution to a volatile situation. By arresting Nausair, they felt they had accomplished both. The typically bureaucratic wording of the statement obscures the reality. The NYPD and the district attorney’s office didn’t just passively resist the attempts to label the assassination a conspiracy. They deliberately covered up vitally important information that would have unwound that conspiracy and undermined the next decade of spectacular al Qaeda terrorism.

Immediately after his arrest, 47 boxes of material were seized from Nausayer’s house in New Jersey. Among those materials were top secret training manuals from Fort Bragg and secret communiques from the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, lest there be any doubt where the materials came from. They even discovered a video of Ali Muhammad’s lectures at the Kennedy Special Warfare center at Fort Bragg. But those weren’t the only pieces of evidence that connected the Kohane assassination conspiracy, now commonly portrayed as the first act of islamic terrorism on us soil.

To Ali Mohammed, the remarkable CIA asset, us army officer and FBI informant, who we are told was al Qaeda’s strangely untouchable triple agent in the heart of the american intelligence establishment, El Sayyid no Sayyir himself, the 34 year old egyptian born janitor with a penchant for Prozac who quite literally got away with murder, was, as it turns out, not unknown to the authorities. In fact, he had been known to the FBI since at least the previous summer.

That’s when, as it was later admitted, no Sayyer and a ragtag bunch of associates had been surveilled, loading up a convoy of vehicles with semi automatic weapons and copious amounts of ammo and heading to the Calverton shooting range on Long island. For four consecutive Sundays in July of 1989, the FBI’s elite special operations group apparently tipped off that PLO terrorists were threatening to blow up casinos in Atlantic City, followed nosairs convoy to the shooting range, snapping dozens of photographs of the group, engaging in target practice with handguns, rifles, and even an AK 47.

The group had set off from the Brooklyn al Kifah refugee center, al Qaeda’s New York office, which, as we have seen, not only operated in full view of the intelligence community but doubled as a recruiting post for the CIA, seeking to steer fresh troops to the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Among those in attendance at the FBI surveilled target practice sessions, nausear himself, brandishing the chrome plated 357 that he would later use to slay Kahane.

Clement Rodney Hampton L. An american born black muslim medical technician known as Doctor Rashid who claimed to have been wounded in Afghanistan Mahmoud Abu Halima, known as the red for his curly red hair, covered during the sessions by an NRA cap Nidal Ayad, a Kuwaiti who had taken classes to become a us citizen and Mohammed Salome, a Palestinian who grew up in Jordan and studied under Abdullah Azam.

Not present at those sessions in July, however, was the group’s trainer, Ali Mohammed, the remarkable al Qaeda triple agent who had been taking weekend breaks from his post at the heart of the US Army’s special forces training center at Fort Bragg to instruct the Alkifa cell in the techniques of guerrilla warfare, including bomb making and weapons handling. Nausear and his fellow al Kifah plotters had been under surveillance by the FBI.

Mohammed, their handler, came straight from Fort Bragg, providing them with top secret government documents and personally overseeing their training. But incredibly, none of these points were raised at Nosair’s trial for the murder of Kohane. FBI officers who tried to follow the leads into the bigger plot were ordered to stand down. What was your feeling about the lone gunman theory? I thought it was preposterous. Based on what my sources in the NYPD told me, that they were ordered to treat this as a simple homicide.

Based on what my sources and the FBI told me, that every time that they got a little bit ambitious and started broadening their investigation to search out, El said no serious possible alleged terrorist links. They were told from a talk to cool it, to stop investigating, that the NYPD would handle it as a simple homicide. And according to the official history, the boxes of arabic documents seized from Nosair’s house were not translated until years later.

Nauseyr’s not guilty verdict was cheered by his supporters. And the same cadre of Ali Muhammad, trained radicals who had been surveilled at the shooting range by the FBI, moved on to plot their next spectacular terror attack, the bombing of the World Trade center. And as would be revealed in dramatic fashion years after the event, this plot too, had an FBI informant at its heart. Last winter, the FBI was praised for its speed in cracking the case of the World Trade center bombing and bringing four suspects to trial.

Now, there is some evidence that the FBI may have known of the plot in advance through an informant and might, might even have stopped the bombing that killed six people. When Ahmad Selim, a former lieutenant colonel in the egyptian army who arrived in the United States in 1988, began working as an FBI asset, he was not originally assigned to infiltrate islamic terror groups. No. In 1988, the cold war was still on, and the FBI tasked Salem with penetrating KGB and russian mafia rings operating in New York City.

But by 1991, things had changed. With the cold war over, the bureau’s priorities were shifting. Selim’s handler, Nancy Floyd, who appreciated his work, thought the egyptian informants background might make him useful to the FBIS Joint terrorism Task force. Selim’s new handlers in the bureau’s counter terror division, Louis Napoli and John Antisev, put him to work infiltrating the groups, raising funds for international islamic terror on us soil. His first priority? Insinuating himself into the ring around the blind Sheikh Omar Abd al Rahman, including al Said Nausair.

Then on trial for the slaying of Kohane and his Calvert and shooting range associates, Selim was remarkably successful in his assignment haunting the trial of Nausair. He soon befriended Nausairs cousin, Ibrahim el Gabroni. El Gabroni immediately took to the affable Egyptian, introducing Salem to nausear in jail and describing him as a new member of the family. In a mere matter of weeks, Salem was caught on camera as one of Rahman’s bodyguards, even personally driving the blind sheikh to Detroit to deliver fundraising speeches.

Soon thereafter, el Gabroni invited Selim to join him for dinner at his Brooklyn apartment. There, after turning up the television in the dining room, explaining that he feared the apartment was bugged, el Gabroni sought to recruit Salem for a special mission. I was in Brooklyn with Ibrahim el Gabroni. Ibrahim el Gabroni is Sayyid Nusir’s cousin. He said that we should start to do something, brother, so the government have some pressure and they don’t put say brother said in more troubles.

So I said, sure, of course we should do something. He said, okay, do you know how to build a bomb? I said, of course that’s what we do. He said, okay, I want you to build some bombs and I’ll tell you later. What do you need? I need, so I said to Ibrahim el Gabroni, I need explosives. I need natures. I need people to help me build the bombs.

I need a safe place to build the bomb in. He said, okay, let me make some phone calls to Afghanistan. At this early stage, the plot was less of a precise plan and more of a vague idea, devoid of details. Even the target of the proposed attack was undecided, with Selim being told that the group intended to set off bombs at twelve jewish locations, including temples, banks, and jewish centers around Brooklyn and Manhattan.

Without knowing it, and with hardly any effort, Selim had been recruited into an operation that would eventually result in the 1993 World Trade center bombing. Selim worked the plot as best he could, meeting more of the Calverton shooting range associates and gathering information from the cell members to pass along to the bureau. As the preparations for the bombing began to take shape, Selims role in the FBI sting operation seemed clear.

He would lead the cell along, swapping out the explosives for a harmless powder before the bombs were placed. Then, when the cell was ready to strike, the FBI would swoop in and round up the plotters. But that is not what happened. Selims remarkable success in infiltrating an active plot to stage terror attacks in New York, something that most FBI assets fail to accomplish in the course of their career, is, in retrospect, stunning.

But not as stunning as the FBI’s response to this incredible turn of events. As author and journalist Peter Lance, who interviewed many of the FBI personnel involved in the story, explained in his book Triple Cross, part of Selim’s deal with the feds was that he would be a deep cover asset, as opposed to an informant who was willing to tape conversations and swear to his undercover evidence on the stand.

Salem, who had family in Egypt, was deeply wary of the blind sheikh’s deadly reach. So the bureau promised him that he’d never have to wear a wire or testify in open court. But in June 1992, Carson Dunbar, a rising young star in the FBI’s New York office, was appointed to head the counter terror division. Dunbar and his deputy, John Krauthammel, didn’t trust Salim. Soon they were trying to get him to submit to additional polygraphs, and eventually they broke their deal with Salem and demanded he wear a wire.

Salem refused and withdrew from the operation, shutting the FBI out of the bomb plot. It was a silly, personal confrontation. And actually he said, and I quote him, you son of a bitch. Coming from the Middle east, dragging sand in your shoes all the way up to here to tell me how to run my FBI and how to do my job. I told him, sir, I am doing your job.

None of your agent could have went undercover that deep. I’m doing it. You’re not. And that even provoked him more. And he said, get out of here. I walked out of his office. I looked at Nancy and John. I said, guys, when this bomb been built by somebody and goes off by somebody else, don’t come knock on my door. And that was it. And I walked away. With Salem out of the picture, the Ali Muhammad trained blind Sheikh supported al Kifa connected cell, continued on with their plot, but with internal disputes disrupting their plans, they had to find someone else to actually build the bomb.

They found that person in Ramzi Youssef. To this day, despite having been caught, tried and convicted for the World Trade center bombing, little is known about Ramzi Yousef’s origins or even his identity. The 911 commission, relying on the torture testimony of his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, identified him merely as a sunni extremist whose real name was Abdul Basset. But this supposedly devout muslim fundamentalist is reported to have hung out at karaoke bars and dated b girls during his trips to the Philippines while his wife and daughters waited for him in Baluchistan.

Even his birthplace remains a mystery. What is known is that Youssef learned bomb making in Osama bin Laden’s training camps in Afghanistan in the early 1990s, perhaps from Ali Muhammad himself. That in 1995, Newsday reported that the FBI was considering a probe of whether the CIA had any relationship with Youssef. And that in 1999, swiss journalist Richard Le Bevier reported that a classified FBI file indicates that he was recruited by the local branch of the CIA.

And like so many of the other key operatives in the al Qaeda story, Youssef was able to avoid regular screening procedures, waltz across borders with forged travel documents, and enter the United States without a visa. On August 31, 1992, Youssef and Ahmad Alge, a fellow mujahideen who Yousef had allegedly met at the training camps in Afghanistan, flew from Pakistan to the US despite lacking the proper travel documents to do so.

A miraculous feat that the FBI has alleged was enabled by direct assistance from senior pakistani intelligence officials upon their arrival at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York on September 1. Both men were immediately detained by immigration officials. Ajaj, acting loud and belligerent, was caught with a crudely forged swedish passport and taken to a back office for questioning. The US government was pretty sure Ahmad Mohammed, a judge, was a terrorist from the moment he stepped foot on us soil, the Los Angeles Times later reported, noting that his suitcases were stuffed with fake passports, fake ids, and a cheat sheet on how to lie to us immigration inspectors.

But that wasn’t all. Among his possessions, inspectors also found two handwritten notebooks filled with bomb recipes, six bomb making guides that included pages from Fort Bragg military manuals, and four how to videotapes concerning weaponry and surveillance training. A judge was charged with passport violations and sentenced to six months in prison. Yousef, meanwhile, tried a different approach. Dressed in traditional peasant garb and carrying an iraqi passport without a us visa, Yousef strode confidently up to the immigration inspector and declared himself to be a refugee seeking asylum from the oppressive iraqi government, politely asking to be admitted into America.

After being questioned and fingerprinted, one alert immigration official noted his links to Ajaj and sought to detain him, but there was not enough room in the INS lockup, so he was released on the condition that he show up at an asylum hearing later. Youssef then left the airport, took a cab to New Yorks East Village, and immediately met with Mahmoud Abu Huleema, the red, who had trained with Ali Mohammed and who had served as the getaway driver for no Sayer.

Before being waved away by the hotel doormen, Youssef set about professionalizing the ragtag band of misfits, transforming their vague jewish locations plot into an altogether more ambitious to plant a bomb in the basement of one of the twin towers of the World Trade center, collapsing it into the other tower and killing tens of thousands in the process. He got to work immediately, organizing the cell, renting a storage locker across the Hudson river in Jersey City, and beginning the five month task of constructing the bomb.

Without Salem, the FBI ostensibly no longer had an asset in the cell to watch as the plot took shape. But if there had been a serious investigation underway, unraveling the cell and discovering their intentions would have been trivial. Amada judge, who had been caught with a raft of terrorist training materials and bomb making guides, remained in contact with Yousef the whole time, speaking to him frequently via the prison phone.

But although those calls were taped, no one from the FBI or any other agency monitored or even attempted to translate those phone calls until after the World Trade center explosion the following February. And no one traced the pairs flights back to discover that they had both boarded in Pakistan without the proper travel documents and had even sat together for the first leg of their journey to New York.

Selim even tried one last time to warn the FBI about the cell, meeting his old handler Nancy Floyd at a subway sandwich shop near the FBIS New York office in October of 1992 to collect his final $500 cash payment. He informed her that he had heard that the group was planning a new attack and begged her to put surveillance on Abu Halima and Salome. But it was no use.

Carson Dunbar had taken her off the terror investigation, and all she could do was pass along the suggestion. Selim’s warning was ignored, and no one followed up on the lead. The FBI had followed the al Kifah plotters to the shooting range, investigated their role in the Kohani murder, had an informant in their midst, reporting on their plans for a spectacular terror attack. And now another high level terror operative had been allowed to enter the country and proceed with his activities unmolested, just as Ali Muhammad and the blind sheikh before him.

And so it was that at noon on February 26, 1993, Ramzi Youssef and Ead Ismoel, a jordanian associate, drove a yellow rider van into the underground parking garage of the World Trade center. Parking on the b two level. Youssef ignited the 20 foot fuse and fled. Twelve minutes later, the bomb went off. We think a bomb caused this explosion. The fluoro seemed to explode it down and collapsed into the level below that.

The Department of Justice and the FBI are operating on the very educated assumption that this was the work of a terrorist bomber. We’re also told now that there are four people confirmed. We call this the terror of the tower. And from now on, people in the Arkham feel even more vulnerable than it ever felt. To see the bomb cutting through the parking garage with an explosive force of 150,000 pounds per square inch might have lacked the explosive force to fulfill Youssef’s goal of toppling the towers.

But it did wreak havoc. Six people died, over a thousand were injured, and 50,000 were forced to evacuate the building in the chaotic aftermath of the explosion. Learning of the bombing, Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert working for the Rand Corporation, we may be talking about the opening salvo of a new conflict for a new world order. As the investigation into the bombing began, a letter arrived in the offices of various New York newspapers claiming responsibility for the attack.

The letter, sent under the name Liberation Army Fifth Battalion, issued three end us aid to Israel, end diplomatic relations with Israel, and stop interfering with the internal affairs of Middle eastern nations. If these demands were not met, the letter promised that 150 suicide soldiers would be ready to commit more attacks, including launching strikes on potential nuclear targets, if there was any doubt about who was behind the explosion.

Those doubts were quickly dispelled. Just two days into the investigation, in one of the FBIs first descents into the pitch black, smoke filled, five story crater left by the blast, an explosives enforcement officer from the ATF found the proverbial needle in the haystack. Apart from the Ryder van itself, bearing a vehicle identification number, the van rental was traced back to Mohamed Salomeh, one of Ali Mohammed’s trainees from the Al Kifah center.

Absurdly, Salome was apprehended on March 4, one week after the bombing, when he returned to the Ryder rental office in Jersey City to reclaim the deposit on the van Salemes. Arrest quickly led to the arrest and eventual conviction of three others in the Alqi Nid al Ayad, Mahmoud Abu Hulima, and Ahmadajaj. It also led investigators to the apartment of Ramzi Youssef. But it was too late. Ramzi Yousef had boarded a flight to Karachi the night of the bombing and then vanished, flying from country to country with impunity, plotting assassinations and bombings in Pakistan, Thailand, the Philippines, and Iran, and concocting an elaborate plot called Bojinka to blow up a number of airliners in mid flight before finally being captured in Pakistan in 1995.

But it was not just Yousef himself, the mysteriously protected terror mastermind who had entered the US without a visa, who vanished. When pakistani federal investigators later went to check their immigration records, they discovered that all of the documents pertaining to Yousef’s journey to the United States in 1992, including his embarkation card, had mysteriously disappeared. In the wake of the bombing, the FBI, now facing enormous public pressure to round up those involved and bust the terror cell that they had infiltrated and abandoned just the year before, turned once again to Ahmad Selim.

Once again, Selim was able to quickly penetrate the blind shake cell and to begin working with them on a new scheme. The so called landmarks plot to bomb key targets around New York City, including the UN headquarters, the Lincoln Tunnel, and the George Washington Bridge. This time, the FBI arrested the plotters before they could stage their attack. But at the trial two years later, Selim had a surprise for the prosecution.

He had secretly recorded dozens of phone conversations with his FBI handlers, conversations that revealed for the first time the FBI’s real role in the World Trade center bombing. FBI agents might have been able to prevent last February’s deadly explosion at New York’s World Trade center. They discussed secretly substituting harmless powder for the explosives, but they didn’t, according to the FBI’s own informant, Emad Salem. Unbeknownst to the FBI at the time, Salem recorded many of his conversations with his handlers.

I’m holding 903 pages of draft transcripts. William Kunstler represents Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman and several others charged with conspiring to blow up a series of New York City landmarks four months after the World Trade center bombing. That case has not yet gone to trial. Kunstler confirmed newspaper reports of the Salem transcripts. In one, Salem complains to an FBI agent since the bomb went off. I feel terrible. I feel bad.

I feel here is people who don’t listen. The agent replies, hey, I mean, it wasn’t like you didn’t try and I didn’t try. You can’t force people to do the right thing. Predictably, in the wake of the blast, the debate began to center on the government’s mismanagement of the case. The blind Sheikh’s entry to the US had been a mistake. The NYPDS refusal to investigate no sayers accomplices in the killing of Kohane had just been a politically expedient omission.

The FBI, having pulled their informant out of an active terror plot before it developed into the World Trade center bombing was simply incompetence. The presence of a CIA linked Fort Bragg stationed green Beret in the midst of this radical terror cell was just an example of blowback. And Ramzi Yousef’s miraculous ability to enter and leave countries at will without the proper documentation was just the result of bureaucratic bungling and overworked immigration officials.

The admissions of error and professions of blowback verged on admissions of guilt. Even the CIA, in an internal investigation into its role in supporting the Alquifa centers operations, concluded that the agency itself was partly culpable for the World Trade center bombing. But the incompetence narrative soon arrived at its inevitable conclusion. The very agencies that had so signally bungled every step along this path were now to be given more money and bestowed more authority to conduct their counter terror operations.

This year, I’ll submit to Congress comprehensive legislation to strengthen our hand in combating terrorists, whether they strike at home or abroad as the cowards who bomb the World Trade center, found out, this country will hunt down terrorists and bring them to justice. Others proposed a less charitable reading of these events. Ron Kubey, the lawyer who, along with William Kunstler, acted as a defense lawyer for the accused bombers and their accomplices, did not mince words in assigning blame for the World Trade center bombing plot.

The mastermind of the plot is the government of the United States. It was a phony, government engineered conspiracy to begin with. It would never have amounted to anything had the government not planned it. Ahmad Salem himself summarized the story of the World Trade center bombing in a phone call with his FBI handler, John Antisev, that was later released to the public. I don’t think it was. If that’s what you think, guys, fine.

But I don’t think that because we was start already building the bomb, which is went off in the World Trade center. It was built by supervising supervision from the bureau and the TA. And we was all informed about it. And we know that the bomb start to be built by who? By your confidential informant. What a wonderful, great case. And then he put his head in the sand and said oh no, no, that’s not true.

He is son of a bitch. Okay, it’s built with a different way in another place and that’s it. If this pattern of missed opportunities and miraculous cross border movements really had been the result of mere incompetence or inattentiveness, then the resources and attention that were thrown at the problem of international terrorism in the wake of the World Trade center bombing would have improved the intelligence agencys record against their erstwhile foes.

But remarkably, the scarcely believable trend of the early 1990s, that of intelligence agencies consistently missing the terrorists operating directly under their nose, border agents allowing known terrorists to pass from country to country unmolested. And law enforcement officials letting these al Qaeda linked operatives off the hook, did not just continue into the late 1990s, the trend actually accelerated. And as al Qaeda went from a loose knit group of a few dozen amateur mujahideen at the beginning of the decade to the premier international terrorist organization at the end of the decade, the number of mistakes and missed opportunities multiplied from the merely unbelievable to the downright impossible.

When Mahmoud Abu Halima was arrested for his part in the World Trade center plot in 1993, he attempted to bargain with federal prosecutors. Abu Halima revealed the name of Wadi al Hajj, a lebanese born naturalized american citizen living in Texas, who the Alqifa cell had turned to for help in purchasing weapons, and recounted his experiences in Afghanistan with Mohammed Odeh, a Palestinian from Jordan who would later claim to have provided the rifles and rocket launchers that killed 18 us soldiers and wounded 73 in Mogadishu in October of 1993.

Abu Halima then offered more information about the World Trade center plot and his associates in exchange for a lighter sentence. Prosecutors turned down the deal and failed to follow up on either el Hajj or Oday. Ali Muhammad, meanwhile, continued in his remarkably successful mission to infiltrate the intelligence arms of the US government. After having worked for the CIA and served as a special forces instructor at Fort Bragg, his next target was the FBI.

Following his honorable discharge from the army, Muhammad returned to his wife in California and applied to be a translator for the bureaucracy. He was turned down for the position. Instead, he was asked to work as an FBI informant in a local document forgery ring in 1992, the bureau evidently impressed with Mohammed’s work opened him as a foreign counterintelligence agent and tasked him with gaining intelligence on a San Jose mosque.

But Mohammed was assigned to a rookie agent, and routine steps like administering a polygraph, were never taken. As a retired special agent who worked in the FBI’s New York office later told journalist Peter Lance, one of the most unbelievable aspects of the Ali Muhammad story is that the bureau could be dealing with this guy and they didn’t put him on the box. The first thing you do with any kind of asset or informant is you polygraph him, and if the relationship continues, you make him submit to continued polygraphs down the line.

That is a basic principle of running informants. Still, despite repeatedly traveling back and forth to and from the Middle east throughout the period, Mohammed remained untouchable by law enforcement and border security. In 1992, he was detained in Rome when he was discovered with a Coca Cola can containing a secret storage compartment. Mohammed convinced the airport security that he was a security agent for the Summer Olympics in Barcelona and was released with a warning that if anything happened on the flight, he would be blamed.

In 1993, after helping Ayman al Zawahiri enter the US on forged documents for a fundraising tour, Mohammad traveled to Vancouver, Canada, to help an associate of Zawahiri, SM Marzuk, enter the country. Marzuk, caught with forged saudi passports by canadian customs officials, was detained by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. When Mohammed arrived inquiring about his friend, he was detained by the RCMP as well. After hours of interrogation, he told them he was an FBI asset, giving them the phone number of his handler, John Zent.

Zents word was good enough. The RCMP let Mohammed go. Muhammad’s travels during this busy period included a trip to Afghanistan in the summer of 1991 to help Osama bin Laden and his fledgling al Qaeda organization relocate to Sudan. Osama’s move to Sudan came at a time when, we are told, the wealthy Saudi was looking to cement his reputation as a holy warrior. The official story of al Qaeda holds that during this period, bin Laden returned briefly to Saudi Arabia.

But incensed by the saudi royal’s decision to invite us soldiers onto saudi soil for the Gulf war, left the country for good. Searching for a place to move his operations, his gaze turned across the Red Sea to Sudan, where, as luck would have it, hardline islamic extremist Hassan Alturabi had come to power in a military coup just as the war was ending in Afghanistan. Heading the National Islamic Front party, which sought to impose sharia law in the country, Altarabi traveled to London for a meeting of the international Muslim Brotherhood, where he openly declared his intention to allow Sudan to act as a base for islamist terror groups.

By the summer of 1991, Osama bin Laden had answered that call. Moving his fighters and equipment from the outskirts of Afghanistan to his new base in Sudan with the help of FBI asset Ali Muhammad Turabi was not the only one traveling to London to foster his terror plans, however. In between, bin ladens work establishing himself as a businessman in Sudan using $12 million granted him by the Saudi bin Laden Group to start a bewildering array of commercial enterprises in the country.

From a construction company to an investment firm to a trucking business to a tannery, a bakery, a furniture making business and even a commercial farm employing 4000 laborers. The budding terrorist mastermind was, according to numerous sources, shuttling back and forth between Khartoum, Karachi and London. Osama bin Laden’s visits to the UK in the early 1990s include an alleged stay at the London estate of saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz, a meeting in Manchester with representatives of an algerian islamic group who were later accused of being infiltrated by government moles and used to launch a series of false flag attacks in France, a period of several months in 1994 where he actually lived in the UK, allegedly buying a house in Wembley through an intermediate and even more explosively, a 1996 trip to his London press office, which was, according to swiss journalist Richard Le Bevier, citing several arab diplomatic sources, clearly under the protection of the british authorities.

Although the official story holds that bin Laden was at this time barely a blip on the US intelligence community’s radar, this is contradicted by numerous lines of evidence. Ali Mohammed, for instance, had volunteered the earliest insider description of al Qaeda that is publicly known to the FBI in 1993, telling them that bin Laden was building an army to overthrow the saudi government and admitting that he had personally trained terrorists at the camps in Afghanistan and Sudan.

But the FBI, according to the Wall Street Journal, was flummoxed by this information and made no attempt to act on it. This news about al Qaeda’s activities would not have been news to the US government’s main intelligence agencies. However, it was later revealed that despite claims that the US government was only dimly aware of bin Laden at this point, he was in fact already under extensive electronic surveillance.

Having obtained his voice print from recordings of his anti Saddam speeches in Saudi Arabia, the NSA and CIA were already using signals intelligence to identify and monitor bin Laden’s personal satellite calls and cell phone traffic. In another key contradiction that is never addressed by the purveyors of the official al Qaeda story. It was during this period that Osama bin Laden, making trips to the UK under the alleged protection of british authorities and while admittedly under surveillance by american intelligence, began the streak of increasingly brazen terror attacks that we are told would end up in 911.

In 1992, al Qaeda mounted their first terror operation against an american target. In December of that year, bombs went off outside two hotels in Aden, where it was believed american servicemen were being quartered on their way to Somalia for Operation Restore Hope. The attack killed an australian tourist and a yemeni hotel worker, but no Americans. The troops had been staying at a different hotel. Osama only claimed responsibility for the bombing.

Six years later, in 1990, 318 american soldiers were killed and 73 wounded in Mogadishu during an intense two day firefight that resulted in the downing of two Blackhawk helicopters by rocket propelled grenades. It wasn’t until the release of the 911 commission report in 2004, however, that the commission, citing new information received by the intelligence community in 1996 to 1997, told the public that al Qaeda had had a role in the incident.

The burnishing of bin Ladens terrorist credentials by the US government continued in 1996. In January of that year, the CIA officially opened Alec station, a so called virtual station dedicated solely to tracking Osama bin Laden and his associates. Headed at first by Michael Shawyer, an analyst at the CIA’s counterterrorism center who had taken a special interest in the saudi exile and named after Shawyer’s son. Alix station soon became the hub for a mostly female group of analysts who dubbed themselves the Manson family because they had acquired a reputation for crazed alarmism about the rising al Qaeda threat.

1996 was also the year that the US government began putting diplomatic pressure on Sudan to hand over their files on bin Laden and his al Qaeda operatives. The secret negotiations between the two countries culminated with al Fati Irwa, Sudans then minister of state for defense, flying from Khartoum to Washington. There, Irwa made a stunning offer not to turn over the sudanese governments records on bin Laden, but to turn over bin Laden himself.

Washington rejected the offer because, the Village Voice later reported, the FBI did not believe it had sufficient evidence to try bin Laden in a us court. Instead, they demanded that Sudan expel the supposed arch terrorist to any other country except Somalia. Sudan complied, protesting that Osama would simply return to Afghanistan, where there was no government for Washington to negotiate with. We told him Sudan is no longer safe for him and creates problems for us, and asked him to leave, Irwa told the Village Voice.

We liquidated everything and he left with his money. We didn’t confiscate anything because there was no legal basis. Nobody had indicted him. He rented a charter plane and left in broad daylight. He was free to plot and build his network. The Americans then came back and wanted us to help track him. But by then it was too late. He didn’t trust us anymore. In June of 1996, a truck bomb exploded outside of the Khobar towers in Darhan, Saudi Arabia.

The facility, located in the heart of the saudi oil industry’s administrative area, where the US had built its first air base and where standard oil first struck oil in the country, establishing what would later become Aramco, was housing us and allied forces involved in enforcing the Iraqi no fly zones. The massive blast left an 85 foot crater, killing 19 and injuring hundreds. At the time, the US blamed Tehran for the bombing, with Clinton’s defense secretary, William Perry later admitting that there was a contingency plan in place to attack Iran if the link had been proven.

But by 2007, Perry had changed his assessment. I believe that the Khobah Tower bombing was probably mastermind by Osama bin Laden. I can’t be sure of that. But in retrospect, that’s what I believe at the time. He was not a suspect at the time. All of the. All of our examinations, all of the evidence was pointing to Iran. One thing is for certain. In 1998, the $150 million contract to rebuild the Khobar Towers was awarded to the Saudi bin Laden group.

All of these incidents helped raise bin Ladens profile in the intelligence community. But it was a series of events in 1998 that introduced the broader public to Osama bin Laden. In February of that year, bin Laden, following up on a declaration of war against America that he had made to CNNS TV cameras in an interview with Peter Bergen the previous year, issued his fatwa calling on Muslims to kill Americans.

The ruling, to kill Americans and their allies, civilians and military, is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al Aqsa mosque and the holy Mosque from their grip and in order for their armies to move out of all of the lands of Islam. Defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim.

In May of that year, John Miller, then reporting for ABC News, but soon to become the FBIS chief spokesman, traveled to Afghanistan for a dramatic nightline report on the most dangerous man you’ve never heard of. That would air on ABC the following month. He lives in a cave atop a range of mountains in Afghanistan. From there, he controls a web of financial, logistical and strategic assistance to sunni islamic groups engaged in what they consider a jihad, or holy war.

The principal targets of that jihad are the Israelis and the United States. His name is Osama bin Laden, and you will meet him a little later in this program. He does nothing to undermine the profile of himself as a terrorist leader with global influence. Indeed, he seems to take considerable satisfaction in it. Even though the profile has been drawn by us intelligence agencies. We believe that the biggest thieves in the world are Americans and the biggest terrorists on earth are the Americans.

The only way for us to fend off these assaults is by using similar means. We do not differentiate between those dressed in military uniforms and civilians. They are all targets in this fatwa. Bin Laden has issued these fatwas and made these threats before. But this time there’s something different. He put a time cap on it, saying that whatever action will be taken against Americans in the Gulf, whatever violence awaits will occur within the next few weeks.

And in August of 1998, the name of Osama bin Laden, terror mastermind, and his shadowy terror group, al Qaeda, finally exploded into the public consciousness. Terrorist attack on Americans, half a world. It is the worst thing I’ve ever seen. Clearly a part of someone’s war against the United States. Although it is still unclear at this hour who our enemy is. Oh, it was a huge explosion. I had.

I still bit death from it. We all just hit the floor as soon as it went off. On the morning of August 7, 1998, two Saudis in Kenya, Mohammed al Awali and Jihad al Yazam, both of whom had been in the hut when John Miller was interviewing Osama bin Laden earlier that year, loaded some boxes into their Toyota cargo truck and headed off to the american embassy in downtown Nairobi.

The boxes contained 2000 pounds of tnt, aluminum nitrate and aluminum powder. At the same time, Hamdan Caliph ala Awad, an Egyptian known as Ahmed the German for his fair hair, loaded a similar bomb into a gasoline truck in Tanzania and set off for the american embassy in Dar es Salaam. The Saudis arrived at the Nairobi embassy at 10:30 a. m. Awali jumped out of the truck as it approached the gates, demanding that the security guard raise the drop bar protecting the entrance.

The guard refused. Awali threw a stun grenade into the courtyard and ran. And then the bomb went off. The blast ripped the face off of the embassy building, collapsing a nearby secretarial college and lighting the tar covered street and a nearby bus on fire. 213 were dead and 4500 injured. Nine minutes later, Ahmed the German parked the gasoline truck in the parking lot of the american embassy and Dar es Salon and detonated his bomb.

He had parked next to a water tanker truck, which ended up absorbing much of the blast, but the building was still badly damaged. Eleven were dead and 85 injured. The message was clear and was dutifully broadcast by media around the world. A new terror group had conducted a sophisticated, coordinated attack against multiple us targets overseas, and its leader was waging holy war against Americans. Al Qaeda had arrived.

What had happened was the first major attack by al Qaeda on american targets and the worst international terrorist incident on african soil. Afterwards, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation placed al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden on its list of most wanted fugitives. But like so many events in the al Qaeda story, this attack, too bore the fingerprints of american intelligence on each stage of its development and execution.

The attacks, prosecutors later discovered, were being planned as far back as 1993, when Osama bin Laden sent his FBI CIA Green Beret triple agent extraordinaire Ali Mohammed to survey potential us, british, french, and israeli targets in Nairobi, according to Muhammad’s own testimony. I later went to Khartoum, where my surveillance files and photographs were reviewed by Osama bin Laden, Abu Haas, Abu Ubaidah and others. Bin Laden looked at the picture of the american embassy and pointed to where a truck could go as a suicide bomber.

Joining Mohammed on the scouting mission was Anas al Libi, a member of a libyan al Qaeda cell known as al Mukatila, described as the computer wizard of al Qaeda’s hierarchy. Not only was al Libi personally trained by Muhammad at the al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan, he was also a protected british intelligence asset. Al Libi applied for asylum in Britain in 1995, claiming to be a political enemy of the libyan government.

But as the Guardian later reported, astonishingly, despite suspicions that he was a high level al Qaeda operative, al Libi was given political asylum in Britain and lived in Manchester until May of 2000, when he eluded a police raid on his house and fled abroad. The raid discovered a 180 page al Qaeda manual for jihad, containing instructions for terrorist attacks. Even more incredibly, not only did the british government grant that asylum, they then recruited al Liby for a failed Mi six operation, to assassinate libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi in 1996, and then let him continue to live in the country even after the embassy bombing before ultimately letting him escape.

According to FBI investigator Ali Sufan, the Manchester raid didnt just nab a manual for jihad. It caught al Libi himself. As Sufan recounts in his book the Black Banners, the british police let al Libby go when he denied being a terrorist, he evaded the team that was sent to follow him and fled the country, eventually ending up on the US governments most wanted list with a $25 million reward for his capture.

Yet another important figure in the bombing who was well known to american intelligence was Wadi al Hajj, the naturalized american citizen who had assisted the al Kifah plotters and who Mahmoud Abu Halima had identified to prosecutors after his arrest for the World Trade center bombing. As was later revealed, us intelligence had El Hajj under surveillance during the entire period that the embassy bombing plot was being hatched, but once again merely watched as the attack unfolded.

As the Los Angeles Times detailed, the CIA and the FBI missed key opportunities to prevent the blasts. They knew from wiretaps on El Haj’s four Nairobi phones, as well as from the computer files they had seized, that al Qaeda was forming a terror cell in the kenyan capital. Indeed, us agents had in hand the names and identities of some of the key Nairobi cell members who would rent the bomb factory, build the bomb, buy the bomb truck, brief the suicide bombers, and even escort the bomb truck the day of the attack.

Author Simon Reeve revealed even more damning evidence about CIA involvement in the plot in his 1999 book the New Jackals. The CIA also had informants working within the East Africa cell, he reported, citing an interview with the CIA official. But they apparently failed to warn of bin Ladens plans, even if the CIA sources within the plot had somehow failed to warn them of the attack. The fact that multiple members of the cell under their surveillance, including Abdullah Ahmed, Abdullah Ahmed, Khalfan Ghaylani Usama al Khini, Mohammed Sadiq Odeh, and five other conspirators all fled Kenya for Pakistan the night before.

The bombing would have instantly raised alarm bells if the agencys intention had been to prevent an attack. Instead, the plotters conspired with CIA informants in their midst, and the attacks went ahead under the watchful eye of CIA, NSA, and FBI surveillance. However they transpired, the bombings succeeded in introducing Osama bin Laden in al Qaeda to the world stage. Despite the years of intelligence agency surveillance and even the creation of a virtual CIA station dedicated solely to the capture, arrest, or assassination of bin Laden and his network.

It wasn’t until after the embassy bombings that the world at large began to hear the name of Osama bin Laden. On August 20, three weeks after the bombing, and just three days after being publicly interrogated about the Monica Lewinsky affair, President Clinton ordered a missile strike on alleged al Qaeda targets in Afghanistan and Sudan. Boldly proclaiming that actions against bin Laden and international terror had become a new mission for the US military.

Today, I ordered our armed forces to strike at terrorist related facilities in Afghanistan and Sudan because of the imminent threat they presented to our national security. I want to speak with you about the objective of this action and why it was necessary. Our target was terror. Our mission was clear to strike at the network of radical groups affiliated with and funded by Usama bin Laden, perhaps the preeminent organizer and financier of international terrorism in the world today.

The strike, however, a barrage of 66 Tomahawk cruise missiles targeting al Qaeda’s camp in coast, Afghanistan, and a pharmaceutical plant thought to be manufacturing chemical weapons in Khartoum was a spectacular failure on almost every level. Neither bin Laden nor Zawahiri were killed in the attacks, and the chemical weapons plant in Khartoum had nothing to do with either bin Laden or chemical weapons, but was in fact manufacturing much needed medicines for the region.

The plant’s destruction, in the estimation of Werner Daum, then Germany’s ambassador to Sudan, led to several tens of thousands of deaths in the region. Hyman al Zawahiri, bin Laden’s longtime associate and future leader of al Qaeda, was on one of bin Laden’s monitored satellite phones at the time of the attack, telling BBC journalist Ral Mullah Yuzhuzai that bin Laden has a message. He says, I have not bombed the american embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

I have declared jihad, but I was not involved. Zawahiri’s exact position would have been immediately detectable by american surveillance aircraft in the region. But in a move that journalist Lawrence Wright called inexplicable, the aircraft were not available prior to the strike, and Zawahiri escaped unscathed. Bin Laden, meanwhile, was, according to CIA intelligence, gleaned from intercepted satellite calls, going to be at his training camp in coast the day of the missile strike.

But he was not. He was, Clinton counterterrorisar Richard Clark later speculated, tipped off about the attack by a retired head of the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence service that had long been known as an adjunct of the CIA. The attacks did succeed in two key respects, however. They kept Clinton’s personal dalliances in the Oval Office from leading America’s nightly news broadcasts for at least one news cycle. And they reinforced the importance of the new threat to global security, Osama bin Laden.

This new threat provided a green light for the american security establishment and its allies around the world to ramp up operations in the name of fighting the al Qaeda menace. The FBI began an international investigation of the bombing. The CIA began a surge of reporting on terror threats that counter terror officials later complained overwhelmed the system and diverted attention and resources. And in November of 1998, the United States federal court finally issued its first public indictment of Osama bin Laden.

The first international arrest warrant for bin Laden, a confidential document intended only for police and judicial authorities, had in fact already been issued in April of that year. But it was not issued by the US. Instead, it was the libyan government that had issued the warrant through Interpol. They were pursuing the terror mastermind for his part in the murder of two german intelligence agents in Libya in 1994.

At the time, despite publicly recognizing bin Laden as the premier financier of international terrorism, the US and british governments downplayed the document, even making sure to scrub the charges against Osama and any mention of Libyas role in issuing the document from the public record. But this surge in activity around the al Qaeda threat resulted in at least one surprising development. In one of the most consequential and underreported moves in this redoubled counterterrorism effort, Ali Muhammad was finally arrested.

Contacted in the days after the bombing, Mohammed admitted to FBI agents that he knew who had carried out the attack but would not give the government the names. Subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury in the southern district of New York, he was finally arrested, although even the charges against him were kept secret from the public. On October 20, 2000, Mohammed pled guilty to involvement in the embassy bombings, but he was never sentenced.

He then disappeared from sight, forever held in what was later reported as protective custody. To this day, there is no public record of Ali Muhammad, the ex us sergeant and FBI asset who admitted to his key role in al Qaeda, ever being sentenced. There is no public record of his incarceration and there are only a handful of accounts that have ever surfaced from people who talked to him in prison in the aftermath of 911.

And just like that, one of the deepest mysteries of the al Qaeda story disappeared from public sight, never to be seen again. But despite all this increased activity, the same pattern of oversights and mistakes by the intelligence agencies continued unabated on October 12, 2000, when a small fiberglass fishing boat approached the massive 8300 ton USS coal, a billion dollar guided missile destroyer employing the latest stealth technology and armed with Tomahawk cruise missiles, anti ship and anti aircraft missiles, and a five inch cannon.

The sailors on board watched in amusement. The tiny skiff stopped amidships and two men stood up, waving and smiling. Then a bomb exploded. US Navy officials in Bahrain today said suspect suicide bombers badly damaged in a terrorist attack in Yemen. American sailors were killed, injured, missing immediately suspect Osama bin Laden. The boat had been carrying over 400 pounds of c four explosive molded into a shaped charge. The explosion was immense, knocking over cars passing by on shore in the city miles away, people believed there was an earthquake taking place.

The blast tore a hole 40ft by 40ft in the hull of the coal, killing 17 us servicemen and injuring 39 more. It was the deadliest attack on a us destroyer in over a decade. But this attack, like all of al Qaeda’s spectacular terror attacks of the 1990s, was preceded by a string of missed opportunities and unheeded warnings. Not only was there intelligence about a potential attack on a us naval ship from several different sources, including reports from multiple informants and intercepted phone calls to al Qaeda’s NSA monitored Yemen communications hub, but as Congressman Kurt Weldon revealed in 2005, a secret military intelligence operation codenamed Able Danger actually warned the Pentagon days before the bombing that an attack was going to take place in Yemen.

But two weeks before the attack on the coal, in fact, two days before the attack on the coal, they saw an increase of activity that led them to say to the senior leadership in the Pentagon at that time and the Clinton administration, there’s something going to happen in Yemen and we better be on high alert. But it was discounted. That story has yet to be told to the american people.

Another able danger, successful activity that was thwarted. But even after the spectacular failure of these intelligence agencies to thwart the attack, and despite President Clinton’s assurance that he would find and retaliate against the bomb plotters, if, as it now appears, this was an act of terrorism, it was a despicable and cowardly act. We will find out who was responsible and hold them accountable. The CIA repeatedly denied FBI investigators access to key information about the plot.

But it turns out the CIA did have such information. And that information, deliberately withheld from the FBI or any other investigative agency, led directly into the heart of the operation behind the next spectacular terror attack to be blamed on al Qaeda. 911. Clear skies, 80% humidity. That’s dropped about 10%. Read this word. The bastard. Get ready. Yes, ma’am. Get ready. See that? United 175. Anywhere? United 175. That just took off out of a thing.

We might have a hijack over here. Two of them. Extensive coverage in this hour. There is something in the air. We have some planes. Just stay quiet and you’ll be okay. We’re returning to the airport. We just got a report in that there’s been some sort of explosion at the World Trade center in New York City, one report said. From the beginning, 911 was presented to the public as an open and shut case.

Osama bin Laden’s name was raised on air by the tv news anchors within seconds of the second plane strike and was endlessly repeated in the hours and days that followed. By the end of the week, the public was convinced that the events were the work of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda, and all of the subsequent investigations and commissions only served to bolster that preformed conclusion. So it was no surprise at all when, on September 14, 2001, the FBI released its list of 19 hijackers, Muslims with arabic names who, we were told, had been sent by bin Laden on a suicide mission.

But who were these men? For the general public, the newscasters solemn intonation that the 19 hijackers had been identified, followed by a Mugshot like lineup of photographs, with all that was needed to cement the case in their minds, those who required more detail turned to made for tv dramas and documentaries to learn about the so called Hamburg cell of radicalized al Qaeda soldiers, which included Muhammad Atta, Ziad Jarrah, and Marwan al Shahi, three of the alleged suicide pilots.

Finally, the 911 commission and its associated monographs like the staff report on 911 and terrorist travel, attempted to fill in the paper trail for researchers concerned about the documentary record of these men, including their motivations and their movement. From these accounts, a picture emerged. These 19 terrorists, crack operatives, handpicked by Osama bin Laden and trained in his terror camps in Afghanistan, had used their carefully honed spycraft to slip into the country, deftly avoiding scrutiny from the authorities, even as they trained at flight schools in the US and finalized the operational details of their plan.

Then, after years of meticulous preparation, these men, consumed by their hatred of the west, their love of Allah, and their devotion to bin Laden, deftly piloted their planes into their targets, wreaking havoc and devastation exactly as planned. If everything goes well, every one of you should pat the other on the shoulder in confidence. Remind your brothers that this act is for almighty God, or they should sing songs to boost their morale, as the pious first generations did in the throws of father.

Afterwards, we will all meet in the highest heaven, Inshallah. But this story, too, is a carefully constructed lie, every part of which falls apart under sustained scrutiny. In the official conspiracy theory of 911, the alleged hijackers were such devout fundamentalist Muslims that they were willing to give their lives for the cause. Marwan al Shahi, we were told, was so devoted to his religious beliefs that he observed the Ramadan fast against medical advice after a stomach operation, causing him to fall severely ill.

Ziad just Jarrah, meanwhile, initially caroused and smoked during his early days in Hamburg, but then grew intensely religious and withdrawn. And according to award winning journalist Lawrence Wright, Mohammed Attas extreme rigidity of character made him into a ruthless killer who constantly demonstrated an aversion to women. When reporters began following the trail that these supposed suicide soldiers had left behind, however, they began to uncover an altogether different story.

Ata and his associates frequented strip clubs in San Diego, Las Vegas and Daytona beach, where they drank alcohol and ordered lap dances. They hung out for days at a time at Harry’s Bar in New York, where Ata preferred a table near the piano. And three nights before the attack, Atta and al Sheyhi went to Shuckum’s oyster bar in Fort Lauderdale, where, according to bar manager Tony Amos, they consumed several drinks, became drunk, and gave the bartender a hard time about the bill.

The guy, Mohammed, was drunk, his voice was slurred, and he had a thick accent, Amos told the Associated Press the day after 911. Even the New York Times reported on Atta and El Shahi’s high life during multiple visits to the Philippines between 1998 and 2000, where the pair of strict religious fundamentalists and an entourage of arab men and their girlfriends flashed money, drank, and partied regularly. Many times I saw him let a girl go at the gate in the morning, the Times quoted.

One hotel chambermaid is recalling about Atta. It was always a different girl. And during his research for welcome to Terrorland, an investigation into the Venice, Florida, flight schools where Mohamed Atta, Marwan Alshahi and Ziad Jarrah were enrolled in the year 2000, Daniel Hopsicker interviewed Amanda Keller, a former stripper who claimed to have been Attas girlfriend during his time in Venice and who shared more stories about the partying of these alleged jihadis.

Guys had money flowing out their ass, excuse my language, but they never seemed to run out of money. I mean, they was just tossing money left and right. I mean, it was just like, oh my God. And they had, they had massive supplies of cocaine. Whenever they’d run out, they’d go to the fight school. But Hopsicker’s investigation uncovered more than just the alleged hijackers trail of booze, drugs and women.

He also became one of the only reporters to look into the strange connections of Huffman Aviation and the Florida Flight training center in Venice, Florida, where Atta, Alshehi and Jara trained. The year before September 11. Huffman aviation was also the flight school that Yaslam bin Laden, Osama’s half brother, paid for flight lessons for one of his acquaintances. The flight school was run by Rudy Deckers, a dutch native who was running a commuter airline with Wally Hilliard.

Hilliard, the founder and former president of a Green Bay, Wisconsin based insurance company, made news in October 2000 when his personal jet was found to be transporting 42 pounds of heroin and was seized by federal agents in what was called the biggest drug bust in central Florida history. But Hilliards charter airline startup had high level political support. Jeb Bush, then governor of Florida, posed for photo ops in support of Hilliards airline.

Deckers, meanwhile, was arrested in 2012 having told an undercover agent, in the words of the criminal complaint against him, that he was involved in narcotics transportation via private aircraft and that he has flown narcotics and us currency previously without any problems. He was carrying over 18 cocaine and nearly 1 heroin at the time of his arrest. Despite the many questions that still hang over the alleged hijackers activities in Venice and their connection to the drug running that was allegedly taking place at the Venice airport, an even deeper question was soon to emerge.

How did these pilots, who were rated as competent at best and who one instructor insisted should have been further along the flight school curriculum than they were, manage to fly jumbo jets that require thousands of hours of flying experience with such precision? That question is even more important in the case of the other alleged 911 pilot, Hani Honjour, the diminutive five foot five inch Saudi who the official story tells us helped overpower grizzled Navy top gun honor graduate Chuck Burlingame and his flight crew at the controls of American Airlines Flight 77.

According to that story, Honjor allegedly flew a Boeing 757 with what aviation sources for the Washington Post described as extraordinary skill, through a 7000 foot spiral descent to hit the Pentagon, a move that veteran airline pilot Ed soliday told the 911 commission would be tough for any pilot, including himself, and which left one radar operator at Dulles airport stunned. The speed, the maneuverability, the way that he turned, we all thought in the radar room, all of us experienced air traffic controllers, that that was a military plane.

But Honjoor, by all accounts, was a completely inept pilot. He dropped out of his first flight school, the Sierra Academy of Aeronautics, after only a few classes. He then dropped out of his next school, cockpit resource management, in Scottsdale, Arizona, after the school’s owner dismissed him as a weak student who was wasting our resources. When he returned to that school again, the following year, the school owner refused, asserting, you’re never going to make it.

An instructor at his next school, Sawyer Aviation called him a neophyte who got overwhelmed with the instruments in the school’s flight simulator. An instructor at his next school concurred. Honjor had no motivation, a poor understanding of the basic principles of aviation and poor judgment combined with poor technical skills. After bypassing the FAA to obtain a commercial pilot’s license from a for profit contractor, the operation manager at yet another flight school in the Phoenix area, Peggy Chevret, told Fox News that Honduras was clearly unqualified to be in the cockpit.

I couldnt believe that he had a license of any kind with the skills that he had. Even the New York Times conceded that the remarkable flight attributed to Honjior on 911 was inexplicable. In an article headlined a trainee noted for incompetence, the paper quoted one former flight school employee who knew Honjor as saying, im still to this day amazed that he could have flown into the Pentagon. He could not fly at all.

Whatever the case, what would eventually become the official explanation for this seeming incongruity, namely, that the single engine aircraft training and jet simulation training that they had received was good enough for these men to jump into the cockpit of commercial jet airliners and pilot them hundreds of miles to their targets, was rejected in the first hours of the attack as completely implausible. And meanwhile, they did spend seven months at this flying school in Venice, according to these records.

And although they were not trained to fly jets, do people believe that what they learned there was easily transferable to, say, a 757 or 767? Actually, no, they don’t say that it’s easily transferable because it’s such a different type of jet. But nonetheless, they got that initial training in Venice, Florida. Whether they’re, whether their training continued elsewhere, you know, you have to assume it took place somewhere else.

Where they learned it, though, at this point, I don’t know, and the FBI hasn’t told us. All right, Kerry Sanders, interesting development down there. A Newsweek story of September 15, 2001, provided one potential answer to this puzzle. According to a high ranking US Navy source cited by the report, three of the alleged hijackers listed their address on driver’s licenses and car registrations as the naval air station in Pensacola.

And according to a separate high ranking Pentagon official, another of the alleged hijackers may have received language instruction at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. But this report, like the subsequent reports of people with the same name as the alleged hijackers turning up alive and well in the wake of 911, which prompted the FBI to apologize to one mistakenly named suspect and forced FBI director Robert Mueller to acknowledge that they were not certain of the identities of several of the named men, were eventually dismissed as mere confusion over common arab names.

On September 28, 2001, the FBI released the final list of names and photographs of the alleged hijackers, and this rogues gallery of fearsome al Qaeda operatives was cemented in the public imagination. So who were these 19 men? If they really were who the FBI said they were, who directed them, how were they supposed to have entered the United States? How did they fund their operations? And how did they evade detection while living openly in the US for months and in some cases, years? In the months after the attacks, we were told that the men identified by the FBI as the culprits had moved through Europe and America unnoticed, and that although several of them had been tracked by intelligence until they got inside the United States, they were ultimately lost.

We were told that al Qaeda’s communications had been monitored, but that bin Laden and his henchmen used scramblers, Internet encryption, fiber optics. So it was very hard to intercept those transmissions. And we were told that no one was to blame for the attacks, which had merely been a failure of imagination. As we detail in our report, this was a failure of policy, management capability, and above all, a failure of imagination.

But as the public was to learn in bits and pieces over the course of the next two decades, every one of these assertions was a demonstrable lie. This alleged team of crack al Qaeda operatives did not move through Europe and America unnoticed. Their communications were not rendered opaque to the intelligence agencies because of fiber optics. Their successful penetration of America’s defenses was not due to a failure of imagination.

Instead, as even the official story of the attacks now concedes, every major branch of us intelligence had key pieces of information on these al Qaeda operatives, their communications, their movements, and their plans. In fact, as can now be shown from official sources, these agencies not only deliberately allowed these operatives to proceed unmolested, but actively stopped investigators and agents within their ranks from blowing the whistle on the plot.

At the FBI, special agent Robert Wright led an investigation into terrorist financing called vulgar betrayal that managed to uncover a money trail connecting a suspected Chicago terror cell to al Qaeda. But when Wright attempted to bring criminal charges against the cell members, his supervisor flew into a rage, shouting, you will not open criminal investigations. I forbid any of you. You will not open criminal investigations against any of these intelligence subjects.

After the embassy bombings, when Wrights team began to trace the financing of the attacks to a group of saudi businessmen. The FBI moved to shut down the investigation altogether. Wright was kicked off the case in 1999, and vulgar betrayal was officially shut down in 2000. Knowing what I know, and again this was written 91 days before the attack. Knowing what I know, I can confidently say that until the investigative responsibilities for terrorism are removed from the FBI, I will not feel safe.

While Wright was pursuing the financial trail, FBI field agents across the US were picking up on another trend, muslim extremists learning to fly. Agents in Oklahoma and Phoenix both wrote memos about the large numbers of middle eastern males receiving flight training and warned that some of them had documentable ties to al Qaeda. But the warnings were ignored. Agents in Minneapolis frantically sought approval for a search warrant to search the laptop of Zacharias Moussaoui, a suspected terrorist who had been receiving flight training in the area.

When that request was denied, one exasperated agent told FBI headquarters that he was trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center. Rita Flack, an intelligence operations specialist at headquarters who had read the Phoenix memo, failed to pass that info on to any of her colleagues involved in the decision to deny the warrant to search Moussowi’s laptop. FBI whistleblower Colleen Rowley later revealed that agents in the Minneapolis office, desperately trying to find an answer to the question of why the bureau was deliberately sabotaging the case, faced the problem with Gallo’s humor.

I know I shouldnt be flippant about this, but jokes were actually made that the key FBI HQ personnel had to be spies or moles like Robert Hansen, who were actually working for Osama bin Laden to have so undercut Minneapolis effort. The Pentagons intelligence branch, meanwhile, not only had foreknowledge of the plot, but according to information that emerged years later and was quickly suppressed, had identified four of the presumed terror operatives and mapped out the network connecting them to the Brooklyn cell headed by the blind Sheikh Abel danger was a classified information operations campaign against transnational terrorism launched by military intelligence in the fall of 1999.

1st revealed to the public in June 2005, able Danger employed data mining techniques on open source and classified information to identify networks of likely terror agents, including those operating in the US. The program was remarkably successful. Not only did it warn the Pentagon of an impending attack just days before the coal bombing, as we have already seen, but according to Defense intelligence agency Whistleblower, Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Schaefer and four of his colleagues working on the operation, Abel Danger identified two of the terror cells connecting al Qaeda to the alleged hijackers.

It even identified four of those suspects, including Mohamed Atta by name. When Lieutenant Colonel Schaeffer tried to set up a meeting between his supervisor and FBI officials in Washington to discuss a collaborative approach to tracking these cells, he was rebuffed by lawyers for the Pentagon Special Operations Command. Shortly thereafter, Schaeffer was ordered off the able danger team and the unit was disbanded, with the Pentagon ordering all the able danger data, 2.

5 terabytes worth of information, equivalent to one quarter of all the printed material in the Library of Congress, destroyed after a hostile investigation that left witnesses feeling intimidated into changing their story about able danger still found five Pentagon employees who said they had seen the organizational chart with Attas name on it. The Department of Defense inspector general concluded that able Danger had never identified ADA or any other alleged hijacker.

And just two months after the story became public, including Schaeffer’s revelation that he had met with 911 commission executive director Philip Zelikow and told him all of the details of the program. In an extensive hour long debriefing in Afghanistan that did not find its way into the commission’s final report, the DIA stripped Schaeffer of his security clearance, essentially ending his decades long career as a military intelligence officer.

Mister speaker, this is not some third rate burglary cover up. This is not some Watergate incident. This is an attempt to prevent the american people from knowing the facts about how we could have prevented 911. And people are covering it up today and they’re ruining the career of a military officer to do it, and we can’t let it stand. The NSA, meanwhile, despite the scrambler and fiber optics excuses of the agencys apologists were monitoring all of the communications going through al Qaeda’s pivotal Yemen communications hub.

From the lead up to the embassy bombings, straight through to the execution of 911 itself. This communications hub, discovered in 1996 when the NSA began tapping into and transcribing the satellite phone calls of bin Laden, was in fact the home of Ahmed al Hada, one of the jihadis who had fought alongside bin Laden against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s. Hadas phone was used by various al Qaeda linked operatives to pass messages to each other as some countries blocked or monitored calls to other countries as possible terrorist communications.

The NSA listened as Mohammed al Awali, one of the bombers involved in the embassy attack, made multiple calls to the hub before and after the attack. They listened as al Qaeda operatives called the hub to discuss attacking a us warship in the months prior to the coal bombing. And they listened as numerous terror suspects called to discuss their operations with Khalid al Maidar, one of the alleged 911 hijackers, and the son in law of Ahmed al Hada.

Thomas Drake was a decorated United States Air Force and United States Navy veteran with a background in military crypto electronics who had worked for twelve years as an outside contractor at the NSA. 911 was his first full day as an employee of the agency, and it was in the wake of that attack that he was handed a report from one of his colleagues in the NSA’s counter terror shop that laid out the agencys role in the events of that day.

According to Drake, the report was an extraordinarily detailed long term study of al Qaeda’s activities that identified the planning cells for 911, including a number of the hijackers based on actual copy Ata Hazmi Maidar, all of whom had appeared on the NSAS radar by the start of 2001. It also contained specific warnings about 911. Drake immediately gave the document to his supervisor, Maureen Baginski, who told him, Tom, I wish you had not brought this to my attention.

He was subsequently forced out of his position, stripped of his security clearance, and indicted under the Espionage act on the day of the attacks. Knowing the information that the NSA had that could have foiled the plot, the analysts began to break down. Two staffers suffered heart attacks, with one dying. Another, a female analyst who had been responsible for monitoring the Yemen hub communications, left NSA headquarters after suffering what Drake was told was a nervous breakdown.

Yet another, a 40 something man, began openly crying in a hallway, telling three women he was talking to in full view of everyone passing. We knew this was being planned months ago, but they would not let us issue the reports we wrote. NSA leadership, however, like Drake’s supervisor and the head of the SigINT division, Maureen Baginski, had a different reaction to the events unfolding that morning. I would hear the following phrase, which I think one person in particular probably had regrets ever saying more publicly that 911 was a gift, NSA a gift.

In fact, the story of intelligence agency foreknowledge of the plot goes from the merely impossible to the outright absurd when it is revealed that it wasn’t just us intelligence that had a window into the plot, but every major intelligence service in the world. In subsequent years, it has emerged that intelligence agencies in Indonesia, the UK, Germany, Italy, Egypt, Russia, Jordan, France, and of course Israel had all passed on various warnings about an imminent attack in the months and years leading up to 911.

And infamously, the president received a classified intelligence briefing on August 6, 2001 that unequivocally stated that an attack was being prepared. Isn’t it a fact, Doctor Rice, that the August 6 PDF be warned against possible attacks in this country? And I ask you whether you recall the title of that PDB. I believe the title was bin Laden determined to attack inside the United States. It’s no surprise that this plot, the most important ever attempted by al Qaeda, would have been known by so many.

Not only did the men that we are told bin Laden handpicked for the operation make no effort to hide their movements or obscure their activities, they instead, in the words of some investigators, left a deliberate trail behind them, a trail that was picked up and extensively reported on in the immediate wake of the attacks. Customs inspectors at Dubai airport became suspicious when they noticed that Jarrah had pasted a page of the Quran into his passport.

When they searched his luggage, they discovered piles of radical muslim propaganda. What he did next remains a mystery to terrorism experts worldwide. He talked freely about his future plans. One possible clue has developed in Florida. A car was towed from the Daytona beach airport to this impound lot near Daytona. An airport worker called police because the car had photographs of Osama bin Laden in the backseat. And that’s why they geared up the FBI agents in the field immediately, and they located him in south Florida and again over on the west coast of Florida, in Venice.

Were they surprised, Kerry, that he wasn’t traveling under an assumed name? I think they are. But clearly, from what the indications are at this point, these terrorists are not hiding, you know, after the fact or anything like that. I mean, I think that one of the agents told me that what he believes is that they wanted to leave this trail. Perhaps the greatest clue as to the real nature of the 911 operation, however, is found in one of the most stunning pieces of evidence of direct intelligence agency complicity in the plot.

In the years after the attack, it was revealed that the CIA were not just surveilling the supposed hijackers or gathering information on their plans. They actively stopped information about these men’s travels from reaching other intelligence agencies, deliberately hiding the fact that two of these agents had entered the US and were openly living in the country from the FBI and even from the National Security Council itself for over one and a half years.

This incredible fact, buried in footnote 44 of chapter six of the 911 commission report with no trivial detail. 911 Commission chair Thomas Kain called it one of the most troubling aspects of our entire report. White House counter terror czar Richard Clark said that it is evidence of both CIA malfeasance and misfeasance. And Mark Rossini, an FBI agent assigned to the CIA’s bin Laden unit, believed it to be part of a secret intelligence operation involving these supposed terrorist hijackers that the agency didn’t want anyone to discover.

You know, the agency had an obligation to tell the bureau about these individuals, and in particular, when it was determined that they did go on to the US, that they did travel to America, I think they had some sort of operational plan going on that they didn’t want the bureau to know about. Shortly after the coal bombing, Fahad al Kuso, a yemeni with known links to Osama bin Laden, was interrogated by yemeni agents and admitted that he had flown from Yemen to Bangkok the previous January to deliver $36,000 to Khalad, a terrorist based in Malaysia who Cuso identified as the bombing mastermind.

The money, Cuso said, was to buy this one legged terror mastermind, an artificial leg. But Ali Soufan, the head of the FBI investigation into the coal bombing, was puzzled by this lead. Why was al Qaeda transferring money out of Yemen when they were supposedly planning an attack in that country? Was this money for a different operation? As with every such lead, Soufan followed up with an official request to the CIA for any information they had on collad in Malaysia or the phone number that Cuso had used to contact him there.

The CIA never responded to any of these official requests, but Soufans intuitions were correct. On December 29, 1999, with all of the US intelligence services on heightened alert due to the threat of millennium terror attacks, the NSA shares information from their wiretap of al Qaeda’s Yemen communication hub with the CIA. Khalid al Maitar, Nawaf al Hazmi, and Salem Alhazmi, will be flying to Malaysia to attend an important al Qaeda summit the following month.

The CIA, already aware of Almidars connection to the Yemen communications hub, tasks agents from eight CIA offices and six friendly foreign intelligence services with tracking his travel to Malaysia. The surveillance operation is successful. When Almaydar changes planes in Dubai, the CIA obtains a copy of his passport. Inside is a vital piece of information. This known bin Laden associate, on his way to an al Qaeda summit has a visa to enter the United States, a visa that was issued at the same jeddah consulate where Michael Springman testified the CIA was helping to secure visas for Osama bin Laden’s men during the afghan soviet war.

Seasoned intelligence officials have no trouble understanding the importance of this fact. Reflecting on the incredible nature of this series of events years later, veteran FBI agent Jack Clunen how often do you get into someone’s suitcase and find multiple entry visas? And how often do you know there’s going to be an organizational meeting of al Qaeda? Any place in the world? The chances are slim to none. This is as good as it gets.

It’s a home run in the 9th inning of the World Series. This is the kind of case you hope your whole life for. What happened next is so inexplicable for purveyors of the official 911 conspiracy theory that it is typically never discussed. After scoring this once in a lifetime intelligence coup, this home run in the 9th inning of the World Series, the CIA then failed to watch list either al Maidar or al Hazmi allegedly lost track of them after they went on from Malaysia to Thailand, despite having the phone number of the hotel where they stayed in Bangkok and failed to inform FBI investigators like Ali Sufan that these known terror associates had been tracked to an al Qaeda summit.

Most incredibly of all, the official record shows that supervisors in the CIAS bin Laden unit repeatedly and deliberately stopped agents from sending info about Almidars us visa to the FBI. On January 5, 2000, while the summit was still underway in Kuala Lumpur, the CIAS Riyadh station forwarded the information about Almeidars visa to Alec station at Langley. Doug Miller, an FBI officer assigned to the bin Laden unit as part of an intelligence sharing program between the CIA and the FBI, read the cable and following protocol immediately drafted a memo asking for permission to forward the Info to FBI headquarters.

The reply from Millers CIA supervisor Michael Ann Casey citing Alec stations deputy chief Tom Wilshire, was immediate and unequivocal. This is not a matter for the FBI. Thus began an 18 month odyssey in which 50 CIA personnel documentably accessed this information and not one of them ever officially shared it with any FBI or National Security Council official. Even then, counter terrorism czar Richard Clark. You understand, the way they update us at the White House is every morning I come in, I turn on my computer and I get 100, 150 CIA reports.

I’m not relying on somebody calling me and telling me things. You have to intentionally stop it. You have to intervene and say no, I don’t want that report to go. And I never got a report to that effect. On its own, this is scarcely believable. The Central Intelligence Agency actively and deliberately made a decision to stop the automatic sharing of information on the most sensitive national security intelligence in their possession.

On September 12, 2001, when the CIA finally granted al Sufans request from nearly one year before and sent him their intelligence about the Malaysia meeting, he began visibly shaking and rushed to the bathroom, vomiting on the floor next to the toilet. When one of his colleagues asked him what had happened, he said, they knew. They knew. But neither Sifan nor anyone else familiar with the hidden history of al Qaeda should be surprised when put into its context.

This episode is a perfectly predictable continuation of the same pattern of intelligence agency aid that, as we have seen, defines the story of al Qaeda. It is sometimes said that in order to be successful in their mission, the intelligence agencies have to get everything right all the time, whereas the terrorists only have to get lucky once. But the al Qaeda terrorists, protected, shepherded, and aided by the intelligence agencies, as they demonstrably were, did not get lucky once.

They got lucky over and over and over again, time after time after time, year after year after year, from their earliest beginnings, through their development and growth, through their rise to international prominence, through every major terrorist attack of the 1990s and right up to the doorstep of 911. At this point, the incompetence theory of failures and missed opportunities is not only not supportable, it is a transparent falsehood.

There is only one conclusion possible. These terrorists were deliberately aided. This is not fringe conspiracy thinking. Even Richard Clark eventually came to this conclusion. For me, to this day, it is inexplicable. Why, when I had every other detail about everything related to terrorism, that the director didn’t tell me that the director of the counterterrorism center didn’t tell me that the other 48 people in CIA who knew about it never mentioned it to me, me or anyone in my staff.

In a period of over twelve months, they were stopped from getting to you and stopped from getting to the White House and stopped from getting to the FBI and the Defense Department. We therefore conclude that there was a high level decision in the CIA ordering people not to share that information. How high level? I think it would have to be made by the director. Have you asked George Tenet, a coper black, or Richard Blee about any of this after the fact? No.

That it kind of the facts tripped out to you over time, right. Over these investigations. And then you started, took a walk. Yeah. If you, you’ve never approached them. You used to be kind of buddies with him, right? So look at it this way. They’ve been able to get through a joint House investigation committee and get through the 911 commission, and this has never come out. They got away with it.

They’re not going to tell you, even if you’re water border, that the former top ranking counterterrorism official in the United States has publicly accused the former director of the CIA and other top CIA officials of running an operation involving the accused 911 hijackers and then covering up that operation and information about it up to and through 911. An incredible accusation recorded by two independent filmmakers and freely viewable on YouTube for the past decade, is apparently of so little importance that it has never been followed up on by any major media outlet.

But Clark’s version of the story, explosive as it is, that these accused terrorists really were terrorists, that they, like Ali Muhammad, managed to triple cross the intelligence agencies that were trying to use them as double agents against al Qaeda, and that the highest ranks of those intelligence agencies, up to and including the director of the CIA, engaged in a cover up of the entire affair, indirectly allowing 911 to take place purely to save their own skin, demonstrably cannot be the full story.

As we now know, these 19 men were no devout islamic fundamentalists, driven by their devotion into striking against the infidels. These alcohol drinking, strip club attending bumblers who at one point lived with an FBI informant and who left what investigators described as a deliberate trail behind them, were not master spies capable of triple crossing the CIA. They did not coordinate their plan to coincide precisely with the live fly hijacking exercises, military war games, and planes into building training drills that were taking place on the day of 911.

They did not overpower the military trained pilots on four separate planes before a single one of them could so much as send out a hijack signal. They did not know to commit those hijackings precisely in the highly classified radar gaps that made their planes movements opaque to flight traffic controllers. They did not pilot those planes through maneuvers that even experienced pilots called tough for any airline pilot, despite never having sat in the cockpit of a jumbo jet before.

They did not cause three buildings to pulverize themselves in mid air, falling directly through the path of most resistance at free fall gravitational acceleration. With two planes, they did not decide to fly around the Pentagon to miss the defense secretary’s office and instead hit the section of the building where bookkeepers and budget analysts were working on the problem of the $2. 3 trillion that Donald Rumsfeld had just 24 hours earlier earlier admitted could not be accounted for in the Defense Department’s budget.

They did not commit the informed trading that three separate academic studies have proven did take place in the run up to 911. They did not engage in the decades long cover up of these facts in the wake of that attack. And they did not launch the war of terror that sometimes saw the US and its allies using al Qaeda as a convenient excuse for aggression in foreign countries, and other times saw them actively collaborating with al Qaeda to achieve their geopolitical goals.

No, Richard Clark’s story is itself a cover up. The spectacular catalyzing terror attack of 911 was not allowed to happen. It was made to happen. But why? Who, other than the devout muslim suicide warriors posited by the official 911 conspiracy theorists, would do such a thing? And for what purpose? To answer these questions, we need to return to Operation Susannah and the false flag terror ruse that has been employed by the British, the Israelis, and the US throughout the past century.

As we shall see, just eight years after Operation Susannah failed in Egypt, the highest ranking officials in the US military drafted plans to stage terror attacks, blow up airliners, and even kill Americans in order to blame their political enemies. And in the lead up to 911, a cadre of political operatives brought those plans into the 21st century, paving the way for a new Pearl harbor that would begin a worldwide war of terror and a clash of civilizations.

Well, that is. Whoops. There you go. That is the. That’s up. That’s part one and two. So part of three. There’s a third part still to go. About. About an hour and 20 minutes. Hour and 30 minutes? I think so. Still more so. Anyway, I am, um. Wow, this was. I just. I’m speechless. This was phenomenal. I had no idea this was even out there. And, you know, I do a lot of digging, and I’m just.

I’m baffled that I missed this so because I’m big. I’m a big. Come here, buddy. You’re making my green screen. You’re not a very good window, brother. Come here. Come on. Come here. Come on, buddy. He doesn’t want to play very well, man. I just. I’m embarrassed that I missed this. But. But any. In any event, this is. I don’t know if I’m gonna do tomorrow night or I’ll leave it for next Friday, but the.

I’ll put a link to the original video in the description, and you guys can go follow. You know, if you’re not followed, James Corbett, you can absolutely go to his website and watch it almost in it all in its entirety. So, um. But in any event, on that note, guys, um. I’m gonna go. I’m, uh. Like, I. You can probably hear it. I’m not really feeling that great.

You know, I don’t think I kicked what, uh, what I have from a couple weeks ago entirely. Um, either that or it’s kind of coming back, like, I don’t know, if you can. I don’t know if you can hear my nasally. I’m. If I sound congested or not, but. But in any event, um, I’m gonna go. So you all enjoy your evening. Have, uh, have a great weekend.

Um, I may play this tomorrow just because I want to watch the third part. And I don’t want to rob you guys of not being able to see it at the same time. So, uh, so there’s a good possibility that that’ll happen tomorrow. So, anyway, all right, everybody, you all have a fantastic evening, and thank you for all your support and whatnot, and I will see you guys very soon.

Have a great night, everybody. Buddy. .

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