“that's for when we have the catastrophe and get struck and a lot of Americans die” -R. Blee




1) By Tim Golden and Sebastian Rotella Jan. 23, 2020 On the morning of Sept. 11 last year, about two dozen family members of those killed in the terror attacks filed into the White House to visit with President Trump. It was a choreographed, somewhat stiff encounter, in which each family walked to the center of the Blue Room to share a moment of conversation with Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump, before having a photograph taken with the first couple. Still, it was an opportunity the visitors were determined not to squander. One after another, the families asked Trump to release documents from the F.B.I.’s investigation into the 9/11 plot, documents that the Justice Department has long fought to keep secret. After so many years they needed closure, they said. They needed to know the truth. Some of the relatives reminded Trump that Presidents Bush and Obama blocked them from seeing the files, as did some of the F.B.I. bureaucrats the President so reviled. The visitors didn’t mention that they hoped to use the documents in a current federal lawsuit that accuses the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia — an American ally that has only grown closer under Trump — of complicity in the attacks. The President promised to help. “It’s done,” he said, reassuring several visitors. Later, the families were told that Trump ordered the attorney general, William P. Barr, to release the name of a Saudi diplomat who was linked to the 9/11 plot in an F.B.I. report years earlier. Justice Department lawyers handed over the Saudi official’s name in a protected court filing that could be read only by lawyers for the plaintiffs. But Barr dashed the families’ hopes. In a statement to the court on Sept. 12, he insisted that other documents that might be relevant to the case had to be protected as state secrets. Their disclosure, he wrote, risked “significant harm to the national security.” https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/23/magazine/9-11-saudi-arabia-fbi.html …………………….. 2) 15 of 19 9-11 hijackers got expeditious visas from US Consulate at Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, though they couldn’t in general even fill out the forms; a CIA covert group operated at that consulate. A US foreign service officer who processed visas at Jeddah in the 1990s later exposed all this in his, M. Springmann, book. Same double-game in terms of anthrax letters of 2001. -r. 15 Hijackers Obtained Visas in Saudi Arabia By Mary Beth Sheridan October 31, 2001 Fifteen of the 19 hijackers in the Sept. 11 attacks obtained U.S. visas in Saudi Arabia, where most citizens seeking to visit the United States are quickly approved without interviews, American officials said yesterday. Only 3 percent of Saudi visa applicants were turned down by U.S. consular officers in that country in fiscal 2000 and 2001, according to State Department figures. Saudis seeking visitors' visas generally submit their paperwork to travel agencies, and only a small minority are called in by U.S. diplomats for interviews, officials said. In contrast, about 25 percent of U.S. visa seekers worldwide are rejected. In countries such as Iraq or Iran, which the State Department lists as sponsors of terrorism, citizens often must wait weeks or months while their applications are scrutinized. https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2001/10/31/15-hijackers-obtained-visas-in-saudi-arabia/9fb44e5a-c650-4afc-a364-3eed64f374a8/ ……………….. 3) J. Cofer Black, Coordinator for Counterterrorism Cofer Black begins with a visual, inside the office of a man named Richard Blee, in the months before 9/11. “By the time 9/11 rolled around he had stacks of paper along this 15-foot wall. The lowest pile was waste high. The highest was, I'm 6 foot 3, shoulder high," Black says. Blee was the head of the CIA’s al-Qaida unit. So Black asked him, what's all that? "He would say, 'Oh, that's for when we have the catastrophe and get struck and a lot of Americans die,'" Black recalls. "'This is so the investigators know where to come, and they'll come and ask 'Did you tell anybody?' And we'll say 'Yeah, there it is. Here's a copy of every briefing we gave on the threat.'" Blee was prescient. After the attacks investigators from across government swarmed the CIA's al-Qaida unit. Black says they all asked the same question: "'So, did you warn anybody?'" "'Yeah, come to my office. Here's one copy of every briefing we gave.' And they'd say, 'Man that's a lot of briefings.' And he'd say, 'Yes, it is.'" Cofer Black is a career spy. He served in London, Latin America, South Asia. He served as CIA station chief in Khartoum, where al-Qaida targeted him for assassination. From 1999-2002 Black ran the CIA's Counterterrorist Center and reported directly to then-CIA director George Tenet. Black has since been called everything from patriot, to assassin, to torture advocate — the epitome of all that's wrong with America's clandestine services. But in the spring of 2001 — before the Afghanistan war, before the Iraq war, before 9/11 — Black was among a few in the CIA who tried to get the Bush Administration's attention about the growing al-Qaida threat. By May of 2001 finished intelligence on al-Qaida related intelligence activity escalated greatly — not just about their activity targeting U.S. military bases and embassies abroad but about active cells within the U.S. Black says that in 2001, from the beginning of the year on, intelligence about a potential attack took on an "escalatory path." The raw intelligence was sent to CIA analysts who prepped the briefings, some of which would travel all the way up the Washington food chain to the White House. "We were producing, I would say, in 2001, it would be hundreds," Black says of the amount of briefings the CIA churning out about al-Qaida. al-Qaida had already proven how deadly it could be. In 1998 and 2000, the terrorist group had pulled off two sets of horrific attacks, outside the United States. On Aug. 7, 1998, nearly simultaneous suicide bombings destroyed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than 200, injuring more than 4,500. Then a little more than two years later on Oct. 12, 2000, 17 sailors died on the USS Cole in Yemen. President Bill Clinton called the bombing a "despicable and cowardly act." To this day Cofer Black remains critical of the Clinton administration. He says it took the Clinton camp "eight years to figure out counterterrorism." By that time it was too late. An election and change in administration intervened. President George W. Bush took office in January 2001. Black says by May 2001 a mere seven months after the USS Cole bombing, intelligence on al-Qaida related terrorist activity began to crescendo. Then in July 2001 a sudden decrease in terrorist activity.  In intelligence, Cofer Black says, it's the worst kind of silence. According to Black, George W. Bush didn't much understood the nature of this new threat. When it came to threats specific to the United States, the Bush Administration’s most intense focus was squarely on nuclear proliferation and weapons of mass destruction. Meanwhile Black's small team of al-Qaida experts says their alarm only grew. Then came the morning of July 10, 2001. Richard Blee was the head of the CIA's al-Qaida unit. As counterterrorism chief, Cofer Black was his boss. Blee had compiled compelling, multiple-sourced information about an imminent attack on the United States. They took it straight to CIA director George Tenet. Black says Tenet got it immediately. Tenet called the White House and told national security advisor Condoleezza Rice "I have to come see you. We're coming right now." It's been almost 20 years, but Black remembers the meeting in detail. "Go in, sit down and George Tenet says to Rich, 'Please start,'" he says. Richard Blee told Rice and her national security team that there would be significant terrorist attacks against the United States in the coming weeks or months. "The attacks will be spectacular. They may be multiple. al-Qaida's intention is the destruction of the United States," Blee said. In one of her memoirs Condoleezza Rice says her memory of the July 10 meeting isn’t crisp because “we were discussing the threat every day.” Following the meeting Rice did raise the threat level for U.S. personnel overseas. But beyond that Cofer Black says nothing happened. "Nothing went out to order, direct or even encourage domestic agencies to mobilize in response to this threat," Black says. "And then these are not my decisions to make, the public was not warned." Two days after that July 10th meeting, Condoleezza Rice gave a speech at the National Press Club. No one would have expected her to talk publicly about a top-level classified briefing she’d just received. However Rice did talk about what the Bush administration saw as the highest-level security threats to the United States: nuclear weapons proliferation. "As the President has made clear, we must deal with today's world and today's threats," Rice said. "Including weapons of mass destruction and missiles in the hands of states that would blackmail us from coming to the aid of friends and allies." She did not mention the threat posed by possible terrorist attacks. By late July Black, Tenet and Blee all believed that an attack within the United States was imminent. They’d gathered in Tenet’s conference room at the CIA. "They're coming here," Blee said. On August 6, 2001 President Bush's daily briefing included the now-infamous memo titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." A little less than three weeks later on August 24th, Bush announced a new chairman of the Joint Chiefs. "Terrorism is prevalent in the Middle East," Bush said. Regarding direct threats to the United States, Bush said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was actively assessing the security landscape at that time. "One of the threats that faces America is the threat of blackmail as a result of some rogue nation having a weapon of mass destruction," Bush said. He did not mention the possibility of terrorist activity on U.S. soil. 18 days later Sept. 11, 2001, al-Qaida attacked the United States. Intelligence failures, particularly at the CIA, are at the center of the exhaustive report published by the 9/11 Commission in July 2004. Cofer Black is candid about those failings. They knew something was going to happen, but they never knew exactly when or exactly who or exactly how. And without that detailed intel, could the attacks have been stopped? What could have been different? Black wishes someone in the White House had called a principals meeting — with the President and heads of defense and national security — specifically to consider the al-Qaida threat. "The national leaders all come together — and they do on other issues, I just don’t understand why they didn’t on this one — all come together, and they make a determination of what course as a nation should be followed, from which they might want to say, 'OK, let’s light a fire in the domestic agencies.'” But would that have made enough of a difference? Black admits that maybe nothing would have changed. But maybe something would have. Because we know what the consequences were of doing nothing. "You know, it might have caught some of these guys, so maybe you only have one group of hijackers instead of four," he says. "It just gives you a bit more opportunity to get lucky than doing nothing." Black comes back to this point again and again. People in the White House bring in their old biases. They have to unlearn those biases and rarely do. Instead in the face of new information they lean into their own expertise. In this diary ... we hear from: Cofer Black, director of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center from 1999-2002. Ambassador-at-Large under the Bush administration until 2004. https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2020/10/13/radio-diary-cofer-black ……… 4) CIA and Saudi Arabia Conspired to Keep 9/11 Details Secret, New Book Says By Jeff Stein On 8/28/18 It's easier to bury uncomfortable facts than to confront them. So this September 11 the ceremonies marking the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. will simply honor the dead. In Manhattan tourists and mourners will gather where the World Trade Center Towers once stood, lowering their heads in memory of the 2,606 who perished there. The services won't reflect the view that the attacks might well have been prevented. But for hundreds of families and a growing number of former FBI agents, the grief of another 9/11 ceremony will be laced with barely muted rage: There remains a conspiracy of silence among high former U.S. and Saudi officials about the attacks. "It's horrible. We still don't know what happened," said Ali Soufan, one of the lead FBI counterterrorism agents whom the CIA kept in the dark about the movements of the future Al-Qaeda hijackers. To Soufan and many other former national security officials, the unanswered questions about the events leading up to the September 11, 2001, attacks dwarf those about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, because "9/11 changed the whole world." It not only led to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the fracturing of the Middle East and global growth of Islamic militantism but also pushed the U.S. closer to being a virtual homeland-security police state. "I am sad and depressed about it," said Mark Rossini, one of two FBI agents assigned to the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit, who says agency managers mysteriously blocked them from informing their headquarters about future Al-Qaeda plotters present in the United States in 2000 and again in the summer of 2001. "It is patently evident the attacks did not need to happen and there has been no justice," he said. The authors of a new book on 9/11 hope to refocus public attention on the cover-up. Thoroughly mining the multiple official investigations into the event, John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski find huge holes and contradictions in the official story that 9/11 was merely "a failure to connect the dots." Duffy, a left-leaning writer and environmental activist, and Nowosielski, a documentary filmmaker, have nowhere near the prominence of other journalists who have poked holes in the official story, in particular Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, the Pulitzer Prize–winning book that was turned into a gripping multi-part docudrama on Hulu earlier this year. But Duffy and Nowosielski come to the story with a noteworthy credential: In 2009 they scored an astounding video interview with Richard Clarke, a White House counterterrorism adviser during the Bill Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. In it Clarke raged that top CIA officials including director George Tenet had withheld crucial information from him about Al-Qaeda's plotting and movements, including the arrival in the U.S. of future hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. In The Watchdogs Didn't Bark: The CIA, NSA, and the Crimes of the War on Terror, the authors assemble a compelling case of a government-wide cover-up of Saudi complicity in the affair. In 2002 Tenet swore to Congress that he wasn't aware of the imminent threat because it came in a cable that wasn't marked urgent—and "no one read it." But his story was shredded five years later when Senators Ron Wyden and Kit Bond forced loose an executive summary of the CIA's own internal investigation of 9/11, which stated that "some 50 to 60 individuals read one or more of the six Agency cables containing travel information related to these terrorists." Clarke went ballistic. Until then he had trusted Tenet, a close colleague and friend, to tell the truth. In 2009 despairing at the lack of media traction on the astounding disclosure he wrote a book about the duplicity, Your Government Failed You, which was largely ignored. So when Duffy and Nowosielski came calling, he welcomed them. "I believed for the longest time that this was one or two low-level desk officers who got this [information about Hazmi and Mihdhar] and somehow didn't realize the significance," he told them. But "50—five 0—50 CIA officers knew this, and they included [Tenet and] all kinds of people who were regularly talking to me? Saying I'm pissed doesn't begin to describe it." All these years later it's still unclear why the CIA would keep such crucial details about Al-Qaeda movements from the FBI. Clarke and other insiders suspect that the spy agency had a deeply compartmented plan in the works to recruit Hazmi, Mihdhar and perhaps other Al-Qaeda operatives as double agents. If the FBI discovered they were in California, the theory goes, it would have demanded their arrest. When the CIA's recruitment ploy fizzled, Tenet and company hid the details from Clarke lest they be accused of "malfeasance and misfeasance," he said. It's the only logical explanation for why the presence of Hazmi and Mihdhar was kept from him until after the attacks, Clarke said. "They told us everything—except this," he says in the video. Tenet and two of his counterterrorism deputies, Rich Blee and Cofer Black, issued a statement calling Clarke's theory "reckless and profoundly wrong." But now Clarke has company. Duffy and Nowosielski found other key former FBI counterterrorism agents and officials who have developed deep doubts about Tenet's story. The only element they disagree on is which officials were responsible for the alleged subterfuge. "I think if there were some conscious effort" not to tell the Bureau what was going on, Dale Watson, a former FBI deputy chief of counterterrorism told them, "it was probably" carried out below Tenet, Blee and Black, by managers of the CIA's Osama bin Laden unit. But Pat D'Amuro, an even more senior former FBI counterterrorism official, told them, "There's no doubt in my mind that [withholding the information] went up further in the Agency" than those managers. "And why they didn't send it over, to this day I don't know why." And then there's the continuing mystery of Saudi complicity with the hijackers. Duffy and Nowosielski offer a tightly focused update on what's been learned about Saudi support for Al-Qaeda in recent years. Back in 2004 the official 9/11 Commission said it found no evidence that the "Saudi government as an institution, or senior Saudi officials individually funded" Al-Qaeda. A year later the highly redacted CIA inspector-general's report cracked open another window, saying that some Agency officers had "speculated" that "dissident sympathizers within the government" (i.e., religious extremists) may have supported bin Laden. Subsequent investigations have revealed that officials from the kingdom's Islamic affairs ministry were actively helping the hijackers get settled in California. Such information spurred several hundred families of the 9/11 attack victims to file suit against the Saudi government in federal court in New York last year, seeking unspecified monetary damages. "Saudi intelligence has admitted that they knew who these two guys were," Andrew Maloney, an attorney for families, told Newsweek last week. "They knew they were Al-Qaeda the day they arrived in Los Angeles. So any notion from the Saudi government saying, 'O we just help out all Saudis here' is false. They knew. And the CIA knew." The kingdom has turned over some 6,800 pages of documents, "mostly in Arabic," that Maloney's team is in the process of translating. "There's some interesting things in there," he said, "and some clear gaps." He said he'll return to court in October to press for more documents. He also wants to depose Saudi officials, particularly Fahad al-Thumairy, a former Los Angeles consular official and imam of a Culver City, California, mosque attended by the hijackers. In 2003, Thumairy was intercepted after he landed in Los Angeles on a flight from Germany and deported from the U.S. "because of suspected terrorist links." But he still works for the government in Riyadh, Maloney said. "Can you believe that?" In April, Maloney subpoenaed the FBI for documents on Thumairy and Omar al-Bayoumi, a suspected Saudi spy in the U.S. who was also in contact with the hijackers. The Bureau has not responded, so on September 11 he plans to file "a formal motion to compel the FBI" to produce the documents. His motion follows a sworn statement by Steven Moore, the FBI agent who headed the bureau's investigation into the hijacking of the plane that flew into the Pentagon, charging the 9/11 Commission with misleading the public when it said it "had not found evidence" of Saudi assistance to Hazmi and Mihdhar. "There was clearly evidence that Thumairy provided assistance to Hazmi and Mihdhar," Moore wrote. And "based on the proof in our investigation," he added, "Bayoumi himself was a clandestine agent and associated with radical extremists, including Thumairy." Moore's statement was first reported by the Florida Bulldog, a Fort Lauderdale news site that has been investigating the hijackers' contacts with flight schools. "To my knowledge," Moore stated, "Thumairy has never been the subject of a genuine law enforcement interview conducted by the actual agents who investigated him." Maloney's additional targets are other FBI, CIA, State Department and Treasury Department personnel and documents. "There are a lot of people, former agents—I won't identify who or what agencies—who have talked to us," he said, but others, especially in the CIA's bin Laden unit, "will never talk to us or will only talk to us if they are given some kind of blanket immunity." Getting access to them, he said, would probably require an executive order from President Donald Trump—an unlikely outcome given his administration's strong backing for the Saudi monarchy. There may be public support for Maloney's endeavors. A 2016 poll found a slight majority of Americans (54.3 percent) believe that the government is hiding something about the 9/11 attacks. Then again, a considerable number of 9/11 "truthers" embrace conspiracy theories positing that the attacks were "an inside job" by the Bush administration and/or Israel and abetted by explosives planted in one of the World Trade Center towers. But they are right about Saudi resistance to fully disclosing its relations with the hijackers. Last year, agents of the monarchy were discovered surreptitiously funding a PR effort to derail a congressional bill permitting a 9/11 families group to sue the kingdom for damages. Last September, the family group filed a 17-page complaint with the Justice Department. Terry Strada, a leader of the group 9/11 Families & Survivors United for Justice Against Terrorism, will mourn again this year, but not at the site where the towers once stood and her husband died. She plans to attend "a private service" at the Shrine of St. Joseph in Stirling, New Jersey, which she said has "a beautiful and solemn space" dedicated to all who died in the 9/11 attacks. But she is also full of fury at the government's refusal to release all it knows about the run-up to the attacks. "It's very sad that we're still being kept in the dark about it. It's frustrating. It angers me," she told Newsweek. "It's a slap in the face. They think they're above the law and don't have to respond to the families—and the world. It's disgusting." But Strada evinces even more disdain for the Saudis. Responding to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's August 20 message "wishing Muslims around the world a blessed Eid al-Adha," she tweeted, "Seriously???" Strada added, "The Saudis promote & finance the most virulent hatred toward Americans than any other nation. Murdered 3,000 on Sept 11." The "9/11 families," she wrote, "will #NEVERFORGET. #FreeTheTruth" https://www.newsweek.com/cia-and-saudi-arabia-conspired-keep-911-details-secret-new-book-says-1091935 …………. 5) Ex-FBI agents accuse top CIA, FBI officials of 9/11 coverup; CIA said to use Saudis, others for illegal domestic spy operations By Dan Christensen, FloridaBulldog.org in a sworn declaration by Donald Canestraro, an investigator for the Office of Military Commissions, part of the Department of Defense’s Military Commissions Defense Organization. It is dated July 20, 2021. Canestraro said in a brief interview with Florida Bulldog that he is part of the defense team for Guantanamo detainee Ammar al-Baluchi, a Pakistani citizen who is awaiting trial with four other men accused of planning the 9/11 attacks…. CIA Director George Tenet intentionally withheld vital intelligence from the FBI that might have prevented the Sept. 11, 2001 al Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington. Specifically, that known operatives and future hijackers Nawaf al Hazmi and Khalid al Mihdhar had entered the U.S. in Los Angeles shortly after attending an al Qaeda summit meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in early January 2000. The new accounts, mostly obtained during interviews in 2016 and 2018, flesh out that narrative. They also support the ominous theory, never fully explored by either the 9/11 Commission or Congress, that the CIA kept silent because NATIONAL SECURITY…. Former Counter-terrorism Czar R. Clarke added that the 9-11 Commission’s executive director, Philip Zelikow, “was selected by National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to prevent damage to the Bush Administration by blocking the Commission’s line of inquiry into the Saudi connection.” “Mr. Clarke told me that the operation to penetrate Al-Qaeda may have [been] organized by high level employees of the CIA. Mr. Clarke stated that he believed that most of the records of the CIA’s operation to penetrate Al-Qaeda through Al-Bayoumi were destroyed in an effort to cover up the operation,” the declaration says. www.floridabulldog.org/2023/04/ex-fbi-agents-accuse-top-cia-fbi-officials-9-11-coverup-cia-domestic-spying/ ……………………..