Ten Years On, Details of 9/11 Cover-Up Released

This August, filmmakers Ray Nowosielski and John Duffy released a previously unseen 2009 interview with the former counterterrorism czar of the Bush and Clinton administrations, Richard Clarke. In the interview, Clarke accuses the former director of the CIA, George Tenet, and two of his aides of covering up the presence of two suspected al-Qaeda terrorists in the US for more than a year.

The terrorist suspects were Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, who were known to have attended a highly monitored al-Qaeda summit in Malaysia in January of 2000. It was later discovered that the two had intentions of traveling to the US, and over 50 CIA officers were aware of when the two would-be hijackers arrived. Yet nobody in the FBI, the Department of Defense or Clarke’s office was actually informed of their arrival.

Clarke claims in the interview that it would have been impossible for Tenet not to have been aware of this information and so “there was a high-level decision in the CIA ordering people not to share information” with other agencies. This recent development is an important one for the family members of 9/11 victims who have long sought accountability and justice for what has been a failed investigation into the attack, with many questions remaining unresolved.

In the interview Clarke claims that Tenet followed the development of al-Qaeda in “microscopic detail” and that he and Tenet were close friends — Tenet would call him on a fairly regular basis to share even the smallest of details. “You gotta understand my relationship with [Tenet]; we were close friends, he called me several times a day, we shared the most trivial of information with each other, there was not a lack of information sharing — [the CIA] told us everything … except this,” said Clarke.

He is clearly perplexed as to why he was not informed of the presence of two al-Qaeda terrorists who had been in the US for over 12 months, and the only conclusion that Clarke has been able to reach is his theory that the CIA had tried to recruit the hijackers and convince them to leave the US. However, there are problems with this explanation. Firstly, it is illegal for the CIA to actually conduct such an operation inside the US as it contravenes the jurisdiction of the FBI. Secondly, if the operation to recruit or “flip” the hijackers had failed, then wouldn’t the hijackers have realized were being watched, panic and leave the US of their own accord?

Strange story

Clearly, they did not leave. Al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar stayed and boarded American Airlines Flight 77, which struck the Pentagon on 9/11. What makes the story even stranger is the fact that in early August of 2001, the CIA decided to tell lower-level FBI agents that the two hijackers were inside the US and were planning an attack. Clarke told the interviewers that Tenet and his aide, Richard Blee, could have informed the White House of the presence of the terrorists in July 2001. Tenet had actually arranged an “urgent meeting” with White House officials on the topic of terrorism, and yet amazingly, the presence of the hijackers was not mentioned. Then, on Sept. 4, 2001, another high-level meeting between the CIA and White House staff was chaired, and yet again the presence of the two terrorists was not even mentioned. Clarke stated that had the CIA informed him as late as Sept. 4 he would have been able to put out the information on the AP newswire and ensure that the FBI arrested the two men. “We would have conducted a massive sweep,” Clarke said. “We would have conducted it publicly. We would have found those assholes. There’s no doubt in my mind. Even with only a week left.”

The 9/11 Commission report stated that “it appears that no one informed higher levels of management in either the FBI or CIA” about the presence of al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar in the US. Yet, Clarke disputes this with his claim that a bungled terrorist-recruitment effort is the only possible explanation he has been able to come up with as to why he and others were not informed about the two terrorists. However, in Clarke’s 2008 book titled “Your Government Failed You,” he seems to cast apparent scrutiny on his own theory that the CIA had attempted to recruit or “flip” the hijackers, although he does not question his view that Tenet ordered CIA officers not to share information about them. In his book, Clarke sarcastically wrote, “The CIA would not try such a dangerous ploy as trying to flip al-Qaeda terrorists in the United States into becoming CIA sources because that would violate laws prohibiting CIA operations inside the United States.

The CIA would not ask Saudi intelligence to approach al-Mihdhar and al-Hazmi in Los Angeles because foreign intelligence agencies are legally barred from running intelligence missions in the United States. Right?” Clarke is referring to the presence of a suspected Saudi intelligence officer, known as Omar al-Bayoumi, who was living with and closely monitoring the two hijackers while they were staying in the US. It seems strange that the head of the CIA was not aware of the presence of this man and his knowledge of the hijackers. As Clarke details in the interview with the two filmmakers, Tenet had a close relationship with members of the Saudi intelligence bureau. The same can be said of his aides, Blee and Cofer Black.

The arrival of the terrorist suspects in the US should have been a red flag in itself, especially given that they had been monitored at the al-Qaeda Malaysia summit earlier in January 2000 and that one of them was a suspect in the American embassy bombings in Africa in 1998. There had also been many warnings of a threat against the US from Osama bin Laden, and many of the hijackers were being monitored by international agencies months before the attacks.

In his book, Clarke explains how he was involved in the creation of an information exchange system to ensure that the CIA and FBI stopped keeping secrets from each other. The FBI terrorism office employed some CIA officers and the CIA’s Counter-terrorism Center also employed some FBI officers. When the two terrorist suspects turned up in Los Angeles, an FBI agent who was working at CIA headquarters asked permission to inform FBI headquarters. His request was denied by his CIA supervisor. Clarke writes that “at that point, the failure to tell the FBI went from being a sloppy oversight to being a conscious decision.”