The 9/11 Files: The Cover-up Commission | Ep 2

TUCKER CARLSON:

In January 2000, as the CIA was tracking two future hijackers as they journeyed to Los Angeles, George W. Bush was seven months into his presidential campaign.

What we’re gonna do is we’re gonna do something no other presidential candidate has been able to do… the near impossible.

Remember what it was — the near impossible. Turn like that.

One of the most exhilarating moments of my political career — and yours too.

His campaign was working to take down his opponent at the time, Arizona Senator John McCain, by spreading rumors he’d fathered a Black bastard child with a prostitute.

Protesters:

You should be ashamed! You should be ashamed!

The following December, two other hijackers — Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the plot, and Marwan al-Shehhi — were finishing their pilot training in Venice, Florida, on the West Coast.

In Washington, the Supreme Court ruled that George W. Bush had won the 2000 election.

John McCain wanted to get political revenge.

When he got his chance ten months later, it would have historic consequences.

The official story of what happened on 9/11 comes from a single report — the 9/11 Final Report of the National Commission.

In the two decades since it was released, it has become the basis for all media coverage of the terror attacks that day.

What the media never mentioned is that the commission itself was a farce. It was intentionally underfunded. It was poorly structured. It was, from top to bottom, corrupt.

Two years after the report was released, the Commission’s own chairman admitted it was set up to fail.

George W. Bush:

Americans have many questions tonight. Americans are asking, who attacked our country?

Beginning in the first hours after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Bush administration began leveraging the tragedy to launch their next project — a so-called global war on terror.

Bush:

The evidence we have gathered all points to a collection of loosely affiliated terrorist organizations known as al-Qaeda.

Tucker Carlson:

In a normal country, its leaders would insist on an answer to the simple question:

How did a terror network closely monitored by United States intelligence agencies — including a unit dedicated to following them at CIA headquarters in Langley — manage to pull off the 9/11 attacks in broad daylight?

That’s the question.

But this is not a normal country.

And it was never answered.

In fact, the Bush administration ferociously opposed any attempt to look carefully at what happened that day.

And that presents a bigger question — why?

What did they have to hide?

Kristin Breitweiser:

My name is Kristin Breitweiser. My husband Ron was killed on September 11th.

Tucker Carlson:

Breitweiser is one of four 9/11 widows who became famous at the time as the “Jersey Girls.”

They were some of the only people in public life in the United States who wouldn’t let it go.

They didn’t believe the official 9/11 story, and they often said so.

They were all over the media for several years, determined to identify government officials who may have been complicit in the tragedy.

In the end, they were ignored.

Breitweiser:

We were looking at a Bush administration that really was not interested in looking backwards.

There was a push to immediately go to war.

There was an invasion into Afghanistan, and then there was the cue-up for the war in Iraq.

Bush (at Ground Zero):

I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you! And the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!

Tucker Carlson:

Rather than get to the bottom of what actually happened, the Bush administration immediately exploited the crisis to push for what it really wanted — an invasion of Iraq.

In his book Against All Enemies, George W. Bush’s counterterrorism czar, Richard Clarke, said that when he went back to the White House immediately after 9/11, he, quote, “expected to go back to a round of meetings examining what the next attacks would be, what our vulnerabilities were.”

Instead, he realized — with what he called “almost sharp physical pain” — that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were going to take advantage of the tragedy to promote their agenda about Iraq.

And that’s exactly what they did.

On the afternoon of September 11, Rumsfeld said his instinct was to hit Saddam Hussein at the same time, not only bin Laden.

The day after the attack, Bush asked Clarke to “see if Saddam did this — see if he’s involved in any way.”

While meeting with the President on September 15th at Camp David, Wolfowitz argued that Iraq was ultimately the source of the terrorist problem and should therefore be attacked.

Breitweiser:

We learned quite quickly that we were not going to get the answers that we really wanted with regard to the murder — the homicide — of our 3,000 loved ones.

My husband Ron was 39 when he was killed. He was a really good man.

He was smart and a good dad.

And he had called me on the morning of September 11th.

I was rushing out the door to take my daughter to speech therapy, and I had no idea what was going on.

I didn’t have the television on.

And he was like, “Sweets, it’s me. I’m okay.”

And I had no idea.

I said, “Okay, I’m glad you’re okay.”

And he said, “No, no, put the television on. It’s not my building. I knew you’d be worried — it’s not my building.”

And I put the television on, and I was still on the phone with him.

And I said, “Oh my God! What is that?”

And he said, “You know, there’s an explosion in the building next to me, but it’s not my building. I’m safe, I’m fine.”

And I said, “It looks really bad.”

He said, “That’s why I called. Don’t worry, it’s not my building.”

Then his voice cracked and he said, “Sweets, people are falling out the windows.”

I said, “What are you going to do?”

He said, “I’m going down to the trading floor to see if I can find a television to see what’s going on. We don’t know anything. But I didn’t want you to worry. I love you. I’ll call you back.”

And that was the last I spoke to him.

Three minutes after we got off the phone, I still had the TV on — and I saw his building explode right where he was.

I just wish I told him to run.

I wish I told him to get out.

I wish I told him, “It’s not safe, something’s wrong, get out.”

But I didn’t.

I think feeling that way — feeling like, “Why didn’t I know? Why didn’t I have a woman’s instinct to say ‘get out’?” — made me want to fight for the commission and everything else, because I felt like the American public deserves to know.

Tucker Carlson:

The Bush administration, which at the time was enjoying a historic 90% approval rating, was pushing a very clear storyline.

They told the country that Osama bin Laden had simply caught American authorities off guard.

“There was no silver bullet that could have prevented the 9/11 attacks.”

That was a lie.

And by May of 2002, more than two-thirds of Americans understood that it was a lie.

They wanted an investigation into the so-called intelligence failures that led to the attack.

The initial effort to investigate 9/11 was a joint congressional commission led by Senator Bob Graham, a Democrat of Florida, and Congressman Porter Goss, a former CIA officer who would later become the agency’s director, appointed by Bush.

Bob Graham:

These public hearings are part of our search for truth.

Tucker Carlson:

Cheney did not want anyone looking into his failures that day — the administration’s failures — and more than anything, he and political strategist Karl Rove were focused on the President’s reputation, on ensuring that he would get reelected.

The lengths that the Bush administration went to kill the investigation into 9/11 are shocking.

In the winter of 2002, Dick Cheney called then–Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota and made a threat.

The Veep told Daschle that the leaders of the war on terror would be too busy to get bogged down in preparing for and testifying in front of the committees.

The strong implication was: if you insist, we’ll say you’re interfering with the war effort.

The committee moved forward anyway.

On June 19th, 2002, they discovered that the NSA had intercepted messages from al-Qaeda operatives the day before the attacks, saying “The match begins tomorrow,” and “Tomorrow is zero hour.”

It couldn’t have been clearer.

Someone on the committee leaked those messages to the news media.

CNN broadcast them.

And in retaliation for this — for telling the truth — the Bush administration sicced the FBI, then run by Robert Mueller, on the committee.

Staffer:

The FBI really came down hard on the joint inquiry. They polygraphed, they interviewed, they made all kinds of threats.

And when the FBI comes after you, it’s kind of scary — because you’re looking at not only potentially losing your position in Congress but also imprisonment.

It was pure intimidation.

And it had a very chilling effect on the progress of the inquiry and their investigation.

Tucker Carlson:

In the end, Congress did make some interesting discoveries — most of which were redacted in the final report.

The Jersey Girls continued to push for the truth.

They were furious. They demanded an independent commission.

George W. Bush’s political enemies agreed.

John McCain’s revenge was an independent commission that would explore the truth about what happened on 9/11.

McCain:

The legislation that calls for a blue-ribbon commission to examine the facts surrounding September 11th.

Tucker Carlson:

On November 27th, 2002, President Bush, fearing major political blowback if he vetoed the commission, signed the bill into law — but he managed to neuter the commission in the process.

His allies in Congress gave the commission weak subpoena power and limited them to a strict 18-month timeline.

They appropriated just $3 million — nothing by Washington standards.

By comparison, Congress gave 13 times more funding to investigate the Monica Lewinsky scandal and 11 times more for Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russiagate.

The administration and Congress simply didn’t want the public to know what happened on 9/11.

But that wasn’t the only thing they did to subvert the truth.

The White House controlled the commission by choosing the chairman.

Their first choice was Henry Kissinger.

Bush:

Today I’m pleased to announce my choice for Commission Chairman — Dr. Henry Kissinger.

Breitweiser:

At the time, I was like 30 years old. I had known Kissinger, but as a stay-at-home suburban housewife, I hadn’t dived into all of his horrible acts and his status as a war criminal.

Bush:

Dr. Kissinger is one of our nation’s most accomplished and respected public servants.

Tucker Carlson:

Kissinger had served as National Security Advisor and then Secretary of State under Richard Nixon.

He pushed a massive expansion of the Vietnam War, including secret bombings in Cambodia and Laos.

There were questions about his role in Vietnam, and his role in the coup in Chile.

Breitweiser:

When we first met him, he gave us this long talk about how honored he was, how it was the responsibility of a lifetime.

He said, “It is a great honor to be appointed by the President to be chairman of the nonpartisan independent commission.”

In 2002, he was running a lucrative consulting business called Kissinger Associates.

I researched him and his clients, and we had grave concerns.

He had huge conflicts of interest.

We met him at his Park Avenue office. It was really hot — he had the thermostat up to a hundred degrees.

Cranking up the thermostat is a manipulation tactic — make people uncomfortable so they give in.

At one point, after the niceties, one of the widows asked, “Do you represent any Saudi royals? Anyone in the bin Laden family?”

It wasn’t outrageous — there were relationships between the Bush family and the bin Laden family.

He immediately got flustered, spilled his tea, and feigned that it was his fake eye — which we didn’t even know he had.

We went to clean it up like moms, and he never answered the question.

The next day, he resigned.

News anchor:

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger stepped down from the position Friday.

Tucker Carlson:

Scrambling to find a new chairman, Bush’s top political adviser Karl Rove called former New Jersey governor Tom Kean and offered him the job.

Why was George W. Bush’s political bagman making this phone call? No one’s ever explained.

Tom Kean — the nicest guy on the planet.

Very much a gentleman.

Does not go for the jugular.

After he accepted the job, Kean was dragged to the White House, where the President’s top advisors told him, “You’ve got to stand up. You’ve got to have courage. We don’t want a runaway commission.”

In other words: do what we say.

The White House’s fingerprints were all over the commission.

Chairman Kean ultimately admitted the commission was “set up to fail.”

And that’s absolutely true.

In addition to a meaningless budget, tight timeline, and weak subpoena power, there was another problem — the man Kean selected to run it.

On January 27th, 2003, the commission announced they’d selected Philip Zelikow as executive director.

He was sold as a historian.

But he had a lot of conflicts of interest.

He was an active Bush administration official — serving on a White House intelligence advisory panel.

He had close ties to Condoleezza Rice — coauthoring a book with her, serving on her transition team, and even writing a policy paper at her request in 2002 advocating preemptive invasion.

Zelikow was the perfect person to keep the commission from finding the truth.

He was placed there to play the gatekeeper — to protect the Bush administration and lay the groundwork for war in Iraq.

His first move was to pre-write the entire report before the facts were in.

In March 2003 — before the investigation even began — Zelikow had already prepared a detailed outline, complete with chapters and subheadings.

It was nearly identical to the final book.

His second move was to consolidate power — controlling hiring, blocking staffers from contacting commissioners, and restricting document access.

He made a secret agreement with the Justice Department to block access to Congressional files until the White House reviewed them.

The final report contains 61 references to “finding no evidence” of certain claims.

If you don’t look for evidence, you don’t find it.

At one point, Zelikow pressured a CIA employee to accept Condoleezza Rice’s version of pre-9/11 intel briefings.

Phone logs show he was regularly taking calls from both Rice and Karl Rove.

We reached out to Rove — he denied regular contact, but that’s false.

Even Zelikow admitted multiple calls, though he claimed they didn’t discuss the commission.

None of it’s plausible.

Why was the commission’s staff director talking to the White House’s political strategist?

From the outset, the commission advanced the Bush administration’s foreign policy agenda.

Zelikow inserted lines trying to link al-Qaeda to Iraq.

Even when removed later, the hearings were stacked with neocons like Abraham Sofaer and Laurie Mylroie — who insisted Iraq was behind 9/11.

By April 2004, former Senator Bob Kerrey confronted Rice about Zelikow’s ties.

Kerrey:

Since he was an expert on terrorism, did you ask Philip Zelikow any questions about terrorism during transition?

Rice:

Philip and I had numerous conversations about the issues we were facing. He had worked in the campaign and the transition. So yes.

Kerrey:

Did you instruct him to do anything on terrorism?

Rice:

To help us think about the structure of terrorism operations — yes.

Tucker Carlson:

Incredibly, the man in charge of the official story of 9/11 — Philip Zelikow — was the Bush advisor who decided to demote counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke before 9/11.

Yet somehow these details were left out of the final report.

The 9/11 Commission Report was a cover-up from beginning to end.

That’s the truth.

And that’s the most important starting point for understanding what actually happened on September 11th.

The official story is a lie.

What isn’t clear is why our government and subsequent administrations continue the lie.

What exactly are they hiding now?

And more importantly, who are they protecting?

We found out.

That’s in the next installment of our 9/11 series.

Thank you for watching The 9/11 Files.

The next episode drops next week, or you can unlock the entire five-part series right now, ad-free, by becoming a TCN member.

Members also get access to The Watch companion — a guide to the timeline, key figures, and sources we used to bring you this documentary.

Join us today at tuckercarlson.com for the full series and to support our investigative work.

We couldn’t do this without our members.

We’re grateful for you — so thanks.

For 24 years now, politicians, the media, intel agencies in this country and abroad… have all demanded that you believe the official story about 9/11.

And here’s what it is. They tell you a group of Al Qaeda affiliated terrorists, many of whom were known to U.S. intel services, somehow managed to evade capture for years as they planned the most significant and elaborate terror attack in human history.

We’re told that despite repeated encounters with the FBI, the CIA, local law enforcement, airport security, and foreign intel organizations, the right information somehow never made it to the right people. The government failed because it just didn’t have the intelligence it needed.

That’s the story. That story is a lie.

Nearly 25 years later, the families of 3,000 civilians are still mourning the murder of their loved ones. Anyone who doubts the official narrative is cast as a kook, a criminal, a fringe conspiracy theorist, and punished. They’ve been blacklisted, censored, and banned even as the leaders who failed to protect our country on 9/11 used these attacks as a pretense to expand their own powers and permanently transform the United States.

None of this is speculation. All of it is true.

Over the course of this series, you will hear accounts from people who lived it. CIA officers and analysts who were there, FBI agents from the bin Laden unit, and family members of the victims. None of these people are kooks. All of them have firsthand information.

What they’ll tell you is that what you have been told about September 11th is not true.

Why are we doing this? Our purpose is in part to make the strongest possible case for a real investigation into 9/11. Twenty-five years later, a new 9/11 Commission. One that is honest. One that is not guided by partisan political interest. One that is not serving foreign powers.

To do this investigation, we spent many months looking into what actually happened and speaking to people who saw it. We pored over thousands of pages of documents, mostly primary sources, but also contemporaneous news reports and declassified government documents.

Over the course of this investigation, we made numerous findings that shocked us — not least of which the apparent role that former CIA director John Brennan played in helping bring the 9/11 hijackers to the United States. And the remarkable lengths the CIA went to protect the 9/11 hijackers from the FBI and from domestic law enforcement.

Telling the full story requires starting before the attacks, going back to something called Alec Station, the CIA’s bin Laden unit in 1999.

Mark Rossini:
My name is Mark Rossini. I’m a former FBI agent. So from January 1999 to May of 2003, I was the FBI New York Joint Terrorism Task Force representative to Alec Station at CIA headquarters.

Before 9/11, there were no sources in Al Qaeda. None. There was a group of Pashtun caretakers, okay? They called them the Trod pints. Trod pints were these Pashtun people that were bin Laden’s tea boys and tea gals, right? And they were the great source of the Pakistani intel service that was feeding information from the Trod pints to the ISI, to the CIA, about what was going on in Al Qaeda.

They had all the electronic communication, satellite stuff in the world, imagery… I remember looking at images of bin Laden in his courtyard. All that, fine. But what’s in his head? What’s he saying? What’s he doing? These people are 10,000 miles away. They don’t give a shit about American law. They don’t care about going to jail. They want to die.

How are you going to get a source inside there?

Before September 11th, U.S. intel services got most of their intelligence on bin Laden from what was called the Hada Home Switchboard in Sanaa, Yemen. That was a communications hub that bin Laden and his associates used to communicate with each other. They were at the time living in Yemen. The FBI gained access to this after the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa.

How did we officially get the Hada home in Sanaa, Yemen, on the books, on the radar, if you will? Okay. Nairobi, 1998. August 7th.

John Anticef. Special Agent John Anticef, greatest FBI agent ever in the FBI. Even better than me. John flies over to Nairobi, and one of the perpetrators who chickened out and ran… and lived, Daoud Al-Owhali, Saudi. He gets captured by the Kenyan police.

John flies over from New York and already there have been two FBI agents interviewing Daoud. They were getting someplace, but they really weren’t getting that far, right? John walks in and first thing he does, he says, you need some water? You want a drink? Did you eat today? Did you pray? Are you okay? Yeah, I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine. He’s like, just relax. Let’s have a chat.

He didn’t beat him with a phone book. He didn’t waterboard him. He didn’t pull his fingernails out. He wasn’t Mr. Tough Guy like all these people like Dick Cheney want to believe. He talked to him like a human being.

Take me through the day. Talk to me. So I went to the hotel and I got my stuff ready. And did you call anybody? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I called this number.

And he wrote it down and he gave John the number of the Hada home in Sanaa, Yemen, which was the Al Qaeda switchboard that we in the FBI had no clue existed up until that point.

The CIA and NSA did because remember, they had been listening to the Nairobi cell and their activity since 1996. We in the FBI didn’t know about that number.

The Hada home wasn’t just a communications hub for Al Qaeda. It was the physical home of the father-in-law of Khalid Al Mihdhar, one of the future 9/11 hijackers.

At the end of 1999, listening to that phone is when the CIA and the NSA learn that Khalid Mihdhar is going to be traveling from there to Dubai and then from Dubai onward to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to meet the summit. The summit was a meeting of an operational cadre of Al Qaeda affiliated terrorists from around the world.

He was scheduled to travel on or about January 5th, 2000. The NSA has the ability, did and probably still has, to get any airplane reservation at once in the world and know about it. We knew his passport number, we had the phone, we had everything. So we knew his travel information, we knew what flights he was taking, whose seat he was going to sit in.

The CIA arranges for when he gets to Dubai to be secondary. Not fully questioned, but you know, talk to him a little bit. And then he goes to his hotel room and they arrange to search his room and go in. And when they go in, his passport is there, and they take pictures of it, photocopy it, and they send back the imagery.

And lo and behold, in his passport is a visa to go to the United States of America, issued out of the American consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.

According to one recently released court filing, quote, the visas were issued to facilitate an operation run by the Saudis and the CIA spying operation. The station chief in Riyadh at the time was future CIA director John Brennan.

The CIA continued tracking Al Mihdhar to Kuala Lumpur where he met up with other Al Qaeda associates, including Nawaf Al Hazmi, a second future 9/11 hijacker.

He lands in Kuala Lumpur. They entrust the Malaysia Special Branch police to surveil this terror summit in this park in Kuala Lumpur, and to tail them and surveil them, etc. That information ends up in a communication from Kuala Lumpur station, CIA, to CIA headquarters, to Alec Station, to the computer screen of me and Special Agent Doug Miller of Washington Field Office, FBI.

You have this cable that lays out the meeting in Kuala Lumpur, the photocopying of his passport in Dubai, and the learning of the visa to go to the United States of America.

Doug Miller gets up from his cubicle of power, comes over to my cubicle of power and says, hey, we got to tell the FBI about this. I said, Doug, you’re damn right. He goes, I’ll write up the CIR.

What is a CIR? A CIR is a Central Intelligence Report. Doug writes it, he sends it to me. I approve it. And it goes to the desk of Michael Ann Casey, CIA officer, analyst. And it sits in her queue, her electronic queue. And it doesn’t move for a day or two. It should move in a few hours.

I’ll never forget it like it was yesterday. I was standing over her, I said, hey, Doug’s CIR, it’s got to go to the FBI. She said, no, it’s not. I said, well, why not? She said, because it’s not an FBI matter.

What do you mean it’s not an FBI matter? She said, it’s a CIA matter. And when and if we want the FBI to know, we will tell them. And you are not to say anything.

I said, yeah, but they got a visa to come to the U.S. She said, no, we’re handling it. And when we want to tell the FBI, we will. I looked at her, she got up, put her hands on her hips, pointed a finger at me.

Now, in my naivete, I believed her. And I have to live with that every day of my life, that I believed her.

---

As the CIA was blocking the FBI detail from informing the bureau, the hijackers were moving. On January 8, 2000, CIA surveillance teams reported that Al Mihdhar had boarded a flight to Bangkok, Thailand. He was accompanied by a man they identified as Al Hazmi.

According to the official account, this is where the trail went cold. The CIA placed their names on a watch list and asked that Thai authorities track their movements. Three months later, the Thai government reported back Al Hazmi had boarded a United Airlines flight to Los Angeles. Al Mihdhar was with him. The two hijackers had arrived in the United States.

But here’s my problem with this whole thing and the whole subsequent investigation of 9/11. You have CIA following one man and then two men all over the planet, and then eventually even to America, landing in Los Angeles, California, and you don’t tell the FBI.

But why would the CIA want to hide the highly relevant and potentially dangerous fact that two known Al Qaeda terrorists had just landed in California?

According to a recently released court filing, former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clark told government investigators that, quote, the CIA was running a false flag operation to recruit the hijackers.

When Kofer Black became the head of the counterterrorism center at CIA, he was aghast that they had no sources in Al Qaeda. So he told me, I’m going to try to get sources in Al Qaeda. I can understand them possibly saying, we need to develop sources inside Al Qaeda. When we do that, we can’t tell anybody about it.

After Clark made that claim publicly, he received an angry call from former director of the CIA George Tenet, who did not deny the allegations made by Mr. Clark. End quote. But when we reached out to Tenet, his spokesperson denied that the CIA was recruiting hijackers, calling it false rumors and saying, quote, that’s categorically not true.

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