I must confess that I am a 9/11 conspiracy theorist. My theory is that the attacks on New York and Washington were the result of a plot organized by Khalid Sheik Muhammed, funded by Osama bin Laden, and carried out by Muhammed’s extended family and other men enlisted by the lead co-conspirators.
The historical validity of that conclusion doesn’t mean we know the whole story of the 9/11 attacks.
So says Bob Graham, the former Florida Senator and 9/11 Commission member.
Dan Christensen and Anthony Summers broke the story last week in the BrowardBulldog.org, an independent south Florida news site.
In a sworn deposition that Christensen and Summers obtained in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, Graham charged the FBI is hiding the results of an investigation of a well-connected Saudi man living in Florida who was reportedly contacted by several of the hijackers in the summer of 2001.
“I am troubled by what appears to me to be a persistent effort by the FBI to conceal from the American people information concerning possible Saudi support of the Sept. 11 attacks,” Graham said
The story was picked up by the 9/11 family group which asked the FBI to “come clean.”
The story concerns Esam Ghazzawi, an advisor to a senior Saudi prince, who hastily deserted his home in a gated community in Sarasota, Florida in the summer of 2001.
In September 2011, Christensen and Summers broke the story that the “FBI found direct ties between 9/11 hijackers” and Ghazzawi yet did not share the information with Congress or investigators.
Christensen and Summers reported that two well-placed sources — an unnamed U.S. counterterrorism official and a Sarasota property manager — said that gatehouse logbooks and security camera photographs of license plates showed that vehicles used by the future hijackers had visited the home where Ghazzawi lived. Analysis of phone records also linked the hijackers to their house, the counterterrorism officer said.
Four of the hijackers lived less than 10 miles away from Ghazawwi’s house in 2001 and two attended a nearby flight school where they learned how to pilot commercial airliners.
Graham says the 9/11 Commission never learned about the FBI investigation of Ghazzawi. The FBI denies that it found any connetion between Ghazzawi and the hijackers.
Graham says the FBI is still withholding evidence. He cited a Sept. 16, 2002, FBI report about Sarasota that he was allowed to see after making inquiries at the FBI. That report has never been publicly released, he said.
Christensen is the editor of the BrowardBulldog. Summers is co-author (with Robbyn Swan) “The Eleventh Day,” an account of the 9/11 conspiracy. Summers is also author of “Not In Your Lifetime,” about the assassination of JFK. (Full disclosure: Summers is a friend.)
The other side of the coin of US Intel spying on US citizens is it is doing so in response to atrocities committed against US citizens in an effort to prevent future atrocities against US citizens. I believe a good deal of what people are complaining about now on TV news shows can be traced back to the 9/11 attacks and the criticism leveled against the government for not preventing the attacks in the first place.
People sometimes forget that little, seemingly innocent things they do sometimes bring on unwanted attention from those who exist to protect and serve us. For example, I recall my fellow soldiers being told to take down posters in their dorms of Jimi Hendrix, Angela Davis & Black Panthers because of the radicalism associated with them. Hendrix was an extremely popular rock musician at the time that suddenly died after his association with the Black Panthers was disclosed. We were told no posters of any anti-government radicals would be allowed in dorms while we were in garrison in an effort to protect us from Intel looking for anti-government radical associations.
I expect as time goes on much of the disclosures made on NSA electronic dragnets is going to be justified by the 9/11 attacks and other, more recent attacks (such as the Boston Marathon bombing). Uncle Sam is caught in a squeeze; if he gets caught unprepared he’s criticized, if he digs into the shadows looking for bad guys he’s criticized.
I think the more interesting, unanswered questions about 9/11 center on how this Saudi Sheik and his criminal loyalists knew the US homeland Air Defense System was so unprepared for what was executed against it. How many people in government were bribed to get that info?
Former Sen. Graham can be compared to Warren Commission member Sen. Richard Russell, who publicly dissented from the Report’s conclusions. Sen. Russell, who never accepted the single bullet theory, expressed his concerns in executive session about the position the commission was put in by the investigative agencies upon which the Warren Commission relied.
(See Sen. Richard Russell and the Great American Murder Mystery, November 2003, by Donald E. Wilkes, Jr., Professor of Law, University of Georgia School of Law; http://www.law.uga.edu/dwilkes_more/jfk_20senrussell.html;
and an example of concern expressed privately in executive session transcript:
http://www.maryferrell.org/mffweb/archive/viewer/showDoc.do?absPageId=172545
Peter Dale Scott has written a number of articles, available on the web, discussing similarities between the 9-11 attacks and the Kennedy assassination. One parallel is the use of the FBI and other federal agencies to cover up inconvenient information.
Another parallel is how the events seem to have a dense onion-like structure which complicates or obscures efforts to understand what exactly happened. Therefore identifying, say, the Mafia or Castro as responsible for JFK’s assassination doesn’t explain, for example, how or why senior officers of the military curtailed the autopsy. And identifying al-Qaeda members as pulling off 9-11 doesn’t explain how or why the US air defence network was AWOL for well over an hour.
Actually, the US air defense prior to 9/11 was not organized to combat hijacked airliners on a massive scale; it was designed to look for missile and air attacks from Siberia and over the North Pole. James Bamford has written extensively on this, as have others in the know. In Bamford’s book, “A Pretext for War” he outlines what happened the morning of 11 Sept. 01 in detail. As for the cover up, there was one: a cover up by the Bush administration, caught flat footed that day, and embarrassed by their negligence, the same way they got caught flat footed over Hurricane Katrina and over ENRON, both of which intelligent people warned them about. It’a a pattern of incompetence that runs through that administration, and continues over their obsession with Iraq and willingness to lie about WMD in order to get US troops to go in.
I do not think 9/11 was an inside job. However 19 of 20 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia.
Welcome to Terrorland by Hopsicker is a good book to read on the untold stories of 9/11:
http://www.amazon.com/Welcome-Terrorland-Mohamed-Cover-up-Florida/dp/0975290673/ref=sr_1_sc_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1371151966&sr=8-1-spell&keywords=welcome+to+terrorlan
Where was the NSA on all this? Didn’t those hijackers use cell phones & have laptops? Doesn’t the NSA basically have its own copy of the entire Internet at its disposal? How did these creeps slip through the cracks?
BTW, who do you think is more likely to have posted all the porn and music on the Internet to entice people to use the internet so that they in turn could be spied on….NSA, FBI or CIA (all all)?
It’s funny, but in late 2000 I bought James Bamford’s book on the NSA, “Body of Secrets”. It was (and still is) a fascinating read. For the record, Bamford does not believe 9/11 was an “inside job” either, and I agree with that assessment. What I think was interesting was that there were internet and phone surveillance procedures, but after 9/11 they got ramped up BIG TIME (read Dana Priest for info on this). In 2001, according to Richard Clarke, the Bush administration was warned about terrorist threats but chose to either ignore them or convince themselves that they weren’t very serious. I think it is this negligence on the part of Bush administration officials that got covered up by the administration, and was the reason why Americans couldn’t get all of their questions about 9/11 answered honestly and openly. The terrorists did use laptops, and one of those was allegedly used to trace a lot of their ties to bin Laden. Also, as Bamford has since pointed out, the NSA got phone records, after the fact, that helped pin them to bin Laden. But before the attacks, there wasn’t a very well organized, unified system to track phone calls etc., especially inter-agency. For better or worse, we now have a more powerful tracking system in place.
This plays into the JFK assassination research I think because with all of the lockdown on information about intelligence amplified after the terror attacks of 2001, it is now harder to get information about intelligence than ever before.
Thank you for the info, JSA. I’ll give that book a read sometime soon. As I recall the time around 2001-2001 the library was a popular place to pick up free Internet access and I recall seeing several packed with what looked to me to be middle eastern students. Too bad someone didn’t notice and take a look at what was happening.
I must confess some books and reports confuse me. For instance, the Church Committee report claims (according to Wikipedia) that JFK ordered the mafia to assassinate Castro where I have also heard that the mafia hit team originated from a phone call from then Vice president Nixon & Howard Hughes that morphed into Johnny Roselli, Sam Giancana, Santos Trafficante Jr. & the Miami CIA station chief prior to JFK getting his feet wet and continuing behind his back up to the time of the assassination. I’ve also read RFK was calling the shots on the teams activities. Which version is correct.
I may be a bit rusty on this but I seem to recall it was the Church Committee that was the first, if not one of the first Washington exposes on the US government spying on its citizens (please correct me if I am wrong on this).
Just how a Saudi Sheik and his band of terrorist thugs could know or even predict that the US Air Defense System was so unprepared for what occurred is almost beyond belief.
Did you read my post?
Just a question.
jeffmorley,
Have you studied the 9-11 attacks?
Just a question.