9/11’s Unanswered Questions
After 20 years, we still don't know what happened - and who helped
I grew up in San Diego’s East County, where two Saudi terrorists lived for a few months, hammering out details of the 9/11 attacks.
Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar rented a room in Lemon Grove, less than five minutes from where I went to high school. According to the official narrative, they helped hijack American Airlines Flight 77 and crash it into the Pentagon.
Now, it wasn’t like I ran into these guys down at Henry’s Marketplace. On Sept. 11, 2001, I was a reporter for the daily newspaper in Colorado Springs. I read all about them three years later, when the late Senator Bob Graham published Intelligence Matters.
Graham’s book detailed Congress’ Joint Inquiry on 9/11. This investigation pre-dated President George W. Bush’s 9/11 Commission, but received a fraction of the press. It raised some serious questions about the Saudi role in aiding and abetting the hijackers.
Twenty years later, many questions remain unanswered. For the most part, the press is no longer digging. The story that 19 Middle Easterners who could barely speak English or fly airplanes, waltzed into the U.S. under the sleeping eye of 13 intelligence agencies and successfully attacked its most guarded spaces is already in the history books.
Graham concluded they must have had help, although he declined to theorize.
9/11 conspiracy theories are generally divided into two categories: the government LIHOP ("Let it happen on purpose") or MIHOP (“Made it happen on purpose"). The level of government complicity runs from deliberately ignoring foreknowledge of the attacks to engineering the controlled demolition of the World Trade Center.
Whether the government was completely surprised by the al-Qaeda attack, knew it was coming and let it roll, or had an active hand in its execution, some unanswered questions need to be probed.
1. Did U.S. intelligence let 9/11 Happen?
The official 9/11 narrative posits that U.S. intelligence was just too underfunded and too fragmented to prevent the attack.
It is a fact, indeed, that the attacks were not prevented. There is certainly evidence that U.S. intelligence services were capable of tracking the hijackers and thwarting their plans.
Did they fail at the task or, for some reason, look the other way?
In 2001 – long before Edward Snowden made it public – the government had immense, full-spectrum capacity to spy on people. But to most of us, the surveillance ability of the NSA was a Hollywood fantasy straight out of Will Smith and Gene Hackman’s “Enemy of the State.”
Three years before 9/11 – and 15 years before the Edward Snowden leaks – NSA surveillance technology was depicted in “Enemy of the State.”
The Joint Inquiry on 9/11 published its 800-plus-page report in December, 2002 (months before the 9/11 Commission even held its first hearing). The congressional committee learned that by 1998, President Clinton was literally gunning for Osama bin Ladin. The CIA, NSA, FBI and other agencies developed a “comprehensive plan” to track and kill him, and dismantle al-Qaeda in some 20 countries.
Clinton’s former national security advisor, Sandy Berger, testified that the Clinton Administration more than doubled counterterrorism spending from $5 billion in 1996 to more than $11 billion in 2000. The FBI tripled its counterterrorism budget, as did the CIA.
“The view we received from the Bureau was that al-Qa’ida had limited capacity to operate in the United States and that any presence here was under surveillance,” Berger said.
The FBI and CIA were following al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar since at least 1999, when the Saudi pair were suspects in the bombing of the USS Cole in a Yemen harbor. The CIA even broke into the Dubai hotel room where al-Mihdhar was staying on his way to an al-Qaeda summit Malaysia.
Yet they were able to move freely in, out and around the United States for the next two years. Graham was furious that the FBI refused to serve a Joint Inquiry subpoena on the pair’s Lemon Grove landlord, Abdulsattar Shaikh, a man who was on the local bureau’s payroll as an informant.
What was the FBI hiding – its incompetence or something more sinister? What was Berger hiding? Prior to his testimony, Clinton’s national security advisor stole 9/11-related documents from the National Archives. (Unlike Edward Snowden, Berger got probation, a $50,000 fine and community service).
The latest news is that one of the key documents Berger smuggled out of the classified vault – the Millennium Alert After Action Review prepared by Clinton’s Counterterrorism Security Group (CSG) in January, 2000 – has been obtained by journalist Robbyn Swan.
The report concluded that the U.S. had trouble penetrating Middle Eastern terror groups and became “overly reliant” on intelligence from “second party services.” Which leads us to the second unanswered question.
2. What was the Role of Saudi Arabia?
“Former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki bin Faisal claimed that in late 1999 and early 2000, his service had warned the CIA that Nawaf al-Hazmi were terrorists,” Robbyn Swan writes in a recent article for the Florida Bulldog.
Whether the Saudi royal family monitored the hijackers or actively supported them has been the core question in a lawsuit filed by 9/11 Families United. They want the courts to decide if the Saudi government was part of the 9/11 plot.
From Left To Right: Dick Cheney, Saudi Prince Bandar, Condoleezza Rice and George W. Bush meet at the White House on Sept. 13, 2001.
Highly motivated to keep digging into the events that cost them their friends and family members, the group told President Joe Biden he would not be welcome at 20th anniversary commemorations unless he declassified key documents.
Documents were, in fact, released on Sept. 11. The 16-page report confirmed that the FBI was still investigating possible Saudi complicity as late as 2016. Saudi officials had many phone conversations with al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar and helped them get settled, find flight schools, and become acclimated to life in the U.S.
No charges were ever filed and the probe was quietly shut down five years ago.
According to the Joint Inquiry report, neither the Clinton nor Bush administrations tried to disrupt al-Qaeda financing - a big question mark for Bob Graham. A former intelligence official testified that “in 1996 or 1997, the Intelligence Community had plans… [REDACTED], plans the Treasury Department blocked due to concerns about… [REDACTED]… and worries that… [REDACTED]. Because of Treasury’s concerns, the Intelligence Community, according to the former official, was limited before September 11 to… [REDACTED].”
3. Why Did World Trade Center 7 Collapse?
Eight hours or so after the Twin Towers collapsed on Sept. 11, 2001, neighboring World Trade Center 7 came cascading down in similar rapid, free-fall time.
The main difference in the third collapse was that WTC7 was not hit by an airplane – flaming debris from the other crashes started some fires on the 12th and 13th floors. After doubting for almost 20 years that a few fires would bring down the tower, Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth financed a computer-modeling study.
Last year, researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks published the results of their four-year study: indeed, the fires in WTC 7 could not have caused its collapse.
“Loose Change” director Dylan Avery’s 46-minute documentary, “Seven,” was quietly released last year. Here’s the trailer.
The skeptical engineers are promoting a new Avery documentary, “The Unspeakable,” which follows four families seeking truth about the death of their loved ones 20 years ago. The film will be released on YouTube Sept. 17.
The evidence that the collapse of WTC7 was not caused by interior fires does not come with a ready-made explanation of what actually happened. The collapse bears strong resemblance to a controlled demolition, but no one has gone on the record so far to claim they set the cascading charges.
Until the government declassifies and publishes all the evidence, all we’ve got are theories.
In all journalistic inquiries, we rely on sources. We look for a narrative that is corroborated by multiple credible sources over time. The truth is out there – help!
