Free Republic

On August 17, Vivek Ramaswamy was interviewed by Tucker Carlson. At the very beginning, Ramaswamy spoke candidly about 9/11: “I didn’t suggest it. I explicitly said that the government absolutely lied to us. The 9/11 Commission lied. The FBI lied to us.”After dropping that bombshell, Ramaswamy went on to describe a scenario that he says “doesn’t make much sense on the face of it.” He explained how a 42-year-old Saudi Arabian graduate student went to Los Angeles International Airport and, while there, met up with two Saudi nationals who went on to hijack a plane on 9/11, which they then...

LIKE MANY GREAT SPY STORIES, this one begins with a brief, mundane scene whose significance only becomes apparent later on. Around lunchtime on February 1, 2000, a man dropped a piece of paper near a table in a Middle Eastern restaurant outside Los Angeles and paused long enough to strike up a conversation with two Arabic-speaking men dining nearby. It would take FBI agents nearly 20 years to understand the full meaning of that small event. The man who dropped the piece of paper was Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi intelligence asset, recently declassified FBI documents show. And the two Arabic-speaking...

The FBI, complying with President Biden’s recent executive order, made public late Saturday night a previously classified April 4, 2016 “review and analysis” report about Operation Encore, the bureau’s highly sensitive investigation of possible Saudi complicity in the 9/11 terrorist attack.The 16-page report is nevertheless heavily redacted in ways that will likely disappoint members of the 9/11 Families who have pushed to learn more about Encore since its existence was first disclosed in December 2016 in documents released to Florida Bulldog amid Freedom of Information Act litigation.For example, the names of many persons who were interviewed by FBI agents during...

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) -- Al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui testified Monday that he and would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid were supposed to hijack a fifth airplane on Sept. 11, 2001, and fly it into the White House. Moussaoui's testimony on his own behalf stunned the courtroom as he disclosed details he had never revealed before. It was in stark contrast to Moussaoui's previous statements in which he said the White House attack was to come later if the United States refused to release a radical Egyptian sheik imprisoned on earlier terrorist convictions. Moussaoui testified Monday he lied to investigators when arrested...

The FBI has blocked two of its veteran counterterrorism agents from going public with accusations that the CIA deliberately withheld crucial intelligence before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. FBI Special Agents Mark Rossini and Douglas Miller have asked for permission to appear in an upcoming public television documentary, scheduled to air in January, on pre-9/11 rivalries between the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency. The program is a spin-off from The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America, by acclaimed investigative reporter James Bamford, due out in a matter of days. The FBI denied Rossini...

A report commissioned in mid-1999 by Rep. Curt Weldon (R) looks into possible Chinese front companies in the US seeking technology for the Chinese military. Dr. Eileen Preisser and Michael Maloof are commissioned to make the report. Dr. Preisser, who runs the Information Dominance Center at the US Army's Land Information Warfare Activity (LIWA) and will later become closely tied to Able Danger, uses LIWA's data mining capabilities to search unclassified information. According to Maloof, their results show Chinese front companies in the US posing as US corporations that acquire technology from US defense contractors. When the study is completed...

AHMED HIKMAT SHAKIR IS A shadowy figure who provided logistical assistance to one, maybe two, of the 9/11 hijackers. Years before, he had received a phone call from the Jersey City, New Jersey, safehouse of the plotters who would soon, in February 1993, park a truck bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center. The safehouse was the apartment of Musab Yasin, brother of Abdul Rahman Yasin, who scorched his own leg while mixing the chemicals for the 1993 bomb.When Shakir was arrested shortly after the 9/11 attacks, his "pocket litter," in the parlance of the investigators, included contact...

SAN DIEGO (AP) - Two Sept. 11 hijackers "should have drawn some scrutiny from the FBI," when they lived openly in San Diego in 2000, the Justice Department's inspector general concluded in a report that chronicles the bureau's failures to connect the dots leading up to the attacks. The head of the San Diego FBI office took issue Thursday with the inspector general's report, saying it "greatly exaggerates" the possibility that local agents could have prevented the attacks. The 368-page review found that the FBI missed opportunities to learn about the al-Qaida operatives when they lived in the San Diego...

THE Bush administration revealed today that some of the September 11, 2001, hijackers booked their tickets on the internet using a computer in a college library in New Jersey. The disclosure by Ken Wainstein, US attorney for the District of Columbia in testimony to the House of Representatives subcommittee on crime, terrorism and homeland security, was intended to bolster the government's argument that Congress should renew a law allowing it to seize library and bookstore records. "Investigators tracing the activities of the hijackers determined that, on four occasions in August of 2001, individuals using internet accounts registered to Nawaf Al...

Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar were not like the other hijackers. While it is true that the two Saudis were of a similar age and the same nationality as most of the other 9/11 conspirators, Alhazmi was 25 and Almihdhar was 26, they had much more worldly and militant backgrounds than the others, despite their young ages. In the mid-1990s both were in the Bosnia conflict, In the course of 1995 Al-Hamzi and Al-Mihdhar travelled to Bosnia to joint other Muslims in the war against the Serbs and then fought in Chechnya at various times between 1996 and 1998. A...

As early as Thursday the Justice Department and the FBI will announced the indictment of two men who carried out the attack on the USS Cole which killed 17 United States Sailors more than two years ago, ABC News has learned.One of the men, Fahd Mohammad Ahmed Al Quoso, may also be linked to the 9/11 terrorist plot, sources invloved in the investigation told ABC News.Sources said Al Quoso said an operative who would eventally become a suicide bomber in the Cole attack each carried $18,000 in cash money belts to Bangkok, Thailand in 1999, and gave it to Waleed...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Thirteen days before the Sept. 11 attacks, a frustrated FBI agent warned headquarters that "someday, someone will die" after he was denied permission to pursue a man who would become one of the hijackers, a congressional panel was told Friday. The agent's efforts were among many missed opportunities to stop two of the hijackers after they were spotted attending an al-Qaida meeting in Malaysia in January 2000, according to the report to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. It was the latest revelation of apparent failures by intelligence and law enforcement authorities before the attacks. In...

<p>PATERSON, N.J. — A man who allegedly sold fake IDs to two of the Sept. 11 hijackers apparently fled the country for Egypt just before authorities came to arrest him in a raid on his home and businesses Wednesday, investigators said.</p>

PATERSON, N.J. (AP) - Secret evidence presented in a closed court session alleged that a man who sold fake IDs to two of the Sept. 11 hijackers had closer ties to terrorism than previously revealed, according to transcripts released Tuesday. In the end, authorities found no evidence to bring terrorism charges against Mohamad El-Atriss, and U.S. Attorney Christopher J. Christie said Tuesday that El-Atriss "is not considered a threat to national security by us." In a plea bargain, El-Atriss was sentenced in March to five years' probation and fined $15,000 for selling phony documents. El-Atriss and his lawyer on Tuesday...

<p>WASHINGTON - On Aug. 20, 2001, Saleh Ibn Abdul Rahman Hussayen, a man who would soon be named a minister of the Saudi government and put in charge of its two holy mosques, arrived in the United States to meet with some of this country's most influential fundamentalist Sunni Muslim leaders.</p>

THE US government had intercepted conversations by early 1999 indicating that two September 11 hijackers-to-be were connected to a suspected al-Qaeda facility in the Middle East. But the National Security Agency did not pass on the information to other agencies, a congressional report on intelligence failures said. The NSA interception was the first evidence in American possession that eventual hijackers Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi were connected to each other and to al-Qaeda, but some of that information was not brought to the attention of other agencies until early 2002 after Congress began investigating pre-September 11 failures, according to excerpts...

ASHINGTON, Sept. 26 — An F.B.I. account of the Sept. 11 plot disclosed today that Mohamed Atta, known to other hijackers as the "boss," met monthly with an associate before the attacks. The account also told of how one hijacker coordinated the so-called muscle hijackers who kept passengers on the airliners at bay.The account said a hijacker who crashed into the Pentagon and who was tracked by the Central Intelligence Agency in the months before the attacks, Khalid al-Mihdhar, organized the travel to the United States for the hijackers who helped seize the flights and who in some instances...

PATERSON, N.J., Jul 31, 2002 (AP Online via COMTEX) -- A man who authorities said sold fake identification to two of the Sept. 11 hijackers apparently left on a flight to Egypt hours before authorities raided his home and businesses Wednesday, officials said. Mohamad El Atriss operated businesses in Paterson and Elizabeth where he sold the IDs, said Passaic County Sheriff Jerry Speziale. Authorities raided his home and business Wednesday afternoon and were told Atriss had took a flight from Newark to Egypt earlier that morning, Speziale said. Atriss sold a fake identification card to Khalid Almihdhar, who was...

Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion. Police never asked me about Sept. 11 hijackers, wife of Malaysian militant suspect says JASBANT SINGH; Associated Press Writer Associated Press Worldstream June 14, 2002 Friday 5:14 AM Eastern Time KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia Released after 58 days in jail without charge, the wife of a Malaysian militant suspect accused of hosting al-Qaida terrorists said Friday her interrogators never asked her about two Sept. 11 hijackers who allegedly stayed at the couple's apartment. U.S. authorities say Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, who were aboard...